Occidentosis

When a factory rapidly producing cloth opened in the village, many people lost their jobs from the resulting occidentosis.

To follow the West—the Western states and the oil companies—is the supreme manifestation of occidentosis in our time.

Occidentosis epitomises the idea that there is a “Western sickness” from which the Third World must rise to detox and strive to cleanse itself.

Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s critique of this imitation—which was manifested not only in Iran’s ‘White Revolution’ under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi but also under the dictatorship of his father Reza Shah—in his Gharbzadegi, written originally in Persian in the 1960s but translated later into English by others, gave rise to a number of equivalent terms in English, such as Occidentosis, Westoxification, West struckenness, Westitis and Westomania.