NO FREE LUNCH

 

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

MUSLIMS HAVE BEEN SOWELL'S MIDDLEMAN MINORITY IN AFRICA PAR EXCELLENCE MAYBE MORE THAN THE HINDUS OR CHINESE

Don't you wonder why he has no chapter in Migrations and Cultures on Muslims?

Or what about the Christian middleman minorities, who collaborated with the Muslim middleman minorities already predominant in Africa, re the slave trade? He covers the Muslims, but less so the Christians although they are discussed, at least in Migrations.

Many think of them as a middleman minority in countries around the Northern mediteranean, even in Spain before the crusade to expel them and Jews from Ibereia, although their role and history in the Balkans usually has caused Westerners later to think of them more as an encroaching  hostile Civilization than as a middleman minority.

His chapters only include: Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Italians, and Indians. 

Many of these beneficial so called middleman minorities did not start out as conquerors either, but they also often ended up that way, as did the Moslems, one way or another, here or there, some time or some place.

In my judgment, and one cannot over generalize, middleman minorities are often a necessary evil, a symptom of political, religious, ethnic, or racial problems, or a problem of development or an economic technological or commercial vacuum otherwise left problematically open and/or unsolved without them. Further, middleman minorities have operated as a thin wedge for encroachment by their home state or civilization on the host state or civilization.

Not only is there no free lunch in multiculturalism, and the exaltation if you will of multiple simultaneous middleman minorities in single societies, but it has long now shown itself to have been not mainly and merely a zero sum game, but in fact, going forward, a negative sum game.