by Thomas Sowell
The desire of intellectuals for some grand
theory that will explain complex patterns with some solitary and simple factor
has produced many ideas that do not stand up under scrutiny, but which have
nevertheless had widespread acceptance — and sometimes catastrophic consequences
— in countries around the world.
The theory of genetic determinism which dominated the early 20th century led
to many harmful consequences, ranging from racial segregation and discrimination
up to and including the Holocaust. The currently prevailing theory is that
malice of one sort or another explains group differences in outcomes. Whether
the lethal results of this theory would add up to as many murders as in the
Holocaust is a question whose answer would require a detailed study of the
history of lethal outbursts against groups hated for their success.
These would include murderous mob violence against the Jews in Europe, the
Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and the Ibos in
Nigeria, among others. Class-based mass slaughters of the successful would range
from Stalin's extermination of the kulaks in the Soviet Union to Pol Pot's
wiping out of at least a quarter of the population of Cambodia for the crime of
being educated middle class people, as evidenced by even such tenuous signs as
wearing glasses.
Minorities who have been more successful than the general population have
been the least likely to have gotten ahead by discriminating against politically
dominant majorities. Yet it is precisely such minorities who have attracted the
most mass violence over the centuries and in countries around the world.
All the blacks lynched in the entire history of the United States would not
add up to as many murders as those committed in one year by mobs against the
Jews in Europe, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire or the Chinese in Southeast
Asia.
What is there about group success that inflames mobs in such disparate times
and places, not to mention mass-murdering governments in Nazi Germany or the Pol
Pot regime in Cambodia? We can speculate about the reasons but there is no
escaping the reality.
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Read the full article here: Intellectuals and Race (Part 3)
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