Thursday, February 02, 2012

Lest a thought of mine go unposted

I was rankling about a billboard campaign against "White Privilege" and this phrase came to mind after I opined that if White Male privilege goes by the boards --which it appears to be doing-- that does not mean that everyone will be equal. "Privilege does not disappear; it transfers."

All societies have dominant groups. No human society lacks them. Part of the point of achieving dominance is the enjoyment of privilege. Group privilege is a permanent part of any society. It's where nature and culture meet. So if Group A has been dominant and enjoying privilege and loses that, --or gives it up, as we are being exhorted to do--then the privilege and dominance will go elsewhere. To Group B.

Interesting example is Arab Muslim imperialism and colonialism. Continuing Mohammed's policy, his Arab Muslims invaded, conquered and colonized vast swaths of the Christian Roman Empire in Africa and the East and the Christian Barbarian Kingdoms toward the West, as well as taking down Zoroastrian Persia and beyond. This was a Muslim colonization by the sword, but it was specifically Arab. And a not-well-known aspect of this practically instant empire is the creation of a set of second-class Muslims: non-Arabs who converted after being conquered and colonized. The word mawali describes them. Excluded from the kinship systems of their Arab Muslim overlords, even when taking on the new "egalitarian" religion, they had legal restrictions and had to continue paying the extra tax, the jizya, laid on dhimmis, non-Muslims, to fund the Muslim government for "protecting" them. (Any comparison to Jim Crow laws and Mafia rackets should be firmly excluded here, as unworthy of the Religion of Peace...).

In short, privilege was transferred only to those who owned the new order, but was only partially granted to collab...er, converts. Islam did not bring everyone to the same level. No human group enterprise does.

Perfect example is the catastrophe of Marxism's "classless society" project. How classless was that?

And as I have noted, if humans cannot create classless societies, how much less genderless societies or raceless societies? These are just covers for supersession.

No comments:

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...