World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, Amy Chua (London: William Heinemann, 2003)
In ‘World on Fire’, Amy Chua introduces her concept of ‘market dominant minorities’, and, in so doing, explains why the USA’s twin policy of exporting both unrestrained free-markets and unrestrained majority-rule democracy is a sure recipe for disaster, as well as for inflaming ethnic tensions, and possibly provoking genocide, throughout much of the developing world.
Yet, while this subject is controversial enough in itself, Chua largely neglects a perhaps even more controversial subject, namely the question of the whether America has a market dominant minority of its own, and also whether, with ongoing demographic change, white Americans, and white westerners more generally, are set to become a market dominant minority ourselves, even in the societies and civilizations our ancestors founded and built, and even in our own indigenous ethnic homelands.
Market Dominant Minorities: An Overly Broad Concept?
Although she does not, to my recollection, provide any succinct definition, Chua’s concept of a ‘market dominant minority’ is simple enough. It refers to an ethnic minority that, while small in number, controls a hugely disproportionate share of wealth in a given economy.
The concept has been compared to the earlier sociological concept of the ‘middleman minority’.
It is true that many of Chua’s paradigmatic exemplars of this phenomenon, for example, the overseas Chinese in South-East Asia, from whom she herself claims descent, have also been cited as a classic example of a middleman minorities, as have other examples she cites, such as Indians in East Africa, the Lebanese in West Africa, and the Igbo in Nigeria.
However, Chua’s term is of far broader application.
Indeed, one might argue that it is hopelessly broad, as she applies it to a dazzlingly diverse array of ethnic minorities, from classic middleman minorities such as the Lebanese and Igbo in West Africa, to the descendants of white settlers in South Africa and Zimbabwe, to the predominantly Iberian-descended elites who have traditionally dominated both business and politics in the pigmentocracies of Latin America.
To illustrate the oversimplicity of this analysis, take her discussion of ethnic tensions in South Africa.
Here, Chua talks of white South Africans as the market dominant minority of South Africa, and explains animosity and discrimination towards whites (e.g. the genocidal rhetoric of leading politicians such as Julius Malema and the programme of ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ which systematically discriminates against white South Africans) as reflecting resentment at continued economic disparities between blacks and whites in the new South Africa.
However, to focus exclusively on animosities between black and whites, is to provide only a grossly superficial account of race relations, and racial resentments, in the self-styled ‘Rainbow Nation’.
Thus, historically, the most important ethnic faultline in South African society was not that between whites and blacks, but rather between Afrikaners and English-speaking whites, a conflict that reached its bloody climax in the Boer Wars, but simmered on for decades thereafter.
Afrikaners long resented English-speakers for their economic, and, in colonial times, political domination of South Africa. Therefore, from an Afrikaner perspective, it is the English, not whites in general, and certainly not Afrikaners, who represent the market dominant minority of South Africa.
Meanwhile, just as black South Africans have long resented whites, and Afrikaans-speakers the English, so the mixed-race ‘Cape Coloreds’ have come, in the post-apartheid era, to resent the blacks, while, even among blacks themselves, there is some resentment against the Xhosa tribe, who are perceived to have unfairly dominated the post-apartheid political scene.
Meanwhile, South African Asians, first arriving as indentured labourers from South Asia, but thereafter thriving in business and commerce, probably represent the closest thing to a classic middleman minority in South Africa – while, on a per capita basis, the country’s wealthiest ethnic group is surely its small but wealthy Jewish community.[1]
In short, South Africa represents a simmering cauldron of racial resentments, and precisely who qualifies as a ‘market dominant minority’ in South African society, as elsewhere, is very much a relative concept.
International Relations and Resentment
Yet Chua’s concept of a ‘market dominant minority’ is even broader, since she applies it, not only to ethnic groups within a single polity, but also at the international level, to conflicts between states and indeed between civilizations.
Thus, writing only a couple of years after the 9/11 attacks, she purports, in her penultimate chapter, ‘Why They Hate Us’, to explain anti-American sentiment across much of the world by reference to Americans’ status as, in her view, the market dominant minority of the world.
Yet the causes of anti-American sentiment are more complex. Certainly, envy is a factor, but it is hardly the only factor, and arguably not even the dominant one.
In the Middle East, the main factor seems to be American support for Israel.
In Latin America, it is probably the US’s history of intervening in the domestic affairs of those countries that the US perceives as within its ‘sphere of influence’. This is more a matter of political and military domination, rather than economic domination as such, though economic power is ultimately what makes this political domination possible.[2]
Moreover, anti-American sentiment in the Developing World must also be viewed as part of a more general anti-western resentment, which reflects, not only the current wealth and power of the west, but also the historical role of western powers in conquering and subjugating much of what is today termed the developing world in previous centuries.
Last, but not least, there is the perceived cultural imperialism of America, with the American lifestyle and values (sometimes disparagingly termed ‘McWorld’, by reference to the proliferation of Mcdonalds restaurants, or, in internet slang, as ‘Globohomo’, a term coined as an abbreviation of ‘global homogenization’) increasingly becoming ubiquitous, proselytised around the world though American media and multinationals, and destroying what remains of cultural diversity and indigenous cultures.
Yet, if anti-Americanism cannot be explained, at least not wholly, by Americans’ supposed position as the ‘market dominant minority’ of the world, then even more absurd is Chua’s attempt to explain anti-Israel sentiment in the Middle East by reference to Israel’s supposed status as the ‘market dominant minority’ of the Middle East.
In fact, anti-Israel sentiment in the Middle East has less to do with Israel’s economic position, and far more to do with its colonisation and conquest of Palestine, and continued dispossession and persecution of Palestinian Arabs, which naturally provokes resentment among their co-ethnics and co-religionists throughout the Middle East and beyond.
Indeed, it is doubtful that Israel can even be considered a ‘market dominant minority’ in the Middle East.
Certainly, Israel is wealthier than many of its neighbours, but it is neither the largest economy in the region, nor the richest on a per capita basis, both of which honours belong to its oil-rich Arab Muslim neighbours – the very same oil-rich Arab Muslim neighbours who nevertheless often resent and despise Israel.
Moreover, far from being ‘market dominant’ in the region, Israel does not really participate in regional markets within the Middle East to a great extent.
Though an advanced high-tech export-oriented economy, few of its exports go direct to its Arab Muslim neighbours, not least due to ongoing conflict and boycotts. The same is true of its imports. Instead, its main trading partners are in Europe, America and East Asia.
Economic Reform and Ethnic Resentment
Chua argues that market liberalization only increases income disparities between the indigenous masses and market dominant minorities, since it is the latter, being more commercially adept, who are better placed to take advantage of the commercial opportunities that market reforms open up.
For example, Chua contends that, in Burma, a decade of “aggressively pro-market” reforms, despite producing economic growth, “brought virtually no benefits to the indigenous population”, benefiting only the Chinese business elite (p24).
This is an exaggeration. Indigenous Burmese did surely benefit.
After all, the wealthier the Chinese minority became, the more money they had to employ and buy products and services from the indigenous poor.
As Chua’s own wealthy Chinese Filipina aunt bluntly told her when, as a young girl, she was shocked to stumble into Filipino servants sleeping “on mats on a dirt floor” after accidently entering the servant’s quarters of her family mansion, these men “were fortunate to be working for our family. If not for their positions, they would be living among rats and open sewers without even a roof over their heads” (p3).
In other words, the so-called ‘trickle-down effect’ is not a mere myth, though it may indeed sometimes represent little more than a mere trickle.
However, while the indigenous majority may have been better off in absolute terms, the disparity in wealth between the indigenous Burmese and the ethnic Chinese only increased.
Thus, Chua acknowledges:
“In absolute terms the majority may actually be marginally better off as a result of markets… but these small improvements are overwhelmed by the majority’s continuing poverty and the hated minority’s extraordinary economic success” (p187).
Thus, ‘relative deprivation’ is often psychologically more potent than ‘absolute deprivation’.
In short, people compare themselves to their neighbours, not their distant ancestors.
An unemployed person or someone employed in low-paid menial labour in ‘relative poverty’ in, say, modern Britain is unlikely to be much consoled when reassured that he is in fact much better off than his distant ancestors who were, in all probability, medieval peasants.
This then perhaps explains the significance of Chua’s provocative subtitle – “How Exporting Free-Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred & Global Instability”.
For free-market capitalism, by its very nature, uproots the traditional relations between social classes, and enables new elites to rapidly emerge and establish themselves, with all the disruption, and resentment, this inevitably produces.
From ‘Middleman Minority’ to ‘Market Dominant Minority’
Thus, it was perhaps the dawn of capitalism that has transformed what were formerly mere ‘middleman minorities’ into ‘market dominant minorities’, and ultimately into a part of the new global economic elite.
Whereas Chua focuses on the impact of market reforms on the contemporary developing world, the same process occurred much earlier in the west.
Thus, traditionally, middleman minorities, not only acted as economic middlemen, but were also middlemen in another sense – namely, they occupied a roughly middling position in society.
Thus, the Jews of medieval Europe, existing outside the three estates of the realm as merchant class, tended to be much wealthier than the peasantry, but, by the same token, tended to be poorer than the landed gentry, and were certainly not comparable in wealth, let alone in power, to the aristocracy.[3]
However, with the rise of capitalism, this was to change.
As a proto-capitalist merchant class, Jews were, to adopt a biological term, ‘preadapted’ to capitalism.
Therefore, once social status came to be determined entirely by money rather than by landholdings or noble birth, and indeed landholdings and noble titles came to represent, at best, mere ostentatious perks of privilege, or, at worst, obsolete and anachronistic irrelevancies, if not, as in the case of some landed estates, financially-draining white elephants, Jews were in the perfect position to convert their commercial acumen into wealth and ultimately into power.
Thus, as applied to groups such as Jews and the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, the term ‘middleman minorities’ is surely obsolete. These groups, or at least many among their number, are no longer mere middlemen, but rather an integral, fully paid up and not insubstantial part of the new global elite.
Markets, Democracy and Murderous Demagogues
If market reforms increase the risk of racial persecution, the same is true, Chua controversially contends, of democracy. This is because democracy provides a ready mechanism whereby populist demagogues can exploit the racial resentments of the masses and thereby obtain power.
Thus, Chua argues that, in any society with a market dominant minority, or the potential for one to develop, the combination of free markets and democracy is especially volatile, readily leading to pogroms, persecution, expulsions, ethnic cleansing and outright genocide.
Yet free markets and democracy are precisely what American foreign policy, and the IMF, has traditionally promoted.
Yet, in truth, democracy and free markets make, at best, uncomfortable bedfellows.
With universal suffrage, the impoverished masses almost invariably vote to restrict markets, impose protectionism and redistribute wealth, usually to themselves.
Late nineteenth and early twentieth century conservatives who opposed the extension of the franchise to the poor and propertyless perhaps recognised what evidently eludes contemporary neoconservatives – namely that the extension of the franchise inevitably leads to socialism.
Indeed, in the west, it arguably already has. After all, as Chua observes:
“All the Western nations today have enormous tax-and-transfer programs, dulling the harshest edges of class conflict” (p192).
By nineteenth century conservative standards, this is indeed socialism.
Unfortunately, however, desirable though such redistributive programmes may be, developing nations simply cannot afford such measures.
This leads Chua to discuss a more controversial proposal – perhaps the US should stop promoting democracy in the developing world, a view she attributes to neoconservative author, policy analyst and commentator, Robert Kaplan.
After all, even in the west, economic development invariably long preceded the extension of the franchise.
Thus, in Britain for example, until as recently as the early twentieth century, to be eligible to vote, a person had to satisfy a property qualification – namely, they had to own or rent property above a certain value. This requirement was only abolished in the aftermath of the First World War under the Representation of the People Act 1918, which also, more famously, extended the vote to women.
Thus, Chua notes the irony that:
“The formula of free market democracy currently being pressed on non-Western nations—the simultaneous pursuit of laissez-faire capitalism and universal suffrage—is one that no Western nation ever adopted at any point in history” (p195).
At any rate, since Chua herself acknowledges that anti-Americanism is rampant in the developing world, due in part, at least in Chua’s telling, to resentment at America’s status as the world’s ‘market dominant minority’, it is obviously hardly in the US interest to promote democracy, since this often leads to the election of virulently anti-American populists, such as Hugo Chávez.
In contrast, the US enjoys some of its strongest diplomatic and economic ties with regimes that are far from democratic.
For example, in Latin America, some of America’s most dependable allies have been pragmatic unelected strongman dictators, like August Pinochet in Chile and Batista in pre-communist Cuba.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, it is surely no accident that America’s strongest allies among the Muslim states tend to be governed by oil-rich hereditary monarchies (e.g. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman), many of them absolute monarchies without the slightest pretence of democratic accountability, and friendly to the Americans for precisely this reason.[4]
Indeed, as Chua herself observes, the last thing the US really wants is true world democracy, i.e. with a single global electorate electing a world government to preside over everyone.
“When Americans call for world democratization, we don’t mean world democracy. For Americans, global democratization means democracy for and within individual countries” (p260).
After all, true world democracy would reduce Americans, and other wealthy westerners, to a tiny fraction of the electorate, and would likely result in the same sort of anti-market backlash that has occurred so often in the developing world – but, this time, Americans, and perhaps other wealthy white westerners, would be among the market dominant minorities at risk of persecution.
“The last thing most Americans want is a true world democracy, in which our economic and political fate is determined by a majority of the world’s countries or citizens. The idea, for example, of the U.N. General Assembly controlling U.S. foreign investments would probably not be appealing to most Americans” (p260).
Unfortunately, however, in an America that is increasingly secular and has long maintained a sharp separation of church and state, democracy has come to function as something of a substitute religion for many Americans.
Indeed, in a USA that is increasingly divided along ethnic, religious, regional, generational and political lines, a fanatical, quasi-religious devotion to democratic ideals seems to be the one thing that holds most modern Americans together.
Therefore, the idea that American governments should cease promoting democracy overseas is an idea unlikely to find favour among the American electorate – and, for this reason, it is unlikely to find favour among their democratically elected representatives either.
This might lead us to an even more controversial conclusion – namely that, just as democracy in the developing world tends to be a bad thing for Americans, the same is no less true of democracy in America itself.[5]
Race and Resentment Revisited
Yet, for all the excessive broadness of her concept of ‘market dominant minorities’, and all her excessive zeal in attempting to explain virtually all global conflict by reference to this concept, Chua is definitely onto something.
The one thing all her many examples of ethnic conflict have in common is this: the disproportionate concentration of wealth and privilege in a particular ethnic group, which inevitably provokes resentment among other groups.
Meanwhile, it is the fact that the group is a minority that renders them vulnerable to persecution.
It is middleman minorities, economically wealthy but often politically weak and few in number, who have been the main victims of most infamous genocides of recent history, from the Armenian genocide to the Jewish Holocaust.
But, extending her purview further with her rather broader concept of a ‘market dominant minority’, Chua purports to explain virtually all recent examples of genocide and ethnic cleansing by reference to her concept.
Thus, for example, Tutsis, the main victims of the Rwandan genocide, the vast majority of whose number perished in this genocide, had tended to be economically better off, and, formerly, politically dominant, over the Hutu majority.
Indeed, Chua even reveals an economic dimension to the ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia that I was not previously aware of, with Serbs, though dominating the police and armed forces, tending to be poorer than Croats and Slovenes, mainly for historical and geographic reasons, the latter enjoying greater economic integration with the economies of Central and Western Europe (Austria, Italy, Germany), and having been a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whereas Serbia had formerly been subject to the rule of the Ottoman Turks, and hence both politically and geographically isolated from the industrial centres of Northern and Western Europe.
Nathaniel Weyl, the twentieth century Jewish columnist, economist, racialist, eugenicist, and conservative public intellectual, in essays of his such as ‘Envy and Aristocide’ (Weyl 1984) and ‘Aristocide as a Force in History’ (Weyl 1967), argued that all the major mass killings of twentieth century political history and beyond, from those of Stalin and Mau to those of Hitler and the Nazis, were motived ultimately by envy and resentment.[6]
Thus, the conventional wisdom has it that the Jews were the victims of a genocide during the Second World War because Hitler and the Nazis considered them an inferior race whom he wished to eliminate on eugenic groups.
It is moreover true that much Nazi propaganda did indeed contend that Jews were inferior to the supposed Aryan ‘master race’ (i.e. ethnic Germans).
However, Nazi propaganda with riddled with internal contradictions. Thus, Nazi propaganda also contended that Jews supposedly controlled the media, the newspapers, the theatre and the film industry in Germany, and exerted a hugely disproportionate power and influence over German culture and politics.
Yet, if Jewish people, who only ever represented a tiny fraction (around 2%) of the population of Weimar-era Germany, did indeed control the media and economy to the extent claimed in Nazi propaganda, then this surely suggested that they were anything but inferior to the German gentile goyim whom they had allegedly so subjugated – and also rather suggests that German gentile goyim themselves were perhaps something less than the ‘master race’ of Hitler’s own demented imagining.
Thus, Weyl contends:
“The main motivation for political anti-Semitism of a virulent sort… is envy of superior intelligence, wealth, status and power [of Jewish people]. This envy is normally directed against the upper classes as a whole, against the leadership of society, against the Establishment, against all that stands higher than the dull level of mediocrity” (Weyl 1975: 291).
In other words, antisemitism is motivated by the exact same type of envy that also motivates socialism, communism, Marxism and other leftist egalitarian ideologies.
On this view, then, most all political mass killings and genocides are ultimately motivated by feelings of envy and repressed inferiority complex – what Nietzsche, Hitler’s own (alleged) favourite philosopher, famously diagnosed and disparaged as ‘ressentiment’.[7]
Much the same point is made by ‘Robert’, a character from Michel Houellebecq’s novel, Platform, who, in a memorable speech, explains:
“One does not feel hatred for an inferior, at most a sort of cordial contempt… [But] the moment the white man began to consider blacks as equals, it was obvious that sooner or later they would come to consider them to be superior… [Hence] the stage was set for a different type of racism, based on masochism: historically, it is in circumstances like these that violence, interracial wars, and massacres break out. For example, all anti-Semites agree that the Jews have a certain superiority. If you read anti-Semitic literature, you’re struck by the fact that the Jew is considered to be more intelligent, more cunning, that he is credited with having singular financial talents – and, moreover, greater communal solidarity. Result: six million dead” (Platform: p113)
Of course, economic resentment exists even in the absence of an ethnic divide.
Thus, even in ethnically homogenous societies, the poor often envy the rich. This is why socialist and redistributive policies almost always enjoy some degree of popular appeal among the masses.
Thus, there is some degree of resentment even among white Americans towards people like Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
However, this resentment tends to be quite muted and restricted to only minority of the population. In contrast, many Americans, far from resenting these figures, actually admire them, and even seek, howsoever unrealistically, to emulate them and follow in their footsteps.
Yet, where the economic elite are of a conspicuously different ethnicity to the majority group, animosity and resentment is magnified, because people feel they are dominated by alien interlopers, and no longer feel able to emulate the achievements of the wealthy, feeling excluded by their ethnicity alone.
In this situation, the two factors, economic resentment and racial resentment, combine and seemingly multiply, resulting in an extremely unstable situation that often explodes into ethnic cleansing and genocide.
As Sarich and Miele write in Race: The Reality of Human Differences (reviewed here):
“Few of us resent a rich kinsman or coethnic. When the differences, even if relative rather than absolute, are associated to some degree with group markers such as race (and to a lesser extent sex, age, or religion), however, overcoming envy becomes more problematic” (Race: The Reality of Human Differences: p242).
As sociologist-turned-sociobiologist and expert in ethnic relations Pierre van den Berghe put it in his excellent The Ethnic Phenomenon (reviewed here):
“It seems a great many people care passionately whether they are ruled and exploited by members of their own [ethnic group] or foreigners” (The Ethnic Phenomenon: p62).
“Blood runs thicker than money” (The Ethnic Phenomenon: p243).
The Inevitability of Ethnic Conflict in Multi-Ethnic Societies?
This seems to suggest that ethnic animosities of this sort are almost inevitable in multi-ethnic societies, since, in all such societies, there is almost always some difference in average wealth as between groups.
For example, even in Belgium, where differences in economic status between the Walloons and Flemish are quite modest (and have reversed over time), the same resentments are observable, if somewhat muted; whereas, in Northern Ireland, the fact that differences in socioeconomic status as between Catholics and Protestants are now quite modest has not noticeably ameliorated animosities.
This leads to the controversial conclusion that multi-ethnic states are inherently unstable, and hence that ethnically homogenous ethnostates, or true nation states (‘ethnostates’), are preferable, as contended by racial and ethnic separatists and many in the alt-right.
But, since Chua extends her analysis to an international level – for example, as we have seen, describing Israel as the ‘market dominant minority’ of the Middle East, and America as the ‘market dominant minority’ of the world – this would arguably only shift the locus of conflict from within the borders of a single state to between the borders of different states, and wars between states can, of course, be just as destructive as ethnic conflict within a state.
Nevertheless, secure borders between nation states surely provide some protection against persecution for a market dominant minority that is fortunate enough to find itself in a different jurisdiction from the people for whom it is the object of resentment, especially since the wealthier nation state is also likely also the militarily dominant state, largely precluding the realistic possibility of ethnic vengeance in the form of interstate warfare.
Are Market Dominant Majorities Any Better?
Another similarly politically incorrect conclusion to be drawn from Chua’s book is that, if an ethnic division within a society does exist, then it is preferable that the numerically dominant group also be the economically dominant group.
Of course, if the economically dominant group is also the numerically dominant group, this seems doubly hard on the minority group, since, being dominated, not only economically, but also numerically and electorally, this means they will likely also be dominated politically too.
However, for precisely this reason, it also precludes the danger of the disadvantaged group rising up in vengeance against the economically dominant majority in their midst, simply because they lack the numbers to do so successfully. Whether in elections or pogroms, they will always be outvoted, outnumbered and outgunned.
Thus, in the USA, whites have historically been both the vast majority of the population and the vast majority of the elite.
As a result, minority groups, especially blacks, have felt excluded and estranged. Sometimes such resentment has spilled over into homicidal, indeed genocidal, rage (e.g. the ‘Zebra killings’ in San Francisco, the ‘DC Sniper’, the ‘De Mao Mao’ murders in Chicago and Yahweh ben Yahweh cult murders in Miami).
However, such rage has never come close to crossing over into genocide or ethnic cleansing, if only because blacks only ever represented only a small and economically-deprived (and often politically disenfranchised) section of the population and hence never had the economic or political power, or even the sheer numbers, to turn their own resentment into political power at the national level, or even into pogroms, save on a very localized level during race riots.[8]
Likewise, some white Americans may have resented blacks, for example on account of their high levels of crime and welfare-dependence, or, today, due to affirmative action and race preferences.
However, such resentment has always been quite muted, and even tempered by a degree of sympathy on the part of other whites, if only because blacks tended to be much poorer than whites on average and hence had little that whites could envy them for.
After all, as ‘Robert’ puts in the passage quoted above, “One does not feel hatred for an inferior, at most a sort of cordial contempt”.
Thus, many blacks resented whites; and many whites looked down upon blacks – but any animosities were never likely to erupt into genocide or expulsions.
However, this once stable situation is fast being transformed by demographic change and immigration (see below).
America’s Market Dominant Minority
So, what about America? Does the US have a market dominant minority?
Of course, the conventional wisdom has it that America doesn’t have a market dominant minority, so much as it has a market dominant majority – namely white people.
Thus, we are constantly inundated with propaganda about so-called ‘white privilege’ and ‘systemic racism’.
Yet, while it is true that white Americans are indeed wealthier, on average, than blacks and Hispanics, it is also true that Indian- and Chinese-Americans are, on average, wealthier than whites.
However, if we are to identify a market dominant minority in modern America, then the obvious candidate is neither Indians nor Chinese people, but rather, of course, Jews.
The notion of Jews as a market dominant minority is, however, a particularly sensitive subject.
Chua, whose husband is Jewish, does not, to her credit, entirely evade the question of Jews as a market dominant minority. On the contrary, she identifies Jews as representing a market dominant minority in interwar Eastern Europe,[9] and, to some extent, in the Weimar Republic and contemporary post-communist Russia.
Indeed, she even remarkably reports that, in Russia at the time she was writing:
“Six out of seven of Russia’s wealthiest and (at least until recently) most powerful oligarchs are Jewish” (p77-8).[10]
However, with respect to the notion that Jewish people might be regarded as a market dominant minority in the contemporary US, Chua is derisive, relegating the issue to a mere parenthesis (not even a whole sentence), where she remarks dismissively:
“If Jewish-Americans are viewed as an ethnic minority in the United States, they do not remotely dominate the U.S. economy; unlike in Russia, for example, only one or at most two of the ten wealthiest Americans are Jewish” (p189).
However, Chua’s cited statistic, though it may have been correct at the time she was writing, is now out of date.
According to the Forbes 400 list for 2025, fully half of ten wealthiest Americans in 2025 are halachically Jewish – Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Michael Dell each being born into Jewish families, while Steve Ballmer, Larry Page each had a Jewish mother and Gentile father.
Moreover, although rankings in the Forbes 400 list fluctuate substantially annually, the ranking 2025 does not appear to be exceptional in this respect. For example, according to The Times of Israel, Jewish people also represented half of the top ten richest Americans in 2018 (Times of Israel, 2018).
However, looking merely at the top ten richest Americans is to focus on a very small sample size. Moreover, just who qualifies as among the ten richest Americans according to Forbes changes considerably each year, as does the proportion of Jews among this top ten.[11]
Perhaps a better approach then is to look at a larger sample size, namely the Forbes 400 list as a whole, which lists what Forbes magazine’s extensive research considers to be the 400 richest Americans in a given year, and is published and updated annually.
Looking at the Forbes 400 as a whole (i.e. the richest 400 people in America), The Jewish Telegraph Agency reported in 2009 that “at least 139 of the Forbes 400 are Jewish” (Berkman 2009).[12]
This figure seems to be relatively stable on a year-by-year basis, as it has been corroborated by tallies conducted by other authors for other recent years (Nolan 2010; Sailer 2013). In short, in any given year, about a third of the Forbes 400 seem to be Jewish, and many more likely of part-Jewish ancestry.
For a group who comprise, depending on how precisely how ‘Jewishness’ is defined, at most, only about three percent of the US population, this is obviously vastly disproportionate.[13]
On the other hand, however, it must here be acknowledged that Jews do not dominate the US economy to anything like the extent that the overseas Chinese dominate the economies of Southeast Asia.
Indeed, some of the statistics cited with respect to the economies of Southeast Asia are positively astounding. For example, for Indonesia, as of 1998, Chua reports that:
“Just 3 percent of the population, the Chinese controlled approximately 70 percent of the private economy. All of Indonesia’s billionaires were ethnically Chinese, and almost all of the country’s largest conglomerates were owned by Sino-Indonesian families” (p43).[14]
In short, the overseas Chinese dominate the economies of Southeast Asia to a far greater extent than Jewish people have ever dominated the economy of any western economy save in the rabid imaginations of the most paranoid of antisemitic conspiracy theorists.
On reflection, however, it is hardly surprising that no single small minority dominates the US economy to the same extent that the Chinese dominate the economies of Southeast Asia.
After all, dominating the commercial economy of a small developing, or, at best, emerging, economy in Southeast Asia, such as Indonesia, the Philippines or Thailand, is a completely different proposition to that of dominating the economy of what was, at the time Chua was writing, still the world’s greatest industrial power, and remains to the day the world’s greatest commercial economy – namely, the USA.
Yet, if Jewish domination of western economies is certainly not anything like as hegemonic as the economic domination evinced by the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, it is still recognisably an analogous phenomenon.
In short, being “market dominant” is a matter of degree.
Interestingly, Chua herself acknowledges this in her discussion of the alleged Jewish domination of the Germany economy during the Weimar period.
Thus, while acknowledging that “Jews in Weimar Germany were not an economically dominant minority in the sense that, say, the Chinese are economically dominant in most Southeast Asian countries” (p201), Chua nevertheless reports that, despite comprising less than one percent of the population of Weimar-era Germany:
“In 1930, Jews owned 40 percent of Germany’s wholesale textile firms and nearly 60 percent of the country’s wholesale and retail clothing businesses. In 1932, Jews owned roughly 80 percent of all department store business… Nearly half of the country’s private banks were owned by Jewish banking families” (p203).
On the other hand, however, even in the banking industry, a traditional area of Jewish specialization:
“Jews controlled almost none of Germany’s more numerous and increasingly important credit banks; nor were the modern large banks that financed the German industrialization principally controlled by Jews” (p203).
In short, Jews in Weimar-era Germany were indeed disproportionately wealthy and did perhaps dominate certain specific industries, though rarely if ever to the complete exclusion of gentile competition.
However, Nazi propaganda about Jews controlling the entire German economy were just that – namely propaganda, with little basis in reality.[15]
On the contrary, had Jews really controlled the German economy to the extent claimed in some Nazi propaganda, then Hitler and the Nazis would likely never have come to power, since, as is emphasized by Marxist historians and political theorists, they were able to do so only with support, acquiescence and funding of many leading German industrialists, who saw in National Socialism a useful bulwark against the threat of communism, but would surely never have supported the Nazis had they themselves been Jewish.[16]
That Jews did not dominate the German commercial economy to anything like the same extent that the overseas Chinese dominate the economies of Southeast Asia is, once again, hardly surprising.
After all, despite the trauma of the First World War and Great Depression, not to mention the economically crippling conditions imposed by the Versailles Treaty, Germany remained, like the USA, among the world’s great industrial powers.
Yet, if Jews, while certainly never totally dominating the Weimar economy, nevertheless were disproportionately wealthy, and did dominate certain specific industries, much the same seems to be true of Jews in modern America.
Indeed, if the figures cited by Chua for Weimar-era Germany are to be trusted, the case for Jewish domination of the US economy, with a third of the richest Americans being Jewish, seems rather stronger than for Weimar-era Germany.
This then raises the question as to why there is comparatively so little antisemitism in the USA?
One factor may be that, whereas in Europe, Jews tended to be viewed, at least by antisemites, as alien interlopers and outsiders, and the overseas Chinese in southeast Asia were and are often viewed similarly, Jews in America are no more alien than any number of the other European peoples who migrated to the Americas in search of opportunity or toleration and subsequently integrated into the American mainstream. Thus, Jews are viewed as no more alien than, say, an Italian Americans.[17]
Secondly, and relatedly, in secular multiethnic and multiracial America, Jews, as a group, do not particularly stand out, and, to most people, white and non-white alike, simply present as white, such that most people rarely even notice the extent of their overrepresentation among the rich and powerful.
An additional factor may also contribute to this lack of awareness of Jewish wealth and power—namely that, among the specific industries that Jews do (allegedly) dominate is the media, which, while endlessly recycling statistics (supposedly) demonstrating white male power and overrepresentation, and so-called ‘white privilege’, studiously avoids the topic of Jewish power and overrepresentation, while also demonizing any expression of racism or antisemitism, especially on the part of the white Christian majority, as anathema.[18]
Finally, and again relatedly, whereas other middleman minorities are often vulnerable to persecution because their economic power is not matched by their political power, Jews in the West today seem to be almost as overrepresented among politicians as among the business elite, which political power likely affords a degree of protection.[19]
In contrast, other middleman minorities rarely directly involve themselves in the political affairs of their host nations, save through bribery and corruption, which perceived corruption only increases resentments and animosity.[20]
Jewish involvement in politics is, however, a relatively recent phenomenon, a consequence of the related processes of emancipation, secularization and integration.
Are Whites Set to Become the Market Dominant Minority of America – and the West?
Yet, if Jews are America’s current market dominant minority, on current demographic trends, America may soon have a new market dominant minority – namely white Americans themselves.
Thus, with mass immigration and below replacement level fertility rates, whites themselves are set to become a minority of the population over the next couple of decades, not just in America, but all across the western world.
Moreover, like market dominant minorities in the developing world, white Americans are already resented by many non-whites for their perceived economic privilege, which resentment is only further stoked in the media by the seemingly endless leftist propaganda about so-called ‘white privilege’ and ‘systemic racism’.
So, are whites themselves set to become a hated and resented market dominant minority even in the very western polities they and their ancestors founded and built?
Chua, to her credit, does not entirely ignore this taboo topic. However, she summarily dismisses the notion that whites will soon, in a ‘majority-minority America’, be the victims of the same sort of persecution as that to which market dominant minorities in the developing world have so often been subject.
She gives several reasons for dismissing this possibility. First, she contends:
“Given how large a percentage of America’s population will still be white, it is extremely implausible that an antiwhite political movement could be democratically successful in the United States” (p209).
However, the white proportion of the population is falling precipitously and there is no reason to expect this trend to reverse any time soon. On the contrary, it may well only accelerate.
Therefore, even if, in the short-term, whites, while no longer a majority, will still represent a large enough minority, or plurality, to resist persecution, this can hardly be guaranteed in the medium- to long-term. On the contrary, all the evidence suggests that the white share of the population will only continue to plummet.
As a further factor militating against the risk of persecution, Chua points to the high rates of “intermarriage and assimilation” in the modern USA, suggesting that this level of integration will make an anti-white ethnic backlash less likely (p209).
However, the same was famously true of Jews in Weimar-era Germany, who are said to have been well integrated into German society and culture and to have enjoyed high rates of intermarriage with German gentiles. However, this evidently was insufficient to prevent the Holocaust, the greatest genocide in human history.[21]
Moreover, even if new arrivals do assimilate, in a ‘majority-minority’ America, it can no longer be guaranteed that it will be to white western culture, values and norms that they assimilate. If the majority of a given region is Hispanic, it will presumably assimilate to Latin American norms and culture that new arrivals acculturate.[22]
Next, Chua also contends that anti-white sentiment will be ameliorated by the relative affluence of even the relatively worse-off groups:
“As in all the Western nations, America’s less well off are rich by comparison to their developing-world counterparts” (p210).
This is, of course, true.
However, as she herself discusses in the context of market reforms in the developing world (p187), and as I have discussed earlier in this review, it is ‘relative deprivation’ that is tends to be more psychologically salient than ‘absolute deprivation’
In short, it is generally their better-off compatriots in their own country to whom people compare themselves, not the poverty-stricken masses in far-off foreign climes.
Thus, modern Americans are more likely to envy their neighbours in the more upscale neighborhood down the block, or in the next town over, or even on the other side of the country, than they are to count themselves lucky not to being among the starving poor of the Global South.
Certainly, black Americans are unlikely to be placated by white Americans who patiently explain to them that, since black Americans enjoy much higher standards of living, on average, than do black Africans who are still resident in Africa, they should be grateful to the slave traders for transporting their ancestors. On the contrary, such a suggestion is, understandably, likely only to further enrage them.
Finally, Chua also points to American’s long tradition of ‘rugged individualism’ and the centrality of the so-called ‘American Dream’ to the American ethos and culture.
Thus, many poor Americans, she explains, don’t really resent the rich. On the contrary, they admire the rich and even aspire, howsoever unrealistically, to join them by becoming similarly rich themselves.
Chua sees this ‘American Dream’ as quintessentially, and perhaps even uniquely, American.
“The belief that anyone has a shot at fame and fortune is in some ways idiosyncratic to the United States. It has no real analogue even in the high-income countries of Western Europe, let alone the chronically poor, malnourished societies of the developing world” (p197).
However, if the American Dream was once uniquely American, then it has certainly long previously been exported to the rest of the world, not least through Hollywood movies, which increasingly proselytize American values to the world.
Indeed, the belief that the ‘huddled masses’, fresh off of the boat, can achieve wealth and fortune in America has surely motivated much of the very immigration to America that is currently reducing whites to minority status.
Yet, the American Dream is not only proselytized by Hollywood, it is also arguably the invention of Hollywood itself.
In particular, it was the invention of a specific group of immigrants, namely the Jewish movie moguls who created Hollywood and the modern American motion picture industry in the early twentieth century.[23]
This is hardly accidental, since, for many Jews, not least these movie moguls themselves, the American Dream was not entirely mythical and nor was it wholly a dream. Rather, it was something they achieved in real life, in the process transforming themselves into America’s own ‘market dominant minority’, and perhaps the world’s as well.
Yet, for the vast majority of American immigrants (and many non-immigrants too), stuck in low paid unrewarding menial work, the American Dream remains just that –a dream, with no connection whatsoever to the mundane reality of their daily lives.
And the disconnect between reality and the aspiration fuelled by movies and imagination, far from alleviating animosities, can only further fuel them.
Chua concludes:
“The possibility that there might someday arise within the United States, or for that matter in any of the Western nations, an antiwhite, anti-market ethnonationalist backlash is extraordinarily slim” (p210).
This might have seemed a reasonable conclusion when Chua wrote these words in 2003.
But, today, in what I have previously termed a ‘post-post-racial America’, after the utopian dreams of the Obama-era went up in flames, along with much of America’s cityscape, during the deadly BLM riots, it is doubtful she could say the same thing—at least not with a straight face.
Indeed, whereas Chua claims that it is “extremely implausible that an antiwhite political movement could be democratically successful in the United States” (p209), such a movement is arguably already thriving and achieving electoral successes in contemporary America. It is, of course, the current incarnation of the Democratic Party and the wider political left, which now trades openly in ethnic resentment and identity politics, and is even championing the absurd notion of white Americans paying reparations for slavery.
Endnotes
[1] The same complexity is evidence elsewhere. For example, although Chua identifies whites as the ‘market dominant minority’ in much of Latin America, she also acknowledges that Spanish and Portuguese-descended whites have increasingly been outcompeted in commerce by more recent arrivals such as Lebanese and Jewish people (p66-8). Similar patterns are apparent elsewhere in the world. For example, although Chua identifies whites as a market dominant majority in the USA, in fact Indian-Americans and East Asian Americans report, on average, higher incomes than white Americans. In short, market dominance is a relative concept.
[2] America’s perceived role in interfering in domestic affairs of foreign nations also causes resentment in other parts of the world, besides Latin America, not least in the Middle East. Here, and elsewhere, the US is also perceived in interfering, not only in domestic affairs, but also in disputes between neighbouring countries, such as Israel and its neighbours.
[3] In addition to their role as economic middlemen (e.g. intermediaries between producers and consumers), and occupying a middling position in society, Jews were also ‘middleman’ in perhaps a third sense, namely they acted as intermediaries, not only between producers and consumers, but also between rulers and the ruled. Thus, Kevin Macdonald argues:
“The prototypical Jewish role as an instrument of governmental oppression has been that of the tax farmer” (A People that Shall Dwell Alone: p175).
According to Macdonald, Jews, as a prescriptively endogamous group of alien origins, were perfectly suited to this role “precisely because their interests, as a genetically segregated group, were maximally divergent from those of the exploited population” and they would therefore have “no kinship ties (and thus no loyalty) to the people who were being ruled” and could therefore be entrusted to extract the maximum revenue possible with all necessary ruthlessness (A People that Shall Dwell Alone: p172).
[4] Most of these countries are governed by monarchies with more or less absolute powers. Only Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan have some claim to being so-called ‘constitutional monarchies’, with some pretence of democratic representation. Even here, however, hereditary monarchs retain more power than elected assemblies, and the franchise is also restricted. In particular, in Kuwait and Bahrain, migrant workers are denied voting rights, and other citizenship rights, yet in Kuwait, and perhaps Bahrain too, form a majority of the resident population.
This is, of course, a very different model to that employed in western countries, which also encourage inward migration for economic reasons, but where immigrants are granted full citizenship rights and permitted to settle, often, over time, coming to comprise a majority of the population, and hence the electorate, in a given region, and thereby assuming electoral control of political institutions and policy.
These hereditary rulers and the elite circles around them are mostly decadent, corrupt and oil-rich, with little if any interest in radical Islamism, or in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, beyond a nominal façade of Islamism and anti-Zionism maintained, one suspects, primarily for public consumption.
Interestingly, if hereditary monarchies make loyal US allies, the same is also often true of secular strongman dictators in the region, such as the late Saddam Hussein. Thus, it is today often forgotten that even Saddam Hussein enjoyed good diplomatic relations with the USA prior to the invasion of Kuwait, especially during the Iran-Iraq war, where he and his regime were seen as providing a useful counterbalance against Islamic fundamentalist Iran, and even received limited US support in that conflict. The relationship broke down only because of ambiguous statements made to Saddam by an inept then-US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, regarding US neutrality vis a vis the Iraqi dispute with Kuwait, which Saddam interpreted, not unreasonably, as a green light to invade and occupy Kuwait and seize their oil reserves.
Of course, the most anti-American Middle Eastern powers are generally not democracies either. For example, America’s current bête noire in the Middle Eastern, Iran, is far from democratic. However, the theocratic republic that is currently in power in Iran did come to power, if not though elections, at least through popular uprising, and enjoyed considerable popular support. Moreover, it overthrew an unpopular, and pro-American, hereditary monarchy.
On the other hand, America’s supposed strongest ally in the Middle East is indeed, for all its alleged faults, a democracy, namely Israel. However, while the US is undoubtedly a very good ally to Israel, whether Israel is indeed a good ally to the US is debatable at best. The huge amount of aid and diplomatic and military support that the US provides to Israel essentially buys the US the animosity of the entire Arab-Muslim world, if not the entire Muslim world. America’s main diplomatic objective in the Middle East should surely be securing access to oil reserves, and, since the Arab-Muslim states have lots of oil, but Israel has very little, American foreign policy in the region should surely be concerned with maintaining good relations with the Arab-Muslim powers, not with Israel.
[5] Although she sympathetically discusses the idea, and recognises its inherent logic, Chua, for her part, does not go so far as to endorse the controversial proposal that the US ought to stop promoting democratic reforms and institutions in the developing world, let alone the idea that democracy even in the developed world might not be the ideal system of government.
Instead, to minimize the risk of a genocidal or anti-market backlash, she proposes marginally less controversial solutions, namely seeking to mitigate the extent of resentment against market dominant minorities by mitigating the extent of their market dominance though so-called affirmative action policies, or ethnic quotas/preferences. For example, she cites the examples of Malaysia, where indigenous Malays have been favoured by such policies, and in Canada, where French-speaking Québécois were favoured, as success stories.
Given that Chua explicitly discusses Jews as a market dominant minority in both Weimar Germany and contemporary Russia, one therefore wonders whether she would therefore also support the quotas formerly imposed on admissions of Jewish students to universities in both Nazi Germany and in some universities in Eastern Europe (and North America) which are now widely condemned as antisemitic, since these seem directly analogous to her proposals and to have been conceived with much the same objective in mind.
[6] Interestingly, in the last years of his life, as an evidently unusually computer-literate nonagenarian, Weyl seems to have reviewed Chua’s book on amazon.com, presumably because he recognised the extent to which it drew on themes that he had himself explored in much of his writing, namely the importance of envy in motivating genocide and mass killing.
[7] Interestingly, Nietzsche himself recognised antisemitism, no less than socialism, as a form of ‘ressentiment’, writing of ‘ressentiment’ that:
“This plant blooms its prettiest at present among Anarchists and anti-Semites” (On the Genealogy of Morals: ii, 11).
[8] Even during recent race riots in the USA, the primary targets of black animus, and hence of these small-scale pogroms, have often been, not whites, or at least not whites in general, but rather the local market dominant minorities in the relevant area (e.g. Korean shopkeepers in black ghettos during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Orthodox Jews during the 1991 Crown Heights riot: p207-8).
[9] Thus, Chua reports that:
“Jews in interwar Romania, although just 4 percent of the population, controlled most of the private capital in the export, transportation, insurance, textile, chemical, housing, and publishing industries… In Poland, as of 1921 over 60 percent of all commerce was conducted by Jews, who comprised just 11 percent of the population. Around the same time, Lithuania’s Jewish minority accounted for more than three-quarters of the country’s commercial activity. Meanwhile, in Hungary… [a]s of 1920, Jews constituted 23 percent of Hungary’s actors and musicians, 34 percent of the country’s authors, 51 percent of the attorneys, 60 percent of the doctors in private practice, and the overwhelming majority of those ‘self-employed’ in business and finance” (p80).
[10] Chua is, of course, referring here to the famous (or perhaps infamous) ‘Seven Bankers’, or Russian oligarchs, who stood accused of buying up Russia’s natural resources on the cheap with their controversial ‘loans for shares’ deal. Similarly, the Guardian reports:
“Of the seven oligarchs who controlled 50% of Russia’s economy during the 1990s, six were Jewish: Berezovsky, Vladimir Guzinsky, Alexander Smolensky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Mikhail Friedman and Valery [sic] Malkin. That fact is incontestable” (Harding 2007).
Actually, since this is, of course, a highly sensitive topic, one ought to acknowledge that this is not entirely “incontestable”. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, for example, is of mixed parentage, only his father being Jewish. Therefore, if one is being pedantic, one might protest he is not halachically Jewish.
It is also interesting to note, however, and Chua herself duly emphasizes, that, of the infamous ‘Seven Bankers’, it was the sole unambiguous Gentile among them – namely Vladimir Potanin, who, with a family background in the Soviet government, had a very different background to most of the remaining seven – seems to have been instrumental in both conceiving and negotiating the deal, making full use of the government connections with which his family background provided him.
[11] I suspect Chua mentioned only the proportion of Jews among richest ten Americans precisely in order to downplay the extent of Jewish dominance in relation to the US economy, because in the year in which she authored her book, this proportion happened to be relatively low.
[12] To arrive at this figure, The Jewish Telegraph Agency report that, for these purposes, they regarded as Jewish “those who were of Jewish descent or those who openly identified as Jews either personally or in their [sic] giving” (Berkman 2009). This would therefore exclude those who were of part-Jewish ancestry who did not practice Judaism or publicly identify as Jewish, many of whom no doubt nevertheless retained some degree of Jewish identity and affiliation.
[13] Indeed, even Chua’s own much lower figure of two out of ten is still vastly disproportionate.
[14] Neither is the situation in Indonesia entirely exceptional. On the contrary, this sort of pattern seems to be the norm throughout much of Southeast Asia. For example, here are a few statistics that Chua cites in relation to other Southeast Asian economies:
“Just 1 percent of the population, Chinese Filipinos control as much as 60 percent of the private economy” (p3).
“Apart from a handful of corrupt politicians and a few aristocratic Spanish mestizo families, all of the Philippines’ billionaires are of Chinese descent” (p4).
“A recent survey of Thailand’s roughly seventy most powerful business groups found that all but three were owned by Thai Chinese”(p35).
Overall, Chua reports, Southeast Asia as a whole:
“The ethnic Chinese communities of Southeast Asia… collectively control virtually all of the region’s most advanced and lucrative industries as well as its economic crown jewels” (p47).
It is hardly surprising that this level of economic dominance should provoke animosity among the indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia. Thus, economist Thomas Sowell once wrote:
“Although the overseas Chinese have long been known as ‘the Jews of Southeast Asia’, perhaps Jews might be more aptly called the overseas Chinese of Europe” (Black Rednecks and White Liberals: p84).
[15] As I have discussed above, Nazi propaganda about Jews controlling the economy and culture of Weimar-era Germany also contradicted another key aspect of the National Socialist Weltanschauung, which also featured heavily in their propaganda, namely the notion that Jews were an inferior race and Germans the master race, since, if Germans were indeed a superior race, then they would surely never have allowed themselves to be so dominated and oppressed by such a tiny number of allegedly inferior Jews in their midst.
[16] The claim of many Marxist historians and theorists that German National Socialism was largely if not entirely funded by big business, as part of a last gasp effort to preserve their own power and forestall the inevitable coming communist utopia is, however, a Marxist myth. The vast majority of German industrialists preferred give their to support to the established conservative parties, seeing the Nazis as dangerous agitators and troublemakers.
Only in the 1930s, did German industrialists begin to make substantial financial contributions to the party coffers. Even then, this was not so much because they supported Hitler’s policies or wished to see him come to power, or even because they saw the Nazis as a preferable alternative to communism (though they no doubt did), but rather simply to attempt to buy influence in a rising movement that was obviously in danger of attaining power. Thus, even during this period, many of the same industrialists who donated monies to the Nazis also financially supported other conservative parties as well.
In contrast, prior to the 1930s, the party was primarily kept afloat, not through the backing of industrialists, but rather thanks to the membership dues paid its members, together with the revenues generated by sale of party literature and newspapers and modest contributions from wealthier private individuals who supported the party.
[17] Certainly, some such groups (e.g. Irish and Italian Americans) did indeed attract nativist animosity, not least on account of their Catholicism. However, this was usually a temporary phenomenon, and these groups soon integrated into the American mainstream.
Interestingly, Chua herself makes the same, or at least a similar point – namely that, in America, no group excepting Native Americans can truly claim to be indigenous, and this renders any attempt by non-indigenous Americans to portray any other group as alien interlopers somewhat hypocritical, if not completely ideologically inviable – though she makes this point not in relation to the lack of antisemitism in modern America, but rather in discounting the possibility of an anti-white backlash in America in the future, when whites themselves are expected become a minority of population in the USA (see discussion above). Thus, she writes:
“There is a strong, ethnically crosscutting national identity in the United States, which would make it far more difficult for politicians to portray American whites as ‘outsiders’ stealing the wealth from America’s ‘true’ Hispanic, black, or Asian ‘owners’. (If Native Americans were still a majority in the United States, it might be a very different story.)” (p209).
[18] The claim that Jews dominate US media is, of course, controversial, and widely dismissed as an antisemitic canard. Certainly, the notion of Jews monolithically ‘controlling the media’, as alleged by some antisemites, is a vast exaggeration at best, especially in the age of the internet and of social media. However, while ‘control’, or even ‘market domination’, are vague and nebulous concepts, what can be demonstrated quantitively and hence objectively is overrepresentation.
Thus, Kevin Macdonald, citing the data from the book, The Roots of Radicalism by political scientists Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman, reports:
“A quarter of the Washington press corps were found to be Jewish in a 1976 study, and 58 percent of the television news producers and editors at the ABC television network in a 1973 study were Jewish. A 1979 study found that Jewish background was characteristic of 27 percent of the staff at the most influential news media. During this period, half of prime-time television writers were Jewish, and 32 percent of influential media critics were Jewish” (A People That Shall Dwell Alone: p197).
Similarly, Yuri Slezkine, in his celebrated work of interpretative history, The Jewish Century, reports:
“According to studies conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, Jews made up between one-quarter and one third of the ‘media elite’ (the news divisions of the three television networks and PBS, the three leading news magazines, and the four top newspapers). More than one-third of the most ‘influential’ critics of film, literature, radio, and television were of Jewish background, as were almost half of the Hollywood producers of primetime television shows and about two-thirds of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing movies between 1965 and 1982” (The Jewish Century: p368).
Jewish people also appear to be overrepresented in prominent positions in the media elsewhere in the world. For example, in Russia in the 1990s, Vladimir Gusinsky owned NTV, one of the main television networks in Russia at the time, and, although the state remained the majority shareholder, Boris Berezovsky was said possess effective control over ORT, another of the major television networks. These networks then backed Yeltsin in the 1996 presidential election, and, together with financial backing from the Seven Bankers (who counted Gusinsky and Berezovsky among their number) are widely credited with contributing to Yeltsin’s victory.
Of course, alleged Jewish ‘control’ over (or, at least, disproportionate representation in and influence over) legacy media is of diminishing importance in the internet age, when many people get their news, and their opinions, from other media outlets.
Moreover, social media is, by its very nature, much more difficult to regulate and control. For example, Mark Zuckerberg may be Jewish and may have founded Facebook, the world’s biggest and most active social media site, and Zuckerberg may still possess majority voting control over the company. However, despite increased censorship over the last decade, he and his company could hardly hope to control what the billions of active users on the website post on a daily basis.
This may partly explain the rise in anti-Jewish, and especially anti-Israel, sentiment in the west in recent years, though the recent and ongoing Gaza War is obviously also a major factor.
[19] For example, in the US, Jewish people are now three times overrepresented in Congress, and four and a half times overrepresented in the Senate. Similarly, Jews are about four times overrepresented in the British House of Commons, and were formerly almost eight times overrepresented
Although Jewish people represent less than one percent of the UK population, each of the two major parties in Britain, Labour and Conservative, have already had an ethnically Jewish leader this century (namely, Michael Howard and Ed Miliband). Meanwhile, the recently deposed British PM, Keir Starmer, was both married to a Jewish woman and raising his offspring in the Jewish tradition as members of a local synagogue.
The US has yet to have a Jewish president. However, both of the last two US presidents (Trump and Biden) have fathered offspring who have converted to Judaism and married in Jewish families, while Trump’s opponent in the last presidential election, Kamala Harris was, like the recently deposed British PM, married to a Jew. Clearly, top level national politics in the USA represents a disproportionately Jewish milieu.
Jews were also, of course, famously (or infamously) vastly overrepresented among the political leadership of the early Soviet Union and other communist regimes in Eastern Europe. However, since markets, at least in the western capitalist sense, did not exist under communism, Jews could not, of course, be described as a ‘market dominant minority’ in these societies, though they were often, to some extent, ‘market dominant minorities’ in the pre-communist economies that these communist regimes did away with.
[20] Thus, Richard Coughlin reports of the overseas Chinese in Thailand:
“Few seem to know or indeed to care about the restrictions on citizenship, nationality rights, and political activities in general, nor are these restrictions given much publicity in the Chinese press. This merely points up the fact, recognized by all observers, that the overseas Chinese are primarily concerned with making a living, or amassing a fortune, and thus take only a passive interest in the formal political life of the country in which they live” (Double Identity: The Chinese in Modern Thailand: p169)
Sociologist-turned-sociobiologist Pierre van den Berghe, discussing middleman minorities in The Ethnic Phenomenon, his seminal sociobiological study of ethnic conflict (which I have reviewed here), explains how:
“[Middleman Minorities] basically survive by keeping a low profile, by remaining as inconspicuous as possible, by being unostentatious about wealth, by staying out of politics (at least overtly) and by adopting a conciliatory, nonaggressive stance” (The Ethnic Phenomenon: p144).
In contrast, Jews today often adopt a very high profile in their host societies, at least in the west, being overrepresented, not only among the business elite and in politics, but also among public intellectuals and even in show business (e.g. among actors, movie directors, comedians etc.). However, it is true that relatively few openly flaunt their Jewishness, and many may even be said to practice a degree of ‘crypsis’ (e.g. anglicizing their names).
With regard to the low profile adopted by the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, especially telling is Chua’s description the “matter-of-fact, almost indifferent attitude” her own family in the Philippines adopted in response to the murder of her wealthy aunt by a native Filipino in her employment, and the apparent failure of the police to apprehend her killer, Chua’s uncle remarking “That’s the way things are here. This is the Philippines–not America” (p2).
“Hundreds of Chinese in the Philippines are kidnapped every year, almost invariably by ethnic Filipinos. Many victims, often children, are brutally murdered, even after ransom is paid. Other Chinese, like my aunt, are killed without a kidnapping, usually in connection with a robbery… The policemen in the Philippines, all poor ethnic Filipinos themselves, are notoriously unmotivated in these cases” (p2-3).
It is impossible to imagine Jewish people in the west today reacting in a similarly resigned, almost fatalistic way to a comparable wave of antisemitic murders targetting Jewish people.
[21] Perhaps aware of this fact, Chua herself acknowledges in this context that “intermarriage is no guarantee against ethnic conflict”, but continues:
“It is hard to imagine that American society will ever again look like a South Africa or Indonesia, where ethnic intermarriage rates are virtually nil” (p209).
[22] It ought also to be noted that, unlike earlier waves of immigrants (Italian Americans, Irish Americans, Polish Americans etc.), new immigrants now have much less incentive to assimilate. Indeed, there may even be disincentives associated with assimilation, if, by assimilating, a group thereby forgoes entitlement to affirmative action and racial preferences, and moreover finds itself classed as part of the hated white oppressor group. This is, of course, precisely why the US has recently added a new ‘MENA’ category to its census forms, at the specific behest of Middle Eastern and North African activists and activist groups, who were aghast at having to identify as ‘white’.
[23] This is the main theme of the magnificent documentary, ‘Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream’, itself based on Neal Gabler’s book, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood.
References
Berkman J (2009) At least 139 of the Forbes 400 are Jewish, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, October 5, 2009
Harding L (2007) The richer they come, Guardian, 2 July.
Nolan H (2010) The Forbes 400: A Demographic Breakdown, Gawker, Sep. 23.
Staff writer, 5 Jews make Forbes’ list of top 10 wealthiest Americans, Times of Israel, October 6.
Weyl, N. (1967). Aristocide as a Force in History. The Intercollegiate Review, 3(6), 237.
Weyl, N (1984) Envy and Aristocide Eugenics Bulletin.
Weyl (1975) Aristocide under Fuehrers and Commissars, Modern Age, Summer, 285-294.
The Contemporary Heretic 