re: #1336 yma o hyd

re: #1347 Sharmuta

Have you read this one by Sowell, Sharmuta? I read it years ago and have never forgotten it. Basically, (and I hope I’m explaining this right), he argues in conclusion that due to several happy accidents of history, the liberties we enjoy are derived from a unique culture that developed in the British Isles and nowhere else on earth. He argues against racial, and racist, arguments interpreting history . I’m not explaining this very well, but I highly recommend the book.
Conquests and Cultures…Thomas Sowell

amazon.com Review
Another tour de force by one of America’s leading public intellectuals. Conquests and Cultures continues in the tradition of Sowell’s superb books, Race and Culture and Migrations and Cultures. The series attempts to understand the meaning of cultural differences, including how these differences have influenced the economic and social fates of civilizations, nations, and ethnic groups. This particular installment focuses on how military conquest both destroys culture and spreads it by examining the histories of the English, the Africans, the Slavs, and the indigenous people of the New World. Sowell rejects the cultural relativism that is currently so fashionable in the universities and forthrightly believes that some cultures—understood as “the working machinery of everyday life”—are clearly superior to others. He marshals a massive amount of scholarly material to support his ideas, and capably turns this mountain of data into straightforward prose.