    50

    The Brahmans were not the only folk to turn plunder into a

    permanent condition, grafting the conquered into the underbelly of

    their own superbeast.  The aristocrats in many civilizations are the

    fossils of earlier conquering hordes.  Their position at society's apex is

    the residue of robbery.

    In England, the titled classes, the folks who hold their noses in

    the air and disdain their lowlier countrymen, are the descendants of

    Saxon, Viking and Norman soldiers who pillaged, slaughtered and

    raped in successive waves from roughly 470 to 1066 AD.101  In Japan,

    the aristocracy which has sat securely in place for nearly 1,800 years is

    the remnant of a population of nomadic Mongoloid horsemen who

    came across the sea from Korea in the first century A.D., brutalizing the

    local population into submission with long iron swords.102   Yet we still

    gush with excitement over princes and princesses who show off at

    elaborate parties and are featured in fashionable magazines, not

    realizing that the virtue which distinguishes their families from ours

    was the greater willingness of their ancestors to use violence.

    In Japan and England, just as in India, religion, philosophy,

    poetry and ideology have all been used to nail the lowly conquered in

    their place.  For a view of the invisible world holds a very visible world

    together--the world of society.  A web of memes justifies the

    subjugation of those on the bottom, upholds the power of those on top,

    and sometimes maintains the specialized roles that allow a static

    society to work.  Even more, it clothes the power of those who rule

    with a sublime halo, disguising overlords as the chosen of God--or, in

    the case of Marxism, the inevitable heirs to the forces of history.  It

    beatifies the pecking order.

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