World on Fire Quotes

“As it happens, the first souvenir I bought was a dried llama fetus. Revolting as it may sound, my poor stillborn llama is actually rather cute. Frozen in the fetal position and dried stiff like beef jerky, it has the gentle, smiling face of a camel and plenty of soft, if slightly formaldehyde-scented, fur. I bought the llama fetus partly because it horrified me, but also for educational purposes, so that my eight-year-old daughter Sophia could show it to her class. (She refused.)

Bolivians buy llama fetuses to ward off evil in its many guises. Bolivian miners—who, with a life expectancy of forty-five years, basically live their entire adult lives dying—look to llama fetuses for protection against dynamite explosions and the lung-destroying silicon particulates they inhale all day. Downing high-proof alcohol also helps. “The purer the alcohol, the purer the minerals I find,” one miner told me wryly.”
― Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

“Page 3:
My family is part of the Philippines’ tiny but entrepreneurial, economically powerful Chinese minority. Just 1 percent of the population, Chinese Filipinos control as much as 60 percent of the private economy, including the country’s four major airlines and almost all of the country’s banks, hotels, shopping malls, and major conglomerates.
...

Since my aunt’s murder, one childhood memory keeps haunting me. I was eight, staying at my family’s splendid hacienda-style house in Manila. It was before dawn, still dark. Wide awake, I decided to get a drink from the kitchen. I must have gone down an extra flight of stairs, because I literally stumbled onto six male bodies. I had found the male servants’ quarters. My family’s houseboys, gardeners, and chauffeurs—I sometimes imagine that Nilo Abique [the chauffeur that murdered her aunt] was among those men—were sleeping on mats on a dirt floor. The place stank of sweat and urine. I was horrified. Later that day I mentioned the incident to my Aunt Leona, who laughed affectionately and explained that the servants—there were perhaps twenty living on the premises, all ethnic Filipinos—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. A Filipino maid then walked in; I remember that she had a bowl of food for my aunt’s Pekingese. My aunt took the bowl but kept talking as if the maid were not there. The Filipinos, she continued—in Chinese, but plainly not caring whether the maid understood or not—were lazy and unintelligent and didn’t really want to do much else. If they didn’t like working for us, they were free to leave any time. After all, my aunt said, they were employees, not slaves.”
― Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

“Page 207
In the inner cities of all the major metropolitan areas across the United States, ethnic Koreans represent an increasingly glaring market-dominant minority vis-à-vis the relatively economically depressed African-American majorities around them. In New York City, Koreans, less than .1 percent of the city’s population, own 85 percent of produce stands, 70 percent of grocery stores, 80 percent of nail salons, and 60 percent of dry cleaners. In portions of downtown Los Angeles, Koreans own 40 percent of the real estate but constitute only 10 percent of the residents. Korean-American businesses in Los Angeles County number roughly 25,000, with gross sales of $4.5 billion. Nationwide, Korean entrepreneurs have in the last decade come to control 80 percent of the $2.5 billion African-American beauty business, which—“like preaching and burying people”—historically was always a “black” business and a source of pride, income, and jobs for African-Americans. “They’ve come in and taken away a market that’s not rightfully theirs,” is the common, angry view among inner-city blacks.
Page 208
At a December 31, 1994, rally, Norman “Grand Dad” Reide, vice president of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, accused Koreans of “reaping a financial harvest at the expense of black people” and recommended that “we boycott the bloodsucking Koreans.” More recently, in November 2000, African-Americans firebombed a Korean-owned grocery store in northeast Washington, D.C. The spray-painted message on the charred walls: “Burn them down, Shut them down, Black Power!”
― Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

“Page 210
Indeed, precisely because American society is so wealthy overall, America has come to occupy the role of a starkly market-dominant minority vis-à-vis the rest of world. We are now the object of intense resentment, even hatred, spurred by globalization.”
― Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

“Page 259:
The bottom line is this. Democracy can be inimical to the interests of market-dominant minorities. There were good reasons why the Indians in Kenya and whites in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and America’s Southern states resisted democratization for generations. Market-dominant minorities do not really want democracy, at least not in the sense of having their fate determined by genuine majority rule. Some readers will surely protest. Many market-dominant minorities—the Chinese in Malaysia, for example, or Jews in Russia, and Americans everywhere—often seem to be among the most vocal advocates of democracy. But “democracy” is a notoriously contested term, meaning different things to different people. When entrepreneurial but politically vulnerable minorities like the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa, or Jews in Russia call for democracy, they principally have in mind constitutionally guaranteed human rights and property protections for minorities. In other words, in calling for democracy, these “outsider” groups are precisely seeking protection against “tyranny of the majority.”
― Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

“Page 221: Between 1950 and 1985, U.S. government grants to Israel totaled approximately $21 billion, a level of aid far exceeding that provided to most other countries. … Over the same period, financial contributions from world Jewry totaled roughly $9.4 billion. Meanwhile, between 1950 and 1965, West Germany paid the government of Israel $780 million in Holocaust reparations. In addition, between 1950 and 1985 it paid Israeli citizens $7 billion in personal reparations”
― Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

“Page 178: … it is striking to note that none of the Asian Tigers has ever had a market-dominant minority. In all the Asian Tigers, the ethnic majority—the Japanese in Japan, the Koreans in South Korea, and the Chinese in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore—is both economically and politically dominant. … Among other factors, the lack of a market-dominant minority in all these Tigers probably helps explain their economic success relative to the far poorer and less stable neighboring Southeast Asian countries of Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.”
― Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

“Page 147: When a poor democratic majority collides with a market-dominant minority, the majority does not always prevail. Instead of a backlash against the market, there is a backlash against democracy. Often, this antidemocracy backlash takes the form of “crony capitalism”: corrupt, symbiotic alliances between indigenous leaders and a market-dominant minority”
― Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

“Page 120: The only point I wish to highlight here is that there are important links between colonialism and the phenomenon of market-dominant minorities. Not only were the colonialists themselves market-dominant minorities, but colonial divide-and-conquer policies favored certain groups over others, exacerbating ethnic wealth imbalances and fomenting group tensions”
― Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

“Page 33: The magnitude of the Chinese minority’s economic power was astounding. Constituting just 1 percent of Vietnam’s population, the Chinese controlled an estimated 90 percent of non-European private capital in the mid-1950s and dominated Vietnam’s retail trade, its financial, manufacturing, and transportation sectors, and all aspects of the country’s rice economy.
Page 43: By 1998, Sino-Indonesians occupied a position of economic dominance wildly disproportionate to their numbers. Just 3 percent of the population, the Chinese controlled approximately 70 percent of the private economy.”
― Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

“When free market democracy is pursued in the presence of a market-dominant minority, the almost invariable result is backlash. This backlash typically takes on of three forms. The first is a backlash against markets, targeting the market-dominant minority’s wealth. The second is a backlash against democracy by forces favorable to the market-dominant minority. The third is violence, sometimes genocidal, directed against the market-dominant minority itself”
― Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

“This book is about a phenomenon—pervasive outside the West yet rarely acknowledged, indeed often viewed as taboo—that turns free market democracy into an engine of ethnic conflagration. The phenomenon I refer to is that of market-dominant minorities: ethnic minorities who, for widely varying reasons, tend under market conditions to dominate economically, often to a startling extent, the “indigenous” majorities around them. … Lebanese are a market-dominant minority in West Africa. Ibo are a market-dominant minority in Nigeria. Croats were a market-dominant minority in the former Yugoslavia. And Jews are almost certainly a market-dominant minority in post-Communist Russia”
― Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

“Even today, many poor and lower-middle-class whites feel more solidarity with Bill Gates and George W. Bush than with African-Americans or Hispanic-Americans of comparable economic status. Indeed, as many have observed, large numbers of working-class whites in the United States oppose welfare and increased government spending on social services, often voting against what might be expected to be their economic self-interest. It is widely suspected that racism (together with a thriving ideology of upward mobility) plays a role in this pattern.”
― Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability