India: The Shining City, Atop the Hill
India: That Shining City, Atop the Hill There’s a nasty fact of life that the United States (and NATO) don’t seem to want to willingly grasp about Russia, China, and to some extent India: life historically has little value in this neck of the woods when compared to the needs of the state. It might seem callous to put it like this, but it should be recognised that treating life as a material input worked as an effective, though bloody shortcut to development for both China and Russia. Both were giant factories where human lives went in one end and a productivity benefit came out the other. It’s in this context of ethical flexibility that the West needs to view the Russia-China dynamic with the world. The world’s not all sunshine and rainbows, and we’re not in Kansas anymore. At least 20 million Russian workers died in labour camps during Stalin’s bloody reign. This was then copied by Mao who visited Stalin and picked up large financial support as well a...