Hacker News Reader

Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

Let me tell you as a white man that does not own anything but his laptop and a few clothes: crushing individuals in the name of Greater Good always backfired on us and it will backfire on you, too.

I am not even sure if we learnt this lesson yet here in the West - power is corrosive to human rights - but your answers seems to be radically rejecting its validity altogether.

Several empires disintegrated after treating their own people badly.

View on HN

The Chinese civilization has at least 2000 (the commonly given 5000 is way too generous) years of experience with statecraft. I think at this point they know what will or will not backfire on them.

So does the Western civilization, our roots are in deep Antiquity and a lot of Greek philosophy and Roman law still forms a base of our contemporary institutions.

But we still repeated the same mistakes on different occasions. It often happens that when someone gets all the power, he (usually he) deems himself better at statecraft than those backward ancestors.

The government was completely overthrown three times in the 20th century, and the prior centuries saw immense turmoil as well.

Do Italians have inherently good government skills due to Ancient Rome?

Edit: oops overthrown two or three times depending on whether the Japanese take over of major cities counts. But anyway what I really mean is it had three distinct and extremely different governments. Transfer of skills seems questionable, to understate it.

A country with even longer tradition of governmental skills would be ... Iraq.

After the "Cultural Revolution", what is left of Chinese history, to learn from?

Taiwan?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com