It’s important that Americans learn the difference between the western and Asian way of doing things.
In the West, individualism is held up as the highest value, but in the East, an individual doesn’t really matter *out of the context* of their family and place in society.
Large, wealthy and powerful *extended* families tend to be dynastic, and with closer bonds than say to their neighbors or town or city.
However, typical families are tied to their caste in society and their city or town.
So, for example, if a fisherman in a village offended the emperor or one of his major lieutenants, it would be regarded as an offense *by his village*, for which they would all be punished.
The clearest expression of the difference between western and Asian thinking are the Russians, who are philosophically tuned to both, yet comfortable with neither. For this reason, they can do things that would be shocking to westerners, but rationalize them in a half sensible way.
For example, in Afghanistan, the women and children actively helped their men fighting the Russians, so the Russians adopted the American idea of “concentration camps” (less the stigma). Putting the women and children in camps, with food and water and clothing and barracks. To probably live better than they did at home. Not intolerable.
But they still made trouble in the camps, so took far more guards than the Russians were able to give. So they came up with an idea.
Dig a slit trench, line it with plastic, and fill it with water that had a little blister agent in it. Make the women and children walk its length, which would take a layer of skin off their feet and ankles, so they would have to go around on their hands and knees until the skin regrew. Thus keeping them out of trouble.
This, as the Russians said, “was the humanitarian thing to do, as otherwise they would have no choice but to kill the women and children; that technically *might* be done according to the Geneva Conventions.”
So by disabling them, it is saving their lives. Russian humanitarian logic.
Of course the outcry in the west was huge. So the Russians backed down, rather puzzled as to why the West thought it was worse to injure than to kill.
The bottom line is that Asian morality and ethics do exist, but to westerners they are so alien that they seem brutal and inhuman. Oddly enough, many Asians see western morality and ethics, if not equally bizarre and alien, as at least illogical.
The atrocities perpetuated in the Balkans by the Austrian Hungarian troops in the very early days of World War 1 signify that there wasn’t much difference between east and west. Thousands of people were being slaughtered daily, hung up by wire on their tippy toes until they slowly choked to death, garroting so to speak... and other such ways of dealing with large masses of populations that needed to be contained and controlled. Colossal genocide.
And then the Turks (Ottoman empire) showed up...
My question is; which rogue state will develop neutron technology first?