The danger of China

The Chinese word for an empire of prison camps is just as easy to remember and to pronounce as its Russian equivalent. But while most educated people in Britain know what the Gulag was, few have ever heard of the Laogai. I sometimes wonder if we will never pay any attention to such things, anywhere in the world, until it is too late to learn from them.

As I recall, it was quite difficult to persuade our cultural establishment to worry about the Gulag when it still existed, because it was so unwilling to believe that the USSR was as wicked and nasty as it was. Now that it has gone, and the radical Left has forgotten that it ever had any connection with the old evil empire, we have a minor industry engaged in revealing to astonished bien pensants that the USSR was a bad place and Stalin a bad man.