Comment by winter_blue

Sorry, I know this is an old thread, but I feel a bit like I need to share my thoughts on this matter.

> like Saudi Arabia is rich but not developed imho > good education, infrastructure, medical care, human rights, clean environment

Saudi Arabia's record on human rights is truly horrible (for example, recently they've started murdering refugees[0]), but the idea of whether a country is "developed" seems to be highly subjective, imho. I don't know for sure (never been to Saudi Arabia), but I'm guessing they check off all the boxes except for human rights[1]. (About a clean environment--I imagine they'd be as clean as Abu Dhabi or Dubai (the UAE) which were a lot cleaner imo or on par with Western cities. I guess this is a matter of subjective matter, but is human rights a dimension a country has to have in order to be considered developed? If human rights is indeed a dimension that needs to be satisfied, would that mean that the brutal treatment of black and brown minorities in the US by the police would make the U.S. a country that's not developed?

I'm asking this since Western European countries also have a track record that has historically surpassed world records for brutality. For example, Belgium[1] was chopping off the hands of African tribal people they had forced into labor (effectively enslaved), Germany murdered 6 million innocent Jewish people[2] and had a habit murdering people even before the Nazis in its colonies as well[3], the British were responsible for numerous famines in India as well as famine in Ireland as well as other atrocities[4], the French committed atrocities[5], so did the Netherlands and the Dutch with the East India Company[6], and Spain and Portugal (along with England and others) were highly culpable in the murder of millions of Native Americans[7].

Did these actions, at least temporarily, render these Western European countries as "not developed" countries?

[0][a] https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/08/21/saudi-arabia-mass-killin...

[0][b] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/world/middleeast/saudi-ki...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Namaqua_genocide

[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/worst-atroci...

[5] https://newlinesmag.com/newsletter/the-dark-legacy-of-french...

[6] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/10/dutch-colonial-history-...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_Indigenous_peoples