Indeed it was. I once had occasion to study a 1930s paper on the mathematics of population growth by R.A. Fisher, it gave me no pleasure to leaf through the "A

Indeed it was. I once had occasion to study a 1930s paper on the mathematics of population growth by R.A. Fisher, it gave me no pleasure to leaf through the "Annals of Eugenics" to find it. But we have an essential difference I think between the genocide that China stands accused of, which you yourself see as a "temporally relative evil" (yes the US did it, but it was a while ago), and the genocide of the German attempt to destroy European Jewry (which was also a while ago) that I think we would all agree is an "absolute evil". So perhaps the Economist have a point here.