'In 1937 more than 20,000 bodies
had been found in the streets
or on the waste ground of the city.
'By 1938 with the help of the [Sino-Japanese] war
the number of corpses collected had risen
to over one hundred thousand
in the International Settlement Alone.'
– J.G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip.
From the same work:
'Let me give you and example, Jim, of what happens when cash and the idea of profit dtrike root in a country unaccustomed to them - like Burma.
It seems that there's a ghastly Darwinian principle of economics known as the Law of Substitution which declares, more or less that "the cheapest will survive". This has all sorts of unpleasant consequences, one of which is that non-ecnomic values tend to be eliminated.'
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