The state of the rail system the most reliable measure of how civilized a country really is

Through a postcolonialist lens this is pretty clever. Use of civilized as a term to excuse the racist and expansionist actions of one’s own country, expansion which happens to have coincided with railways being central to industrial power. Now the colonized are civilized, are we the barbarians?

Unironically thinking like that is the real ape-brained behavior.