Do you therefore conclude that this is in fact being done in secret? Or maybe that the only reason why it's not being done is the difficulty of keeping it secret?
Primarily the latter. Consider this:
North Korea abducts women for the president's harem.
South Korea does not (neither openly nor secretly, with p~0).
And yet it's people of the same nationality on both sides of the border. Therefore such things don't seem to me to be primarily dependent on "national character". They seem to be primarily about what each leader can get away with doing. South Korea and America are semi-democratic capitalist states. North Korea is a totalitarian regime.
To get back to my comment where I explained what I consider to be a reasonable interpretation of "national character," I defined it thus:
[N]orms that the British government is known to follow consistently in practice, and expected to follow by a broad consensus of the British people -- such consensus being strong enough that it can be considered part of their national character.
In this discussion, I am not at all interested in the exact connection that these norms have with ethnicity or any other factors. I merely claim that for whatever rea...
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