Good luck with this, when the fate of human beings require unified effort.

I'd like to think of it more as the typical:

"Yeah, our country did those things back in the day to develop/get rich, but yours should not do them. History shouldn't repeat itself in your country's case, only my country should be allowed that privilege"

Countries must pass through certain stages to develop.

Countries that were once at stage 0 and now, after centuries , managed to be on stage N, are hypocritical (if not self-serving and used for diplomatic/political reasons) to point fingers at countries earlier in those stages. Especially if those countries are much older and larger (and thus slower to change) and despite that go through those stages much faster...

The argument that human rights abuses, totalitarian thinking, and mass pollution is absolutely necessary to advance is absurd and damaging.

Maybe you forgot what is discussed in this thread? The argument was about workers sacrificing their life for industrialisation, suffering through lack of safety, work dangers, etc, and then tossed aside as seniors. To quote:

"These people literally put their life into the modernization of the nation. Some of them died young, mostly from poor safety measures in their work environment. A lot of them suffer chronicle diseases that make their life a living torture. Yet even more of them wait to see the grim prospect of a miserable senior life. We are not even starting mentioning the tragic life of these events on their offsprings!*"

-- that is, nothing specific to totalitarianism.

Those things happened every time and for every country that developed from from a mostly agrarian society to an advanced industrial one, so there's nothing "absurd" about considering them as typical stages...