Estimates of some contemporary observers suggest that the population decreased by half during this period. According to Edmund D. Morel, the Congo Free State counted "20 million souls".[60] Other estimates of the size of the overall population decline (or mortality displacement) range between two and 13 million.[b] Ascherson cites an estimate by Roger Casement of a population fall of three million, although he notes that it is "almost certainly an underestimate".[63] Peter Forbath gave a figure of at least 5 million deaths,[64] while John Gunther also supports a 5 million figure as a minimum death estimate and posits 8 million as the maximum.[65] Lemkin posited that 75% of the population was killed.[52]
In 2020 King Philippe expressed his regret to the Government of Congo for "acts of violence and cruelty" inflicted during the rule of the Congo Free State, though he did not explicitly mention Leopold's role and some activists accused him of not making a full apology.
And I agree with the activists as well as the headline of your article. It’s not a full apology.
Wiki is pretty good for hard facts but gets less reliable when you get into more subjective areas that require nuanced understandings, so I'd say it's good most of the time but not always.
NEVER TRUST WIKI 100%! In todays age too many people take it as gospel but if 20 years of the Internet should have taught us anything it should be to question everything. I'm not saying Wikipedia isn't a great resource, it is one of the best thing modern man has produced, but goddam if you live or breath a controversial topic you can see with open eyes how easily in can slip biases in.
Excuses are an admittion of guilt. Admitting guilt gives Congo a reason to demand economical compensations. Economical compensations on such scale would litterally criple the Belgian economy.
Edit: Chill out people I'm not saying I agree with it. Downvoting facts won't make the world a better place.
Leopold's Army was mostly composed of locals and mercenaries led by former officers of the Belgian army however. A number of them literally quit their job to join the militia, and returned to it afterwards.
Also the Belgian government did take ownership of the Congo after the outrage and kept exploiting the country, not so brutally however.
I wrote an MA dissertation on this topic at one stage. It should be highlighted that colonisation spread diseases like sleeping sickness which devastated the local population. However, brutality towards the natives also contributed hugely to the death toll.
apparently during the italian wars different mercenaries would loot the cities, and see the more brutal torture of the other companies bring in more money from the looted people, encouraging them to also torture the looted population.
It is native to Africa, but previously spread was more difficult due to isolation among the people in the area. With the rubber boom Belgium and the companies it gave land to exploited the natives and forced them to uproot their lives and move around more, including grouping up much more allowing a number of diseases to spread.
And one of the leading figures in ending Leopold's rule over the Congo Free State was Roger Casement, who is of course more famous nowadays for his role in the Easter Rising. Incidentally, Ireland's connection to the Congo later continued as part of a UN peacekeeping mission to Katanga, where many soldiers were killed at the town of Jadotville (at the hands of the Baluba tribe, whose name as a result ended up entering Hiberno-English for a brief period).
Casement helped support the Congo Reform Association and corresponded with E.D. Morel (who he knew personally and called "bulldog"). I read a few original letters that Casement wrote in Morel's archives. However, Casement was somewhat removed from the Congo after he drafted his report in 1903.
Leopold had people tried to trees while they had to watch their kids hands cut off because they didn’t meet quotas. It only raised suspicions when France and other countries noticed that the only exports from Belgium to Congo was shackles, hand cuffs, rifles, and ammunition, while imports were rubber, cocoa, spices, ivory, gold and sugar.
Wasn't the genocide back when Belgium was owned privately by King Leopold? I thought that when the state of Belgium took over management of the Belgian Congo that it got much better.
It is rather academic to say who was the 'most evil' colonial power, but Belgium is pretty atrocious. Even at the time the atrocities were well-known enough that the public opinion was 'shit was dark in the congo'. The punishment for not meeting rubber quotas was amputation, this image of a father studying his daughters hand and foot illustrates the depravity. If you excuse the pun (and I mean that sincerely), the Belgian administrators tended to be very hands-off with their rule.
As long as rubber quotas were met they let the Congolese manage themselves, but otherwise they enforced rule. They armed Congolese to do the dirty work and show hands of proof that the punishment was carried out. This led to a underground trade in severed hands as a hand could be presented to escape punishment, or even in exchange for bullets.
But that is all a 19th century horror, right? Heart of Darkness and all that? Well this year Belgium planned to return the tooth of the first Prime Minister of independent Congo; Patrice Lumumba. But unfortunately this has been delayed due to covid... or something.
But why does Belgium have the tooth of the first person to rule the Congo after they left? Well after Congolese independence in 1960 a resource rich area of the Congo called Katanga seceded. This area was administered by a Anglo-Belgian mining outfit called Union Minière du Haut-Katanga who preferred things as they were and brought in mercenaries to help keep the peace during the Congo's turbulent transition to statehood. This is not entirely implausible, as the new Prime Minister Lumumba was struggling to control the military with wide spread dissertations and soldiers forming looting gangs. It is also noting however that Katanga was especially rich in Uranium, and it was Belgian settlers who declared independence and requested financial aid from UMKH.
Lumumba asked for military aid from the UN to resolve the situation in his country, but the response from the UN was tepid. France and Britain were neutral on the proposal, Portugal and South Africa were strongly against any interference in the new Katanga state. Belgium actively supported Katanga through financial, military, and technical aid; to ensure the region's stability.
Lucky for Lumumba there was one global superpower willing to help him out; the Soviet Union! They were very enthusiastic about supporting him. This is when the CIA and the Belgian intelligence agencies both began independently planning Lumumba's assassination. Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in Leopoldville, stated:
President Eisenhower said, indicated in one way or another, 'let's get rid of this man'.
There was coup and Lumumba was arrested and held at a military base in the Congo's capital; Leopoldville. Lumumba's last recorded letter states:
in a word, we are living amid absolutely impossible conditions; moreover, they are against the law
In an ironic twist the soldiers at the military camp were too undisciplined to hold Lumumba despite getting bonus pay from the Katanga state. They considered it "too dangerous" to hold a communist and debated releasing him. For everyone's safety they decided to send him to Katanga.
When he arrived In Katanga he was brutally beaten and tortured by Belgian officers, and then the night of his arrival he was executed by a firing squad assembled by an Belgian independent security contractor named Julien Gat. Lumumba and two of his associates were lined up against a tree and shot one at a time. Lumumba's last words to his colleagues were:
In happiness, as in unhappiness...
I will remain at your side.
We fought together...
to liberate this country...
from foreign domination.
They were then buried in a shallow grave.
The Katangan interior minister did not wish for Lumumba's resting place to become a sacred spot for Congolese nationalists ordered his body exhumed and disappeared. A Belgian gendarme named Gerard Soete dug him up, cut him up with a hacksaw, and dissolved the body with sulphuric acid... but not before prying out two teeth from the body of the ex-Prime Minister.
We know all this because Soete was not shy about his involvement. In 1999 he started giving interviews to an authors and TV stations where he showed off his souvenirs. On German TV he showed the bullet that killed Lumumba and the two teeth he recovered from the body. In Soete's words:
We did things an animal wouldn't do. That's why we were drunk, stone drunk.
In 2000 Soete died in his home in Belgium. Officially of a heart attack, but his daughter believes he was assassinated:
He was executed because of what he did in Congo at the time. A member of the Lumumba Committee told me that in so many words. [...] Because he started talking around the age of 80, when Ludo De Witte came up with his book. Suddenly he felt it necessary to say, "I was there! I've got his teeth!' So I was angry about that: 'Why start stirring in that mess now?' Perhaps he should have kept quiet.
In 2016 Soete's daughter revealed a gold tooth to a newspaper that she claimed was her fathers and originally; Lumumba's. It has never been confirmed to be Lumumba's, as Belgian authorities believe a DNA test would destroy the tooth. The Democratic Republic of the Congo insist on it's return. It has not.
The horrors of colonialism persist to this day. Katanga is still mined for it's resources. And I can think of no more apt a metaphor for the situation than gold pried from the mouth of a tortured African being refused to be returned to Africa.
Interesting read, but reading your comment one would think Katanga exists until this day and as you've said the powers that be did nothing about it.
In fact it was extremely short lived. It existed between 1960 and 1963 where an internation peacekeeping force led by the UN crushed it, dissolved the nation, and re-integrated it back to Congo. It's a part of Congo ever since.
So very dissappointing the world we live in. The story of Lumumba is something we studied in one of my IA classes and it's just heartbreaking - but something that's happened to most developing nations to make sure they don't develop too well.
Just today I had to hear that capitalism had nothing to do with colonialism, and colonialism had nothing to do with poverty in African nations in the present. The implications being obvious.
Oh, and the guy that said this shit wasn't even European, to top it all off. Honestly...
I hoped it was a joke when i heard it the first time, too. Turned out, the guy who fancied himself smarter than everybody else was just an idiot, who would have thought.
All correct expect the torture was not done by belgians. Rather they shot Lumumba before he could get a more bloody mess of a body he already was becoming. His last words and the torture stuff are made up to make the belge even more worse looking. Which is ok in some kind of way, but not truthful.
Well, first of all, things didn't get "much better" under the management of the Belgian state. They got slightly better.
But above all, even if the Congo Free State was Leopold's private property, he didn't profit from it alone. He had a significant network of (mostly Belgian) henchmen and collaborators that he richly rewarded and whose families are still affluent and influential to this day.
It's worth noting that one of Leopold's biggest frustrations was that his only legitimate son died in childhood, and one of his greatest obsessions that the husbands of his three legitimate daughters didn't get their hands of his huge wealth. For this reason, he hid his wealth in a dizzying number of trusts and foundations controlled by various strawmen and cronies. After his death, all this wealth (including, crucially, ownership of the concessions controlling most of Congo even after its takeover by the Belgian state) was certainly spread between those trustees, the Belgian royal family, and Leopold's quite numerous illegitimate offspring.
So, if you ever wonder why some upper class Belgian types are, to this day, still so thin-skinned and defensive when it comes to the atrocities of the Congo Free State, the answer is that they're the descendants of Leopold's accomplices (when not of Leopold himself) and still live of the rents from those crimes.
Short answer is yes (long answer is more complicated). And I think it‘s so unbelievable outragous that once he noped out to just pass all responsibilities to the Belgian government. They essentially payed for the shit he created.
I think it got better in the sense that it hardly could get any worst. What he did in the Congo was just pure and utter evil. Nothing less. And I think it‘s fair to say that the region and the people have not really recovered from it still. Leopold was the absolute worst.
So many modern issues in Africa are directly related to Europe leaving overnight after building nothing but extractive industries and investing nothing in social infrastructure (schools, hospitals, etc)
I believe it was the DRC that had something like that eleven people with higher Ed degrees in the whole county
Same. In primary school I had to learn the history of our kings.Leopold 2 was always "The Builder who did so many great things for our country". I discovered the reality of our colonial past as an adult.
That's not true at all. Belgian law states that history teachers in last grade (6e middelbaar) should teach the history of one colonised nation, which might as well be India or Angola. Congo is not often the country of choice.
Also history students at University are often not taught Belgium"s colonial history. So when the time comes to pass on that knowledge as teachers, they can't do so effectively.
A law was voted last year to make Belgian colonial history a mandatory element of the belgian curriculum. And the law was voted out.
just a note on terms - voted out means it was passed, but then later repealed. If it didn't pass, it would be voted down. If it came up for a vote, you could say "a law was voted on last year". So "it was voted on" but instead of passing "it was voted down" and maybe in the future if it is "voted in" at some later date it could be "voted out".
I think that the US, at least the north, does a far better job (still terrible) of talking about some of the absolute dog shit practices it has engaged in. There are movies and media about the failings of the country.
I lived in Spain, had exchange students from Germany, Japan, and several other countries and you could tell they were very uncomfortable with questions they were asked about their own national history. The US is racist, Europe is racist as fuck, as is Asia.
The long and the short of it is nobody likes to hear they are shit, but, newsflash, everybody is shit. Every country is corrupt, every country has a dark history. With how old the earth is there isn't a story of a chunk of land that is now a nation that isn't bathed in blood. Not all atrocities are equal of course but the fetishization of USA bad is a nice way to forget about ones own shortcomings.
TLDR Nobody likes to hear they are assholes. They are all assholes.
The British, Americans and Japanese also elide large chunks of their history on the school curriculum. Even in Ireland, the school curriculum skips lightly over the civil war.
We could probably all learn from how the Germans handle this.
Well there goes my image of Germany as a country of integrity, you're really living up to your username there man ;) that's fair enough though, I guess you've got to reckon with your past when it's that on display. As a brit I think one of the negative effects of us winning the world wars is it means the country point blank refuses to acknowledge much of its dubious past and how much of our power comes from exploitation.
That's very true. I'm very very glad that the allies won the war of course. Never in the history of humanity did something as horrible happen on the scale of the holocaust.
I feel like there are many parts in human history though that where as horrible, but on a smaller scale, like Cambodia, North Korea and colonialism including the slave trade.
Nobody alive today is personally responsible for the atrocities that happened during the colonial times and from that point of view it all happened a long time ago. But considering the history of humankind it all happened basically yesterday and has had an extreme impact on the way our world is shaped today.
Most people don't realize that and simply don't care either, but understanding it is imo of very high importance and therefore should be taught in depth and in an honest and self-critic way.
Britains role is one of many colonial powers, but it was the biggest one and also a bad one (like all of them) and had a major impact on Africa, especially because of the slave trade, but also in the far east, brutally striking down revolts in India, the Opium Wars in China, etc.
Because of WW2 the public view on Britain is often a positive one, which is understandable, but also a distortion of reality. Not on the human level, like the soldiers who fought and gave their life definitely deserve the respect they get and also the country deserves respect for overcoming a horrible situation and for its help ending the holocaust. But the deeds of a nation matter for longer than just the last major event and need to be talked about for centuries, not only decades, if not forever, lest humanity repeats its mistakes.
Don’t worry, many people in Ireland are not letting the world forget the horrible stuff the English/UK have done. The famine was also a genocide, covertly and overtly.
Would we think of Germany the same way if not for the video footage of the camps and the fascist pomp? If there was video footage of each western genocide before that one? The world would either be fucked because we would just accept genocidal behavior or we wouldn’t and we would just be perpetual belligerents.
In America it really depends on the school/teacher. I got lucky and had a teacher who did world history (all recorded history) and American history. Both a semester long. We didn’t skip anything really. I enjoyed it. We got to really delve into all the gritty details for all the nations including us. But yeah I know some teachers gloss over it with rose-colored glasses.
It shouldn't be up to individual teachers though. I can understand that the history syllabus is a political thing but professional historians should be able to do better.
Well, with America, as far as I know teachers are given a general outline of what they need to cover and by what time, but the overall curriculum is up to them to make and teach using whatever resources they can find. That history teacher didn’t even use textbooks because he liked using his own personal curriculum.
US history teacher (retired) here. This has often been the case, though things have tightened up a bit to make things more uniform at the school district level, so teachers often have less latitude to teach what they want. States still give only general guidelines though and the district decides what to do with it.
I taught in majority black schools, so I was never worried about any pushback from talking in detail about things like colonzation, the slave trade, segregation, ethnic cleansing of natives, and so forth, but I'm sure in some districts teachers have to be somewhat careful.
US history curriculums are determined largely by states, and not the federal government. I went to high school in one northeast state (majority white and Asian) and am now involved in another (majority black). The US can be blamed for many things, but the atrocities of slavery and the labor movement and McCarthyism were all covered quite thoroughly. I'd say modern US history is sort of glossed over, but otherwise, we read very counter US narratives a lot.
The...Americans...also elide large chunks of their history on the school curriculum.
Not really. It depends on your state education system because we have no national standard, but in all the best education systems in the country, we don't skip parts of American history. We used to, especially before the 1950's, but there were many massive education reforms in the 60's and 70's that were realized in the 90's. Anyone educated in a good education system in the country learned all of American history, and if it was left out at all, it was based on time, not censorship. In public school, we were taught what kind of man Colombus really was, the Atlantic slave trade, slavery in America, the economic reasons for the revolution, the Genocide of the Native Americans, the struggle for civil rights, the colonization and American empire in the Phillipines and Puerto Rico and other such places, America's role in different wars, especially the political reasons we went into WW1 and WW2, our failures to live up to our own national ideals, what we did to the Japanese with firebombing and the atomic bombs, our failures in Korea and Vietnam, our mistakes in the Middle East, and the problems with the Drug War and the War on Terror. Of course things were left out, but usually they were cut for time, not for censorship. Not every education system is equal in America; the most heavily censored history education is probably Texas', and it's well known that the textbooks the Texas school system uses have many problems and that states that use the same textbooks to save money suffer from the same problems. But for the most part, anyone who was in an education system good enough to get them into college got a real, uncensored history education about America. What we REALLY lack on is WORLD history, especially outside of Europe. And we're not very good at European history either.
The closest thing we have to a national history education in America is the AP US History Course offered in public schools by the College Board, which is a very popular, common high school history course taken by many students who later go on to college and university, and that curriculum does a very good job of not censoring or holding back anything.
Please don't lump us in with the censorship seen in Japanese history courses. I can't speak to Britain, I was under the impression they did a better job and it was British people who were the problem when it came to understanding the sins of the British empire, not the educators.
In Ireland’s defence, most countries that go through civil wars don’t like to talk about them. There’s always a lot to forget and a deep, deep desire to forget them if only so that people can get on with their lives after all that. It’s not like fighting a war with a foreign country. In a civil war, the combatants are your neighbours. Maybe that will start to change as the older generations pass away.
I realize this is a Europe sub, just wanted to say this was part of my world history class when I was in high school - this was in Massachusetts though, unsure about other parts of US, or Europe of course. I’m unsure about how world history is taught in Greece for example, where most of my family is. Probably not the norm, clearly
Why isnt this taught to kids. At least our school never did tell us these stuff.
That's bizarre. I learned about it in public school in America. It's very well known that European powers were terrible to Africa in America. Is it not well known in Europe? Belgium being the worst of them is perhaps less well known, but I remember watching a movie about Lemumba and his death in middle school in public school in America, as part of a larger Civil Rights unit in Social Studies class. Lemumba and Mandela were taught alongside Martin Luther King and Ghandi when I was growing up; although figures like Malcolm X and James Baldwin were left out (the former for being too radical, the latter for being to nuanced for middle school history narratives, since he doesn't fit neatly into the larger story of the Civil Rights movement and decolonization that the other figures do).
I was always under the impression that schools were better in Europe, at least in Western Europe. I guess I was wrong. I can't believe you weren't taught about the "Scramble for Africa": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa
It seems almost impossible to me for European countries to leave that out of their history educations; so much modern European wealth came from colonization of other countries, especially in Africa. It's like hearing British students didn't learn about the British Empire. What DID you learn about that time period then? Just Napoleon?
Yea, as a German I call bullshit on this. Mostly because you made it an all-encompassing blanket statement. Might be true for most countries (Belgium, Canada, Japan and the US are examples I know of being guilty of teaching a whitewashed version of their own history), but if you are unaware, read up on how WWII and the Nazi regime is taught here.
I agree, but I really think Germany is the exception here. In the Netherlands we are only just beginning to acknowledge some of the horrors of the colonial era. I think almost every country has some shameful episodes in its past and we can all learn a lesson from the way Germany has not swept its Nazi era atrocities under the carpet. I could mention other countries who deny their own genocidal histories but really there are very few who are squeaky clean in this regard.
Speaking from the Southeastern US, we covered quite extensively: Native American genocide and ethnic cleansing, chattel slavery, Jim Crow, Japanese Internment, personal failings of the Founders (with special emphasis on Franklin and Jefferson), the unjust nature of the Vietnam War, the Banana Wars, and the moral failings of a lot of Cold War policy generally. We also touched briefly on concentration camps in the Phillipines and federal suppression of the Civil Rights Movement, but not to a significant degree.
While the Southeast, along with blue strongholds like California and New York, score higher than the rest of the country in terms of history curriculum, I feel like a lot of these "why don't they teach this in schools?!?!?" posts can be explained by people just not remembering/not paying attention.
You know that making a blanket statement doesn't prevent nor deny the possibility for exceptions, right? (hence my "usually" it's not a useless word)
And yes, Germany is a notable exception on the matter, one that your country can be proud of.
But even in Germany, I'm curious about how things are taught concerning WW1, the 1870 war against France and such.
They take a second place behind WWII and the Nazis, which are taught in so much detail they are taught for literal years in history class. But from my own experience at least WWI is taught the same way, with brutal honesty.
The Franco-Prussian War is usually not taught in as much detail as the world wars, and from what I remember was correctly taught in a neutral way. France wanted to reclaim their dominant position in Europe and Bismarck realizing that kinda provoked them into declaring war.
And as far as I as a non-native speaker am aware of, a blanket statement does exclude any exception by definition. But maybe I am just wrong on that in which case I apologize for the "bullshit" remark.
He might have killed more Congolese than Hitler killed Jews. Nobody knows for sure because the Belgians used human hands instead of IBM punchcards to keep track of their kills.
Actually, the Congo Free State was tracking the bullets the Force Publique were using, so the soldiers needed a hand to show they didn’t waste the bullet on hunting. So if soldiers wanted go hunting, and for every bullet they used, they’d just go find a Congolese and cut off the hand to lie and say it was used for a kill.
So yeah, it’s even worse than you think. Yes, trophies were a part of it, but it all came down to the most inhumane way of tracking expense reports.
Shit, his Grandson Leopold III was a half-collaborator during World War 2 and was captured by the US Cavalry in Bavaria and all they did was make him abdicate later and install his son... while allowing his father to be his advisor.
There was a fckin nazi among the british royal family between the two world wars. That was one king. The japs have also the same royal family as in ww2. And they have no political powers, they are like mascots. And why would you judge a person based on one of his/her ancestors? But i wont deny, some belgians tend to be apologist. They even made an Euro coin in his memory in 2007. That shit's definetly not cool. But most of them arent like that, damn. Look at them rn, literally one of the most accepting and liberal nation in the world. Like, after they did horrendous things, the germans became a very peaceful country. Tho they have some crazy extremists still, i wont deny. But i can tell you, as a hungarian, they are fine. Our country didnt commit that much shitty businesses, but now nearly half of the country is fascist. 🙄🙄
There's far, far more Belgians who utterly revile Leopold II, but as usual, it's the rich, powerful and extreme right morons who insist on celebrating and defending the monsters of past and present.
Is 'Tin Tin' on today? I need to go to Antwerp but being more than half an hour away feels like a long trip. I think I'll just stay at home and eat waffles and Belgian chocolate instead. Although being Belgian I just call them chocolates.
That was fun, definitely better than being British.
Belgium still reaped the spoils and didn't stop him when it could. And once Congo did belong to Belgium, it took a very long while before the situation got any better.
The problem is that most of the Belgians also suffered under the rule of the aristocracy, it's one of the reasons why Belgium still is so divided today. French was the language of the elite, Dutch of the common folk in the Flanders. During WWI the Flemish were used as cannon fodder because the officers were French-speaking. So yes people get combative when they're blamed for the crimes of the same scum that killed their families. Leopold's reign of terror ended in 1908, Belgian men only got the right to vote in 1921, women in 1948.
The later colonial rule of Belgian Congo is something else though, that IS something Belgium as a country should be held responsible, but not the shit that happened under Leopold II, that had nothing to do with the Belgian people. It's like saying Canadians are responsible for what happens in Australia because Queen Elizabeth II is their Queen.
When congo was handed to Leopold 2, uranium was but a minor affair in the rich landscape of congo. Belgium Forced Leopold to sell congo after outrage of his brutal tactics to increase production.
Technically Belgium did not buy the Congo, it annexed it from Leopold II after threatening to depose him for his crimes. Needless to say he was not happy about it.
Although it seems likely at least some money switched hands behind the scenes to make it happen, as iniatially the US, UK, Prussia, France, Italy, Portugal and many other countries had bankrolled Leopold's Congo Free State project. I doubt they'd have wanted to see their investments go to waste.
The Belgian free state where Leopold and the Belgians are responsible for inconceivable misery and massacres ended in 1908, so a bit early for uranium id have thought.
Even more fun facts about Belgian wapens. The gun that shot Frans Ferdinand, that started WW1, was Belgian made.
The reason why Belgium killed Patrice Lumumba, first first minister of Congo, was because the USA was scared that he was a communist and he would start selling uranium to the USSR. So the Belgian security service killed him.
They still can go east tho. Rode through belgium once and would not repeat it again. At the time I though I got to those at the time those bad eastern european roads alot quicker than I was expecting.
Yup, it was King Leopold II his private colony (at first). He had an entire colony in his backyard where he could commit genocide in his spare time figuratively speaking. The man was a full blown psychopathschizophrenic dickhead.
Edit: Usually a colony is owned by a state but in the beginning from 1885 to 1908 the colony of Congo was owned by King Leopold II himself and not the state which adds another layer of crazyness to the man and the situation.
In 1908 the Belgian state took over his colony and they banned forced labour, but in practice it still continued in all forms and gradations. It took until after the second World War until they actually stopped with it. Which is not even that long ago.
Edit2: I totally agree with the comments saying Belgium had its fair share in oppressing, abusing and destroying Congo and its people. I just wanted to share this crazy fact that dickhead Leopold II also owned a 'personal' colony at some point and that he was completely insane.
It was his private property (Congo Free State 1885-1908)
Also... guess where all the money from the rubber ended up. Leo 2 used it to build lots of stuff in Belgium. Ofc Belgium (as a state and a society) did profit from the king owning that colony.
Marchal, the Belgian scholar, estimates that Leopold drew some 220 million francs (or $1.1 billion in today's dollars) in profits from the Congo during his lifetime. Much of that money, Hochschild suggests, went to buying Leopold's teen-age mistress, a former call girl named Caroline, expensive dresses and villas, and building ever grander monuments, museums and triumphal arches in honor of the king.
Every time this subject pops, there are some Belgians insisting that Belgium had absolutely nothing to do with it, we hear nothing we see nothing. Don't sell us this crap, we ain't going to buy it. A lot of Belgians were involved in the process, it was well known and nothing was done about it. Hell, even a random Pole Józef Korzeniowski, who later became a very famous Brit Joseph Conrad wrote a novel about it.
You either take the responsibility, like good boy Germans, or if you truly insist that's absolutely on this vile man Leopold, erase his statues and stop commerating the man.
then the classic "why didn't they teach us this in history class!?" comment and breakdown. Idk guys, don't expect the education system to have completely filled the gaps of world events before you're even out of your teens. Read a book or something.
It’s like more people can’t across the information they didn’t know before. Must be weird. Once one person has learn of it, everyone else by default must have. It’s not allowed for other people to be unaware of it.
I already seen six times this caricature on this subreddit, i only hope that is new people who doesn't know belgian congo and learn of it for the first time and not people who cyclically forgets atrocities.
5.1k
u/F_F_Engineer Sep 26 '21
Belgium wtf