Europe’s Forgotten ‘Hitler’ Killed Over 10 Million Africans — But the West Erased it From History

[KamaAina]

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/hitler-killed-10-million-congo-erased/

King Leopold II is part of an ongoing history of colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and genocide in Africa that would clash with the popular social narratives taught in our school system today. It doesn’t fit neatly into school curriculums where, paradoxically, it is looked down upon to make overtly racist statements. However, it’s quite fine not to talk about a genocide perpetrated by European capitalist monarchs that killed over 10 million Congolese....

The empire was known as the Congo Free State, and Leopold II stood as its undisputed slave master. For almost 30 years, rather than being a regular colony of a European government, Congo was administered as the property of Leopold II for his personal enrichment.

The world’s largest plantation, registering at 76 times the size of Belgium, possessed rich mineral and agricultural resources and lost nearly half of its population by the time the first census counted only 10 million people living there in 1924....

It seems that when you kill ten million Africans — you aren’t called ‘Hitler’, your name never comes to symbolize the living incarnation of evil, and your picture doesn’t produce fear, hatred, and sorrow — rather your crimes are simply swept under the historical rug and the victims of colonialism/imperialism remain forever voiceless.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

1. this is why i encourage people to watch the three part documentary on race from the BBC

[elehhhhna]

2. Read King Leopold's Ghost

Amazing and horrible.

[tenderfoot]

4. yes!

So horrible, I had to stop reading.

[eppur_se_muova]

6. Second that rec ... also, Pakenham's "The Scramble for Africa" is a good prelude.

http://www.powells.com/book/scramble-for-africa-9780349104492/2-5

Pakenham focuses on a certain time period, which pretty well leaves the Belgian Congo out of it. Hochschild's book, in many ways, picks up where Pakenham leaves off.

http://www.powells.com/sale/history-and-social-science/africa/general

[gratuitous]

7. Reading it now - chilling

Even Leopold didn't think he was a bad guy or was sponsoring bad things. I think we're more civilized nowadays, but in some ways it's really hard to gauge.

[malaise]

3. Western Powers have been slaughtering Africans

and our descendants for centuries. The British slaughtered millions everywhere they went. Amazing that they call themselves civilized. It's hilarious.

[The2ndWheel]

5. Civilization is a resource concentration mechanism

[rug]

8. Who died for freedom?

[EX500rider]

9. I don't know about "erased from history"....I knew about it..

....you can find a Wiki page about it...
Just not as well know as other genocides.

[struggle4progress]

10. Leopold II died a few years before WWI started. There was an active European movement

which finally forced him to relinquish personal control of the Congo the year before he died

There was a time when the plight of the Congo was a major progressive concern: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness or Vachel Lindsay's The Congo illustrate this. E. D. Morel, who perhaps first really understood and publicized the problems of Leopold's control, launched a major and effective movement for ending the gross abuses. Just how well-regarded Morel was, as a result of his well-organized campaign, can be gauged by the following fact: although he was imprisoned for part of 1917-1918, for his anti-WWI pacifism, he defeated Winston Churchill for a seat in Parliament in 1922

It is unsurprising that the Congo rather faded from Europe's mind after 1914: the war cost about 17 million dead and another 28 million wounded; and it precipitated a serious of crises that preoccupied mind for most of the rest of the century, including WWII and the Cold War. As the author of King Leopold's Ghost points out in another book, there may be a poetic justice in some WWI carnage: European commanders, used to mowing down (by machine gun) natives in the colonies, proved surprisingly unable to imagine what it meant for their own troops to march into machine-gun fire. And perhaps a silver lining, for much of the world, was that the world wars really bankrupted the colonial powers, leading to the inevitable success of decolonization struggles in the years after WWII

This history is well worth knowing, but it should all be understood is its own particularity, rather than by lazily smearing together different places and times. We want to understand the methods and mechanisms Leopold II used to export a private army to the Cpngo in order to convert it into a private rubber plantation manned by slave labor; and we want to understand how the Weimar Republic was converted into a psychopathic dictatorship. In both cases, of course, we should be motivated by a desire to prevent such siffering in the future -- but as the stories as different, the lessons learned might also be different, and we ought not to begin by muddling them together