[Peace-discuss] When You Kill Ten Million Africans You Aren't Called ‘Hitler’

Sat Oct 5 16:20:41 UTC 2013

King Leopold of Belgium was an interesting fellow.

Most of those killed in the Congo were killed by fellow Africans
who became the military police, and by pestilence.

Not exactly a round 'em up and kill 'em programme like Hitler
but atrocious none the less.

On 10/05/13 22:28, Stephen Francis wrote:
> For all you antiSemitism accusation freakoids out there.... Why is it 
> that the vast majority have never heard of King Leopold II of Belgium.
> The website WalkingButterfly is not anti-semitic....and notice all the 
> Socialist organizations advertising.
> http://www.walkingbutterfly.com/2010/12/22/when-you-kill-ten-million-africans-you-arent-called-hitler/
> http://www.walkingbutterfly.com/?s=holocaust&submit.x=-1255&submit.y=-147 
> <http://www.walkingbutterfly.com/?s=holocaust&submit.x=-1255&submit.y=-147>  
> See Socialist advertising.
> Mark Twain: “King Leopold’s soliloquy; a defense of his Congo rule 
> <http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/i2l/kls.html>“
> When You Kill Ten Million Africans You Aren’t Called ‘Hitler’
> Take a look at this picture. Do you know who it is?
> Most people haven’t heard of him.
> But you should have. When you see his face or hear his name you should 
> get as sick in your stomach as when you read about Mussolini or Hitler 
> or see one of their pictures. You see, he killed over 10 million 
> people in the Congo.
> His name is King Leopold II of Belgium.
> He “owned” the Congo during his reign as the constitutional monarch of 
> Belgium. After several failed colonial attempts in Asia and Africa, he 
> settled on the Congo. He “bought” it and enslaved its people, turning 
> the entire country into his own personal slave plantation. He 
> disguised his business transactions as “philanthropic” and 
> “scientific” efforts under the banner of the /International African 
> Society/. He used their enslaved labor to extract Congolese resources 
> and services. His reign was enforced through work camps, body 
> mutilations, executions, torture, and his private army.
> Most of us aren’t taught about him in school. We don’t hear about him 
> in the media. He’s not part of the widely repeated narrative of 
> oppression (which includes things like the Holocaust during World War 
> II). He’s part of a long history of colonialism, imperialism, slavery 
> and genocide in Africa that would clash with the social construction 
> of the white supremacist narrative in our schools. It doesn’t fit 
> neatly into a capitalist curriculum. Making overtly racist remarks is 
> (sometimes) frowned upon in polite society, but it’s quite fine not to 
> talk about genocides in Africa perpetrated by European capitalist 
> monarchs.
> Mark Twain wrote a satire about Leopold called “King Leopold’s 
> soliloquy; a defense of his Congo rule 
> <http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/i2l/kls.html>“, where he 
> mocked the King’s defense of his reign of terror, largely through 
> Leopold’s own words. It’s an easy read at 49 pages long. Mark Twain is 
> a popular author for American public schools. But like most political 
> authors, we will often read some of their least political writings or 
> read them without learning why the author wrote them (Orwell’s Animal 
> Farm for example serves to re-inforce American anti-socialist 
> propaganda, but Orwell was an anti-capitalist revolutionary of a 
> different kind, and that is never pointed out). We can read about Huck 
> Finn and Tom Sawyer, but King Leopold’s Soliloquy isn’t on the reading 
> list. This isn’t by accident. Reading lists are created by boards of 
> education in order to prepare students to follow orders and endure 
> boredom well. From the point of view of the Education Department, 
> Africans have no history.
> When we learn about Africa, we learn about a caricaturized Egypt, 
> about the HIV epidemic (but never its causes), about the surface level 
> effects of the slave trade, and maybe about South African Apartheid 
> (which of course now is long, long over). We also see lots of pictures 
> of starving children on Christian Ministry commercials, we see safaris 
> on animal shows, and we see pictures of deserts in films and movies. 
> But we don’t learn about the Great African War or Leopold’s Reign of 
> Terror during the Congolese Genocide. Nor do we learn about what the 
> United States has done in Iraq and Afghanistan, killing millions of 
> people through bombs, sanctions, disease and starvation. Body counts 
> are important. And we don’t count Afghans, Iraqis, or Congolese.
> There’s a Wikipedia page called “Genocides in History”. The Congolese 
> Genocide isn’t included. The Congo is mentioned though. What’s now 
> called the Democratic Republic of the Congo is listed in reference to 
> the Second Congo War (also called Africa’s World War and the Great War 
> of Africa), where both sides of the multinational conflict hunted down 
> Bambenga and ate them. Cannibalism and slavery are horrendous evils 
> which must be entered into history and talked about for sure, but I 
> couldn’t help thinking whose interests were served when the only 
> mention of the Congo on the page was in reference to multi-national 
> incidents where a tiny minority of people were  eating each other 
> (completely devoid of the conditions which created the conflict). 
> Stories which support the white supremacist narrative about the 
> subhumanness of people in Africa are allowed to be entered into the 
> records of history. The white guy who turned the Congo into his own 
> personal part-plantation, part-concentration camp, part-Christian 
> ministry and killed 10 to 15 million Conglese people in the process 
> doesn’t make the cut.
> You see, when you kill ten million Africans, you aren’t called 
> ‘Hitler’. That is, your name doesn’t come to symbolize the living 
> incarnation of evil. Your name and your picture don’t produce fear, 
> hatred, and sorrow. Your victims aren’t talked about and your name 
> isn’t remembered.
> Leopold was just one part of thousands of things that helped construct 
> white supremacy as both an ideological narrative and material reality. 
> Of course I don’t want to pretend that in the Congo he was the source 
> of all evil. He had generals, and foot soldiers, and managers who did 
> his bidding and enforced his laws. It was a system. But that doesn’t 
> negate the need to talk about the individuals who are symbolic of the 
> system. But we don’t even get that. And since it isn’t talked about, 
> what capitalism did to Africa, all the privileges that rich white 
> people gained from the Congolese genocide are hidden. The victims of 
> imperialism are made, like they usually are, invisible.
>
>
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