Possessed by King Leopold's Ghost

by VorJack

The EU Observer reports the following:

Louis Michel, the Belgian former EU development commissioner and current prominent Liberal MEP has shocked his home nation and its one-time central African subjects by calling King Leopold II, the Congo’s colonial master responsible for between 3 million and 10 million deaths, a “visionary hero.”

“Leopold II was a true visionary for his time, a hero,” he told P-Magazine, a local publication, in an interview on Tuesday. “And even if there were horrible events in the Congo, should we now condemn them?”

Yes, we damn well should. We should never forget the atrocities committed and the millions dead. And we should never allow vacuous apologists like this one to sweep them under the rug. Consider his argument:

“The Belgians built railways, schools and hospitals and boosted economic growth. Leopold turned the Congo into a vast labour camp? Really? In those days it was just the way things were done.”

It’s the same tired old rationalization in favor of colonialism. “Oh, being oppressed was good for them!” But the sad truth is that even other colonial powers were appalled by the excesses that were being committed in Leopold’s “Congo Free State.” Chris Bertram is right to compare Michel’s statement to Holocaust Denial.

Look, I could rant myself hoarse here. But instead I’ll just encourage folks to read Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost and get the full story of how Leopold scammed together his colony and how he ran it.

Of course, you could also read Heart of Darkness to get Joesph Conrad’s from-the-gut feelings after his visit to the Congo.

Finally, you can read the great Mark Twain and his work King Leopold’s Soliloquy, which has all the scathing lines and all the venom necessary to respond to Louis Michel.

[King Leopold II:] “These meddlesome American missionaries! these frank British consuls! these blabbingblabbing Belgian-born traitor officials! — those tiresome parrots are always talking, always telling. They have told how for twenty years I have ruled the Congo State not as a trustee of the Powers, an agent, a subordinate, a foreman, but as a sovereign — sovereign over a fruitful domain four times as large as the German Empire — sovereign absolute, irresponsible, above all law; trampling the Berlin-made Congo charter under foot; barring out all foreign traders but myself; restricting commerce to myself, through concessionaires who are my creatures and confederates; seizing and holding the State as my personal property, the whole of its vast revenues as my private “swag” — mine, solely mine — claiming and holding its millions of people as my private property, my serfs, my slaves; their labor mine, with or without wage; the food they raise not their property but mine; the rubber, the ivory and all the other riches of the land mine — mine solely — and gathered for me by the men, the women and the little children under compulsion of lash and bullet, fire, starvation, mutilation and the halter.

His closing is true enough to be painful. Leopold is reading an article from one of his detractors:

[reading:] It seems strange to see a king destroying a nation and laying waste a country for mere sordid money’s sake, and solely and only for that. Lust of conquest is royal; kings have always exercised that stately vice; we are used to it, by old habit we condone it, perceiving a certain dignity in it; but lust of money — lust of shillings — lust of nickels — lust of dirty coin, not for the nation’s enrichment but for the king’s alone — this is new. It distinctly revolts us, we cannot seem to reconcile ourselves to it, we resent it, we despise it, we say it is shabby, unkingly, out of character. Being democrats we ought to jeer and jest, we ought to rejoice to see the purple dragged in the dirt, but — well, account for it as we may, we don’t. We see this awful king, this pitiless and blood-drenched king, this money-crazy king towering toward the sky in a world-solitude of sordid crime, unfellowed and apart from the human race, sole butcher for personal gain findable in all his caste, ancient or modern, pagan or Christian, proper and legitimate target for the scorn of the lowest and the highest, and the execrations of all who hold in cold esteem the oppressor and the coward; and — well, it is a mystery, but we do not wish to look; for he is a king, and it hurts us, it troubles us, by ancient and inherited instinct it shames us to see a king degraded to this aspect, and we shrink from hearing the particulars of how it happened. We shudder and turn away when we come upon them in print.”

[Leopold:] Why, certainly — THAT IS MY PROTECTION.. And you will continue to do it. I know the human race.

We may shudder, but this time we will not look away.