King Leopold II orchestrated the Congo Free State's creation through deceptive treaties with Henry Morton Stanley and the 1885 Berlin Conference, masking a brutal rubber extraction regime. By exploiting American anti-Arab sentiments and privatizing labor via corporations, he enforced quotas that led to 10 to 15 million deaths through mutilation, starvation, and the infamous "right hand for every bullet" policy. This venture capital model, sustained by consistent lies and public perception manipulation, transformed a humanitarian crusade into a private atrocity, establishing Leopold as history's first modern bastard whose legacy challenges traditional narratives of colonial benevolence. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Leopold's Belgian Kingdom00:14:45
So this week we are doing another rewind, our infamous and beloved episodes on King Leopold II of Belgium.
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Hello, friends, and welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in history.
On this show, we cover monsters like Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Eric Prince, Will Wheaton, and today's topic, King Leopold.
But before we get to King Leopold, I'd like to introduce my guest for the week, Andrew T, host of Yo Is This Racist and general man about town.
Hello, Andrew.
What's up?
Well, today we're talking about a little Belgian dude named Leopold.
Have you ever heard of King Leopold of Belgium?
Uh, not particularly King Leopold II, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I feel like the closest I'm going to come is, I feel like at some point I got a box of fancy chocolates that might have had a Leopold, maybe not the bad Leopold.
I assume a good Leopold.
This is not a good Leopold.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
So probably not this particular Leopold.
Yeah.
Leopold II was king of Belgium once upon a time, and he was, in my opinion, the first world leader to be truly shitty in the modern sense of the word.
Oh, snap.
Like, like, like the kind of shitty that like Putin and Trump.
Right, right, right.
So not, right, we're discounting our Genghis Khans and ours.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because Genghis Khan, like, did what he did, but he didn't have like a bunch of newspapers that he used to justify.
He was just like, I'm going to conquer some shit.
Right, right, right.
This is the transition from barbarian bastards into media bastards.
Exactly.
And I think Leopold of Belgium is really where it happens in a modern, like obviously other people had toyed with aspects of this, but he really nailed it.
So King Leopold II's dad was obviously King Leopold I, and he was the first king of Belgium.
Is that obvious?
Is it always like one begets two?
Or is it like a, oh, your grandfather was Leopold I. I'm Gerald.
of Belgium, but you're going to be Leopold II.
I think that's more how it happens most of the time.
Not this time.
Not this time.
This time Leopold I was like, this went so well.
Yeah.
We're going to have a going.
So Leopold I was like, again, the very first king of Belgium at all, because Belgium had just been made a thing in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars.
So during the whole fighting between Napoleon and everyone else in Europe, Belgium was generally the battleground where everyone would sort of duke it out between the Germans and the French and the French and everybody else.
Yeah, Waterloo is in Belgium.
Oh.
So after Napoleon's butt gets kicked, the European powers who win are like, okay, we can't have France and Germany fighting over Belgium forever.
We're going to make it its own thing.
Oh.
And since it was going to be a new country, obviously it needed a king.
Yeah.
So Leopold I got the job because he was a German prince who didn't have a kingdom of his own.
Oh, okay.
So he was just like split off, right?
This is like, we're going to give Meghan Markle Wales or whatever.
Or no, part of Wales.
Yeah, part of Wales.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's exactly that sort of thing.
They actually tried him out to be king of Greece first, but he didn't like didn't fit for whatever.
Yeah.
What?
That's an option?
We're going to find you with something, buddy.
Don't worry, Leopold.
Oh, my God.
We're going to put you in a kingdom.
Greece isn't the right one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Of course.
You try it, starter kingdom.
Everyone has a kingdom to start.
Yeah, yeah.
Makes sense.
Yeah, Greece was his unsold pilot.
Wow.
Yeah.
And he was, by all accounts, a pretty good king of Belgium, if you're into that sort of thing.
Yeah.
Waffles.
Waffles and chocolate.
Chocolate.
Getting by the Germans.
Great beer.
Yeah.
Great beer.
Getting jammed by the Germs.
Great beer, great at getting jammed by the Germans.
That's Belgium in a nutshell.
But yeah, he was a good king.
While he was king midway through his reign in 1848, there was like this big year of revolutions all across Europe, and all these European countries had their monarchs overthrown, except for Belgium.
So he's like, Spring, we call that.
Yes.
Or no, the white man's spring.
I don't know.
That's the last 300 years.
Yeah, that's true.
What a time.
What a time for the whites.
Give it up for the whites.
Yeah.
So Leopold I, solid king.
I've got two main sources for today's podcast, which I should note now.
The first is a biography called Leopold II, King of Belgium.
It's a pro-monarchist book that was written in 1910.
Great.
The article is critical of Leopold sometimes, but he thinks he was like a great king, and he thinks kings are a good idea.
So it's an interesting book because it gives you an idea of how Leopold himself would sort of present himself and defend himself.
It lets you know what the propaganda at the time was.
Well, and also write just critical enough to be legitimate.
Well, no.
No.
It's totally, I guess for the time it wasn't bad.
Oh, what I mean is you put in just the faintest of criticism to give the rest of it more.
Yeah.
Oh, this is a real investigation.
Yeah, it's like the monarch's equivalent of one of those celebrity biographies off Ben Affleck or whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is a Geraldo interview of books.
Exactly.
Great.
Exactly.
And then the other book is a book called King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild, which takes the stance that Leopold was one of history's great monsters.
Anyway, so these are most of what I come from is sort of the contrasting views that these two books present.
You read two books for a podcast?
Of your mind?
Come on, dog.
There's a lot to dig into here.
Oh, wow.
Wow.
And there's not a lot.
You're making me feel real bad.
I'm like usually good for half a Wikipedia article.
Holy shit.
Well, this is at least the equivalent of like four Wikipedia articles.
So buckle up.
Jeez, go ahead.
All right.
So Leopold II's mom, Luis, was almost a love match is the term the book uses for his dad the king.
And it says this because the king was already in love with her before they got married.
She was a teenager.
What a nice of a love match.
That's so nice.
He liked her when she was 14.
Yeah.
So it's love.
The 1800s were a hell of a time.
And she had the right land, I assume.
Yeah, she had some nice land.
I'm getting.
Related to the right enemies?
She was with, I think, from the Orleans family.
So she was like, she had some solid-ass royal pedigree.
We all love them.
You know, you get some German from King Leopold I, you get a little bit of French from his wife, and then their baby is sort of a mix.
So maybe Germany and France won't fight over Belgium.
Oh, wow.
What a brave.
Yeah.
Didn't wear it?
Yeah.
So Leopold II was born Leopold Louis-Philippe Marie Victor, and he was his parents' second child.
His older brother died 11 months before he was born.
Nice.
So if you think about that timeline a lot, it's not very fun because Leopold's older brother is born.
He dies.
And 11 months later, they pop out another son.
Yeah.
Immediately.
Immediately.
Not a lot of mourning time.
Nah.
Or maybe they just kind of, you know, fuck the pain away.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's probably what happened.
That's the optimistic look.
All right.
So at age five, Leopold's father declared him Duke of Brabant, which is how he was addressed right up until his coronation.
He said five, age five.
Yeah, age five.
Great.
Yeah, you're old enough to be a duke at age five.
And he looks like he should be ruling people in this place.
What a pretty little duke.
We'll have the pictures up on our website.
He has no chin and a kind of a lopsided face, but maybe that's just the painting.
Looks a little bit like a ghost, like a human ghost.
It looks like the painting of a ghost that you find in the basement of an old house.
Yeah.
And then there's a rush of wind and the camera falls over and like your friend gets mauled by a spirit.
Yeah.
And that's this guy's selfie, essentially.
Yeah.
That's this guy's like, this is the image we want to put out into the world.
Yeah, this was like hanging in palaces and shit.
Yeah.
So he looks like a creeper from Daniel.
Yeah, little spooky boy.
But he's still a baby.
So the biography notes that Leopold and his siblings were brought up in, quote, the simplest manner and taught to behave as if they were normal citizens rather than royalty.
That sounds great until you get to the next part.
Quote, the king further expressed the wish to develop in the children the sentiment of duty and not to allow them to have an opinion of their own with regard to their duties and their studies.
Basically, the king was trying to crush the individuality of his kids so that they would just fit the role of king.
That's kind of good, actually.
Is it?
Well, what else are you going to do?
Because they got to do this dumb job.
Well, I mean, you could try to make them be healthy, fully formed people.
Yeah, but why?
Then they got to be king.
Yeah.
Well, okay, that's fair.
I mean, you're taking Leopold I's side.
Yeah, well, he's the good one again.
I'm probably at his chocolate.
No, but right, isn't that the...
He's just as trapped as everyone else, you know?
Yes.
So if he's got to do this thing, you might as well make it so he can do this thing.
Okay, so you're expressing some motivation maybe to why you would do what he winds up doing.
I mean, and you don't even know what he winds up doing.
What does he do?
Yeah, what did I just defend?
We are.
I still stand.
Let me just say right now, whatever he does, I stand behind it.
Well, he kills about 10 to 15 million people.
Yeah, it's fine.
Okay.
Well, that's it.
So when Leopold is 15, his mom dies of some illness or another.
It's one of those things where the writers at the time aren't specific.
They're just like, she took ill and was sick for like, and then she dies.
Yeah, yeah.
It's probably diphtheria or some weird named flu disease.
Yeah.
If it was a flu, it'd be a big deal, I guess.
I mean, it probably is a flu.
Like, that killed everybody back then.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hosschild describes Leopold's childhood as being kind of stark and cold.
Quote, if Leopold wanted to see his father, he had to apply for an audience.
When the father had something to tell the son, he communicated it through one of his secretaries.
I mean, look, this is not just 18th century arrested development.
Yeah.
Nice.
Yeah, yeah, that's kind of what's going on.
Like, he definitely has a Buster Bluth vibe to him.
Yeah.
Again, especially once you see this fucking painting.
You'll get it, audience.
The biography that was written at the time says that it is worthy of note that the late king never had any comrades or playmates.
His childhood was passed among his teachers and tutors, and the disciplinarian father made even more the relationship with his brother and sister a very formal one.
Frank childish gaiety and brotherly expansion and confidence were banished.
The prince's thoughts thus became concentrated upon himself and his natural activity and vitality.
His exuberant strength were expended on work and study.
Tight.
Yeah.
About it.
No friends, does nothing but work.
Yeah.
Who needs friends?
He is a duke.
Yeah.
I mean, he's already achieved a lot.
I mean, he is kind of a boss baby.
Yeah.
Just throwing that out there.
So he grows up.
He serves in the Belgian military.
He apparently does okay.
By his early 20s, Leopold becomes an influential figure in Belgian politics.
You know, he's the crown prince.
Everyone thinks he's going to wind up being king.
Influential, yeah.
And he kind of looks a little like Adam Driver.
Yeah.
He looks like anime Adam Driver.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's who you would cast as anime Adam Driver in the movie.
So like many rich young people, he traveled far and wide in his early 20s.
He went all throughout the Middle East, North Africa, parts of Asia.
But he was not traveling for his enjoyment.
He was basically traveling, the biography says, as like a commercial employee.
So he was essentially looking for financial opportunities for Belgium because this is the period when all of Europe is colonizing the entire world.
Yeah.
And Belgium doesn't have a colony.
So he's traveling all around the Middle East and Asia, basically being like, what can we take?
Yeah, whose land can we take?
Yeah, yeah.
What can we get?
Does this hop ahead to the Congo?
Oh, yes.
Oh, nice.
Yeah, that's where we're headed.
Tight, okay.
How do I know that tiny bit of history?
It's one of those things that drops in every now and then.
You'll hear like, oh, yeah, the Belgians did something bad in the Congo, but you don't ever get the whole story.
In fact, I probably know more plot points from Michael Crichton's The Congo than Reality's The Congo.
Yes, I mean, there's unconfirmed reports that he tried to find the lost city of Zinge, but no, that's right.
Great movie.
Is that what they were doing there?
Yeah, yeah.
They're trying to find diamonds.
There was a monkey city.
Yeah.
They were trying to find diamonds when the monkeys were evil.
Yeah.
That's more what I remember.
Solid, to be honest.
Really solid film.
There's a laser.
There is a laser.
Yeah, there's definitely a laser in that movie.
Oh, man.
What a weird.
It's a ride.
Michael Crichton, we're still watching his bullshit.
I can't believe Westworld.
All right, go ahead.
Sorry.
Okay.
So Prince Leopold, one of his favorite books as he's a young man studying, trying to find a new colony for Belgium, is a book about the Dutch East Indies called Java, How to Manage a Colony.
Tight.
Yeah.
Why would you...
Oh, my God.
I mean, I guess that's what you have to tell people your favorite book is.
But that's.
Well, no, I mean, so the book is all about how the Dutch colonized the island of Java and how they got a shitload of coffee and sugar and like dyes and tobacco.
And it made basically made so much money that they were able to buy a bunch of railroads and canals back in Holland.
So like the book is all about that.
So it outlines sort of how they were able to monetize Java so well.
And like it talks about how the king basically brought in a bunch of private companies and became a major shareholder in those companies.
And it was the company's job to farm the land and to produce the resources and to export them to Belgium.
So the king didn't have to send Dutch government workers over to do anything.
The king just said, I own Java.
Corporations come in, give me a stake in your profits and do whatever you want.
I think it's just cool to have political leaders also own corporations.
That has never been a problem and never will be a problem.
No, it seems to always work out great.
It seems to work out great 100% of the time.
The book also did note that the Dutch profits in Java would have been impossible without a huge amount of forced labor.
And young Prince Leopold agreed with this and said that forced labor was, quote, the only way to civilize and uplift these indolent and corrupt peoples of the Far East.
Soft Power and Forced Labor00:07:35
Yeah.
Yeah.
He ain't wrong.
Go ahead.
What else?
What else you got?
I thought you said this guy was bad.
All right.
So late in his dukedom, you know, a few years before he becomes king, Leopold gets up in front of Belgium's Senate and he urges them to take up foreign colonies.
So they got a king and a senate.
Yeah.
Yeah.
How's that work?
So basically the king of Belgium is kind of a ceremonial figure.
He's got more power than like the queen in England has today.
But it's heading towards.
But it's heading towards that.
There's no formal power, lots of soft power.
Lots of soft power and a little bit of formal power.
Okay.
But you can't do things as the king like just make colonies.
Right.
You can't do things as the king like send the army places.
Yeah, yeah.
And so Leopold's dad seems to be okay with that.
But Leopold II is growing up chomping at the bent to do shit and doesn't want to become a monarch who just waves at the crowd.
Why?
Yeah, why not?
So he gets up in front of the Senate and he says, quote, I am profoundly convinced of our vast resources and I passionately wish that my beautiful country would show the necessary pluck to derive all the benefit which, in my opinion, it can derive.
I think that the moment for our expansion abroad has arrived.
We must not lose time.
Otherwise, the best positions and markets, which are becoming more rare every day, will be occupied by nations more enterprising than ourselves.
And when he talks about positions and markets, he's talking about whole countries and stuff.
I mean, millions of people.
It's more chilling in the original Flemish.
Yeah, Flemish.
Yes.
Yeah, he nailed it.
Although he probably would have been speaking just French.
Ah, boo.
All right.
Why did I say Flemish?
Well, you can say Walloon if you want.
I'm getting.
What is that?
That's the other group of people.
Belgium is made up of Flemish people and Walloons.
Yeah, the Walloonatics.
Yeah.
Of course.
Band-aid on their face.
We get it.
That's a rough name to grow into the world stage taking on.
Well, you know, you got to get enough rifles, get enough cutlasses.
Everything starts to make sense.
I don't feel like it does.
I feel like Germany was so fierce in part because German is like, that's like an imposing name.
Like the Germans are coming.
Imagine if the name got switched and the Belgians were called the Germans and like the Nazis had tried to invade and everyone was like, oh, the Walloons are invading.
That's not going to go.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, listen, let's boot up a risk game.
We'll figure it out.
All right.
So yeah, Leopold I, Leopold II's dad, died in December of 1865, the same year the American Civil War ended.
Leopold is now the king and 30 years old.
This appears to be the point when he decided to grow a gigantic mountain man beard.
Tight.
Which he would maintain for the rest of his life.
He needed it.
Yeah, well, there's a lot of pictures of Leopold with a beard.
We'll post them on the site.
Some of them look uncomfortably like me.
Some of them are clear missteps in the beard growing process where he's got like gigantic mutton chops and it's he looks like a fucking hair octopus.
Style of the time, though.
Yeah.
He went through some rough patches in his sartorial history for sure.
That's pretty.
That's that ain't easy.
We're looking at.
Yeah, that's a rough picture.
Dem chop.
And it's almost, he's almost wearing bell bottoms in that picture.
Hey, it's the 60s.
Well, it is the 1860s.
Boom.
All right.
So yeah, Leopold's the king of Belgium.
He's super frustrated because the king doesn't have that much in the way of power.
Leopold takes to sort of mocking the restrained role that he has in Belgian politics.
There's a story of like this guy who came to visit him because he's like, you know, the king's got to visit with like his donors and benefactors and whatnot.
And this guy complains about the poor state of the roads around his property.
And Leopold interrupts him and says, I have no authority to change the roads.
You ought to address yourself to the press, especially to the small papers.
The municipality and the government will do anything they ask.
So he was like, he was like making the point of being frustrated that like, I can't do anything.
So I'm just going to take it to the press.
Your king's not allowed to do anything.
He sort of set to work making himself into kind of an image for the Belgian people.
He was the aristocratic equivalent of an alpha male.
He spent a lot of time doing science work and supporting the arts and sciences.
19th century science is just like beakers of lead and shit.
He's pouring colored water into beakers.
He's got goggles on.
You know how this all goes.
Yeah.
There's a quote from his biography that says he used to sleep in a camp bed, so like a military cot, and had a general horror of everything that could innervate or render him effeminate.
So he's kind of like a proud boy.
Yeah, that's what they call people who aren't racist soy boys.
Is that right?
Yeah, because eating soy feminizes you.
Again, that's the alt-right thing.
Yeah.
Hey, well, at least we know that they have a nice historical antecedent.
Leopold would have been all about that stuff.
So he's growing a giant weird beard.
He's sleeping in a palace in a military cot.
He's scared of girls.
He hates spending money.
His biography says, quote, his pocket handkerchief was only renewed on Sunday mornings when going to mass, and on no account would he take another in the interval.
If his valets changed his towels more than once a week, they were sure to receive a good scolding from His Majesty.
What?
So he's like a gross miser.
Yeah.
Don't clean those towels.
Oh, which one of those wasn't one of the alt-right guys living in their mom's basement?
I think most of them are.
But definitely Rouch V. Yes, that guy.
Yeah, Rouch V, the pickup artist guy that was found living in his mom's basement.
Literally living in his mom's base.
Yeah, that's what this guy was, Leopold was missing.
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess the beard, the beard experiment, clearly on that vector.
His mom died young, so he became a king.
Yeah.
Yep.
Instead, called peacocking, everyone.
I attract women having a kingdom.
Yeah, being a king.
I mean, having a castle is pretty solid peacocking.
That's true.
Yeah.
Undeniable.
Yeah.
Leopold II was noted in his biography as the first king to treat his kingship as a corporate endeavor.
His primary concern was making money, not for Belgium, but for himself.
It was all about the bottom line.
So there's like when you talk about dictators and warlords and terrorists, there's like a tendency to call them psychopaths and sociopaths.
Sociopath was like an actual medical diagnosis.
And I don't think guys like Hitler or Stalin really fit it because they all had histories of like warm family life and like people who cared about them and people that they like sacrificed for at times.
Leopold might have been a straight up like a monster.
Yeah, because that's what they say, right?
Is like so many CEOs and Fortune 500, whatever the fuck.
They're overrepresented in corporate leadership.
Yeah, psychopathic traits.
Yeah, even his positive biography says that while he was charming, he was quote devoid of enthusiasm himself and was quite incapable of arousing any in others.
So he just can't actually touch people's heart.
Yeah, he can't motivate people.
So yeah, we're going to get more into the soulless Leopold II, his scheme to find a colony and the colony that he eventually founds.
Corporate Psychopathy in History00:03:33
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Internet Detectives Crack the Case00:03:31
And we're back.
We're back.
We're talking about King Leopold, who is searching for a little colony somewhere in the world to fill that hole.
Leopold's heart.
The Deuce, of course.
Yeah, Leopold the Deuce, Leopold II, Electric Boogaloo, whatever you want to call him.
We were just talking about what a soulless sociopathic creep he is.
Allegedly.
Yeah, allegedly.
Well, here's another quote.
Again, this is from like a positive pro-Leopold biography that he probably paid for.
He disliked music, hunting, tobacco, and had no taste for physical exercises except walking.
Although a frequent visitor at Austin, which is like one of his palaces, he never learned to swim.
He was seen yawning in a gala performance of Faust.
So he doesn't like plays.
He doesn't like art.
He hates music.
Like, that's a thing.
Any book you read about him, anyone who knew him, he hated music.
Like, not like he hated popular music, but music itself was offensive to him.
So that's fascinating.
Well, that's cutting into the American psycho narrative.
Yeah.
Unfortunately.
Yeah, a little bit.
Yeah.
He's a weird guy.
He's very vain.
But his main vanity was quite odd.
He thought he had the most beautiful hands in all of Europe.
Tight.
His biography.
What?
His biography notes.
Another of Leopold's hobbies was his dislike for gloves.
And although he often wore uniform, he is never reported to have put on gloves.
It may have been a hatred of restraint, but more probably it was a pardonable vanity on the part of the late king, for he possessed the shapely and beautiful hand of the Orleans family.
That rules so hard.
Here's the only picture I could find.
Good ass hands.
His good ass hands.
No, no, he's holding the gloves in his hand, so his hand is nothing.
That's even stronger, actually.
Like reminding people you could be wearing gloves.
I'm the master of the...
Yeah.
I mean, in fairness to him, his hands are beautiful in this picture.
Of course.
I mean, they're just, look at the bone definition.
Yeah.
They are shapely.
They good-ass hands.
Yeah, they good-ass hands.
Oh, man.
So that means that he made some painter do multiple drafts on those hands.
That's like, this is like a, isn't it?
Wait, Wrestle Development where the guy has a fake hand?
Always thought he were the handshake hands.
Yeah, the lawyer and always sunny.
Always has fake hands.
Oh.
Yeah.
Then there's some things to be said about our president and hands.
Nah.
It's weird.
It's weird that you would even, like, I never think about my hands.
Yeah.
Like, how they look.
Like, when I'm thinking about someone taking a picture of me, like, 0% of the time I'm like, oh, my God, my hands.
Do they look shapely?
Do you know what's crazy is I had to send a picture of a piece of equipment for this job I'm on to a technical person.
And I just took a picture of my phone and sent it to them.
And I realized as I was sending the email, I was like, my hands look fucked up in this.
I'm having a real low hand self-esteem day.
Oh, I think you have the shapely hands of the Orleone family.
No, you're being really nice right now, but it's actually a little hilarious that the one day possibly in my life that I've noticed my hands.
He's like, these are horrible.
I was like, what the fuck is up with my hands?
Only these were feet.
Yeah.
I've been an arm model before.
My friend was doing some, not like, you know, elbows down.
I was doing, was doing some stock photography and was like, I want to take pictures of your arms.
And I was like, you're wilding out.
So, you know what?
I'm good wrist to elbow.
Wrist to elbow.
Yeah, I got forearm.
My forearms are about it.
Well, Leopold was a handman.
Charitable Facades for Exploitation00:14:54
Yeah.
So we've got this frustrated, greedy, gorgeous-handed king on the throne of Belgium.
He keeps trying to get his countrymen to jump on board the having a colony train, but the people of Belgium express zero interest in this.
Oh, okay.
Wait, why?
What do you mean?
All right, because obviously all European colonialism is pretty much the root of almost everything that's wrong in the world right now.
It sure is.
But I don't understand why they, I mean, they certainly didn't, I'm going to, I guess, not want to do it for the reasons why I don't think they should have done it.
I think the Belgians, for one thing, so the Belgians of this era, anyone who's like a mature adult, lived through what was at that point the equivalent of World War II, the Napoleonic Wars.
It's like, we just don't want any trouble.
Like, we just want to stay in Belgium and eat chocolate and drink beer.
We don't really want to go to Africa or Asia and die.
Not the first.
Can I say continue an incredibly long list of ignorant ass shit I'm about to say?
You do you.
Is Belgium landlocked?
No.
It has an Antwerp.
Antwerp.
That's right.
Okay.
A number of ports.
I'm sure.
Yeah, yeah.
It's a wee little country.
You can drive across it in a couple of hours.
Yes.
Okay.
I was just like, okay, never mind.
I was just like, it's funny to imagine a landlocked country owning stuff.
But of course they can.
Who gives a shit?
But they're not landlocked, so fuck me.
Yeah, no, they're not.
They didn't have a colony at this point, and they seem to have zero interest in having one.
Now, at this same time, from 1874 to 1877, when Leopold's like a decade or so into his kinghood, there's this explorer named Henry Morton Stanley.
And yeah, from 74 to 77, he completes a 7,000-mile expedition across Central Africa.
Much of his travels centered upon the still undiscovered by like white people, Congo.
No one had mapped the extent of the Congo River.
We didn't know where it originated from at this point.
So at this time in European history, different explorers mapping Africa are kind of like the Marvel movie franchise of the day.
Each of these guys is world famous and newspapers breathlessly cover every expedition and whenever they finish an expedition, they write a book and millions of people buy it.
Automatically profitable.
Exactly.
This is like the thing people care about at this point in time.
It's like what these explorers are doing in Africa and all over the world.
That just means if I were alive then and a white person, two big F's, I would be like struggling to get on one of the good expeditions.
Yeah, you really, you really like fingers crossed, it's not one of the ones where people eat each other.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Which statistically a lot of them are.
Yeah.
So Stanley maps like a huge chunk of the Congo more than anyone had ever done before.
And it's like big news.
He gets back to Europe from Africa and he goes on tour.
He's doing like speaking engagements.
He's a big celebrity.
I feel like there's a lot of like skulls and calipers in a talk like this.
Yeah, and probably buckets of racism.
Yeah.
Like totally unexamined racism.
Why look?
Don't look.
If you don't look, it's not there.
Yeah.
That's the racist motto.
So he's touring around and King Leopold winds up meeting with him.
Stanley had been bullish on the idea that the Congo would be a great place for a colony.
And he wanted the British to set up a colony there.
The OGs.
You want to go to the best colonizing studio first.
Yeah, exactly.
That's like the...
Is Paramount good?
Probably not, right?
I don't know anything about the city we all live in.
The Disney.
That's the Disney.
Disney.
Yeah.
Britain's the Disney of colonizing.
Yeah.
And instead he goes to, I don't know, who's making DC's garbage movies?
Warner Brothers.
Warner Brothers.
Okay.
So Leopold's Warner Brothers.
No, they're not even in it.
Leopold is like.
This has gotten very confusing.
Leopold is like a Snapchat making stuff.
Like, technically, they got the, or YouTube.
Like, it's a YouTube show.
Yeah, you know, it's like they got the money.
Let's actually go.
There's no history for it, but who knows?
I feel like we actually hit upon the right thing to compare him to, which is Amazon.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So Stanley tries to sell his Congo idea to Disney slash Britain, and it fails.
And King Leopold, aka Amazon's like, well, we might be interested in this plan.
Yeah.
We'll fund this.
Why don't you give me your elevator pitch?
Colony in the Congo, huh?
I like it.
I like this idea.
Yeah.
So Leopold contracts Stanley to work for him, and he sends him back to Africa with a new mission.
So Leopold's master plan here, I'm going to peel back for a minute, and then we're going to zoom into the different pieces because it's a complicated ass plan.
Great.
His master plan is to create the Congo Free State, which is a supposedly independent African nation that just happened to also be ruled by King Leopold II.
Sure.
So he went about doing this in a few ways.
In 1876, he hosted the Brussels Geographic Conference, where he invited a bunch of European experts to form the so-called International African Association, which of course had no Africans as members.
The association was a supposedly philanthropic organization.
I'm going to read you a selection from Leopold's speech at the conference where he sort of lays out what he wants to do.
The subject that calls us together today is one that demands a first place in the attention of friends of humanity.
To open up to civilization, the only part of our globe where she has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness that envelops entire populations is, I may venture to say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress.
And I am glad to observe how very favorable public feeling is to its accomplishment.
The current is with us.
So he gets this association together and he says, this is an international group and we're trying to civilize Africa and improve lives of people who are there.
I didn't realize that back then the rhetoric was already like the kind of like, oh, this is to help them double speak.
I actually just assumed they were like, yeah, we're going to take this shit from black people.
No, they are.
And these guys, the people that he invites to the geographic conference and forms the International African Association with, these guys are a lot of people who legitimately want to make things better for Africans, who aren't even thinking about making it.
Yeah, yeah.
These are the well-meaning liberal white people.
Yeah, exactly.
And like missionaries who are like, well-meaning liberal white people, because there's an Arab slave trade in Africa, like traders moving through the Congo, and the abolition movement is very big at this point in time.
And so these people are being like, we've got to stop the slave trade in Africa.
So Leopold's like, we can do that.
And there's a bunch of people who are like, we've got to Christianize the Africans.
And Leopold's like, we can do that.
And like, so that's what he's claiming this association.
Okay, so this is right.
This is like definitely like colonialism 2.0 or 3.0.
He's steps ahead of everyone else.
Yeah, yeah.
He's not even framing this as colonialism.
He's framing this as a charitable endeavor to prevent it.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So he suggests that Belgium would be a great place for this new international body to meet because it's a neutral country and it's centrally located in Europe.
And then he suggests that he might be a good person to run the association.
Just for its first year.
Gotta hit yourself.
You've got to be calm.
Just for its first year.
And he assures them all that he's doing this from the goodness of his heart.
He says, Belgium is small.
She is happy and satisfied with her lot.
I have no other ambition than to serve her well.
And it was true that Belgians were pretty happy with their lot, but Leopold did have some ambitions.
So he gets elected head of the International African Association the first year, and then he gets elected the head of it the second year too, even though that was supposed to be illegal.
Back to back.
And then the association kind of stops existing.
And Leopold replaces it with the Committee for Studies of the Upper Congo.
And then he replaces that with the International Association for the Congo.
On paper, these are all different international philanthropic groups.
Their names were deliberately forgettable and similar, so the public would assume they were all the same thing.
In King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hosschild writes that Leopold directly told his aides, quote, care must be taken not to let it be obvious that the Association of the Congo and the African Association are two different things.
The public doesn't grasp that.
So in reality, all of these philanthropic groups are shadow fronts for Leopold's plan to conquer the Congo.
So they're all charity organizations that he gets international aid money getting sent into, and he's able to pour Belgian government funds into as loans and donations.
Just like Hillary Clinton.
Exactly like Hillary Clinton.
Yes.
You've watched the documentary Clinton Cash by Denish DeSouza.
Yes.
The thing that's amazing about this is it's so complicated a plan that doesn't feel like, I mean, I'm a super smart person, of course.
I'm not finding a place where you could improvise your way into this.
You just got to wait because we're not even halfway through the plan.
Like, this is like he's, he is a legitimate, like, okay, so the villain that Marvel keeps trying to write and like failing to write, in my opinion, where it's like the low-key character where he's got all these plans within plans.
He's a step ahead.
Leopold actually was that guy to the whole world.
But in sort of the same villainous way, you're like, this is insane.
There's so many things that could go wrong in this.
So he's now created three different philanthropic associations just because the backers will start realizing that the association's fake and they'll pull their money, but he'll keep the organization alive or he'll roll its assets into a new organization.
And nobody who got caught, who realized that this was some weird shell company, wants to admit that they got caught.
So they just don't say anything.
And the public just hears like, oh, it's the new thing is out.
The International African Association.
It's that group of people trying to make life better in Africa.
Right, right, right.
So all these groups are basically funneling money into the work of Henry Morton Stanley, that explorer who Leopold sent back to Africa.
So Leopold sent him back in 1879, and his job was to start building, using the association money, a series of stations along the Congo River to act as like waypoints for steamboat traffic.
He also met with hundreds of local chiefs all throughout the Congo, all the different people who had chunks of land throughout the Congo, the different villages and chiefs, hundreds and hundreds of them.
He meets with these guys and he gets them to sign treaties giving up their rights to the land.
Here's a quote from Hosschild's book.
The very word treaty is a euphemism for many chiefs had no idea what they were signing.
Few had ever seen the written word before and they were being asked to mark their exes to documents in a foreign language and in legalese.
These guys weren't ignorant of the concept of diplomacy.
They knew what it meant to write treaties of friendship with neighboring tribes or villages.
They understood the idea of a non-aggression pact, and that's what they thought these were.
The reality was somewhat different.
Quote, in return for one piece of cloth per month to each of the undersigned chiefs, besides present of cloth in hand, they promised to freely of their own accord for themselves and their heirs and successors forever give up to said association the sovereignty and all sovereign and governing rights to all their territories.
Basically, he gives them cloth.
They think that they're getting some sick-ass clothes just for a non-aggression pattern.
Yeah, this is a thing.
Here's our, everyone gets a jersey.
You give us shirts.
We promise we won't shoot you.
We don't want to shoot you anyway.
That sounds great.
In reality, these are all statements saying that they give up all their rights to the International African Association.
And the association will have the right to collect taxes on the people who gave up their rights to their land.
And those taxes, because there's no currency in most of the Congo, those taxes can be paid in labor.
So Leopold gets hundreds of chiefs through Stanley to sign these agreements.
Yeah.
Jesus.
So Europe thinks Stanley's over there doing valuable philanthropic work, fighting with the slave traders and trying to open the Congo up to free trade.
That's the big buzzword everyone's using.
It's like, we're going to open the Congo up to free trade, and it'll benefit the Africans.
It'll benefit Europe.
Everyone will benefit if there's free trade in the Congo.
Meanwhile, what he's actually doing is getting pieces of paper that give Leopold the rights to the Congo, that make it look like all these chiefs have come together and said, we want this guy to be our king, and we want to be a country.
So, I feel like I should break for just a second and talk a little bit more about Henry Morton Stanley, who's the guy who's actually doing all this legwork.
He was one of the greatest explorers in history, and he was also a human garbage fire.
Yeah, sort of a Darth Vader type guy.
Definitely a Darth Vader, too.
He was terrified by the thought of being touched by a woman, just like Darth Vader.
That's very true.
He once cut off his own dog's tail, cooked it, and fed it to the dog for no real reason.
And he basically, when I say he was an explorer, he shot his way through Africa.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Here's a quote from a description of one of Stanley's expeditions in King Leopold's Ghost.
To those unfortunate enough to live in its path, the expedition felt like an invading army, for it sometimes held women and children hostage until local chiefs supplied food.
So yeah, he's shooting his way through these tribes, taking their food, taking their shit, burning down villages if there's any resistance.
One of his men described just hunting people, like the predator, like laying in wait and just shooting random strangers.
Yeah.
Less ethical than the predator, who I should point out has a certain code.
Yeah, yeah, way less ethical than the predator.
So these guys are predatoring their way through Africa.
But they're not particularly worse than any other explorer of the time, I would say.
He's one of the worst.
They vary.
So Henry Morton Stanley, you know the Dr. Livingston, I presume?
He's that guy.
Yeah, yeah.
And Dr. Livingston was apparently a pretty nice guy.
He was also an explorer and actually would like get to know people and like crocade himself into local culture.
So some of these guys are legitimately just in it for the sake of exploration and they're scientists and they're good to the people they encounter.
And some of them, like Stanley, just want to make a shitload of money and they're creepy violent weirdos.
Stanley is one of the kills thousands of people while he's exploring.
Got it, got it.
I guess what I meant, not as a mitigating thing of like everyone was doing it, but like if not the only standard practice, it was not, what you're describing is not a standard practice.
It's definitely common practice among a lot of these guys, but he's not nearly the only one.
But he's one of the worst, for sure.
Okay.
So yeah, while Stanley's expedition is going on, Leopold also hires a bunch of other expeditions to explore other parts of Africa.
These were deliberately showy expeditions meant to distract public attention.
One of them involved a team of four Indian elephants being sent to Africa to see if they could breed with African elephants.
All of the elephants died horribly, but the news covered the story the whole time.
So nobody's reading about what Stanley's doing because they think it's a boring philanthropical mission.
And there's this crazy story about elephants.
Showy Expeditions to Distract Public00:04:45
Let's read about that.
It's so fucking dark.
Holy shit.
So he clearly understands the media well enough that he's not just thinking about how to accomplish his plan, but how to distract public attention while he does it.
When Morton Stanley gets back from his expedition, he writes a book.
It's an instant bestseller.
King Leopold edits it himself.
That's one of the things he'd insisted on, is that Stanley could write a book about this, but King Leopold would get to edit it.
And most of what he did was correct the times when Stanley mixed up the different associations and committees that he was supposedly working for.
Because nobody could keep it straight but Leopold.
That's such an attention to detail.
That's unbelievable.
Like I said, he's the first modern, truly modern bastard.
Yeah.
So this book is sort of framed as like Henry Morton Stanley's helping the Congo Free State be born and helping these Africans like take their stab at nationhood and joining the international community and whatnot.
So that's how all this is being played on the outside world.
The reality in the Congo is very different.
And what happens next is not what anyone but Leopold had expected.
And we're going to get into that in a minute.
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Rubber Trade and State Rights00:14:56
So we're back.
And King Leopold has sent an explorer off to the Congo to trick a bunch of tribespeople into signing away their rights to the land while he's distracted the rest of Europe with a bunch of showy expeditions.
It's just like it used to be just like cannons and soldiers and swords, I guess.
And now it's PR and incredible fake treaties and stuff.
Yeah.
Wow.
It's really modern in a lot of ways.
Yeah.
So Leopold has this new best-selling book that's talking about the great stuff he's trying to do in the Congo.
That gets the public jazz.
And he's able to sort of further push the legitimacy of his project by getting the U.S. president, Chester A. Arthur, to recognize the Congo Free State.
Leopold had charmed the former U.S. minister to Belgium, a guy who called himself General Sanford, even though he wasn't actually a general.
Sure.
But he was a rich guy who had a lot of money and like an orange plantation.
And because he was a rich guy, he was able to get the president's ear.
General Sanford appealed to President Arthur's dislike of Arabs because, again, there were all these Arab slave traders.
Yeah, so just...
Yes, nothing's changed.
Nothing's new.
Yeah, so Chester A. Arthur was, he also pointed out that the Congo had been discovered by an American because Henry Morton Stanley called himself an American.
He wasn't.
He was actually British, but he lied his whole life and said he was American.
Everyone lies about everything in the 1800s.
There's no internet.
Because there's no, yeah, there's nothing to like you run into 5,000 colonels when you're reading anything in this period, and none of them are colonels.
Sure.
None of them were ever in the military.
Great.
I'm going to be a colonel now.
Fried chicken colonels.
It's fine.
And in this case, a general.
Anyway, Chester A. Arthur was like, sounds great.
Congo Free Strait sounds like a great idea.
You're going to fight some Arabs.
Best part.
Hooray.
So he included this next bit in his State of the Union speech, recognizing the Congo Free State.
Quote from Chester A. Arthur.
The rich and populous valley of the Congo, spelled with a K in this, is being opened by a society called the International African Association, of which the King of the Belgians is the president.
Large tracts of territory have been ceded to the association by native chiefs.
Roads have been opened.
Steamboats have been placed on the river and the nuclei of states established under one flag which offers freedom to commerce and prohibits the slave trade.
Oh my God.
So that's how Chester A. Arthur pictures it.
So he got paid placement for his propaganda in the State of the Union.
Yeah, in the State of the Union.
So far, the people of Belgium and the other European states are fooled pretty well.
But France and some other folks and like the British government and whatnot are starting to catch on to Leopold's plan and realize that he's making a power grab.
This helped to spark a general, what's known as the scramble for Africa, where all these European powers are like, oh my God, we're running out of Africa to take over.
So they start shooting out expeditions to claim the last pieces of the continent before it fills up.
This all culminates in the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 85.
And a bunch of stuff is decided there.
But Leopold's main goal is to get recognition for what he starts calling the Congo Free State.
He's basically like, I've got all these treaties.
Like he gets up in front of Europe and he's like, I got all these treaties.
Look, the people of the Congo want to be their own state.
They want me to be their king.
They've given the state the rights to their land.
And if you all back me in establishing the state, it'll be a free trade zone.
So everyone will be able to trade freely and buy and sell freely in there.
It'll make a bunch of money for everybody.
So that's Leopold's pitch.
Man.
And Europe buys it.
In 1885, the Congo Free State is established.
Leopold had to go in front of Belgium's Senate to ask if he could be two kings at once.
He promised that the Congo would be its own independent nation and that it would pay its own way in the world.
He told Belgium he thought it was his duty to, quote, help the nations of second rank become useful members of the great family of nations.
Then he asked for money, a little loan to help the fledgling new nation.
And he asked his fellow Belgians to volunteer to help in this bold project.
Quote, more than any other, a manufacturing and commercial people like ourselves ought to strive to obtain a market for all its workers, for thinkers, capitalists, and workmen.
So the Congo Free State is, on paper, a country with Leopold II as its absolute ruler.
So he's gone from the king of Belgium, where he doesn't really have any power, to the absolute ruler.
Yeah, of a country like 20 times the size of Belgium.
Jesus Christ.
So the Congo Free State is... to all intents and purposes a state.
It has its own army, the Force Publique, which is made up of African soldiers led by Belgian officers.
It's illegal for black men to be officers in the army of the Congo.
Yeah.
That sounds a bug.
That sounds about right.
Yeah.
So Leopold has acquired himself an African empire.
Unfortunately, he didn't want an empire.
He had no desire to actually rule another country.
He just wanted money.
He just wanted money.
So the Congo Free State is entirely a money-making scheme.
And it's all based around rubber.
So the late 1800s is when rubber really started to take off.
That's like in the mid-1800s or so is when they figured out how to vulcanize rubber, which is what makes it like nice and shiny and stable and it doesn't smell weird and fall apart.
So the Macintosh coat becomes popular around this time.
People like in Europe are just like covered head to toe in rubber.
Like it's everywhere.
It's like the fashion of the times.
People are just flipping out over rubber.
It's easy.
Tons of fetishes are born.
Tons of fetishes are born.
Exactly.
Hot air balloons, required.
It's a wonder material.
It's like the first time people, they don't have to use glass for everything.
Yeah.
So everyone's in love with rubber, but there's only two ways to make rubber at that time.
Vines and trees.
Now, rubber vines grew wild all around the Congo.
Wait, sorry, the two ways are vines and trees.
There's rubber vines and there's rubber trees.
Got it.
I thought it was going to be vegetation and chemistry.
No, they do.
Now we can make rubber using rubber, but they hadn't figured that shit out yet.
Yeah, yeah.
So actually harvesting all of the rubber from vines, like the ones you grew in the Congo, required thousands and thousands of people climbing trees in the jungle.
There's the risk of snake bite and monster attacks, and it's just a nightmare harvesting rubber at large scale in the Congo.
Harvesting rubber from trees, on the other hand, is really easy.
And some enterprising people had already started planting groves of rubber trees in South America.
But those trees took about 20 years or so to really get going.
So Leopold, standing here in charge of the Congo, knows that he has about 20 years to be the world's leading producer of rubber.
The Congo Free State was basically just a giant rubber factory.
That was his whole vision for this land filled with millions of people.
This is like the actual story of Willy Wonka.
He's the real Willy Wonka.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Jesus Christ.
So now remember when I said that Leopold had the right to collect taxes in the form of labor?
Well, he used these taxes to make Congolese people go harvest rubber for him.
In theory, I think he was allowed to only demand like 40 hours a month from them or something.
But what happened is that he would have his soldiers go from village to village and take hostages.
These hostages would be put in concentration camps where they'd be starved and beaten until the village met its rubber quota.
So if you didn't get all the rubber that you were supposed to get soon enough, your family would just starve to death.
Leopold's government did have a problem because obviously it needs soldiers to enforce these nightmarish rules.
But white people die like crazy in the Congo.
Like more than a third of the Belgians who went there died there.
And since, again, it's illegal for Africans to be officers in the Force Publique, there would wind up being like four or five Belgian guys commanding hundreds and hundreds of African soldiers.
So that's like, obviously, you're treating these guys terribly.
You're making them massacre their own people.
And there's five of you for every 500 of them.
That's like a recipe for a revolution.
Or it would be if the soldiers had free access to bullets.
One of the ways the Belgians controlled their army was by heavily restricting when anybody would get bullets and by policing their ammo so they couldn't hide any away.
So each soldier would only be issued a certain amount of ammo when they'd go out to get rubber.
And if they fired any rounds, they had to account for them.
The general policy in the Congo became that if you fired a round, you had to provide a right hand from a corpse for every round that you shot.
This was meant to stop people from stockpiling ammo, and it was meant to stop them from like hunting for animals when they should have been shooting people.
What this actually meant.
Yeah, exactly.
But that creates a market for right hands.
Exactly.
What could possibly go wrong?
Yeah.
For one thing, these soldiers aren't fed enough, so they're starving and they start hunting.
And then once they've fired a couple of rounds to hunt an animal, they need to pick up, okay, well, we fired three rounds getting that whatever it is.
Now we need three hands.
So we need to go into a village and we need to take some people's hands.
And in addition to that, like it becomes common if a village refuses to provide rubber, like people are like, we're not going to work to you.
We're not going to give up our relatives as hostages.
The Force Publique would just burn down the whole village.
Sometimes they'd just kill everybody in the entire village.
And this is happening on basically an industrial scale.
In 1903, a single rubber collecting post was sent more than 40,000 replacement rounds of ammunition.
For every round that they're being sent, they've got a hand.
So the military units in the Force Publique even would have a keeper of the hands whose job was to smoke all of the severed hands so that they'd preserve so that you could go back to the authorities.
That's your evidence.
We need 20,000 more bullets.
Here's 20,000 human hands.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
So in 1885, when this whole operation is just getting off the ground, King Leopold is named in British court as a client of what the British called a disorderly house.
Can you guess what a disorderly house was?
Probably not enough.
It's a punishment.
No, go for it.
Yeah.
No, it's a brothel.
Oh!
Yeah.
So while this is all starting off, King Leopoldhouse in England.
I thought you, oh, a disorderly house meant like his dukedom didn't have like X or Y like paperwork filed.
No, no, no.
While he's freshly the king of the Belgian Congo, he's named in British court as a client of a whorehouse.
And they say that he had been paying 800 pounds a month for a steady supply of young women, some of whom were 10 to 15 years old.
That's so.
I mean.
That's what Leopold's doing in between administering the Congo.
Yeah.
And while he's doing that, his men in the Congo are building a system of roads, railways, posts, and steamboats that are meant to allow the rubber-making operation to prosper.
Leopold doesn't want to pay for all this himself, so he claims the infrastructure is necessary so that the Free State's army can fight those dastardly Arab slavers.
And he got the U.S. to pay for it?
Or just generally?
He got everyone else to pay for it.
So he got Europe on board with this by saying the Congo was going to be a free trade zone.
But then he's like, we need to build all this infrastructure in order to fight the slavers.
So we're going to have to collect import taxes now.
Nice.
He's just like, the one thing you can trust Leopold to do is he will fuck over every single person.
Yeah.
So now even these countries who had like gotten on board because they thought this was a free trade zone, they're getting screwed.
And of course the millions of people whose hands he's having severed are getting screwed.
I guess the key is just never stop lying.
Yeah.
That's the thing.
Whenever you read about any of these guys, that is the most important thing.
Yeah.
Just never ever stop lying.
If you're going to be a monster, you have to lie consistently for decades about everything.
All right.
Yeah.
I'm in.
It works.
Yeah.
No, I mean, I'm in.
Well, you'll be a great king of the Congo.
So, to Leopold's credit, his men did fight Arab slave traders, but most of the fighting was done by conscripted African soldiers who were themselves basically slaves.
Yeah.
Yeah.
King Leopold personally endorsed a system where white agents of the free state got a bonus if they were able to find more recruits for the Force Publique.
Many agents wound up buying them in from various chiefs, in effect doing the same thing as the Arab slavers they bragged about fighting.
State agents also got bonuses for, quote, reducing recruiting expenses.
So if they outright enslaved people rather than paid them to join, they got more money in their pocket.
As many as three-quarters of all volunteers for the Force Publique died before they could receive training.
Most of those volunteers were teenagers.
Right.
Yeah.
So they're just volunteers, quote unquote.
That's fucking incredible.
So it was like, we have our indentured servant army is going to fight your slave harvest.
So basically, the Congo at this point is groups of white guys with soldiers going into the jungle to collect a bunch of other soldiers and they'll put them in chains and like march them through the jungle and most of them will die.
And then they'll train those guys up to fight and they'll take those guys into the jungle to tell people to collect rubber from people and to kill everyone who doesn't provide enough rubber and to kill a lot of the people who do provide enough rubber, just because these kids are like starving to death and maybe they have to shoot an animal or maybe there's rebels and they get into a firefight but they don't kill anyone.
But yeah, and then you got to take hands from the.
So it just keeps spiraling out of control and becoming like even more of a nightmare to everybody, but Leopold, because again he's sitting back in Belgium this time.
Since Leopold was the absolute monarch.
He got to rule by royal decree.
His first decree was that all quote vacant land was now property of the state.
He didn't explain what vacant meant, because obviously farmers don't live on every inch of their farmland.
So basically most of the land in the Congo was now just his.
He leased this land to a series of private corporations.
And this gets to the real brilliance of his scheme.
Because Leopold didn't have to dirty his hands actually running any of the rubber harvesting, he was able to privatize it.
Yeah, other people paid for the right to mine rubber and cut off hands and do all the actual work and Leopold would own the rights to a huge chunk of their profits.
So basically these companies would come in and give him an owning stake in the corporation.
They would license the scheme yeah, of enslaving people, cutting off their hands, etc.
Yeah, Adam Hosschild in King Leopold's Ghost compares the Congo Free State to a venture capital firm.
Right quote, he had essentially found a way to attract other people's capital to his investment schemes.
While he retained half the proceeds in the end, what with various taxes and fees the companies paid the state, it came to more than half Jesus.
So in the 1890s the Congo Free State really starts putting out rubber and suddenly King Leopold is one of the richest guys in the world.
He starts buying gigantic monuments and palaces and shit for Belgium big, showy projects, some of which are still there.
Venture Capitalism of Enslavement00:03:54
To make people like him.
It's to keep him popular at home.
He's succeeding beyond his wildest dreams in the business side of things, but his personal life is just kind of one series of train wrecks after the other.
Oh sad, That's sad.
Yeah, his son had died in 1864, which led to an understandable estrangement between Leopold and his wife.
It took eight years before they could stand to be around each other and try again.
This passage from Leopold's biography tells you a lot about the relationships between the sexes in the 1860s.
Quote: Leopold II was anxious to have a male heir, and in 1872, Queen Marie Henriette consented to resume conjugal life with her royal spouse, from whom she had separated some time before.
She sacrificed herself, as one may say, for her country.
A child was born unto them, but alas, it was a daughter and not a son which was given unto them.
So that's messed up for a lot of reasons.
Jesus.
One of which is just that even in the pro-Leopold biography, it just admits that having sex with Leopold is a sacrifice.
I actually am surprised at the amount of agency she has.
Like, she, you know, she is the queen.
She was facing pressure, but wasn't forced at guillotined point or whatever to she kind of was.
I guess that's true.
I guess that's between the lines, of course.
Yeah.
Jesus.
I mean, she probably has more agency than the average, but at the same time, in a way, she has less because it's less important for a commoner to have a son.
Yeah, yeah.
Because, like, the king, that's like the whole dynasty thing.
So you might say she has even less.
We probably should say that.
Yeah, we probably would be responsible for that.
Yeah.
So yeah, Leopold did not take having a daughter very well.
This quote is from King Leopold's Ghost.
When the last daughter, Clementine, was born, according to his sister Louise, the king was furious and thenceforth refused to have anything to do with his admirable wife.
From the beginning, she wrote, The king paid very little attention to me or my sisters.
So he doesn't pay attention to his daughters, and he mostly seems to care when one of them fucks with his garden.
Here's a recollection from Luis.
Large, juicy peaches grew on the walls of the gardens, and the king was very proud of them.
I had a passion for peaches, and one day I dared to eat one which was hidden away among the leaves.
And that year, peaches were plentiful.
But the following day, the king discovered the theft.
What a dramatic moment.
At once suspected, I confessed my crime and was promptly punished.
I did not realize that the king counted his peaches.
So while Leopold is running a nightmare hand-harvesting rubber-making scheme in the Congo, he's got enough time to make sure that his daughter doesn't steal a peach from his garden.
Because it's like, at least Ivanka Trump has the decency to pretend that she loved her tie with her dad, even though, like, in all those stories she tells, it's sad and weird, too.
But it's like, at least she's like, I love him.
He's my dad.
You know, and I believe in all this shit.
He couldn't even get his daughters to be like, I love him.
Well, there's going to be more about his daughters coming in.
He is not a great dad.
Yeah.
If you can't tell that already.
There's, in fact, no evidence that Leopold cared about any of his children as anything more than vehicles for his legacy.
Even that fawning 1910 biography can't make it seem like Leopold had a single fuck for his family.
As King Leopold.
I'm going to be honest, that's so far the most relatable thing about it.
Just not liking his family.
Yeah.
Just kidding.
I love you, fam.
As King Leopold grew older and richer, he also became a full-on hypochondriac.
He took to wearing a waterproof bag around his gigantic beard whenever he went outside in the rain or when he swam.
He required his palace tablecloths to be boiled every day to kill any germs, which is at least a character evolution from not letting them wash his sheets.
Yes.
Napkin.
Yeah.
Good for him.
So he's changing.
He's had his own little hero's journey.
Yeah, yeah, we all get there.
Yeah.
Hypochondriac.
This wound up being another really, really long one.
There was just so much research.
Two-Part Series Coming Thursday00:02:36
So this is going to be a two-parter podcast, and the second part is going to drop on Thursday.
So we'll be getting into the rest of Leopold's story and the tremendously dark story of the Congo.
So stick around.
Check back in on Thursday.
It's going to be great.
In the meantime, you can check out Andrew T's podcast, Yoist This Racist.
You can also check out every other episode of Behind the Bastards.
You can find us on Twitter at BastardsPod and Instagram as well.
You can find us on the internet at behindthebastards.com.
And you can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK.
So, Andrew and I will be back on Thursday with more Leopold.
So, check us out then.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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