King Leopold II of Belgium orchestrated the Congo Free State's exploitation through deceptive land treaties and the chicote whip, killing millions for rubber profits. While George Washington Williams exposed early atrocities and Edmund Morel founded the Congo Reform Association, Leopold countered with a PR campaign buying out editors and using whataboutism. Despite his grotesque personal life and burning state records before ceding control in 1908 for 110 million francs, his financial evil proved scarier than ideological tyranny. The episode concludes by linking this colonial violence to modern uranium mining for atomic bombs, highlighting enduring systemic abuse. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Leopold's Blood-Soaked Rubber Regime00:16:05
So this week we are doing another rewind, our infamous and beloved episodes on King Leopold II of Belgium.
So tuck in and enjoy yourselves and enjoy a real terrible story of a real terrible piece of shit.
I hope you all have a good week, regardless of what you do during it.
Hello, friends.
I'm Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in history.
And this is part two of our episode on Leopold II, King of Belgium.
In part one, we sort of went over how Leopold conned his way into becoming king of the Congo, how he tricked the locals into signing over their rights to their land, and how he conscripted thousands of them into a slave army.
So now we're going to get back into all that and the rest of the terrible, terrible story of the Belgian Congo.
So the first five or so years of the Congo Project are great for Leopold.
He's in total control, richer than God, and most of Europe still believes he's improving a lot of the Congolese people.
But in around 1890, a black journalist named Colonel, and he's not really a Colonel, George Washington Williams, saw the actual Congo.
So he didn't like take the tour where you get led through the nice parts of the Congo.
Like he went on foot and he got in there and he saw the fucking nightmare that Leopold had built.
And he wrote an article called an open letter to King Leopold.
And it was the first expose of Leopold's blood-soaked rubber regime.
Williams' document is remarkable because he's basically the only person up to that point who actually sat down with African people and asked them what was going on in the Congo.
He retraced a lot of Stanley's rat along the Congo and actually talked to some of the people who'd signed treaties giving their land to Leopold.
He learned that a great number of chiefs had been tricked into signing things with magic tricks.
One of the tricks was that, like, Stanley had bought a bunch of electric batteries in London, and when, quote, when attached to the arm under the coat, communicated with a band of ribbon which passed over the palm of the white brother's hand.
And when he gave the black brother a cordial grasp of the hand, the black brother was greatly surprised to find his white brother was so strong that he nearly knocked him off his feet.
When the native inquired about the disparity of strength between himself and his white brother, he was told that the white man could pull up trees and perform the most prodigious feats of strength.
So he did a hand buzzer?
He did a hand buzzer, and he's like, if you don't know what electricity is, he's just some sort of superman.
Yeah, let's sign the peace treaty.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Holy shit.
Yeah.
Another trick was to use a magnifying glass to light a cigar and then claim that white people had sun powers.
And he'll burn up your village.
Basically, like, I have power over the sun and I'll light your village on fire.
Yeah, yeah.
God, what a fucking bluff.
Yeah.
So Williams writes this open letter.
He frames it as like, presuming Leopold doesn't know how terrible things are.
He writes about the taking of hands and like all of the death and the people who are being like starved to death as porters carrying is this like sort of like modest proposal style?
Like of course you know, but it's an indictment or do you think it is?
There's a little bit of a satirical bit.
Yeah, yeah.
And yeah, so Williams publishes this, but unfortunately he dies not long after writing the letter.
And Leopold's able to clamp down on any kind of outrage after for a little while.
But seven or eight years later, another guy who's an amateur journalist named Morel stumbles upon the conspiracy.
So he was working as a mid-level employee for a shipping line that had the contract to handle all shipping into the Congo free state.
And so every so often, Morell would get sent over to Belgium and he would report on what's going into and out of the port of Antwerp.
And so he realizes that the only thing coming out of the Congo into Europe is rubber, just shitloads of rubber, impossible quantities of it.
Larger quantities than have been reported, in fact.
And the only thing that's going being sent out to the Congo rather than trade are just guns and money and a lot more guns than you'd need for any kind of philanthropic enterprise.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
So the wire.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So he starts, he never actually goes to the Congo, but he just starts digging.
And he starts talking to other people who have worked there.
And basically, he starts a newspaper that is focused entirely on exposing King Leopold's crimes to the world and starts publishing it all throughout Europe.
He's active all over the world and basically becomes like the Congo equivalent of WikiLeaks.
So all these guys who had worked in Leopold's Congo and felt bad will come to him and be like, I saw this.
This is what happened.
Here's some documents I managed to smuggle.
Well, it's also like you're like, yeah, this is what WikiLeaks was supposed to be.
Yeah.
Like, this is what it could be.
And this is also why people like that have legitimacy because, and why conspiracies have legitimacy, because guess what?
There have been big, complex conspiracies.
Gigantic conspiracies.
So Morell starts this newspaper and he winds up creating what's probably the first modern human rights organization, the Congo Reform Association, which is dedicated to stopping this fucking nightmare in the Congo.
King Leopold responded by inventing the first modern international PR campaign.
He bought a shitload of journalists of his own and he had them all write puff pieces about how great the Congo actually was.
He would pay for journalists to go on lavish, carefully controlled trips through the Congo.
He'd give them exclusive interviews when they got back and he'd use his network of agents to help them place their articles in newspapers.
He got journalists in the New York Times to write quotes like, I have witnessed more atrocities in London streets than I have ever seen in the Congo.
He would pay for journalists to give public speeches and he would lobby politicians.
Leopold's regime was heavily criticized for its widespread use of something called the jakote, which is a hippo hide whip which was used to punish laborers.
Prisoners were often lashed to death by it, and it's possible that like literally several million people were killed with this whip.
So Leopold starts catching flack for this and he decides to distract attention from his whipping millions of people to death by sending journalists to British colonies and having them write lurist exposés of abuses in British colonies.
So his pet reporters would write stories about like how the British were using whips on prisoners in South Africa or something terrible they'd done to people in India.
Yeah.
And then exactly.
What about Hillary style?
That's exactly it.
Like I said, he invented the modern art of being shitty.
Like he's doing like whataboutism on a massive scale.
Did he have like an antecedent for like the media, like playing the media or did he just make all this shit?
I think he invented this playbook.
Yeah.
Because other people had obviously every the media has existed for a while.
Other people have used the media to one degree or another.
But he is the first person that I've ever run across who's using it in the same way politicians use it today.
Yeah.
In the same way world leaders use it today.
Like this is a very modern PR campaign.
He buys, he uses his Congo earnings to buy the editors of a bunch of newspapers, including the London Times.
So he's spending like thousands of dollars on just owning editors so that number one, they'll kill stories that are negative towards the Congo Free State.
And so that he can place his positive stories once he gets like positive journalists to go, you know, have a tour of the Congo and then come and write about it.
And this is all basically a delaying action.
Leopold knows eventually the truth is going to get out, but he's playing for time.
He's got 20 years before rubber stops being as profitable.
He doesn't need to do this forever.
He just needs to do it for a little while longer.
He just wants to suck as much money as he can out of the situation.
And eventually the sheer weight of facts did change public opinion against him, but it took like 20 years.
At one point, Leopold is said to have seen a cartoon of himself in a German newspaper.
And in the cartoon, he's cutting the hands off of Africans.
And he reportedly laughed at that and said, Cut off hands, that's idiotic.
I'd cut off all the rest of them, but not the hands.
That's the thing I need in the Congo.
So he's a real piece of work.
Now, in 1895, Leopold had started dating a 16-year-old prostitute named Caroline.
This is when the Congo was at the height of its rubber production.
So he'd been hooked up to her via a pimp named Durow, who was a former officer in the French army.
We know now that Caroline's whole relationship with Leopold was likely a con game, an incredibly successful scheme to snatch his inheritance.
But at the time, King Leopold, blood-drenched, absolute ruler of the Congo, was smitten with this teenage prostitute.
Adam Hosschild writes that, quote, to the extent that someone like Leopold was capable of love, this teenage prostitute proved to be the love of his life.
So he's really got it for this girl hard.
He names her the Baroness of Vaughan, and the unseemliness of their relationship isn't really acknowledged in the 1910 biography.
It just calls her one of the king's, quote, favorites, and it dances around the fact that they got together while the queen was still alive.
In general, it refers to the king's constant parade of mistresses as distractions.
So, yeah, Carolyn went on to write a bit about their life together, and she gives this additional insight into the kind of man Leopold was.
Quote, every evening, a steam launch took the king to a pier leading to my villa through a subterranean passage.
Speaking about this, I can't help remarking on the extraordinary taste of the king for everything, which had a secret and mysterious character.
Anyone who could sell him any house so long as it was built on the side of an abandoned quarry or if it had a secret staircase.
So basically, he's gone from being too cheap to like rinse his fucking like a handkerchief.
He's like a cartoon villain.
Yeah, to like a cartoonville with like lairs built into mountainsides and hidden boat like grottos and stuff.
Jesus.
Yeah.
But Carolyn seems to have his number.
So she's both got him on madly in love with her, but she also like she takes advantage of his hypochondriac or whatever you call that.
Like whenever she wanted him to leave her alone, she'd pretend to have a cough.
Right.
And then he'd hide for days because he was scared of her.
So she's she's my favorite person in this story.
She's got this guy locked down.
So the king is sort of the 1900s come around, is in his late 60s.
And he takes to visiting his teenage mistress in a large tricycle.
Because again, he's getting more and more eager to get a moment of whimsy for the genocidal murderer.
Yeah, he's riding a big tricycle to hang out with his teenage girlfriend.
By the way, just as bad everyone who, every white guy riding a tricycle with a big old mustache.
You are all as bad as King Leopold.
Yeah.
So he's riding a big tricycle.
He drinks nothing but hot water.
And he starts referring to himself in the third person at this point in time.
So yeah, he's a weirdo.
He's not entirely past his old ways at this point.
There's like a story of the time his mistress bought a new hat for him and gives it to him and he like flies into a rage.
And he only calms down when she explains him that she got it for a bargain, that it was like a deal that she bought at a quarter of its value.
So like he's still, he's just a weirdo.
Yeah.
He's a weird guy.
He's like a weird old rich lecher who's just knows what's going on in the Congo, but doesn't like.
I mean, look, here's the other part, the other way to look at that, I suppose, maybe not in such a direct degree, but as Americans, we all have similar types of blood on our hands that we're electing to not think about.
Yeah, but we're not driving it in the same way, but we absolutely, like, we all have these phones that we know are made by people who hate the work that they're doing and they're like include minerals that are mined from like conflict-ridden nations and often use slave labor and whatnot.
We know that like the fabric in our clothes is often there's slave labor at some point in the production line.
Leopold knows that because he's signing the orders and saying, no, cut off more hands, cut off more hands.
And he's just, it's just amazing to me that he's able to do that all day, every day, and then write a tricycle to his teenage girlfriend's house.
Yeah.
But that's amazing.
I hear what you're saying, but to me, I'm like, it's a little bit just degrees.
I mean, look, we're all able to.
It is degrees.
We're all able to compartmentalize the misery that's necessary for our comfort.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, fuck this guy.
Yeah, but fuck this guy.
One of the things that was interesting to me reading that pro-Leopold biography is that while it does talk about the year after he died.
Jesus.
Spoiler.
So this biography of him, it's very positive.
It talks about how there's atrocities, but it always kind of doesn't talk about the detail.
It just said, he definitely committed atrocities.
But look at this cool thing.
Or look at how smart he was.
Look at how.
And everyone did.
Everyone did.
And we'll get to that in a little bit.
What is interesting to me is that this biography does condemn his mistress for capitalizing on the Congo.
Sure.
It notes that she was called the Queen of the Congo by the people of Belgium for she was to benefit largely by the atrocities committed in the free state, where sweating and bleeding natives labored so as to accumulate millions for the royal favorite.
So like, again, he doesn't really attack Leopold ever.
Like he's like, yeah, he did some bad stuff.
Yeah.
But this biographer goes off on her mistress for like taking money from him.
That's cool.
That's blood money.
Which it is blood money, but like she's the least objectionable person in this situation.
So yeah.
Yeah.
She is a little Melania-esque, I suppose.
She is.
I mean, she maybe knew more what she was getting into at the top.
Yeah, she probably knew less about the Congo because, like, I doubt.
Just a rich guy.
Yeah, she just wanted to marry a rich guy.
Like, I doubt he doesn't seem like the kind of guy to have talked to his mistress about the hands or the whips that they were murdering people with.
And it's at the time, especially probably easy to ignore.
Yeah.
Forget about stuff.
Yeah.
You don't share a lot of that stuff with your, yeah, especially not your teenage child bride.
No, no.
And as the teenage child bride to just be like, I don't read those books.
Yeah.
I don't read that article.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So in the early 1900s, more and more stories of abuse in the Congo hit the world press.
People actually started to take notice and care.
They read about things like an entire town's worth of boys being given 50 lashes each, which is a fatal sentence, for laughing in the presence of a white man.
In 1904, one of the rubber companies in the Congo put one of its own men on trial, mostly to show that they were trying to do something about all of the horrible crimes.
The guy, Charles Cadron, was accused of murdering at least 122 Africans.
The case wound up revealing a bunch of fucked up details about how all the hostage taking and the hand-taking and stuff actually worked.
But Cadron was released due to, quote, extenuating circumstances.
The court said that he'd had to contend with, quote, great difficulties under which Cadron found himself accomplishing his mission in the midst of a population absolutely resistant to any idea of work and which respects no other law than force and knows no other means of persuasion than terror.
So they were asking for it defense.
They were asking for it defense.
That works.
That also still works today, Kaida.
It does, but it was stopping.
This is at the point where it was working less and less in the Congo.
And in the early 1900s, Leopold starts dealing with more and more resistance to his ideas, both in the Congo and at home.
So this is also kind of the point at which socialism is starting to rise, and socialists obviously aren't big fans of kings.
Leopold declared himself a mortal enemy of socialism.
He fought against the universal right to vote for all Belgians.
Still on the playbook.
Yeah.
Both of those things.
In 1902, the Belgian Labor Party called a general strike, and Leopold called for it to be brutally stopped.
The strikers were fired upon by city guards and eight people were killed.
The massacre was a calculated message to the socialists.
Don't fuck with the money train.
Leopold was willing to kill a hell of a lot more than eight people to keep the money coming in.
Hochschild's book relates one six-week campaign in the Congo that killed, quote, over 900 natives, men, women, and children in order to add 20 tons of rubber a month to one region's productivity.
So that gives you an idea of the kind of calculus he's making.
Yeah, yeah.
Resistance Rises Against Kings00:04:44
That's how, I mean, right, it's just lives for rubber.
Yeah, it's just lives for rubber.
Rubber has a commodity price.
Yeah.
I have to point out that none of the revelations of brutality did much to hurt Leopold's popularity at home in Belgium.
He was growing less popular and even hated in a lot of Europe.
But even today, there are Belgian museums that proudly talk about his anti-slavery campaigns and ignore the whole genocide thing.
The crimes against humanity didn't hurt Leopold's legacy.
The only thing Belgium couldn't forgive him for was being a shitty dad and having a mistress.
In 1904, Leopold's daughter, Stephanie, sued her father, the king, for keeping her chunk of her mother's inheritance.
Leopold fought in court for the right to deny his children their inheritance and, in fact, denied them any wealth or property even after his death.
Around this time, a Belgian cabinet minister noted that, quote, the king has but two dreams, to die a billionaire and to disinherit his daughters.
I mean, what father doesn't want that?
Yeah, in a lot of ways, kind of cool.
In a lot of ways, kind of cool.
Wow.
So, in 1906, King Leopold finally marries the Baroness.
They have two sons.
His second son was born with a malformed arm that just sort of ended in a stump with no hand.
Obviously, some people suggested this might be a judgment from God for all the millions of hands that Leopold ordered severed.
Which is almost more fucked up if you think about the morality behind like, okay, this guy cut off millions of people's hands.
Let's fuck off his innocent baby's hands.
Yeah.
That's not how you do that.
First of all, that is definitely how God do that.
God is a little punchy on the messages.
Yeah, God, God ain't great with making sure these people get their just desserts.
Yeah.
Yeah, because right, because it's so funny.
It's like all these like just so kind of stories where God is just a little like tricky metaphor man.
Like, oh, you didn't expect this, did you?
Didn't think God would do that, did you?
Oh, just, God, get it right, man.
Yeah.
Hey, speaking of hands, why don't you use both of them to order the products that we are about to advertise?
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So, the general unseemliness of the king's young bride and the disinheritance of his daughters meant the public sort of deserted Leopold once the human rights campaign against his atrocities really took off.
In 1908, King Leopold was forced to bequeath his control of the Congo to the Belgian government.
In exchange, they paid for the colony's 110 million francs worth of debt, most of which had been accrued because Leopold used the free state as a bank to buy gifts for his mistresses.
Before he hands over control of the colony, he'd ruled with an iron fist for more than 20 years.
Leopold has all of the Congo state records burned.
I will give them my Congo, he said, but they have no right to know what I did there.
Oh, what the fuck?
Such a piece of shit.
So, a thing that I say all the time or think about, it's like, yes, of course, there have been massive conspiracies in history and I'm sure today, but like, oftentimes, like, there isn't like the basic human competency to pull off some of the more far-fetched, you know, like a Pizzagate-style thing.
You're like, how could everyone cover this up?
And then it's like just hearing a story of 19th century to 20th century, like attention to detail.
Well, because he's a genius, like he really is like a genius in the sense that, like, if you saw a character execute a plan like this in a movie, you would be like, that's a little far-fetched that he might get away with it.
But he did.
Yeah.
And he is an evil genius.
Yeah.
And I guess, you know what?
And it's I guess it was from a time when little people were less empowered to speak up.
Yes.
Because that's the real thing.
It's like it would be hard to pull off a Pizzagate because it's not like the top conspirators would go to jail, but it's like there's going to be a janitor who's like, what the fuck is this?
What the fuck's going on?
There's kids in this basement.
Yeah.
And that's like less likely to happen.
That was more controllable back in the day, clearly.
Yeah.
I mean, even when that started coming out, there's a lot less of a media landscape.
You only get the news from your newspapers.
You don't read every newspaper.
Most people don't read much of one newspaper.
So if you're a guy like Leopold, you've got the money to make the press do what you want to a big extra.
And if I understand my history correctly, which I probably don't, that was a time when the public had more of an expectation that media was biased.
It was just right.
Well, yeah, this is like a lot of this is right around the time when America gets involved in a war with Spain that's essentially pushed by two different newspaper magnets wanting to sell more papers.
So like, yeah, the press, I mean, he doesn't have a great reputation now.
Yeah, but it even still didn't have a great reputation then.
So yeah, it's like a perfect storm, but it also is, it was a legitimately brilliant scheme.
And he did his best to cover his tracks.
And he died in December of 1909 at the age of 84, super rich.
Did he make that billion?
Well, we'll get to that in a minute.
What?
The biography published the next year said that, quote, were it not for his private life, his domestic affairs, and his avarice, he would have retained his popularity to the very last.
Belgium, as a nation, with the exception of the socialists, would have forgiven him the Congo atrocities.
Indeed, she has forgiven him for, after all, she is destined to benefit by them.
And she will not grudge her king the royal commission he pocketed on the Enterprise.
Yeah.
And this is where, again, I want to point out that in some total, there's no 100% agreed upon death toll for Leopold's regime in the Congo, but the likely numbers are between 10 and 13 million, possibly as high as 15 million people.
Right.
Right.
And the Congo was definitely the bloodiest of any of the colonies in Africa by a substantial margin, but they all killed a lot of people.
And a lot of them killed a lot of people making rubber.
And one of the things that was found out after Leopold's death is that in the bloody French and German colonies that were producing rubber, Leopold owned a majority of several of the large rubber-making corporations in those colonies, too.
Right.
So he was also the first pan-multinational right.
The corporations can be the conduits for the scumbags because the corporations are the scumbags, of course.
But Jesus Christ.
Yeah, so he's a real monster.
The late king achieved his ambition of disinheriting his daughters.
He left them only 15 million francs, the exact amount he'd inherited from his father.
His entire fortune went to Baroness Devon, the prostitute courtesan that he fell in love with and married.
After his death, she immediately married DeRot, her pimp, and spent the rest of her life living lavishly off the gold made by the blood of Congolese labor.
Yeah.
She doesn't come out as good as...
I don't know.
I kind of like that his inheritance got stolen by a scheming prostitute and her pimp friend.
Yeah.
That's better than not.
I guess if she'd murdered him, that would have been a little bit better.
If she'd strangled him with his own beard, Jabba like or poisoned him.
Maybe she did poison him.
Maybe she did poison him.
I can't.
I hope so.
I certainly don't know.
Oh, what a grim ass tale.
Fuck.
Yeah, his biography, the 1910 biography, summed up Leopold's life this way.
Leopold II knew Belgium, new Europe, and new humanity.
And like a strong man, he had a deep contempt for everything and everybody.
He loved his country and his own interests, for all love is, after all, selfish.
Jesus.
The Victorian age is a bleak-ass period.
There's also, you know, speaking of, although it's not exactly the same players, but it's the same types of institutions.
Every one of y'all who, whenever this comes out, y'all have just enjoyed the royal wedding.
Yeah.
That shit is built off the back of shit like this.
Exactly like this.
Well, less artful than this.
A lot crueler.
Like the pretty good.
Because this is...
It's up there with the Holocaust in terms of the greatest crimes in human history.
But as a scheme, his plan is...
It's like almost artwork.
It's like watching the Joker and the good Chrisnol and Batman pull out.
But also that one, too, where you're like, it has similar moments of like, I feel like some of these lies are just to do the lie.
Yeah.
It's not even about achieving the age.
You don't even need to do this.
Yeah.
There's a lot of like, the fuck do you do that for?
Well, it's crazy.
And so one of the more, I mean, there's so many fucked up things about this.
Yeah.
I really recommend reading King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hosschild.
It's a great book, and it really delves into the human misery caused by this regime.
But, you know, you're talking 10 to 15 million people killed, millions more left without hands, left maimed, starved, like whose villages were destroyed.
The Congo today is still probably the least stable state in Africa, or at least one of them.
Yeah.
Because all social order was destroyed.
He swaths the pop, like that, it continues to this day.
Leopold's profits.
Roughly a billion dollars in modern currency.
That's bonkers.
I feel like that's fucking nothing for what he did.
Oh, in terms of, right, like not a billion dollars in 1909 money.
Right, right.
A billion dollars in today's money is what he got for killing 10 to 15 million people and destroying Central Africa.
That's Jesus.
Yeah.
He's not even extracting enough wealth.
Like, you could do that just by closing up bookshops.
Yeah.
And I think a lot of that is because he had to spend so much money on an army on policing the city and fighting it because there were a bunch of rebellions.
People who fought back, he had to suppress those rebellions, and he had to pay all these journalists.
Yeah, there you go, fucking capitalists.
It isn't even profitable to be the worst person in history.
Although, I guess that was the second lesson that everyone turned: oh, the real profit's in PR and making people think they want to do this.
Now, I want to ask you a question that occurred to me when I finished researching this, and I wonder about this.
Like, is Leopold a worse person than Hitler?
Because I can't not think about that line in the Big Lebowski where what's his name, Walters, like, say what you will about National Socialism, at least it's an ethos.
Yeah.
Hitler committed crimes on a similar, if not much greater, scale, if you include all of the war dead.
But he had like an ideology behind it, as opposed to Leopold, who this was never anything but money.
Yeah.
There was no hatred.
There was no goal.
There was no view of the world.
It was purely, if I can make money and killing these people is the fastest way to get it.
I don't care what happens to them because I want money.
And it was also separate.
I mean, obviously, I guess it's just different things.
They are very different things.
Although, like, when you look at the Holocaust, and this is something that's often glossed over when people talk about the Holocaust, is how much of it was a money-making endeavor from the German state because they were literally mining people to death, both in terms of like taking their hair, taking the gold fillings out of them, taking their businesses beforehand, taking their property.
So, I mean, you have with most of like, and with really with every great genocide, because like if you look at the Rwandan genocide, there was a lot of financial motivation there, people wanting each other's farms and whatnot.
Yeah.
I have to imagine like those are the things that allow, I mean, like all, look, but like all conflict, too.
It's like, especially anything sectarian or religious, like the Crusades, you know, you can make an economic case for the Crusades or colonialism writ large.
Like all that is sort of possible.
I think the thing with Leopold's evil is, as we've discussed already, it's like, though not in the same degree, anyone listening to this on a podcast thing.
Out iFire and is complicit in something along Leopold's vector.
Yeah.
Whereas it's fewer of us listening to this podcast are complicit in some type of thing that Hitler is involved in.
So I think it behooves us to say Hitler is more evil because we don't want to be part, you know, like the banality.
I mean, look, not banality, but the, you know, the it's in the direction of banality.
Well, I think you're onto something that's great there.
And I think that's why the idea of the banality of evil is so important is because Hitler is, it's so easy to see the evil in Hitler because he was showy.
Like he's the most showy villain in all of history.
Yeah.
Leopold was a weird old man who had a stupid beard and sat in his office and never shot anybody and rode a tricycle to his mistress and was just this weird old dude who was happy to orchestrate one of like the great crimes in human history just for some cash in his pocket.
And that's scarier.
Yeah, and you can imagine like he doesn't come up with the hands for bullets scheme.
No, he's just need to.
We can't let them have bullets.
Yeah.
We have to make sure that like we're accounting for all the bullets so that they're not saving them up for a rebellion.
What can we do?
Oh, well, we just make sure they prove to us they're using the bullets for a good reason when they fire them.
How about we have them bring in a hand?
Great.
And that's probably the end of the conversation.
And then the first person brings it.
20 million people lose hands.
Yeah.
Like then a crime on an unspeakable scale happens and he's just like sitting at home being like, boy, I wonder why production's down this week.
But he can also be like, I'm not the one that came up with the hands thing.
Oh, it's a shame.
He can even be like, oh, the hand thing's a real shame.
Yeah, that's a real shame.
One of my new guys, you know, these, you know, the Walloons.
Yeah, you put him in charge of something and they mess it up.
I hate that we have to do this, but of course we do need that rubber.
That's the thing that, you know, and look, that's a version of this every one of us tells ourselves every fucking day.
So that's why I think most people would say Hitler is a worse, more evil person, because we don't want to be complicit in our own evil.
Hey, everybody.
This is Robert Evans from The Future.
I realized that this podcast was a teeny bit incomplete.
There was some more information I wanted to give out, so I gained access to a time machine and went back in time to record it.
It was either fix the podcast or stop 9-11.
Hopefully I made the right decision.
But I wanted to say a little bit more about the Chicote, which we talked about a little bit in this podcast.
That's the hippohide whip that was the primary disciplinary tool in the Congo Free State.
The book, King Leopold's Ghost, makes a big deal out of the Chakote, and it's probably true that the Belgians under Leopold whipped more people to death than any other regime in history.
But that book also points out that whipping people to death or nearly to death was basically the bedrock that colonialism was founded upon.
It relates the story of a guy named Roger Casement, who we didn't get to talk to in this podcast.
He's a very interesting dude.
He's one of the men who investigated atrocities in the Congo.
He also wound up investigating a lot of atrocities in the Amazon at a place called Putumayo, where the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company had been caught, basically enslaving and murdering people to produce even more rubber.
And this was for, I think, the British.
It was mostly a British-owned company, although it was like a corporation with a lot of different sort of stockholders behind it.
And the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company dealt out punishments with a whip of their own that was actually a tapir hide whip.
But it was similar to the Chakote in its effect.
Roughly 30,000 indigenous people in the Amazon died mining rubber for that company.
Whips, it turns out, were basically the glue that made colonialism possible.
I found one book on slavery in the British West Indies published in 1824 that admits that whips were, quote, the mainspring of the agricultural system in that region of the empire.
Whips were also critical to the French colonies as far back as the 1700s, when a visitor to the French Antilles noticed that the use of whips was, quote, always excessive and barbarous with the potential of maiming the victim by assaulting his private parts or even killing him, if not instantly, as has already been the case in due course, as is often the case.
So whipping and slavery go hand in hand, obviously.
I don't think most people are surprised by that.
But I think a lot of people would be surprised to know that Europeans didn't stop whipping subject people once slavery was over.
The Congo and the Amazon are proof of that, but the atomic bomb is actually even more proof.
After Leopold died, the Belgians continued to control the Congo region, and they moved on from rubber farming to mining.
In the first six months of 1920, a single gold mine is recorded as issuing over 26,000 lashes to his workers, more than eight lashes for every single African, quote, employed there.
Colonial Whipping Continues After Slavery00:02:38
I say, you know, employed in quotation marks because the Belgians kept right on using forced labor, as did the British in Kenya up and into the modern era.
By World War II, Belgium required 120 days per year of labor for each adult male inhabitant of the Congo region.
And it turns out that 80% of the uranium mined to make the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from Congolese mines that used forced labor, which means we can thank the Chakote for the first atom bombs.
The British are also famous for flogging their colonial subjects well into the middle of the 20th century.
By the 1920s, Kenya was the colony where the British used the most corporal punishment, or as they called it, rough justice.
Flogging was seen to be necessary in order to deal with the, quote, raw native Africans who were perhaps so raw because the British regularly whipped them bloody.
There were attempts in the 1930s to alter British penal laws in the colony to be less brutal, but they didn't exactly stop the problem of white colonists treating black natives like shit.
Brutality in the Kenyan colony eventually led to the Mau Mau Uprising, which started in 1952 when a bunch of rebels calling themselves the Mau Mau killed 32 white people.
This made England go batshit crazy.
The English forces rounded up 150,000 Kenyans and threw them into concentration camps where they were starved and beaten regularly.
One survivor recalled, We were forced to do work carrying bricks to build a school.
We were beaten if we moved too slowly.
It was very hard work.
They would just flog everyone at times.
Four or five guards with whips would come into the cell.
So at least 12,000 people were killed during the Mau Mau uprising.
Although it's hard to say how many of them died from being whipped, the brutalizing effect of whipping people certainly had an impact on the British men who did it.
A Kenyan judge who investigated whipping, torture, and murder at one British interrogation center compared it to a Nazi labor camp and said, quote, from the brutalizing of flogging, it is only a step to taking a life without qualm.
So I just thought this is good information to know.
People talk about colonialism a lot, and it gets a lot of well-deserved harsh criticism these days.
But I think that the people who rightly view it as a horrible historical crime also tend to kind of push it further back in history and sort of assume that most of the worst stuff was done in the 17 and 1800s.
The reality is that colonialism was still exporting wealth from African nations into Europe well into the 20th century, and that the European nations were using brutal and in a lot of ways medieval justice measures in order to keep the colonies compliant.
So there's your happy little reminder that not only was colonialism a nightmare, but it is a nightmare that happened recently enough that a lot of people are still alive to remember it today.
Heroes Push History Further Back00:05:00
So just keep that in mind, I guess.
And now I'm going to use my magical time powers to go back to, you know, when Andrew and I were sitting in the room.
Yeah, and we don't want to, we also don't want to acknowledge like when you go to Belgium, which I love Belgium.
I've been there a couple times.
Waffles and chocolates.
Beautiful country, best beer I've ever had in the world.
Gorgeous, giant buildings.
Yeah.
Many in like the cities and stuff, like really old, beautiful museums and stuff, many of which are built on Congo money.
Yeah.
Of course.
And so you don't, and like we're shitting on Belgium here.
Yeah.
But that's like all of Europe.
You go to the American South and the American North.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like that's everything was built on the backs of that shit.
So, and, you know, there were good people at all times being like, oh, it sucks.
This is really messed up.
But yeah, but that's the same.
You pick up an iPhone, you're like, oh, it sucks that someone had to suffer for this.
I do need it, though.
Well, and there are, and this is again the thing that Leopold's ghost does a good job of going into.
There are the heroes in this story.
There's the guy like Colonel Washington goes there and writes.
There's guys like Morel who like who don't even see it firsthand but put it together.
Yeah.
Like, this can't stand.
I have to do something.
And I hope that like, like, that's the we got to focus on Leopold in this, both because his story is the blueprint of every terrible person who came after him.
He really is the first modern monster world head of state, the first one to use PR in a really modern way.
Right.
But it's important, it's just as important to think about the guys like Morel, who are probably more relevant to our own lives because they point out like, well, you can do something.
Yeah.
And you don't have to just say, oh, this is, it's a shame.
Yeah, exactly.
And it might take 15 years, but you can.
It's a right.
Yeah.
Like these guys will still win to some extent, but you can lower the margins by which they win.
You can cut into their profits.
Well, right.
It's just a battle.
All you can do is make it less profitable.
Yep.
Wow.
Well, the capitalist revolution.
Great.
That is our podcast for the week.
Andrew, you want to plug your pluggables?
Oh, yeah.
Well, just please listen to yo, is this racist?
I used to think it was the most depressing podcast on the internet, but not anymore.
And I'm Robert Evans.
You can find me on Twitter at at iWriteOK.
You can find this podcast on the internet at behindthebastards.com.
You can find us on social media at bastardspod.
I've got a book you can find on Amazon, A Brief History of Vice.
So yeah, check my stuff out.
Check us out.
We will be back every single Tuesday from now until the heat death of the universe with a new bastard.
So check that out.
That is next year, though, right?
Yes.
Can't wait.
Yep.
Okay.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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