Part Two: King Leopold II: The First Modern Bastard

into a slave army. Uh 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 or 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 eighteen ninety, 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 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 uh and it was the first expos of Leopold's blood soak rubber regime. UM William's 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 right along the Congo and actually talked to some of the people who had signed treaties giving their land to Leopold. He learned that a great number of chiefs had been tricked into signing things

with magic tricks. Um. 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 performing the most prodigious feats of strength. So he did a hand buzzer. He did a hand buzzer and these like if you don't know what electricity is. Yeah, he's just some sort of superman. Let's sign the peace treaty. Yeah yeah, holy ship. Yeah. Another trick was to use a magnifying glass to light

a cigar and then claim that white people had sun powers. Um, and he'll burn up your villain, basically like I have power over the sun and I'll plage on fire. Yeah ye god, what a bluff. Yeah yeah yeah. So um Williams writes this open letter. Um. 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 this sort of like modest proposal style like of course, you know, but it's an indictment or think there's a little bit of a satirical bit um And yeah, so Williams publishes this that, 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 Morrell 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 Morrell 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 shiploads 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. Um Man, Yeah, so 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, um he starts a newspaper that is focused entirely on exposing King Leopold's crimes to the world and starts publishing it all throughout Europe. Um. He's active all over the world and basically becomes like

the Congo equivalent of Wiki leaks. So all the guys who had worked in Leopold's Congo and felt bad kind to him and be like, I saw this, this is what happened. Here's some documents I managed to smug. Well, it's also like you're like, yeah, this is what wikilliks was supposed to be, 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 Yeah, big complex conspiracy gigantic conspiracies. So Morrel starts this newspaper and he winds up creating was probably the first modern human rights organization, the Congo Reform Association, which is dedicated to stopping this fi nightmare in the Congo. UM. King Leopold responded by inventing the first modern international pr campaign. He bought a shipload of journalists of his own, and he had them all right 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 jacote, which is a hippo hyde 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

his whip. Um So Leopold starts catching flak 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 lurished expose 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've done to people in India. 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 he's doing what about is um on a massive scale? Did he did he have like an anti sdent for like the media, like playing the media or did he just make all of I think he invented this playbook because other people had. Obviously, every the media's existed for a while. Other people have used the media

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, in the same way world leaders use it today, Like this is a very modern pr campaign. Um 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. UM, so that number one, they'll kill stories that are negative to with 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. Um. 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 twenty years before rubber stops being his problem. He doesn't need

to do this forever. He just needs to do it for a little while. He just wants to as much money as he can out of the situation. Um. And eventually the sheer weight of facts did change public opinion against him, but it took like twenty years. At one point, Leopold has said to have seen a cartoon of himself in a German newspaper. UM. 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. Um. Now in Leopold had started dating a sixteen year old prostitute named Caroline um. This is when the congo is at the height of its rubber production. UM. So he'd been hooked up to her via a pimp named Duro, 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, Uh, King Leopold, blood drenched, absolute ruler of the Congo, was smitten with this teenage prostitute. Adam hoss Child 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. Um so he's really got it for

this girl hard. He names her the barrenness of Vaughan. Uh. And the unseemliness of their relationship isn't really acknowledged in the nineteen ten biography. It just calls her one of the king's quote favorites. Uh, and it dances around the fact that they got together while the Queen was still alive. Um. In general, it refers to the King's constant parade of mistresses as distractions. Um so yeah. Caroline 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 appear 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 like a handkerchief. He's like a cartoon villain. Yeah, to like a cartoon villed with like layers built into mountain sides and hidden boat like grottos and stuff. Yeah. But Caroline seems to have his number. Um. So she's both got

him on madly in love with her. But she also like she takes advantage of his hypochondriasm or whatever you call that, Like whenever she wanted him to leave her alone, she'd pretend to have a cough and then he'd hide for days, um because he was scared of So she's she's my favorite person in this story. She's lockdown. Um. So the king is sort of the nineteen hundreds come around, is in his late sixties, um, and he takes to

visiting his teenage mistress in a large tricycle. Um, because again, yeah, he's getting more and more Yeah for the genocidal murderer. Yeah righting a big tricycle to hang out with his teenage girlfriend. Um, just as bad everyone who every white guy riding a tricycle with the big old mustache, you are all as bad as king. Yeah. So he's writing a big tricycle. He drinks nothing but hot water. Uh. And he starts referring to himself in the third person

at this point in time. Um, so yeah, he's a weirdo. Um, 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, um, and gives it to him, and he like flies into a rage. Uh. And he only calms down when she explains him that she got it for a bargain and it was like a deal that she bought it a quarter of its value. So like he's still he's just he's just a weirdo. He's

a weird guy. He's like a weird old rich letcher 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 is maybe not in such a direct degree, but as Americans, we all have similar types of blood on our hands that we are electing to not think about. Yeah, but we're not 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 including minerals that are mined from like conflict written nations and often use slave labor in one. And we know that, like the fabric in our clothes is often their slave labor. At some point in the production line. Leopold knows that because he's signing the orders and saying 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. Um,

but that's it's amazing 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. Um, but this guy, this guy. Uh. One of the things that was interesting to me reading that pro Leopold biography is that, well, it does talk about nineteen ten, the air after he died spoiler. Um. 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 or look at how, look at how and everyone did is like everyone did, and we'll get to that in a little. Um. What is interesting to me is that this biography does condemn his mistress for capitalizing on the congo.

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. We're sweating and bleeding natives labored so as to accumulate millions for the royal favorite. So like he again, he doesn't really attack Leopold ever, like he's like, yeah, he did some bad stuff, But this biographer goes off on her mistress for like taking money from him. That's that's blood money, which it is blood money, but like she's

the least objectionable person situation. Um so, yeah, yeah, she has a little Melannia asked, I suppose she is, and she maybe knew more what she was getting into at the top. Yeah, she probably knew less about them 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 who have talked to his mistress about the hands or that they were murdering people with. And it's at the time especially quite

easy to ignore you forget about. You don't share a lot of that stuff with you, Yeah, especially not your teenage child bride. And as a teenage child bride to just feel like, I don't read those books. Yeah, I don't read that article. Yeah yeah. Um So. In the early nineteen hundreds, 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 towns worth of boys being giving fifty lashes each, which is a fatal sentence for laughing in the presence of a white man. Uh. In nineteen o four, 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 Couldron was accused of murdering at least

a hundred and twenty two Africans. The case wound up revealing a bunch of fun up details about like how all the hostage taking and the hand taking and stuff actually worked. Um. But Caldrone was released due to quote

extenuating circumstances. The court said that he'd had to contend with quote great difficulties under which could Drone 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. Um. So yeah, they were asking for it defense. They were asking for it works it that also still works today kind it does, but it was

it was stopping. This is at the point where it was working less and less in the congo um and in the early nineteen hundreds, Leopold starts dealing with more and more resistance to his ideas um, both in the congo end at home. So this is also kind of the point of where socialism is starting to rise, and socialists obviously are a big fans of kings. Um. Leopold declared himself a mortal enemy of socialism. He fought against the universal right to vote for all Belgians. Still in

the playbook, both of those things. In nine two, 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 funk with the money trained. Leopold was willing to kill a hell of a lot more than eight people to keep

the money coming. In has Child's book relates one six week campaign in the Congo that killed quote over nine hundred natives, men, women, and children in order to add twenty tons of rubber a month to one region's productivity. They gives you an idea of the kind of calculus he's making. Yeah, Yeah, that's how I mean. Right, it's just lives for rubber. Yeah, it's just lives for rubber has a commodity price. Yeah. Um. I have to point out that none of the revelations 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 are Belgian museums that proudly talk about his anti slavery campaigns that 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 nineteen o four, 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? A lot of ways kind of cool, A lot always kind of cool. Uh So in nineteen o six,

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 this guy cut off millions of people's hands, let's funk off his innocent baby's hand. Yeah, that's not how you do that, if you got first

of all, that is definitely how God do that. God is 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, didn't You didn't think God would do that? 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. Here they go and we're back. So the general and seemliness 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 nineteen o eight, King Leopold was forced to bequeath his control of the

Congo to the Belgian government. In exchange, they paid for the colonies hundred and ten 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 twenty 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 fun

such a piece of ship. So the 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 pizza gate style thing. You're like, how could everyone cover this up? And then it's like just hearing a story of nineteenth century to

twentieth century like attention to detail. 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, it would be like, that's a little far fext that he get away with it, But he did, and he's 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 pizza Gate because it's not like the top conspirators would go to jail, but it's like there's gonna be a janitor who's like, what the fund is this? What is going on? Kids in this basement? Yeah, and that's like less likely to happen. That was more controllable back in the day, clearly. Yeah. And and even when that it started coming out, Um, there's a lot less of a media landscape. You only get the news from your newspapers.

You 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. And if I 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 the 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, he doesn't have a great reputation now, yeah, but even it still didn't have a great reputation then. Um, 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. Uh. And he died in December of nineteen nine at the age of eighty four. Uh super rich. Uh did you

make that billion? Well we'll get to that in a minute. Um. 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. And this is where again I want to point out that in some total there's no percent agreed upon death toll for Leopold's regime in the Congo, but the likely numbers are between ten and thirteen million, possibly as high as fifteen million people um. And the Congo was definitely the bloodiest of any of the colonists 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 and those colonies too, so he was also the first like 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 he's he's a real monster.

The late king achieved his ambition of disinheriting his daughters. He left them only fifteen million francs, the exact amount he'd inherited from his father. His entire fortune went to Baroness Devon, the prostitute courts On that he fell in love with and married. After his death, she immediately married drou, her pimp, and spent the rest of her life living lavishly off the gold made by the blood of Congolese labor. Which 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 I can us. If she had murdered him, that would have if she'd strangled him with his own beard job al Yeah, or poison him. Maybe she did poison him. Maybe she had poisoned him. I can't hope, so I certainly don't know. Um oh what a grim mass tail. Fuck. Yeah. His biography, the nineteen ten biography, summed up Leopold's life this way Leopold the second New 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. It's the Victorian Age is a bleak gas 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, you'll have

just enjoyed the royal wedding. Yeah, that ship has built off the back of ship, like exactly like this, well, less artful than this a lot not even good was because this is if you can like the it's it's up there with the Holocaust in terms of like the greatest crimes in human history. But as a scheme, his planned is it's like almost artwork. It's like watching The

Joker and The Good Christinal and Batman. Yeah, but also that one too, where you're like it has similar moments of like I feel like some of these lives are just to do the lie. Yeah, it's not even about achieving the aid need to do this yeah yeah, yeah, there's a lot of like the funk you do that for well, it's crazy and so one of the more I mean, there's so many fund up things about this. I really recommend reading King Leopold's Ghost by Adam host Child.

It's a great book. And it really delves into the human misery caused by this regime. But you know, you're you're talking ten to fifteen million people killed, millions more left without hands, left maimed, starved, like whose villages were destroyed the go Today, it's still probably the least stable state in Africa, or at least one of them, because all social order was destroyed. He swats the party like that. It continues to this day. Leopold's profits, Yeah, roughly a

billion dollars in modern currency. That's bonkers, that's I feel like, that's fucking nothing for what he did in terms of right. Not a billion dollars in nineteen o nine money. Billion dollars in today's money is what he got for killing ten to fifteen 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 state of fighting, because there were a bunch of rebellions, people who thought back. He had to he had to suppress those rebellions, and he had to pay all these journalists and like, yeah, there you go, fucking capitalists, and he's

like and profitable to be the worst person. Although I guess that was the second lesson that everyone turned is like, oh, the real prophets 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 Walter's like,

say what you will about national socialism. At least it's an ethos. Hitler committed crimes on a 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. 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 like 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 in terms of like taking their hair, taking the gold fillings out of them, taking their businesses beforehand, and 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 are people wanting each other's farms and one, yeah, I I have to imagine like those are the things that allow I mean, like all look but like all conflict to It's like like especially anything sectarian or religious,

like the Crusades. You know, you can make an economic case for the Crusades or or or colonialism or at large, like all that is sort of possible. I think the thing with Leopold's evil is as as we've discussed already. It's like, though not in the same degree, anyone listening to this on a podcast thing and on exactly is complicit in something along Leopold's vector whereas it's fewer of us listening to this podcast are complicit in some type

of thing that Hitler has involved in. So I think it behooves us to say Hitler is more evil because we don't want to be part you know. Yeah, the banality that I mean, look, not banality, but the you know, the it's in the direction of banality. 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 and Hitler because he was he was showy with like he's the most showy villain in all of history.

Leopold was a weird old man who had a stupid beard and sat in his office and never shot anybody in RhoD of 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 that he doesn't come up with the hands for bullets scheme. No, he's just doesn't need to.

We can't let them have bullets. We have to make sure that, like we're accounting for all the bullets, 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 good reason when they fire them. How about we have them bringing a hand. Great, and that's probably the end of the cons and then the first person people lose hands, like, then a crime

on an unspeakable scale happens. And he's just like sitting at home being like, boy, I wonder why productions down this week. But he can also be like, I'm not the one that came up with the hands thing. It's a shame. He can even be like all the hand things are real shame. Yeah, that's a real shame. One of my new guys, you know these you know the walloons. Yeah, you put them 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. Yeah, that's that's the thing that you know. And look, that's a version of every one of us calls ourselves every fucking day. Yeah. 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 want to give out, so I gained access to a time machine and went back in time to to record it. It was either fixed the podcast or stop nine eleven. Hopefully I made the right decision. But UM, I wanted to say a little bit more about the Chakote, which we we talked about a little bit in this podcast. That's the hippo hyde whip that was the primary disciplinary

tool in the Congo Free State. UM. 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. UM. But that book also points out that whipping people to death or nearly to death was basically the bedrock that colonialism was founded upon. UM. It relates the story of a guy named Roger Casement. We didn't get to talk to you in this podcast, but 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 Puta Mayo, where the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company had been caught basically enslaving and murdering people to produce even more rubber. UM. 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. UM and the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company dealt out punishments with a whip of their own that was actually a two peer hide whip UM, but it was similar to the jacote and its effect. Roughly thirty thousand indigenous people in the Amazon died mining rubber for that company. UM whips. It turns out we're basically the glue that made colonialism

UM possible. I found one book on slavery in the British West Indies published in eighteen twenty four, that admits that whips were quote the main spring of the agricultural

system in that region of the Empire. Whips were also critical to the French colonies as far back as the seventeen hundreds, 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, um, 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 nineteen twenty, a single gold mine is recorded as issuing over twenty six thousand lashes to his workers, more than eight lashes for every single African quote employed there. I say, you know, employed in quotation marks. Because the Belgians kept right on using forced labor, as did the British and Kenya up and into the

modern era. By World War Two, Belgium required a hundred and twenty days per year of labor for each adult male inhabitant of the Congo reach. And it turns out that of the uranium mind to make the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from Congolese minds that used forced labor, which means we can thank the Jacote for the first atom bombs. The British are also famous for flogging their colonial subjects well into the middle of the

twentieth century. By the nineteen twenties, Kenya was the colony where the British used the most corporal punishment, or as they called it, rough justice UH. 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 uh. There were attempts in the nineteen thirties 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 and the Kenyan colony eventually led to the Mau Mau Uprising, which started in nineteen fifty two when a bunch of rebels, calling themselves the Mau Mau killed thirty two white people. This made England go batch it crazy. Uh. The English forces rounded up a hundred and fifty thousand Kenyans and through 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 beating 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 twelve thousand people were killed during the Mamou 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 uh, I just thought this is a good information to know. People talk about colonialism a lot and it gets you know, a lot of well deserved harsh criticism

these days. But I think that the people who rightly view it as a 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 and you know, the seventeen and eighteen hundreds. The reality is that colonialism was still exporting wealth from African nations, you know, into Europe well into the twentieth 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, uh, there's your happy little reminder that not only was colonialism and nightmare, but it is a nightmare that happened recently enough that a lot of people are still alive to remember it today. Uh 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 wanna We also don't want to acknowledge like when you go to Belgium, which I love Belgium, on there a couple of times beautiful country, best beer I've ever had in the world, gorgeous giant buildings, many in like the cities and stuff like ain't really old, beautiful museums and stuff, many of which are built on congo money um, and so you don't and in like we're shooting on Belgium here, but that's like all of Europe you go to, you go

to uh, American South and they're American North. Yeah, like that's everything was built on the backs of that ship. So and you know there's there were good people at all times being like that sucks, this is really messed up. But yeah, but that's the same every you pick up an iPhone, you're like, it sucks that someone had a south from that. I do need it though, well, and there are and this is again the thing that Leopold's Ghost is a good job of going into. There are

the heroes in this story. There's the guy like Colonel Washington, who I was there and right, there's guys like Morrell who are who like who don't even see it firsthand, but put it together 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 like head of State, the first one to

use pr in a really modern way. But it's important. It's just as important to think about the guys like Morrell, who are probably more relevant to our own lives because they pointed like, well, you can do something. Yeah, and you don't have to just say this it's a shame, yeah exactly, and it might take fifteen years, but you can. Yeah, Like, these guys will still win to some extent, but you can know where the margins by which they win you can put into their profits. Well, right, it's a it's

just a battle. All you can do is make it less profitable. The Capitalist Revolution. That is our podcast for the week. Uh, Andrew, you want to plug your plugables? Oh yeah, well just just please listen to you know, is this racist? Uh? 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 I right, okay, you can find this podcast

on the internet at Behind the Bastards dot com. You can find us on social media at at Bastard's Pod. I've got a book you can find on Amazon, Brief History of Vice. Um, 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 us next. Yes, I can't wait. Yep. Okay, m h m