Highly recommend reading "King Leopold's Ghost" to anyone interested in the history of Belgian colonialist atrocities in Africa. Warning: it makes for grim reading.
> it coudl be argued much of africa has a better life and opportunity under colonialism
Read King Leopold’s Ghost from cover to cover before you ever make this claim again.
King Leopold's Ghost is a powerful book on Beligian atrocities in the Congo during its colonial period. Highly recommended for understanding what's taking place there to this day.
Or read a book. Shit, if you even read your own comment it shows that Belgium only sent troops to protect the white civilians. If you actually read that thread you'd see that the other UN members were opposed to providing support to the Belgian-backed secessionists and eventually even intervened to block and engage them. The only reason the US ended up involved on the behalf of the secessionists was because after they didn't want to back up the rebel factions those factions sought and received aid from the Communist bloc.
Though you did remind me that if we get any Free French forces for the Paris Liberation phase, we should probably get some Senegalese representation.
I recently read King Leopold's Ghost per a recommendation in one of the "audiobooks similar to HH episodes" threads:
https://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905
It definitely explores the history in a way that is reminiscent of a HH episode.
That said I would also like to hear Dan's take.
The setting - the Congo (country and river), and the occasional rogue soldier, stationed during Leopold's reign, in isolated areas upriver during the rubber boom.
I'd advise King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa https://www.amazon.com/dp/0618001905, it explains Leopold's history in the Congo in very vivid detail.
For those who want to know how the sausage was really made, The number one ranked book in Amazon under Belgian history that goes into the grisly details :
https://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905/ref=nodl_
Quite a riveting read.
Not OP, but here's a good place to start: King Leopold's Ghost
I don't know if there's been any studies directly connecting colonialism with the actual state of countries today, but it seems like an oft discussed topic. u/arkatopia is kind of right when it comes to connecting the dots. Countries are like people--they don't overcome abuse easily, and countries live a lot longer, so the result of abuses is very much likely to linger.
All that aside, there's an even WORSE thing to consider, which is that, surprise, colonialism didn't end ! It's still going on ! But now it's done economically, with the capitalist elite relying on local elites in the countries, strong armed by organizations like the IMF, to extract the resources by proxy.
There are a massive amount of problems in African, South American, and South Asian countries, and many of them are the result of government failures, from governments hamstrung, maligned, and hindered by the end of colonialism AND the continued pressure provided by the modern day, seemingly innocent and peaceful, economic variant.
It can come across offensive to some to suggest one needs evidence of that, when the history of these places is obvious, and it is naive to suggest that a country can go from being an English Colony primarily for extracting ores/local resources, and just spring into a modern, fully developed nation over the course of only a few decades. That'd be a feat if they were isolated from the world economy, but with those pressures (coming primarily from the ex-colonizers) it's practically impossible.
For Belgium and the Congo both, I would instead recommend King Leopold's Ghost.
The book "explores the exploitation of the Congo Free State by King Leopold II of Belgium between 1885 and 1908, as well as the large-scale atrocities committed during that period. The book succeeded in increasing public awareness of these Belgian colonial crimes." (Wikipedia)
I don't think that's the book their ambassador would want us to read, though.
Are you suggesting that India and Pakistan, before partition, weren't subjected to 200 years of British colonial rule? That the arbitrary colonial borders drawn up by the British didn't involuntarily mash together a part of the world that was largely Muslim with a part of the world that was primarily Hindu? That atrocities and human rights abuses did not occur on a regular basis, including intentional famines? Have you done any historical reading about the actions of the East India Company in SE Asia? Do you have any thoughts on why many in the Middle East have a deep-seated, generational resentment of the Imperial behavior of the West?
Perhaps it has something to do with the firebombings and mustard gas?
>But most of the unpeaceful ones are Muslim.
This sweeping generalization is laughably ignorant. But engaging you further will not be useful, as your worldview is grounded in faith instead of historical research. If you don't think the atrocities committed by Western imperial powers didn't permanently fuck-up and fuck-over India, Africa and the Middle East, I can't help you.
Your use of the world "unpeaceful" suggests to me that you don't have a college degree. This is not to put you down, it's just to say that engaging you further will be pointless since you already have your mind made up about the "bad guys."
I can make a book recommendation though, if you have the stomach and the balls to read the historical events that inspired Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
https://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905
Good Resources is King Leopold's Ghost. http://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905
To get more into it. It was the Age of Colonization and the Carving up of Africa. As the major powers took chunks for the nation for themselves King Leopold decided he wanted a part of the action.
He paid explorers to chart of the Congo River and claimed a large swath of land along it. He was competing with France to his North, and Germans to the East.
It is important to note that the Congo Free State started not as a Belguian colony but as King Leopold's personal colony. He exploited the lands for Ivory and later Rubber by essential enslaving the natives in their own homeland. Those that didn't make quotas had their hands cut off. The population in the Congo crashed, and it is general considered the 4th worst destruction of human life after the Holocaust, Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's Communist China
The book Heart of Darkness is written about what Joseph Conrad saw when he visited.
Eventually as people learned of the atrocities King Leopold was forced to turn it over to the Belgium nation. When they took over Missionary school and other more "civilized" systems were set up, but the exploitation continued in a slightly less extreme way.
> Most people haven’t heard of him.
and
> Most of us – I don’t yet know an approximate percentage but I fear its extremely high – aren’t taught about him in school.
Really?
I thought King Leopold's Ghost was practically required reading in college.
Read this book if you want to see more about how racist the powers were in Belgium at the start of the 20th Century. Human zoos showed me that the racism extended to the residents as well.
http://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905
Sub Saharan Africa is one of the most natural resource rich regions in the world. Diamonds in South Africa, rubber and later cobalt in the Congo, and oil in Nigeria are just a few. This is an excellent place to get started, and will likely be available at your school library.
Oil has obvious applications, Diamonds, besides being a luxury, have many industrial applications, and rubber was instrumental in the development of combustion engines, both for tires on the vehicles, as well as seal like O-rings.
If you can stomach it, King Leopold's Ghost is a very well-written account of the destruction of the Congo. The book is where I first saw this picture, and it provides all the harrowingly detailed context you could want.
King Leopold's Ghost is an excellent book on the subject if you're interested in reading about it in depth.
Read up on your history before making assumptions
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa https://www.amazon.com/dp/0618001905/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_aB8TBbCQ7Q6M1
On the direct subject of the Congo, I would suggest Leopold's Ghost
Another one I’ve been wanting to read: King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa https://www.amazon.com/dp/0618001905/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_UsJfFbQEP91AA
I have a book for you to read
https://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905
Read King Leopold’s Ghost. It’s horrifying and very well done.
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa https://www.amazon.com/dp/0618001905/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i_YKPBDYMEWV8HBP12BTMC
Omg, this book is devastating…
From Wikipedia:
> They also burned recalcitrant villages, and above all, cut off the hands of Congolese natives, including children. The human hands were collected as trophies on the orders of their officers to show that bullets had not been wasted. Officers were concerned that their subordinates might waste their ammunition on hunting animals for sport, so they required soldiers to submit one hand for every bullet spent.[53] These mutilations also served to further terrorize the Congolese into submission. This was all contrary to the promises of uplift made at the Berlin Conference which had recognized the Congo Free State.
The Congo Free State was a vanity project of Leopold II of Belgium. The book King Leopold's Ghost is a fascinating and depressing read.
Joseph Conrad's book Heart of Darkness is believed to have been inspired by what happened there. The movie Apocalypse Now is a modern interpretation of Heart of Darkness.
I had the same first thought, King Leopold’s Ghost is devastating.
Here are some specific sources concerning the brutal racist exploitation that took place routinely during the colonization period:
<em>12 Years a Slave</em>, conveniently available in movie form for the less literate
Three sources, three different time periods, and three different groups of perpetrators. The thing they have in common is the underlying extreme racism at the root of it and direct connection to colonialism.
Here's a good read. But depressing.
https://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905
All good--for context in terms of my favorite non-fiction reads, this one is pretty high on the list, and it's not exactly riveting reading.
Cool. Cool Cool. Personally, I think the nazi stuff has been done to death on this sub (not to dissuade, if you want to do it!). For colonialism, this boo seems well respected. It focuses on just the Belgian Congo. so if there is anything terrible about that area, this could be a good place to start.
Here is another book on south africa It's from the cambridge concise histories which is generally pretty good. It's expensive though :(
Do you support the sciences? Eugenics theories in them led to death camps and genocidal superstates, the H-Bomb nearly destroying the world (and still technically looming), global warming, and a potential for AI becoming dangerous (personally I don't buy that one). Now before you react with how necessary it is to take those risks and pay those costs...why? Really, why?
The reason is to achieve the alchemist's dream: The Philosopher's Stone. On that, the exploration of the natural sciences and both modern and early 20th Century scientism, have hinged. The idea is that science will ultimately solve all major problems like want, hunger, and death. Our sciences seem to have that ultimate potential to us, so we take these risks. The idea of not taking these risks seems silly and backwards to us, but from a Darwinian perspective we've almost destroyed our world (and may have) several times and have caused untold suffering, which could render the entire pursuit of science backwards and futile if it actually does end life or fails to deliver more than it has cost.
People who follow gods are also after the Philosopher's Stone. Rather than alchemy advanced into natural sciences and such, they do so by appealing to the god's wishes and/or demands. From their perspective, once the god is appeased or motivated by pleasure or pity, (s)he will bestow the Philosopher's Stone. This is the concept of an apocalypse or end of age, when the pious have done god's will and so god enters to help them and vindicate them.
Modern nationalistic tribal gods emphasize a particular culture (in this case, Arab) through a literary idol (in this case, the Quran) which is the manifestation of all the god's perfection and power by establishing the Nation of Islam. Looking at powerful Arab nations, weapons, influence, tradition, rituals, and the like is cultural evidence of Allah's power being real and the Philosopher's Stone feasible; not unlike rockets and telecommunications and technical achievements convince you that science has a shot at the Philosopher's Stone.
You can read about this graphically depicted in a book called <em>King Leopold's Ghost</em> that describes in the first few chapters how the African slave trade caused a fury in Africa, in which people were selling their own family members and abductitng one another for advanced European cargo (earrings and watches and stuff). To them, and the European traders peddling flesh, European goods were so advanced that they were something of a Philosopher's Stone causing a lust for treasure that inadvertently destroyed their families and the Kingdom of the Kongo. Too much good too fast caused people to be willing to commit any evil to get it, including priests taking on concubines, enslaving their congregations, and shipping them to the Americas. The European lust for free workers may have also been rooted in that promise of something more. In my view, selling out others for "something more" is the ultimate Uncle Tom move, be it for begging gods or treasure or cultural advancement or a shot at utopia--any chance taken at somebody else's expense for big promises. I'm against it all, although not against using science as a tool to solve problems or belief to tie together peoples and expand our existential knowledge.
However if you've never thought of H-Bombs as a reason to reel in the sciences and apply the breaks, or global warming as too big a price to pay, becoming at least critical of science, then how can you blame a radical Muslim for seeing death and backwardsness as just spilled milk in the Middle East, on the way to eternal life and utopia and their own method to the Philosopher's Stone? After all, your view is world destroying, including all plants and animals--theirs is just homicidal, and it allows for conversion. If you're not critical or cautious, why be critical of them? Really and truly, stop and consider.
Edit: Don't think we're beyond the African slave trade mentality, carelessness, or brutality; it's just taken on a different manifestation, different methods, and world threatening costs--which may be why we show any caution. We're from the same cloth as the Europeans who did that to Africa, and the Africans who did, which is the same madness for promise that drove the 20th Century mass murderers--it's just a shift in methodology, and incidentally the same blindness and justifications.
A good cultural depiction of this is found in the original Star Trek episode Who Mourns for the Adonis?.
Remember, you can learn a lot from fiction. But try these non-fiction books that have a narrative arc King Leopold's Ghost and The Big Burn The last features nature, early conservation and great figures like Teddy Roosevelt.
Chief of Station is an awesome read. You should also check out King Leopold's Ghost and The Congo: From Leopold to Kabila: A People's History. The people's history is written by a radical Congolese guy but it's one of the better books I've read about the DRC despite he obvious bias.
He may not be trying to insult the Congolese people but he is admonishing them for things they can not be entirely blamed for. It's really not fair to make somebody feel like shit when you don't know their history. Some books for people who really want to know:
https://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905
https://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Glory-Monsters-Collapse-Africa/dp/1610391071/
This is a pretty interesting question. I actually didn't know about King Leopold myself until a few months ago. I read this book about him. I forget whether or not it explains in the book why he is relatively unknown.
For anyone wanting to learn more about Colonial Congo, "King Leopold's Ghost" by Adam Hochschild is a fascinating and haunting read.