Speaker 1: Hello, friends, and welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the
Speaker 1: show where we tell you everything you don't know about
Speaker 1: the very worst people in history. On this show, we
Speaker 1: cover monsters like Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Eric, Prince Will Wheaton,
Speaker 1: and today's topic, King Leopold. But before we get to
Speaker 1: King Leopold, I'd like to introduce my guest for the week,
Speaker 1: Andrew T host of YO is this racist in general
Speaker 1: man about town? Hello Andrew, what's up? Well? Today we're
Speaker 1: talking about a little Belgian dude named Leopold. You've ever
Speaker 1: heard of King Leopold of Belgium. Uh? Not particularly King
Speaker 1: Leopold the Second, If that makes it. Yeah, I feel
Speaker 1: like the closest I'm gonna come is. I feel like
Speaker 1: at some point I got a box of fancy chocolates
Speaker 1: that might have had a Leopold. Maybe not the bad Leopold.
Speaker 1: I assume a good Leopold. This is not a good Leopold. Yeah,
Speaker 1: probably not this particularly Leopold. Yeah. Uh. Leopold the Second
Speaker 1: was King of Belgium once upon of time, and he was,
Speaker 1: in my opinion, the first world leader to be truly
Speaker 1: shitty in the modern sense of the word. Like like
Speaker 1: like the kind of shitty that like Putin and Trump
Speaker 1: right right right, so not right, we're discounting our Genghis
Speaker 1: Khans and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because Genghis Khan like
Speaker 1: did what he did, but he didn't have like a
Speaker 1: bunch of newspapers, did he. He was just like I'm
Speaker 1: gonna conquer some ship, right right right. This is the
Speaker 1: transition from barbarian bastards into media bastards exactly. And I
Speaker 1: think Leopold of Belgium is really where it happens in
Speaker 1: a modern like obviously other people had toyed with aspects
Speaker 1: of this. He really nailed it. Uh So King Leopold
Speaker 1: the Seconds dad was obviously King Leopold the First, uh
Speaker 1: and he was the first king of Belgium. Not obvious?
Speaker 1: Is that? Is it always like a like one piguets
Speaker 1: two or is it like a your grandfather was Leopold
Speaker 1: the first, I'm Gerald of Belgium, but you're gonna be
Speaker 1: Leopold too. I think that's more how it happens most
Speaker 1: of the time, not this time. This time, Leopold the
Speaker 1: First was like this went so well, yeah, we're gonna
Speaker 1: have at the second. Um so Leopold the First was
Speaker 1: like the again, the very first king of Belgium at all,
Speaker 1: because Belgium had just been made a thing in the
Speaker 1: wake from the Napoleonic Wars. So during the whole fighting
Speaker 1: between Napoleon and everyone else in Europe, Belgium was generally
Speaker 1: the battleground, where like the everyone would sort of duke
Speaker 1: it out between the Germans and the French and the
Speaker 1: French and everybody else. Yet Waterloo was in Belgium. So
Speaker 1: after Napoleon's but gets kicked, the European powers who win
Speaker 1: are like, okay, we can't have France and Germany fighting
Speaker 1: over Belgium forever. We're gonna make it its own thing.
Speaker 1: And since it was going to be a new country,
Speaker 1: obviously it needed a king um so they Leopold the
Speaker 1: First got the job because he was a German prince
Speaker 1: who didn't have a kingdom of his own, okay, so
Speaker 1: it was just like split off, right, this is like
Speaker 1: we're going to give Megan Marcole Whales or whatever or
Speaker 1: part of Wales. Yeah, part of Whales, yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: that exactly that sort of thing. They actually tried him
Speaker 1: out to be king of Greece first, but he didn't like,
Speaker 1: didn't fit for whatever. Yeah, that's an option. We're gonna
Speaker 1: find you with something, buddy, don't worry leap. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna put you in a kingdom. Greece isn't the
Speaker 1: right one. Yeah, of course you try a starter kingdom.
Speaker 1: Everyone has a kingdom to start. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, Greece
Speaker 1: was his unsold pilot. Yeah. Um. And he was, by
Speaker 1: all accounts, a pretty good king of Belgium if you're
Speaker 1: into that sort of thing. Yeah. Um, waffles, waffles and
Speaker 1: chocolate and pocolate, getting by beer, yeah, great beer, getting
Speaker 1: jammed by the Germs, great beer. Great at getting jammed
Speaker 1: by the Germans. That's Belgium in a nutshell. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: he was a good king. While he was king. Midway
Speaker 1: through his reign in eighteen forty eight, there was like
Speaker 1: this big year of revolutions all across Europe, and all
Speaker 1: these European countries had their monarchs overthrown except for Belgium.
Speaker 1: So he's the Christian spring we call that, Yes, the
Speaker 1: white white Man's springs, that's the lad three hundred years.
Speaker 1: What a time, what a time for the whites, given
Speaker 1: up for the whites. Yeah um so Leopold the first
Speaker 1: solid King. I've got two main sources for today's podcast,
Speaker 1: which I shouldn't note now. The first is a biography
Speaker 1: called Leopold, the Second King of Belgium. Uh. It's a
Speaker 1: pro monarchist book that was written in nineteen ten um.
Speaker 1: The article is critical about Leopold sometimes, but he thinks
Speaker 1: he was like a great king and he thinks kings
Speaker 1: are a good idea. So it's an interesting book because
Speaker 1: it gives you an idea of how Leopold himself would
Speaker 1: sort of present himself and defend himself and let you
Speaker 1: know what the propaganda at the time was well, and
Speaker 1: also write just critical enough to be legitimate. Well, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's totally I guess for the time it wasn't bad.
Speaker 1: What I mean is the you put it in just
Speaker 1: the faintest of criticism to give the exactly you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a real investigation. Yeah, it's like the monarch's
Speaker 1: equivalent of one of those like celebrity biographies out of
Speaker 1: Ben Affleck or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, the Heraldo Interview of
Speaker 1: books exactly right, exactly. And then the other book is
Speaker 1: a book called King Leopold's Ghost by Adam hosh Child,
Speaker 1: which takes the stance that Leopold was one of history's
Speaker 1: great monsters. Anyway, So these are these are most of
Speaker 1: what I come from, a sort of the contrasting views
Speaker 1: that these two books. Person, you read two books for
Speaker 1: a podcast, Get out of your mind. Come on, there's
Speaker 1: a lot to dig into here, and there's not a lot.
Speaker 1: You're making me feel real bad. I'm like, usually good
Speaker 1: for half a Wikipedia article. Holy sh it, well this
Speaker 1: is at least the equivalent of like four Wikipedia articles. Jeez,
Speaker 1: go ahead, alright. So Leopold the seconds Mom Louise was
Speaker 1: almost a love match is the term the book uses
Speaker 1: for his dad, the King Um And it says this
Speaker 1: because the king was already in love with her before
Speaker 1: they get married. That makes it a love match. He
Speaker 1: liked her when she was fourteen, so it's love. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there were hell of it, and she had the right land.
Speaker 1: She had some nice land. I'm related to the right
Speaker 1: enemies she was with I think from the Orleone family,
Speaker 1: so she was like she had some solid ass royal pedigree.
Speaker 1: You know, you get some German from King Leopold the first,
Speaker 1: you get a little bit of French from his wife
Speaker 1: and then their baby is sort of a mix. So
Speaker 1: maybe Germany and France won't fight over belgimin what a
Speaker 1: brave Yeah, didn't war? Yeah. So Leopold the second was
Speaker 1: born Leopold Louis Philippe Mary Victor. Uh, and he was
Speaker 1: his parents second child. His older brother died eleven months
Speaker 1: before he was born. Um, so if you think about
Speaker 1: that timeline a lot, it's not very fun. Because Leopold's
Speaker 1: older brothers born, he dies eleven months later, they pop
Speaker 1: out another son, Yeah, immediately, immediately, not a lot of
Speaker 1: morning time, or maybe they just kind of, you know,
Speaker 1: fun the pain away. But yeah, yeah, that's probably would happened.
Speaker 1: That's the optimistic look. Um. Alright, So at age five,
Speaker 1: Leopold's father declared him Duke of Brabant, which is how
Speaker 1: he was addressed right up until his coronation. Uh he
Speaker 1: said five, age five, Yeah, age five, Yeah you can
Speaker 1: you'll have to be a duke at age five. And
Speaker 1: he looks he looks like he looks like people in
Speaker 1: this pretty little duke. We'll have the pictures up on
Speaker 1: our website. He has no chin um and a kind
Speaker 1: of a lopsided face. But maybe that's just the painting
Speaker 1: looks a little bit like a ghost, like a human ghost.
Speaker 1: It looks like the painting of a ghost that you
Speaker 1: find in the basement of an old house. And then
Speaker 1: like there's a rush of wind and the camera falls over,
Speaker 1: and like your friend gets mauled by a spirit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's this guy's selfie essentially. Yeah, that's this guy's like,
Speaker 1: this is the image we want to put out into
Speaker 1: the world. Yeah, this was like hanging in palaces. So
Speaker 1: he looks like a creeper from day a little spooky boy,
Speaker 1: but he's still a baby. Um. So, the biography notes
Speaker 1: that Leopold and his siblings were brought up in quote
Speaker 1: the simplest manner and taught to behave as if they
Speaker 1: were normal citizens rather than noryalty. That sounds great until
Speaker 1: you get to the next part quote. The king further
Speaker 1: expressed the wish to develop in the children the sentiment
Speaker 1: of duty and not to allow them to have an
Speaker 1: opinion of their own with regard to their duties and
Speaker 1: their studies. Um. Basically, the king was trying to crush
Speaker 1: the individuality of his kids so that they would just
Speaker 1: fit the role of king. That's kind of yeah, good
Speaker 1: actually is it in that? Well what else are you
Speaker 1: gonna do? Because I got to do this dumb job? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean you could try to make them be healthy,
Speaker 1: fully formed people. Yeah, but why then they got to
Speaker 1: be king? Yeah? Well okay, that's fair. I mean you
Speaker 1: were taking Leopold the first side. Yeah, well he's the
Speaker 1: good one again, I'm probably this chocolate. Um No, but right,
Speaker 1: isn't that the he's He's he's just as trapped as
Speaker 1: everyone else, you know, Yes, so if he's got to
Speaker 1: do this thing, you might as well make it so
Speaker 1: he can do this thing. Okay, So you're expressing some
Speaker 1: motivation maybe two, why you would do this, why you
Speaker 1: would do what he winds up doing, and you don't
Speaker 1: even know what he winds up doing do? Yeah? What
Speaker 1: did I just defend? We are still? Let me just
Speaker 1: say right now, whatever he does, I stand behind it. Well,
Speaker 1: he kills about ten to fifteen million people. Yeah, it's fine. Okay,
Speaker 1: Well what's it? Um? So when Leopold is fifteen, his
Speaker 1: mom dies of some illness or another. It's one of
Speaker 1: those things where the writers at the time aren't specific.
Speaker 1: They're just like she took ill and was secret and
Speaker 1: then she and then she dies, Like, yeah, it's probably
Speaker 1: dip theoria or some weird named the flue disease. Yeah,
Speaker 1: would be a big deal, I guess. I mean it's
Speaker 1: probably as a flu like that killed everybody back then. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And King Leopold's ghost, Adam hosh Child, describes Leopold's childhood
Speaker 1: as being kind of stark and cold. Quote, if Leopold
Speaker 1: wanted to see his father, he had to apply for
Speaker 1: an audience. When the father had something to tell the same,
Speaker 1: he communicated it through one of his secretaries. I mean, look,
Speaker 1: this is not just uh eighteenth century arrested element. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's kind of kind of what's going on. Like, he
Speaker 1: definitely has a buster Bluth vibe to him. Um again,
Speaker 1: especially once you see this fucking painting, you'll get it audience.
Speaker 1: The biography that was written at the time says that
Speaker 1: it is worthy of note that the late king never
Speaker 1: had any comrades or playmates. His childhood was passed among
Speaker 1: his teachers and tutors, and the disciplinarian father made even
Speaker 1: more the relationship with his brother and sister a very
Speaker 1: formal one, frank childish gaiety and brotherly expansion and confidence
Speaker 1: were banished. The princess thoughts thus became concentrated upon himself
Speaker 1: and his natural activity and vitality, his exuberant strength were
Speaker 1: expended on work and study. Tight yeah about it, No, friends,
Speaker 1: does nothing but work. Yeah, he's a duke. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean he's already achieved a lot. I mean he has
Speaker 1: kind of a boss baby. Yeah, just throwing that out there.
Speaker 1: So he grows up, He serves in the Belgian military,
Speaker 1: he apparently does okay. By his early twenties, Leopold becomes
Speaker 1: an fluential figure in Belgian politics. You know, he's the
Speaker 1: crown prince. Everyone who's going to wind him being king?
Speaker 1: And he kind of looks a little like Adam Driver.
Speaker 1: He yeah, he looks here, he looks like a anime
Speaker 1: Adam Driver. Yeah. Yeah, that's who you would cast his
Speaker 1: anime Adam Drive. Yeah yeah in the movie. So Um.
Speaker 1: Like many rich young people, he traveled far and wide
Speaker 1: in his early twenties. He went all throughout the Middle East,
Speaker 1: North Africa, parts of Asia. But he was not traveling
Speaker 1: for his enjoyment. Uh, he was basically traveling. The biography,
Speaker 1: he says, it's like a commercial employee. So he was
Speaker 1: essentially looking for financial opportunities for Belgium because this is
Speaker 1: the period when all of Europe is colonizing the entire world.
Speaker 1: Belgian doesn't have a colony. So he's traveling all around
Speaker 1: the Middle East and Asia basically being like what can
Speaker 1: who's yeah, who's like can we take? Yeah? Yeah, what
Speaker 1: can we get? Does this hop ahead to the Congo? Oh? Yes,
Speaker 1: oh nice, Yeah, that's where we're headed. Tight, Okay, how
Speaker 1: do I know that tiny bit of history. It's one
Speaker 1: of those things that drops in every now and then
Speaker 1: you'll hear like, oh, yeah, the Belgium's did something bad
Speaker 1: in the Congo, but you don't ever get I don't
Speaker 1: know any details story. In fact, I probably no more
Speaker 1: plot points from Michael Crichton's The Congo than than realities
Speaker 1: the Congo. Yes, I mean there's unconfirmed reports that he
Speaker 1: he tried to find the lost city of Zinch but
Speaker 1: no great movie. Is that what what they were doing there? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're trying to find diamonds. That a monkey there's a
Speaker 1: monkey city. Yeah, find diamonds and monkeys were evil. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's more what I remember. Solid to bed. There's a laser.
Speaker 1: There is a laser. There's definitely a laser in that movie. Man,
Speaker 1: what a weird it's a ride, Michael, We're still watching
Speaker 1: his bullshit. I can't believe West World. Yeah, um okay,
Speaker 1: So Prince Leopold, one of his favorite books as he's
Speaker 1: a young man studying trying to find a new colony
Speaker 1: for Belgium is a book about the Dutch East Indies
Speaker 1: called Java, How to Manage Your Colony. Uh yeah, why
Speaker 1: would you? Oh my god, I mean, I guess that's
Speaker 1: why you have to tell people your favorite book is.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's well, no, I mean, because so the
Speaker 1: book is all about how the Dutch colonized the island
Speaker 1: of Java and how they got a shipload of coffee
Speaker 1: and sugar and like dies and tobacco and it it
Speaker 1: made basically made so much money that they were able
Speaker 1: to buy a bunch of railroads and canals back in Holland. Um, so,
Speaker 1: like the book is all about that. So so it
Speaker 1: outlines sort of how they were able to monetize Java
Speaker 1: so well, and like it talks about how the king
Speaker 1: basically brought in a bunch of private companies and became
Speaker 1: a major shareholder in those companies and it was the
Speaker 1: company's job to farm the land and to produce the resources,
Speaker 1: and they export them to Belgium. So the king didn't
Speaker 1: have to send Dutch government workers over and do anything.
Speaker 1: The king just said, I own Java corporations. Come in,
Speaker 1: give me a steak in your profits, and do whatever
Speaker 1: you want. I think it's just cool to have political
Speaker 1: leaders also owned corporates. That has never been a problem
Speaker 1: and never will be a problem. No, it seems to
Speaker 1: always work out great. Um. It seems to work out
Speaker 1: great percent of the time. Um. The book also did
Speaker 1: note that the Dutch prophets in Java would have been
Speaker 1: impossible without a huge amount of forced labor. Uh. And
Speaker 1: young Prince Leopold agreed with this and said that forced
Speaker 1: labor was quote the only way to civilize and uplift
Speaker 1: these indolent and corrupt peoples of the far East. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he ain't wrong. Go ahead, what else? What else? God thought?
Speaker 1: You said this guy was bad? Alright? Uh? So late
Speaker 1: in his dukedom, you know, a few years before he
Speaker 1: becomes king, Leopold gets in front of Belgium Senate and
Speaker 1: he urges them to take up foreign colonies. So they
Speaker 1: got a king and a senate. Yeah, that work so basically,
Speaker 1: the King of Belgium is kind of a ceremonial figure.
Speaker 1: He's got he's got more power than like the Queen
Speaker 1: in England has today. It's heading towards, but it's heading
Speaker 1: towards that. There's no formal power, lots of soft power,
Speaker 1: lots of soft power in a little bit of formal power.
Speaker 1: But um, you can't do things as the king like
Speaker 1: us make colonies. M you can't do things as the
Speaker 1: king likes in the army places. Um. And so Leopold's
Speaker 1: dad seems to be okay with that. But Leopold the
Speaker 1: second is growing up chopping at the bent to do
Speaker 1: ship and doesn't want to become a monarch who just
Speaker 1: waves at the crowd. Um, why not. So he gets
Speaker 1: up in front of the Senate and he says, quote,
Speaker 1: I am profoundly convinced of our vast resources, and I
Speaker 1: passionately wish that my beautiful country would show the necessary
Speaker 1: pluck to derive all the benefit which, in my opinion,
Speaker 1: it can derive. I think that the moment for our
Speaker 1: expansion abroad has arrived. We must not lose time. Otherwise,
Speaker 1: the best positions in markets which are becoming more rare.
Speaker 1: Every day will be occupied by nations more enterprising than ourselves.
Speaker 1: And when he talks about positions in markets, he's talking
Speaker 1: about whole countries and stuff. I mean, millions of people.
Speaker 1: It's more chilling in the original Flemmish. Yeah yeah, yeah, nailed.
Speaker 1: But although he probably would have been speaking just French
Speaker 1: for alright, so well you can say, you can say
Speaker 1: Walloon if you want. I'm getting what is that. That's
Speaker 1: the other group of people. There's Belgium is made up
Speaker 1: of Flemish people and Walloons. Yeah, the wall Unatics, of course,
Speaker 1: band aid on their face. We got it. It's a
Speaker 1: rough name to grow into the world stage taking on.
Speaker 1: Uh well, you know, you gotta get you get enough rifles,
Speaker 1: get enough cutlasses, everything starts to make sense. I don't
Speaker 1: feel like it does. I feel like Germany was so
Speaker 1: fierce in part because German is like, that's like an name,
Speaker 1: like the Germans are coming. Imagine if if the name
Speaker 1: got switched and the Belgians were called the Germans, and
Speaker 1: like the Nazis had tried to invade and everyone was like, oh,
Speaker 1: the Walloons are invading. Yeah, that's not gonna go. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Well listen let's boot up a risk game. We'll figure
Speaker 1: it out, all right. Um so, yeah, Leopold, the first Leopold,
Speaker 1: the seconds Dad died in December of eighteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: the same year the American Civil War ended. Leopold is
Speaker 1: now with the king and thirty years old. Uh. This
Speaker 1: appears to be the point when he decided to grow
Speaker 1: a gigantic mountain man beard tight, which he would maintain
Speaker 1: for the rest of his Yeah. Well, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of pictures of Leopold with a beard. Will post him
Speaker 1: on the site. Some of them look uncomfortably like me.
Speaker 1: Some of them are clear missteps in the beard growing process,
Speaker 1: where he's got like gigantic mutton chops and it's he
Speaker 1: looks like a fucking hair octopus style of the time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he he went through some rough patches in his sartorial history,
Speaker 1: for sure. That's pretty that's get any easy kind of
Speaker 1: we're looking at Yeah, that's a rough picture and almost
Speaker 1: he's almost wearing bell bottoms in that picture. Hey, it's
Speaker 1: the sixties. It is the eighteen sixties. Boom alright. Uh so, yeah,
Speaker 1: Leopold the King of Belgium. He's super frustrated because the
Speaker 1: King doesn't have that much in the way of power. Uh.
Speaker 1: Leopold takes two sort of bocking the restrained role that
Speaker 1: he has in Belgian politics. There's a story of like
Speaker 1: this guy who came to visit him, uh, because like,
Speaker 1: you know, the King's got a visit with like his
Speaker 1: donors and benefactors and whatnot. And this guy complains about
Speaker 1: the poor state of the roads around his property, and
Speaker 1: Leopold interrupts him and says, I have no authority to
Speaker 1: change the roads. You ought to address yourself to the press,
Speaker 1: especially to the small papers. The municipality and the government
Speaker 1: will do anything they ask. So he was like, he
Speaker 1: was like making that point. I'm frustrated that, like I
Speaker 1: can't do anything, so I'm just kinda like to take
Speaker 1: it to the press. King is not allowed to do anything. Um.
Speaker 1: He sort of set to work making himself into kind
Speaker 1: of an image for the Belgian people. He was the
Speaker 1: aristocratic equivalent of an alpha male. Uh. He spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time doing science work and and and you know,
Speaker 1: supporting the arts and sciences. Nineteenth century science is just
Speaker 1: like beakers of lead and ship He's he's pouring colored
Speaker 1: water into bakers. He's got goggles on, you know, you
Speaker 1: know how that goes. Yeah, there's a quote from his
Speaker 1: biography that says he used to sleep in a camp
Speaker 1: bed so like a military cot, and had a general
Speaker 1: horror of everything that could innervate or render him a feminate.
Speaker 1: So he's kind of like he's a proud boy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what they call people who aren't racist soy boys.
Speaker 1: Is that right? Yeah, because eating soy feminizes you again, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what the that's all right thing? Yeah, um, hey,
Speaker 1: well at least we know that they have a nice
Speaker 1: historical antisy. Leopold would have been all about that stuff.
Speaker 1: So he's he's growing a giant, weird beard, he's sleeping
Speaker 1: in a palace in a military cot. He's scared of girls. Uh,
Speaker 1: he hates spending money. His biography says, quote his pocket
Speaker 1: handkerchief was only renewed on Sunday mornings when going to Mass,
Speaker 1: and on no account would he take another in the interval.
Speaker 1: If his valet's changed his towels more than once a week,
Speaker 1: they were sure to receive a good scolding from his majesty.
Speaker 1: What So he's like a gross miser, Yeah, don't clean
Speaker 1: those tells which one of those wasn't one of the
Speaker 1: all right guys living in their mom's basement. I think
Speaker 1: most of them are definitely Yeah, yeah that guy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: rouche Vie, the pickup artist guy that was found living
Speaker 1: in his mom's basement. Literally, that's what this guy was.
Speaker 1: Leopold was missing. Yeah, yeah, I guess the Beard. The
Speaker 1: Beard experiment clearly on that factor. His mom died young,
Speaker 1: so he became a king. Yeah yeah, instead, okay, called
Speaker 1: peacocking everyone. How you interact women the kingdom? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean having a castle is pretty solid peacocking Yeah, undeniable. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Leopold the Second was noted in his biography, is the
Speaker 1: first king to treat his kingship as a corporate endeavor.
Speaker 1: His primary concern was making money, not for Belgium, but
Speaker 1: for himself. It was all about the bottom line. Um.
Speaker 1: So there's um Like when you talk about dictators and
Speaker 1: warlords and terrorists, there's like a tendency to call them
Speaker 1: side paths and sociopaths. Sociopath is like an actual medical diagnosis.
Speaker 1: And I don't think guys like Hitler or Stalin really
Speaker 1: fit it, um because they all had histories of like
Speaker 1: warm family life and like people who cared about them
Speaker 1: and people that they like sacrificed for. At times, Leopold
Speaker 1: might have been a straight up like yeah, because that's
Speaker 1: that's that's what they say, right, is like so many
Speaker 1: CEOs and fortune fid uh whatever. Then there corporately like
Speaker 1: psychopathic traits. Yeah. Even his positive biography says that while
Speaker 1: he was charming, he was quote devoid of enthusiasm and
Speaker 1: set himself and was quite incapable of arousing any and others.
Speaker 1: So he just can't unctually touch people's heart. He can't
Speaker 1: motivate people. Um, so, yeah, we're gonna get more into
Speaker 1: the soulless Leopold the second, his scheme to find a
Speaker 1: colony and the colony that he eventually found. But for
Speaker 1: we've got some ads. Of course, we all realized it's
Speaker 1: a pro corporate podcast, so let's keep it real. Here's
Speaker 1: some buying advice, and we're back. Uh, we're back. We're
Speaker 1: talking about King Leopold, who is searching for a little
Speaker 1: colony somewhere in the world to fill that whole of course. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Leopold the Deuce, Leopold to Electric Boogaloo whenever you want
Speaker 1: to call him. We were just talking about what a soulless,
Speaker 1: sociopathic creepy is. Yeah, allegedly. Well here's another quote again,
Speaker 1: this is from like a positive pro Leopold biography that
Speaker 1: he probably paid for. He disliked music, hunting, tobacco, and
Speaker 1: had no taste for physical exercises except walking. Although a
Speaker 1: frequent visitor at Austin, which is like one of his palaces,
Speaker 1: he never learned to swim. He was seen yawning and
Speaker 1: a gala performance of Faust. So he doesn't like plays.
Speaker 1: He doesn't like art, he doesn't. He hates music like
Speaker 1: it's a thing. Any book you read about him, anyone
Speaker 1: who knew him. He hated music like not like he
Speaker 1: hated popular music. Music itself was offensive to him. So
Speaker 1: that's fascinating. Well that's cutting into the American psycho narrative. Yeah, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: yeah a little bit. Yeah, he's he's a weird guy.
Speaker 1: He's very vain um. But his main vanity was quite odd.
Speaker 1: He thought he had the most beautiful hands in all
Speaker 1: of Europe, type his biography. What his biography notes. Another
Speaker 1: of Leopold's hobbies was his dislike for gloves, and although
Speaker 1: he often wore uniform he has never reported to have
Speaker 1: put on gloves. It may have been a hatred of restraint,
Speaker 1: but more probably it was a pardonable vanity on the
Speaker 1: part of the late king, for he possessed the shapely
Speaker 1: and beautiful hand of the Orleans family that rules so hard.
Speaker 1: Here's the only picture I could find hands. He's holding
Speaker 1: the gloves in his hand, so his hand is not
Speaker 1: even stra younger actually like reminding people you could be
Speaker 1: wearing gloves. I'm the master of the his I mean,
Speaker 1: in fairness to him, his hands are beautiful in this picture.
Speaker 1: I mean they just just look at the bone definition.
Speaker 1: They are shapely. They're good ass hands. Yeah, they're good
Speaker 1: ass hands. Oh man, So that means that he made
Speaker 1: some painter or do multiple drafts on those hands. That's like,
Speaker 1: this is like, isn't it wait, rest of development where
Speaker 1: the guy has a fake hands, always, always always sunny,
Speaker 1: always fake hands. Yeah, then there's some things to be
Speaker 1: said about our president in hands. It's weird. It's it's
Speaker 1: weird that you would even like I never think about
Speaker 1: my hands like how they look. Like when I'm thinking
Speaker 1: about someone taking a picture of me, like zero percent
Speaker 1: of the time, I'm like, oh, my god, my hands
Speaker 1: do they look shapely? Do you know what's crazy is
Speaker 1: I had to send a picture of a piece of
Speaker 1: equipment for this job I'm on to a technical person
Speaker 1: and I just took a picture of my phone and
Speaker 1: into to them. And I realized as I was sending
Speaker 1: the email, was like, my hands like funked up in this.
Speaker 1: I'm having a real low hand self esteem day. Oh,
Speaker 1: I think you have the shapely hands of the Orleanslan family.
Speaker 1: I know you're being really nice right now, but it's
Speaker 1: actually a little hilarious that the one day possibly in
Speaker 1: my life, that I've noticed my hands, I was like,
Speaker 1: what the fund is up with my hands? Only these
Speaker 1: were feet. Yeah. I've been an arm model before. My
Speaker 1: friend was doing some not like you know, elbows down
Speaker 1: I was doing. I was doing some stock photography and
Speaker 1: was like, I want to take pictures of your arms,
Speaker 1: and I was like, you're wilding out. So you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm good. I'm good risk to elbow to elbow, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I got I got far arm. My fearms are I'm
Speaker 1: about it? Well, Leopold was a handman. Yeah, so we've
Speaker 1: got this frustrated, greedy, gorgeous handed king on the throne
Speaker 1: of Belgium. He keeps trying to get his country and
Speaker 1: to jump on board the having a colony train that
Speaker 1: the people of Belgium expresses zero interest in this. Oh okay, wait,
Speaker 1: why what do you mean? All right? Because obviously all
Speaker 1: European colonialism is pretty much the root of almost everything
Speaker 1: that's wrong in the world right now. But there is.
Speaker 1: But I don't understand why they. I mean, they certainly didn't.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna, I guess not want to do it. For
Speaker 1: the reasons why I don't think they should have done it.
Speaker 1: I think the Belgians, for one thing, So the Belgiums
Speaker 1: of this era, anyone who's like a mature adult, lived
Speaker 1: through what was at that point he equipment in World
Speaker 1: War two, the Napoleonic Wars, like we just don't want
Speaker 1: any trouble, Like we just want to stay in Belgium
Speaker 1: and eat chocolate and drink beer. We don't really want
Speaker 1: to go to Africa or Asia. And let's see the
Speaker 1: first of die not the first can I say, can
Speaker 1: continue an incredibly less long list of ignorant as sh
Speaker 1: I'm about to say, you do you is Belgium landlocked? No? No, no, no,
Speaker 1: it has an Antwerp Antwerp, that's right, okay, number of Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's a wee little country. You can drive across
Speaker 1: it in a couple of hours. Yeah, okay. I was
Speaker 1: just like, okay, yeah, I was just like, it's funny
Speaker 1: to imagine a landlock country own and stuff. But of
Speaker 1: course they can who gives a ship. But they're not landlocked,
Speaker 1: so fuck me. Yeah, no, they're not. Um they didn't
Speaker 1: have a colony at this point, and they seem to
Speaker 1: have zero interest in having one now. At this same time,
Speaker 1: from eighteen seventy eighteen seventy seven, when Leopolds like a
Speaker 1: decade or so into his kinghood, there's this explorer named
Speaker 1: Henry Morton Stanley. Uh and yeah, from seventy four to
Speaker 1: seventy seven, he completes seven thousand mile expedition across Central Africa.
Speaker 1: Much of his travel centered upon the still undiscovered by
Speaker 1: like white people, Congo. No one had like mapped the
Speaker 1: extent of the Congo River. We didn't know where it
Speaker 1: originated from at this point. Um so, and at this
Speaker 1: time in European history, like different explorers mapping Africa are
Speaker 1: kind of like the Marvel movie franchise of the day,
Speaker 1: Like each of these guys is world famous and like
Speaker 1: newspapers breathlessly cover every expedition, and whenever they finished an expedition,
Speaker 1: they write a book and millions of people by it
Speaker 1: so automatically. For the ball exactly, this is like the
Speaker 1: thing people care about at this point in time. It's
Speaker 1: like what these explorers are doing in Africa and all
Speaker 1: over the world. Like that just means if I were
Speaker 1: alive then and a white person, two big guests, I
Speaker 1: would be like struggling to get on one of the
Speaker 1: good expeditions. Yeah you really, you really like fingers crossed.
Speaker 1: It's not one of the ones where people eat each other.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, statistically a lot of them are. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Um So Stanley maps like a huge chunk of the Congo,
Speaker 1: more than anyone had ever done before, and it's like
Speaker 1: big news. He gets back to Europe from Africa and
Speaker 1: he goes on tour. He's doing like speaking engagements. He's
Speaker 1: a big celebrity. I feel like there's a lot of
Speaker 1: like skulls and calipers in a talk like this, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and probably buckets of racism, like like totally unexamined racism.
Speaker 1: I look. If you don't look, it's not there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the racist motto. Um. So he's touring around and
Speaker 1: King Leopold winds up meeting with him. Um. Stanley had
Speaker 1: been bullish on the idea that the Congo would be
Speaker 1: a great place for a colony, and he wanted the
Speaker 1: British to set up a colony there. You want to
Speaker 1: go to the best colonizing studio first, Yeah, exactly, that's
Speaker 1: like the paramount good. Probably not. I don't know anything
Speaker 1: about Warner Brothers. We all live in the Disney, isn't
Speaker 1: that's the Disney. Yeah, Britain's the Disney of colonizing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and instead he goes to I don't who's who's
Speaker 1: making DC's garbage movies. Warner Brothers, Warner Brothers. Okay, so
Speaker 1: Leopold's Warner Brothers. No, they're not even in it. Leopold
Speaker 1: is like he's gotten very confusing. Leopold is like, uh,
Speaker 1: snapchat making stuff, Like technically they got the our YouTube
Speaker 1: like it's a YouTube show. Yeah, you know, it's like
Speaker 1: they got some money. Let's actually call it no history
Speaker 1: for it, but who knows. I feel like we actually
Speaker 1: hit upon the right thing to compare him to, which
Speaker 1: is Amazon. Yes. Yeah. So Stanley tries to sell his
Speaker 1: Congo idea to Disney Slash Britain and it fails, and
Speaker 1: King Leopold a k A. Amazon's like, well, we might
Speaker 1: be interested in this plan. Yeah, we'll fund this. Why
Speaker 1: don't you, Why don't you give me your elevator pitch
Speaker 1: colony and the Congo Huh? I like it. I like
Speaker 1: this idea. Yeah. So Leopold uh contracts Stanley to work
Speaker 1: for him, and he sends him back to Africa with
Speaker 1: a new mission. So Leopold's master plan here, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: appeal back for a minute, and we're going to zoom
Speaker 1: into the different pieces because it's a complicated as plant.
Speaker 1: His master plan is to create the Congo Free State,
Speaker 1: which is a supposedly independent African nation that just happened
Speaker 1: to also be ruled by King Leopold the Second UM.
Speaker 1: So he went about doing this in a few ways. Uh.
Speaker 1: In eighteen seventy six, he hosted the Brussels Geographic Conference,
Speaker 1: where he invited a bunch of European experts to form
Speaker 1: the so called International African Association, which of course had
Speaker 1: no Africans as members. UM the association was a supposedly
Speaker 1: philanthropic organization. I'm going to read you a selection from
Speaker 1: Leopold's speech at the conference where he sort of lays
Speaker 1: out what he wants to do. The subject that calls
Speaker 1: us together today is one that demands the first place
Speaker 1: in the attention of friends of humanity to open up
Speaker 1: to civilization. The only part of our globe where she
Speaker 1: has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness that envelops
Speaker 1: entire populations is I may venture to say a crusade
Speaker 1: worthy of this century of progress, and I am glad
Speaker 1: to observe how very favorable public feeling is to its accomplishment.
Speaker 1: The current is with us. So he gets this association
Speaker 1: together and he says, this is an international group and
Speaker 1: we're trying to civilize Africa and improve lives of people
Speaker 1: who were there. I didn't realize that back then. The
Speaker 1: rhetoric was already like the kind of like always is
Speaker 1: this is to help them double speak. I actually just
Speaker 1: assumed they were like, yeah, I'm gonna take this ship
Speaker 1: from black people. No, they they are. And these guys
Speaker 1: the people he invites to the Geographic Conference and forms
Speaker 1: the International African association with these guys are a lot
Speaker 1: of people who legitimately want to make things better for Africans,
Speaker 1: who aren't even thinking about making these are the well
Speaker 1: meaning liberal white people, yeah, exactly, and like missionaries who
Speaker 1: are like and like well meaning liberal white people. Because
Speaker 1: there's an Arab slave trade in Africa, like traders moving
Speaker 1: through the Congo, and the abolition movement is very big
Speaker 1: at this point in time, and so these people are
Speaker 1: being like, we've got to stop the slave trade in Africa,
Speaker 1: sold we can do that. And there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: people who are like, we've got to christianize the Africans
Speaker 1: and Leopolds, like we can do that and like that.
Speaker 1: So that's that's what he's claiming this association. Okay, so
Speaker 1: this is right, This is like definitely like colonialism two
Speaker 1: point o or three point oh. He steps ahead of everyone.
Speaker 1: He's not even framing this as colonialism. He's framing this
Speaker 1: as a charitable endeavor to exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So he
Speaker 1: suggests that Belgium would be a great place for this
Speaker 1: new international body to meet because it's a neutral country
Speaker 1: and it's centrally located in Europe. And then he suggests
Speaker 1: that he might be a good person to run the
Speaker 1: association just for its first year. Hit yourself, you know
Speaker 1: you've got to conference first year. Uh. And he assures
Speaker 1: them all that he's doing this from the goodness of
Speaker 1: his heart. Uh. He says, Belgium is small, she is
Speaker 1: happy and satisfied with her lot. I have no other
Speaker 1: ambition than to serve her well. And it was true
Speaker 1: that Belgians were pretty happy with their lot. But Leopold
Speaker 1: did have some ambitions. So he gets elected head of
Speaker 1: the International African Association the first year, and then he
Speaker 1: gets elected the head of it the second year too,
Speaker 1: even though that was supposed to be illegal, back to back.
Speaker 1: And then the association kind of stops existing, and Leopold
Speaker 1: replaces it with the Committee for Studies of the Upper Congo,
Speaker 1: and then he replaces that with the International Association for
Speaker 1: the Congo. On paper, these are all different international philanthropic groups.
Speaker 1: Their names were deliberately forgettable and similar, so the public
Speaker 1: would assume they were all the same thing. Uh. In
Speaker 1: King Leopold's Ghost, Adam hos Child writes that Leopold directly
Speaker 1: told his aids quote, care must be taken, not to
Speaker 1: let it be obvious that the Association of the Congo
Speaker 1: and the African Association are two different things. The public
Speaker 1: doesn't grasp that. So in reality, all of these lanthropic
Speaker 1: groups are shadow fronts for Leopold's plan to conquer the Congo.
Speaker 1: So they're all charity organizations that he gets international aid
Speaker 1: money getting sent into, and he's able to pour Belgian
Speaker 1: government funds into ass and donations, just like Hillary Clinton,
Speaker 1: not exactly like Hillary Clinton. Yes, you've watched the documentary
Speaker 1: Clinton Cash by Niche Deza. Yes. Um. The thing that's
Speaker 1: amazing about this is it's so complicated a plan that
Speaker 1: doesn't feel like I mean, I you know, I'm a
Speaker 1: super smart person. Of course I'm not finding a place
Speaker 1: where you could improvise your way into this. You just
Speaker 1: gotta wait, because we're not even halfway through the plan
Speaker 1: like this, like he's he is a legitimate Like okay,
Speaker 1: so the villain that Marvel keeps trying to write and
Speaker 1: like failing to write in my opinion, where it's like
Speaker 1: the low key character whether here he's got all these
Speaker 1: plans within plans step ahead. Leopold actually was that guy
Speaker 1: to the whole world, but in sort of the same
Speaker 1: villain as way, You're like, this is insane. There's so
Speaker 1: many things that could go wrong in this. So he's
Speaker 1: now created three different philanthropic associations just because like the
Speaker 1: backers will start realizing that the association's fake and they'll
Speaker 1: pull their money, but he'll keep the organization alive or
Speaker 1: whole roll its assets into a new organization. And nobody
Speaker 1: who got caught, who realized that this was some weird
Speaker 1: show company wants to admit that they got caught, so
Speaker 1: they just don't say anything. And the public just here's like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's the new thing. Is how the International African Association,
Speaker 1: it's that group of people trying to make life better
Speaker 1: in Africa, right, Um, So he all these groups are
Speaker 1: basically funneling money into the work of Henry Morton Stanley,
Speaker 1: that explorer who Leopold sent back to Africa. So Leopold
Speaker 1: sent him back in eighteen seventy nine, and his job
Speaker 1: was to start building, using the association money, a series
Speaker 1: of stations along the Congo River to act as like
Speaker 1: way points for steamboat traffic. Uh. He also met with
Speaker 1: hundreds of local treats all throughout the Congo, all the
Speaker 1: different people who had chunks of land throughout the Congo,
Speaker 1: the different villages and chiefs, hundreds and hundreds of them.
Speaker 1: He meets with these guys and he gets them to
Speaker 1: sign treaties giving up their rights to the land. Uh.
Speaker 1: Here's a quote from host Child's book. The very word
Speaker 1: treaty is a euphemism. For many chiefs had no idea
Speaker 1: what they were signing. I few had ever seen the
Speaker 1: written word before, and they were being asked to mark
Speaker 1: their excess to documents in a foreign language and in
Speaker 1: legal ease. These guys weren't ignorant of the concept of diplomacy.
Speaker 1: They knew wouldmitt to write treaties of friendship with neighboring
Speaker 1: tribes or villages. They understood the idea of a non
Speaker 1: aggression pact, and that's what they thought these were. The
Speaker 1: reality was somewhat different. Quote. In return for one piece
Speaker 1: of cloth per month to each of the undersigned chiefs,
Speaker 1: besides present of cloth in hand, they promised, too freely
Speaker 1: of their own accord for themselves and their heirs and successors,
Speaker 1: forever give up to set association the sovereignty and all
Speaker 1: sovereign and governing rights to all their territories. So Basically
Speaker 1: he gives them cloth. They think that they're getting some
Speaker 1: sick ass clothes, just assion pacts. This is a thing.
Speaker 1: Here's our everyone. You give us shirts. We promise we
Speaker 1: won't shoot you. We don't want to shoot you anyway.
Speaker 1: That sounds great. In reality, these are all statements saying
Speaker 1: that they give up other rights to the International African Association,
Speaker 1: and the Association will have the right to collect taxes
Speaker 1: on the people who gave up their rights to their land,
Speaker 1: and those taxes, because there's no currency in most of
Speaker 1: the Congo, those taxes can be paid in labor. So
Speaker 1: Leopold gets hundreds of chiefs from Stanley to sign these agreements. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: Jesus so Europe. Thanks. Stanley's over there doing valuable philanthropic
Speaker 1: work fighting with the slave traders and trying to open
Speaker 1: the Congo up to free trade. That's the big buzzword
Speaker 1: everyone's using. It's like, we're gonna open the Congo to
Speaker 1: free trade and it will benefit the Africans, it will
Speaker 1: benefit Europe. Everyone will benefit if there's free trade in
Speaker 1: the Congo. Uh. Meanwhile, what he's actually doing is getting
Speaker 1: pieces of paper that give Leopold the rights to the
Speaker 1: Congo that make it look like all these chiefs have
Speaker 1: come together and said, we want this guy to be
Speaker 1: our king, and we want to be a country. So
Speaker 1: I feel like I should break for just a second
Speaker 1: and talk a little bit more about Henry Morton Stanley.
Speaker 1: Who's the guy who's actually doing all this leg work.
Speaker 1: He was one of the greatest explorers in history. And
Speaker 1: he was also a human garbage fire, sort of a
Speaker 1: Darth Vader. Definitely a Darth Vader too. He was terrified
Speaker 1: by the thought of being touched by a woman, just
Speaker 1: like Darth Vader. He once cut off his own dog's tail,
Speaker 1: cooked it, and fed it to the dog for no
Speaker 1: real reason. Um. And he basically, when I say he
Speaker 1: was an explorer, he shot his way through Africa. Here's
Speaker 1: a quote from a description of one of Stanley's expeditions
Speaker 1: in King's Leopold's Ghost. To those unfortunate enough to live
Speaker 1: in its path, the expedition felt like an invading army,
Speaker 1: for it sometimes held women in children hostage until local
Speaker 1: chief supplied food. UM. So yeah, he's shooting his way
Speaker 1: through these tribes, taking their food, taking their ship, um,
Speaker 1: burning down villages if there's any resistance um. One of
Speaker 1: his men described just hunting people like the predator, like
Speaker 1: laying in wait and just shooting random strangers. UM like
Speaker 1: less ethical than the predator, who should played out has
Speaker 1: a certain code. Yeah yeah, way less ethical than the predators.
Speaker 1: So these guys are predatoring their way through through Africa,
Speaker 1: but they're not particularly worse than any other explorer at
Speaker 1: the time. I would he's one of the worst. They vary.
Speaker 1: So Henry Morton Stanley, you know, the Dr Livingston, I
Speaker 1: presume that he's that guy. And Dr Livingstone was apparently
Speaker 1: a pretty nice guy. He was also an explorer and
Speaker 1: actually would like get to know people and like and
Speaker 1: plcate himself in the local culture. So some of these
Speaker 1: guys are legitimately just in it for the sake of exploration,
Speaker 1: and they're scientists and they're good to the people they encounter.
Speaker 1: And some of them, like Stanley, just want to make
Speaker 1: a shipload of money and they're creepy. Stanley is one
Speaker 1: of the kills thousands of people while he's exploring. God,
Speaker 1: I got it. I just want to I guess when
Speaker 1: I met not as a mitigating thing of like everyone
Speaker 1: was doing it, but like, if not the only standard practice.
Speaker 1: It was not what you're describing is not not he's
Speaker 1: a standard he's it's definitely common practice on a lot
Speaker 1: of these guys. But he's not near to the only one.
Speaker 1: But he's one of the worst for sure. Um So yeah.
Speaker 1: While Stanley's expedition is going on, Leopold also hires a
Speaker 1: bunch of other expeditions to explore their parts of Africa.
Speaker 1: These were deliberately showy expeditions meant to distract public attention.
Speaker 1: One of them involved the team of four Indian elephants
Speaker 1: being sent to Africa to see if they could bread
Speaker 1: with African elephants. All of the elephants died horribly, but
Speaker 1: the news covered the story the whole time. So nobody's
Speaker 1: reading about what Stanley is doing because they think it's
Speaker 1: a boring philanthropical mission and there's this crazy story about elephants.
Speaker 1: Let's read about that, so fucking dark. So he's clearly
Speaker 1: understands the media well enough that he's not just thinking
Speaker 1: about how to accomplish his plan, but how to distract
Speaker 1: public attention. And while he does it, when Morton Stanley
Speaker 1: gets back from his expedition and he writes a book
Speaker 1: it's an instant bestseller. King Leopold edits it himself. That's
Speaker 1: one of the things he had insisted on is that
Speaker 1: Stanley could write a book about this, but King Leopold
Speaker 1: would get to edit it. And most of what he
Speaker 1: did was correct the times when Stanley mixed up the
Speaker 1: different associations and committees that he was supposedly working for,
Speaker 1: because nobody could keep it straight, but Leopold. That's such
Speaker 1: an attention to detail, that's unbelievable. Like I said, he's
Speaker 1: the first modern, truly modern past um. So this book
Speaker 1: is sort of framed as like Henry Morton, Stanley is
Speaker 1: helping the Congo Free State be born and helping these
Speaker 1: these Africans like take their stab at nation hood and
Speaker 1: joining the international community and whatnot. So that's how that
Speaker 1: all this is being played on the outside world. The
Speaker 1: reality and the Congo is very different. Uh. And what
Speaker 1: happens next is uh not what anyone but Leopold had expected.
Speaker 1: And we're going to get into that in a minute.
Speaker 1: But right now, Uh, Andrew, do you have too much money? Oh?
Speaker 1: Hell yeah. Well one of the great things to do
Speaker 1: with too much money is spend it on products. Products
Speaker 1: like the ones that I'm going to talk about. Now
Speaker 1: here's ads. So we're back. Uh and King Leopold has
Speaker 1: sent an explorer off to the Congo to trick a
Speaker 1: bunch of tribes people into signing away their rights to
Speaker 1: the land, while he has distracted the rest of Europe
Speaker 1: with a bunch of showy expeditions. Uh So it's just
Speaker 1: like it used to be, just like cannons and soldiers swords,
Speaker 1: I guess, and now it's pr and fake treaties and stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really modern in a lot of ways. Um. So
Speaker 1: Leopold has this new bestselling book that's talking about the
Speaker 1: great stuff he's trying to do in the Congo that
Speaker 1: gets the public jazz, and he's able to sort of
Speaker 1: further push the legitimacy of his project by getting the
Speaker 1: US President Chester A. Arthur to recognize the Congo Free State.
Speaker 1: Leopold had charmed the former U S Minister to Belgium,
Speaker 1: a guy who called himself General Sanford, even though he
Speaker 1: was an ACTU le a general. Um. But he was
Speaker 1: a rich guy who had a lot of money and
Speaker 1: like an orange plantation. And because he was a rich guy,
Speaker 1: he was able to get the President's ear Uh. General
Speaker 1: Sandford appealed to President Arthur's justlike of Arabs, because again
Speaker 1: there were all these Arab slave traders. Um, yes, nothing's changed,
Speaker 1: nothing's new. Yeah, so chess Sterry Arthur was. He also
Speaker 1: pointed out that that the Congo had been discovered by
Speaker 1: an American because Henry Morton Stanley called himself an American.
Speaker 1: He wasn't he was actually British, but the light his
Speaker 1: whole life and said he was American. Everyone lies about
Speaker 1: everything in the no Internet, because yeah, nothing like you.
Speaker 1: You run into thousand colonels when you're reading anything in
Speaker 1: this period, and none of them are colonels. Sure, none
Speaker 1: of them were ever in the military, just like they
Speaker 1: just I'm going to be a colonels, fried chicken colonels.
Speaker 1: It's fine. And in this case of General anyway, Chess
Speaker 1: Terry Arthur was like, sounds great, Uh, Congo free street,
Speaker 1: sounds like a great idea. You're gonna fight some Arabs party, hooray.
Speaker 1: So he included this next bit in his State of
Speaker 1: the Union speech, recognizing the Congo free speech quote from
Speaker 1: Chester A. Arthur. The rich and populous valley of the
Speaker 1: Congo spelled with a k in. This is being opened
Speaker 1: by a society called the International African Association, of which
Speaker 1: the King of the Belgians is the president. Large tracts
Speaker 1: of territory have been ceded to the Association by native chiefs.
Speaker 1: Roads have been opened, steamboats have been placed on the river,
Speaker 1: and the Nuclei of states established under one flag, which
Speaker 1: offers freedom to commerce and prohibits the slave trade. Oh
Speaker 1: my god, So that's how Chester A. Arthur pictures it.
Speaker 1: So he got paid placement for his propaganda in the
Speaker 1: State of the Union. Yeah, in the State of the Union. Uh.
Speaker 1: So far the people of Belgium and the other European
Speaker 1: states are fooled pretty well. But France and some other
Speaker 1: folks and like the British government whatnot are starting to
Speaker 1: catch on the Leopold's plan and realize that he's making
Speaker 1: a power grab. This helped to spark a general what's
Speaker 1: known as the Scramble for Africa, where all these European
Speaker 1: powers are like, oh my god, we're running out of
Speaker 1: Africa to take over. Uh. So they start shooting out
Speaker 1: expeditions to claim the last pieces of the continent before
Speaker 1: it fills up. Uh. This all culminates in the Berlin
Speaker 1: Conference of eighteen eighty four to eighty five, and a
Speaker 1: bunch of stuff is decided there. But Leopold's main goal
Speaker 1: is to get recognition for what he starts calling the
Speaker 1: Congo Free State. He's basically like, I've got all these treaties.
Speaker 1: Like he gets up in front of Europe and he's like,
Speaker 1: I got all these treaties. Look, the people of the
Speaker 1: Congo want to be their own state. They want me
Speaker 1: to be their king. They've given this this state the
Speaker 1: rights to their land. Uh. And if you all back
Speaker 1: me and establishing the state, it will be a free
Speaker 1: trade zone, so all everyone will be able to trade
Speaker 1: freely and buy and sell freely in there. It will
Speaker 1: make a bunch of money for everybody. So that's Leopold's pitch,
Speaker 1: and Europe buys it. In eighteen eighty five, the Congo
Speaker 1: Free State is established. Leopold had to go in front
Speaker 1: of Belgium Senate to ask if he could be two
Speaker 1: kings at once. Uh. He promised that the Congo would
Speaker 1: be its own independent nation and that it would pay
Speaker 1: its own way in the world. He told Belgium he
Speaker 1: thought it was his duty to quote help the nations
Speaker 1: of second rank become useful members of the great family
Speaker 1: of nations. Then he asked for money, a little alone
Speaker 1: to help the fledgling new nation. And he asked his
Speaker 1: fellow Belgians to volunteer to help in this bold project
Speaker 1: quote more than any other. A manufacturing and commercial people
Speaker 1: like ourselves ought to strive to obtain a market for
Speaker 1: all its workers, for thinkers, capitalists and workmen. So the
Speaker 1: Congo Free State is on paper a country with Leopold
Speaker 1: the Second as its absolute ruler. So he's gone from
Speaker 1: the King of Belgium, but he doesn't really have any
Speaker 1: power to yeah of of a country like twenties times
Speaker 1: the size of Belgium. Jesus Christ. Uh. So the Congo
Speaker 1: Free State is to all intends and purposes of state.
Speaker 1: It has its own army, the Force Publique, which is
Speaker 1: made up of African soldiers led by Belgian officers. It's
Speaker 1: illegal for black men to be officers in the Army
Speaker 1: of the Congo. That sounds about yeah, um. So man
Speaker 1: Leopold is a wired himself an African empire. Unfortunately, he
Speaker 1: didn't want an empire. He had no desire to actually
Speaker 1: rule another just wanted money. He just wanted money. So
Speaker 1: the Congo Free State is entirely a money making scheme
Speaker 1: and it's all based around rubber. So the late eighteen
Speaker 1: hundreds is when rubber really started to take off. That's
Speaker 1: like in the mid eighteen hundreds or so is when
Speaker 1: they figure out how to vulcanized rubber, which is what
Speaker 1: makes it like nice and shiny and stable and it
Speaker 1: doesn't smell weird and fall apart. Um. It's so the
Speaker 1: Macintosh coat becomes popular around this time. People like in
Speaker 1: Europe are just like covered headed tone rubber, like it's
Speaker 1: it's it's everywhere. It's like the fashion of the times.
Speaker 1: People are just flipping out over rubber. Um fetishes are
Speaker 1: born tons exactly, hot air balloons. It's like this one.
Speaker 1: It's a wonder material. It's like the first time people
Speaker 1: they don't have to use glass for everything. Um. So
Speaker 1: everyone's in love with rubber. But there's only two ways
Speaker 1: to make rubber at that time, vines and trees. Now
Speaker 1: rubber vines grew wild all around the Congo. The two
Speaker 1: ways are vines and trees. There's rubber vines and there rubbers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I thought it was going to be vegetation and chemistry. No,
Speaker 1: they hadn't. They didn't. They do now we can make
Speaker 1: but they hadn't figured that ship out. Um So, actually
Speaker 1: harvesting all of the rubber from vines like the ones
Speaker 1: who grew in the Congo required thousands and thousands of
Speaker 1: people climbing trees in the jungle. There's the risk of
Speaker 1: snake bite and monster attacks, and it's just it's just
Speaker 1: a nightmare harvesting, Yeah, at large scale in the Congo.
Speaker 1: Harvesting rubber from trees, on the other hand, is really easy,
Speaker 1: and some enterprising people had already started planting groves of
Speaker 1: rubber trees in South America, but those trees took about
Speaker 1: twenty years or so to really get going. So Leopold
Speaker 1: standing here in charge of the Congo knows that he
Speaker 1: has about twenty years to be the world's leading producer
Speaker 1: of rubber. The Congo Free State wasn't basically just a
Speaker 1: giant rubber factory. That was his whole vision for this
Speaker 1: land filled with millions of people. This is like the
Speaker 1: actual story of Willie Wonka. Yeah, he's the real Willie Wonka.
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ. So, I remember when I said that Leopold
Speaker 1: had the right to collect taxes in the form of labor. Well,
Speaker 1: he used these taxes to make Congolese people go harvest
Speaker 1: rubber for him. In theory, I think he was allowed
Speaker 1: to only demand like forty hours a month from them
Speaker 1: or something. But what happened is that he would have
Speaker 1: his soldiers go from village to village and take hostages.
Speaker 1: These hostages would be put in concentration camps where they'd
Speaker 1: be starved and beaten until the village met its rubber quota.
Speaker 1: So if you didn't get all the rubber that you
Speaker 1: were supposed to get soon enough, your family would just
Speaker 1: starve to get Uh. Leopold's government did have a problem
Speaker 1: because obviously it needs soldiers to enforce these nightmarish rules.
Speaker 1: But white people die like crazy in the Congo um,
Speaker 1: Like a more than a third of the Belgians who
Speaker 1: went there died there. And since again it's illegal for
Speaker 1: Africans to be officers and force publique, uh, there would
Speaker 1: wind up being like four or five Belgian guys commanding
Speaker 1: hundreds and hundreds of African soldiers. So that's like, obviously
Speaker 1: you're treating these guys terribly. You're making the massacre of
Speaker 1: their own people, and there's five of you for every
Speaker 1: five hundred of them. That's like a recipe for a revolution,
Speaker 1: or it would be if the soldiers had free access
Speaker 1: to bullets. One of the ways the Belgians controlled their
Speaker 1: army was by heavily restricting when anybody would get bullets,
Speaker 1: and by policing their AMMO so they couldn't hide any away.
Speaker 1: So each soldier would only be issued a certain amount
Speaker 1: of AMMO when they go out to get rubber, and
Speaker 1: if they fired any rounds, they had to account for them.
Speaker 1: The general policy and the congo became that if you
Speaker 1: fired around, you had to provide a right hand from
Speaker 1: a corpse for every round that you shot. This was
Speaker 1: meant to stop people from stockpiling AMMO, and it was
Speaker 1: meant to stop them from like hunting for animals when
Speaker 1: they should have been, you know, shooting people. Um what
Speaker 1: this actually meant? Yeah, exactly so, but that creates a
Speaker 1: market for right hands. Exactly possibly go wrong. Yeah, For
Speaker 1: one thing, these soldiers aren't fed enough, so they're starving
Speaker 1: and they start hunting, and then once they fired a
Speaker 1: couple of rounds to hunt an animal, they need to
Speaker 1: pick up. Okay, we we we fired three rounds getting
Speaker 1: that that whatever it is. Now we need three hands.
Speaker 1: So we need to go into a village. We need
Speaker 1: to take some people's hands. And in addition to that,
Speaker 1: like it becomes common if if a village refuses to
Speaker 1: provide rubber, like people like we're not going to work
Speaker 1: to you, We're not going to give up our relatives
Speaker 1: as hostages. The Force Publique would just burned down the
Speaker 1: whole village. Sometimes they just kill everybody in the entire village. Um.
Speaker 1: And this this is happening on basically an industrial scale.
Speaker 1: In nineteen o three, a single rubber collecting post was
Speaker 1: sent more than forty replacement rounds of ammunition to every
Speaker 1: round that they're being sent. They've got a hand. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So like the military units in the Force Publique even
Speaker 1: would have a keeper of the hands whose job was
Speaker 1: to smoke all of the severed hands so that they preserve,
Speaker 1: so that you could go back to the authority. We
Speaker 1: need twenty more bullets. Here's twenty thou human hands, Jesus Christ. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in five, when this whole operation is just getting
Speaker 1: off the ground, King Leopold is named in British Court
Speaker 1: as a client of what the British called a disorderly house.
Speaker 1: Can you guess what a disorderly house was? Uh? Probably
Speaker 1: not enough. It's the Hottish a go for it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's a brothel. So while this is all starting off,
Speaker 1: King sorry to a horhouse in England, I thought, I
Speaker 1: thought you disorderly house meant like his dukedom didn't have
Speaker 1: like x or y like paperwork filed. No, no no.
Speaker 1: While he's freshly the king of the Belgian Congo, he's
Speaker 1: named in British court as a client of a whorehouse. Uh.
Speaker 1: And they say that he had been paying eight hundred
Speaker 1: pounds a month for a steady supply of young women,
Speaker 1: some of whom were ten to fifteen years old. That's so,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's what Leopold's doing in between administering the Congo. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: And while he's doing that, his men in the Congo
Speaker 1: are building a system of Rhodes railways, post and steamboats
Speaker 1: that are meant to allow the rubber making operation to prosper.
Speaker 1: Leopold doesn't want to pay for all this himself, so
Speaker 1: he claimed the infrastructure is necessary so that the Free
Speaker 1: States Army can fight those dastardly Arab slavers. Um got
Speaker 1: the US to pay for it, or just generally he
Speaker 1: got everyone wants to pay for it. So he gotten
Speaker 1: Europe on board with this by saying the Congo was
Speaker 1: going to be a free trade zone. But then he's like,
Speaker 1: we need to build all this infrastructure in order to
Speaker 1: fight the slavers, so we're gonna have to collect import taxes.
Speaker 1: Now he's just he like the one that you can
Speaker 1: trust Leopold to do is he will funck over every
Speaker 1: single person. Ye. So now even these countries who had
Speaker 1: like gotten on board because they thought this was a
Speaker 1: free trade zone, they're getting screwed. And of course the
Speaker 1: millions of people whose hands he's having severed and unscrewed.
Speaker 1: I guess the key is just never stopped lying. Yeah,
Speaker 1: whenever you read about any of these guys. That is
Speaker 1: the most important thing. He's never ever stopped lying. If
Speaker 1: you're going to be a monster, you have to lie,
Speaker 1: consist only for decades about everything. All right, Yeah, I'm in.
Speaker 1: It works, Yeah, No, I mean I'm in. Well, you'll
Speaker 1: be a great king of the Congo. Um so uh.
Speaker 1: To Leopold's credit, his men did fight Arab slave traders,
Speaker 1: but most of the fighting was done by conscripted African
Speaker 1: soldiers who were themselves basically slaves. Yeah. Yeah. King Leopold
Speaker 1: personally endorsed a system where white agents of the Free
Speaker 1: State got a bonus if they were able to find
Speaker 1: more recruits for the Force Publique. Many agents wound up
Speaker 1: buying them in from various chiefs and effect doing the
Speaker 1: same thing as the Arab slavers they bragged about fighting.
Speaker 1: State agents also got bonuses for quote reducing recruiting expenses,
Speaker 1: so if they outright enslaved people rather than paid them
Speaker 1: to join, they got more money in their pocket. As
Speaker 1: many as three quarters of all volunteers for the Force
Speaker 1: Publique died before they could receive training. Most of those
Speaker 1: volunteers were teenagers, right, yeah, so they're just volunteers, quote unquote,
Speaker 1: that's fucking incredible. It was like, we have our indentured
Speaker 1: servant army is going to fight your slave arm So
Speaker 1: basically the Congo at this point is groups of white
Speaker 1: guys with soldiers going into the jungle to collect a
Speaker 1: bunch of other soldiers and they'll put them in chains
Speaker 1: and like march them through the jungle and most of
Speaker 1: them will die, and then they'll train those guys up
Speaker 1: to fight, and they'll take those guys into the jungle
Speaker 1: to tell people to collect rubber from people, and to
Speaker 1: kill everyone who doesn't provide enough rubber, and to kill
Speaker 1: a lot of the people who do provide enough rubber,
Speaker 1: just because these kids are like starving to death, and
Speaker 1: maybe they have to shoot an animal, or maybe there's
Speaker 1: rebels and they get into a firefight, but they don't,
Speaker 1: and then you got to take hands from the So
Speaker 1: it just keeps spiraling out of control and becoming like
Speaker 1: even more of a nightmare to everybody but Leopold, because
Speaker 1: again he's sitting back in Belgium this time. Um. Since
Speaker 1: Leopold was the absolute monarch, he got to rule by
Speaker 1: royal decree. His first decree was that all quote vacant
Speaker 1: land was now property of the state. He didn't explain
Speaker 1: in what vacant meant, because obviously farmers don't live on
Speaker 1: every inch of their farmland, so basically most of the
Speaker 1: land in the Congo was now just his. Uh. He
Speaker 1: leased this land to a series of private corporations. And
Speaker 1: this gets to the real brilliance of his scheme because
Speaker 1: Leopold didn't have to dirty his hands actually running any
Speaker 1: of the rubber harvesting. He was able to private right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: other people paid for their right to mind rubber and
Speaker 1: cut off hands and do all the actual work, and
Speaker 1: LEOPOLDLD owned the rights to a huge chunk of their profits.
Speaker 1: So basically, these companies would come in and give him
Speaker 1: an owning stake in the corporation, licensed the scheme of
Speaker 1: incliving people, cutting off their hands, etcetera. Yeah. Adam hash
Speaker 1: Child in King Leopold's Ghost compares the Congo Free State
Speaker 1: to a venture capital firm. Quote he had essentially found
Speaker 1: a way to attract other people's capital to his investment schemes.
Speaker 1: While he retained half the proceeds. In the end, what
Speaker 1: with various taxes and fees the companies paid the state,
Speaker 1: it came to more than half. So in the eighteen nineties,
Speaker 1: the Congo Free State really starts putting out rubber, and
Speaker 1: suddenly King Leopold is one of the richest guys in
Speaker 1: the world. He starts buying gigantic monuments and palaces and
Speaker 1: shipped for Belgium, big showy projects, some of which are
Speaker 1: still there, and it is to make people like him.
Speaker 1: It's to keep him popular at home. He's succeeding beyond
Speaker 1: his wildest dreams in the business side of things, but
Speaker 1: his personal life is just kind of one series of
Speaker 1: train Wrex after the other. Um. Yeah, his son had
Speaker 1: died in eighteen sixty four, which led to an understandable
Speaker 1: estrangement between Leopold and his wife. It took eight years
Speaker 1: before they could stand to be around each other and
Speaker 1: try again. This passage from Leopold's biography tells you a
Speaker 1: lot about the relationships between the sexes. In the eighteen
Speaker 1: sixties quote, Leopold the Second was anxious to have a
Speaker 1: male heir, and in eighteen seventy two Queen Marie Henriette
Speaker 1: consented to resume conjugal life with her royal spouse, from
Speaker 1: whom she had separated some time before. She sacrificed herself,
Speaker 1: as one may say, for her country. A child was
Speaker 1: born unto them, but alas it was a daughter and
Speaker 1: not a son, which was given unto them, So that's
Speaker 1: messed up for a lot of reasons. She's one of
Speaker 1: which is just that Even in the pro Leopold biography,
Speaker 1: it just admits that having sex with Leopold is a sacrifice.
Speaker 1: I actually I'm surprised that the amount of agency she has,
Speaker 1: like she you know, she is the queen facing pressure,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't force that guillotined point or whatever she
Speaker 1: kind of was. I guess that's true. I guess that's
Speaker 1: between the lines, of course. Yeah, Jesus, it's I mean,
Speaker 1: she probably has more agency than the average. But at
Speaker 1: the same time, in the way she is less because
Speaker 1: it's less important for a commoner to have a son,
Speaker 1: because like the king, that's like the whole dynasty things.
Speaker 1: You might say she has even less. Um, we probably
Speaker 1: should say, yeah, we probably would be. Um. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: Leopold did not take having a daughter very well. Uh.
Speaker 1: This quote is from King Leopold's ghost. When the last daughter, Clementine,
Speaker 1: was born, according to his sister Louise, the king was
Speaker 1: furious and thenceforth refused to have anything to do with
Speaker 1: his admirable wife from the beginning. She wrote, quote, the
Speaker 1: king paid very little attention to me or my sister's.
Speaker 1: So he doesn't pay attention to his daughters, and he
Speaker 1: mostly seems to care when one of them, like fox
Speaker 1: with his garden. Um, here's a recollection from Luis. Large,
Speaker 1: juicy peaches grew on the walls of the gardens, and
Speaker 1: the king was very proud of them. I had a
Speaker 1: passion for peaches, and one day I dared to eat one,
Speaker 1: which was hidden away among the leaves. And that year
Speaker 1: peaches were plentiful. But the following day the king discovered
Speaker 1: the theft. What a dramatic moment. At once suspected, I
Speaker 1: confessed my crime and was promptly punished. I did not
Speaker 1: realize that the king counted his peaches. So while Leopold
Speaker 1: is running a nightmare hand harvesting rubber making scheme in
Speaker 1: the Congo, he's got enough time to make sure that
Speaker 1: his daughter doesn't steal a peach from himself. Because it's like,
Speaker 1: at least Ivanka Trump has the decency to pretend that
Speaker 1: she loved her tie with her daddy, even though like
Speaker 1: in all those like stories she tells, it's sad and
Speaker 1: weird too, but it's like, at least she's like, I
Speaker 1: love him. He's my dad, you know, And I believe
Speaker 1: in all this sha he couldn't even get his daughters
Speaker 1: to be like I love Well, there's gonna be more
Speaker 1: about his daughter's coming in. He's he is not a
Speaker 1: great dad. Yeah, if you can't sell that already. Um,
Speaker 1: there's in fact no evidence that Leopold cared about any
Speaker 1: of his children as anything more than vehicles for his legacy.
Speaker 1: Even that fawning nineteen ten biography can't make it seem
Speaker 1: like Leopold had a single funk for his family as
Speaker 1: King Leo, I'm gonna be honest, that's so far the
Speaker 1: most relatable thing about it, just not liking his family.
Speaker 1: As King, Leopold grew older and richer, he also became
Speaker 1: a full on hypochondriac. He took to wearing a waterproof
Speaker 1: bag around his gigantic beard whenever he went outside in
Speaker 1: the rain or when he swam. He required his palace
Speaker 1: tablecloths to be boiled every day to kill any germs,
Speaker 1: which is at least a character evolution from not letting
Speaker 1: them wash his sheets. Yeah, napkin, Um yeah for him,
Speaker 1: So he's changing, He's had his own little heroes journey. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we all get there. Yeah, hypochondria. Um. This wind up
Speaker 1: being another really really long one. There was just so
Speaker 1: much research, So um, this is gonna be a two
Speaker 1: parter podcast and the second part is going to drop
Speaker 1: on Thursday. Uh so we'll be getting into the rest
Speaker 1: of Leopold's story and the tremendously dark story of the Congo.
Speaker 1: So so stick around, check back out on Thursday. It's
Speaker 1: gonna be great. In the meantime, you can check out
Speaker 1: andrew ts podcasts This Racist. You can also check out
Speaker 1: every other episode of Behind the Bastards. You can find
Speaker 1: us on Twitter at Bastards Pod and Instagram as well.
Speaker 1: You can find us on the Internet at behind the
Speaker 1: Bastards dot com and you can find me on Twitter
Speaker 1: at I Right. Okay, so Andrew and I will be
Speaker 1: back on Thursday with more Leopold, so check us out then.