Speaker 1: Also media. Hey everyone, Robert Evans here, and you know
Speaker 1: it's another holiday week. This is not a holiday I
Speaker 1: tend to celebrate, but it is a holiday that our
Speaker 1: company gives us off. And I like my team not
Speaker 1: having to work. It's also good to not have to work.
Speaker 1: And when we drop episodes on weeks like this, it
Speaker 1: means you basically have to double up during the week
Speaker 1: before the week after, which causes a lot of stress
Speaker 1: that isn't necessary when you're trying to have everyone be
Speaker 1: able to relax. So this week we are doing another
Speaker 1: rewind our infamous and beloved episodes on King Leopold, the
Speaker 1: Second of Belgium. So tuck in and enjoy yourselves and
Speaker 1: enjoy a real terrible story of a real terrible piece
Speaker 1: of shit. I hope you all have a good week,
Speaker 1: regardless of what you do during it. Hello friends, I'm
Speaker 1: Robert Evans and this is Behind the Bastards, the show
Speaker 1: where we tell you everything you don't know about the
Speaker 1: very worst people in his And this is part two
Speaker 1: of our episode on Leopold, the Second, King of Belgium.
Speaker 1: In part one, we sort of went over how Leopold
Speaker 1: conned his way into becoming king of the Congo, how
Speaker 1: he tricked the locals into signing over their rights to
Speaker 1: their land, and how he conscripted thousands of them into
Speaker 1: a slave army. So now we're going to get back
Speaker 1: into all that and the rest of the terrible, terrible
Speaker 1: story of the Belgian Congo. So the first five or
Speaker 1: so years of the Congo project are great for Leopold.
Speaker 1: He's in total control, richer than God, and most of
Speaker 1: Europe still believes he's improving a lot of the Congolese people.
Speaker 1: But in around eighteen ninety, a black journalist named Colonel
Speaker 1: and he's not really a colonel, George Washington Williams saw
Speaker 1: the actual Congo. So he didn't like take the tour
Speaker 1: where you get led through the nice parts of the Congo, like,
Speaker 1: he went on foot and he got in there and
Speaker 1: he saw the fucking nightmare that Leopold had built. And
Speaker 1: he wrote an article called an open Letter to King Leopold,
Speaker 1: and it was the first expos of Leopold's blood soak,
Speaker 1: rubber regime. William's document is remarkable because he's basically the
Speaker 1: only person up to that point who actually sat down
Speaker 1: with African people and asked them what was going on
Speaker 1: in the Congo. He retraced a lot of Stanley's rat
Speaker 1: along the Congo and actually talked to some of the
Speaker 1: people who'd signed treaties giving their land to Leopold. He
Speaker 1: learned that a great number of chiefs had been tricked
Speaker 1: into signing things with magic tricks. One of the tricks
Speaker 1: was that, like Stanley, had bought a bunch of electric
Speaker 1: batteries in London, and when when attached to the arm
Speaker 1: under the coat, communicated with a band of ribbon which
Speaker 1: passed over the palm of the white brother's hand, And
Speaker 1: when he gave the black brother a cordial grasp of
Speaker 1: the hand, the black brother was greatly surprised to find
Speaker 1: his white brother was so strong that he nearly knocked
Speaker 1: him off his feet. When the native inquired about the
Speaker 1: disparity of strength between himself and his white brother, he
Speaker 1: was told that the white man could pull up trees
Speaker 1: and perform the most prodigious feats of strength. So he
Speaker 1: did a hand buzzer, He did a hand buzzer, and
Speaker 1: these like, if you don't know what electricity is, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's just some sort of superman. Let's sign the peace treaty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, oh, shit.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Another trick was to use a magnifying glass to light
Speaker 1: a cigar and then claim that white people had sun
Speaker 1: powers and he'll burn up your villain, basically like I
Speaker 1: have power of the sun and a lake.
Speaker 2: Riloge on fire. Yeah yeah, God, what a fucking bluff.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah. So Williams writes this open letter. He
Speaker 2: frames it as like presuming Leopold doesn't know how terrible
Speaker 2: things are. He writes about the taking of hands and
Speaker 2: like all of the death and the people who are
Speaker 2: being like starved to death as porters carrying. Is this
Speaker 2: like sort of like modest proposal style, like of course,
Speaker 2: you know, but it's an indictment or do I think
Speaker 2: it is.
Speaker 1: There's a little bit of a satirical bent. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and yeah. So Williams publishes this that but unfortunately he
Speaker 1: dies not long after writing the letter, and Leopold's able
Speaker 1: to clamp down on any kind of outrage after for
Speaker 1: a little while. But seven or eight years later, another
Speaker 1: guy who's an amateur journalist named Morel stumbles upon the conspiracy.
Speaker 1: So he was working as a mid level employee for
Speaker 1: a shipping line that had the contract to handle all
Speaker 1: shipping in the Congo Free State, and so every so
Speaker 1: often Morell would get sent over to Belgium and he
Speaker 1: would report on what's going into and out of the
Speaker 1: port of Antwerp. And so he realizes that the only
Speaker 1: thing coming out of the Congo into Europe is rubber,
Speaker 1: just shitloads of rubber, impossible quantities of it, larger quantities
Speaker 1: than have been reported in fact. And the only thing
Speaker 1: that's going being sent out to the Congo rather than
Speaker 1: trade are just guns and money, and a lot more
Speaker 1: guns than you'd need for any kind of philanthropic enterprise.
Speaker 1: O man, Yeah, so a wire, exactly exactly. So he
Speaker 1: starts he never actually goes to the Congo, but he
Speaker 1: just starts digging, and he starts talking to other people
Speaker 1: who have worked there, and basically he starts a newspaper
Speaker 1: that is focused entirely on exposing King Leopold's crimes to
Speaker 1: the world and starts publishing it all throughout Europe. He's
Speaker 1: active all over the world and basically becomes like the
Speaker 1: Congo equivalent of Wiki Leagues. So all these guys who
Speaker 1: had worked in Leopold's Congo and felt bad were running
Speaker 1: to him and be like, I saw this, this is
Speaker 1: what happened. Here's some documents I managed.
Speaker 2: To Well, it's also like you're like, yeah, this is
Speaker 2: what wikloks was supposed to be, Like this is what
Speaker 2: it could be. And this is also why people like
Speaker 2: that have legitimacy because and why conspiracies have legitimacy because
Speaker 2: guess what there have been Yeah, big complex conspiracy.
Speaker 1: Gi gantic conspiracies. So Morrell starts this newspaper and he
Speaker 1: winds up creating was probably the first modern human rights organization,
Speaker 1: the Congo Reform Association, which is dedicated to stopping this
Speaker 1: this fucking nightmare in the Congo. King Leopold responded by
Speaker 1: inventing the first modern international pr campaign. He bought a
Speaker 1: shitload of journalists of his own, and he had them
Speaker 1: all right puff pieces about how great the Congo actually was.
Speaker 1: He would pay for journalists to go on lavish, carefully
Speaker 1: controlled trips through the Congo. He'd give them exclusive interviews
Speaker 1: when they got back, and he'd use his network of
Speaker 1: agents to help them place their articles in newspapers. He
Speaker 1: got journalists in the New York Times to write quotes
Speaker 1: like I have witnessed more atrocities in London streets than
Speaker 1: I have ever seen in the Congo. He would pay
Speaker 1: for journalists to give public speeches, and he would lobby politicians.
Speaker 1: Leopold's regime was heavily criticized for its widespread use of
Speaker 1: something called the jacote, which is a hippo hyde whip,
Speaker 1: which was used to punish laborers. Prisoners were often lashed
Speaker 1: to death by it, and it's possible that, like literally
Speaker 1: several million people were killed with this whip. So Leopold
Speaker 1: starts catching flak for this, and he decides to distract
Speaker 1: attention from his whipping millions of people to death by
Speaker 1: sending journalists to British colonies and having them write lyrist
Speaker 1: exposees of abuses in British colonies. So his pet reporters
Speaker 1: would write stories about like how the British were using
Speaker 1: whips on prisoners in South Africa or something terrible they'd
Speaker 1: done to people in India, and then yeah.
Speaker 2: Exactly Hilary style, that's exactly it.
Speaker 1: Like I said, he invented the modern art of being shitty,
Speaker 1: like he's he's doing, Like what about ism on a
Speaker 1: massive scale?
Speaker 2: Did he have like an antecedent for like the media,
Speaker 2: like playing the media, or did he just make all this.
Speaker 1: I think he invented this playbook because other people had. Obviously,
Speaker 1: every the media is existed for a while, other people
Speaker 1: have used the media to one agree or other. But
Speaker 1: he is the first person that I've ever run across
Speaker 1: who's using it in the same way politicians use it today,
Speaker 1: in the same way world leaders use it today, Like
Speaker 1: this is a very modern pr campaign. He buys he
Speaker 1: uses his Congo earnings to buy the editors of a
Speaker 1: bunch of newspapers, including the London Times. So he's spending
Speaker 1: like thousands of dollars on just yeah, owning editors so
Speaker 1: that number one, they'll kill stories that are negative to
Speaker 1: the Congo Free State, and so that he can place
Speaker 1: his positive stories once he gets like positive journalists to go,
Speaker 1: you know, have a tour of the Congo and then
Speaker 1: come and write about it. And this is all basically
Speaker 1: a delaying action. Leopold knows eventually the truth is going
Speaker 1: to get out, but he's playing for time. He's got
Speaker 1: twenty years before rubber stops being as profits.
Speaker 2: He doesn't need to do this forever, he just needs
Speaker 2: to do it for a little while.
Speaker 1: He just wants to suck as much money as he
Speaker 1: can out of the situation, and eventually the sheer way
Speaker 1: to facts did change public opinion against him, but it
Speaker 1: took like twenty years. At one point, Leopold is said
Speaker 1: to have seen a cartoon of himself in a German newspaper,
Speaker 1: and in the cartoon he's cutting the hands off of Africans,
Speaker 1: and he reportedly laughed at that and said, cut off hands.
Speaker 1: That's idiotic. I'd cut off all the rest of them,
Speaker 1: but not the hands. That's the thing I need in
Speaker 1: the Congo. So he's a real piece of work. Now,
Speaker 1: in eighteen ninety five, Leopold had started dating a sixteen
Speaker 1: year old prostitute, Nade Caroline. This is when the Congo
Speaker 1: is that at the height of its rubber production, so
Speaker 1: he'd been hooked up to her via a pimp named Durou,
Speaker 1: who was a former officer in the French army. We
Speaker 1: know now that Caroline's whole relationship with Leopold was likely
Speaker 1: a con game, an incredibly successful scheme to snatch his inheritance.
Speaker 1: But at the time, King Leopold, blood drenched, absolute ruler
Speaker 1: of the Congo, was smitten with this teenage prostitute Adam
Speaker 1: Hoschild writes that quote to the extent that someone like
Speaker 1: Leopold was capable of love. This teenage prostitute proved to
Speaker 1: be the love of his life, So he's really he
Speaker 1: got it for this girl hard. He names her. The
Speaker 1: barrenness of Vaughan and the unseemliness of their relationship isn't
Speaker 1: really acknowledged in the nineteen ten biography. It just calls
Speaker 1: her one of the king's quote favorites, and it dances
Speaker 1: around the fact that they got together while the Queen
Speaker 1: was still alive. In general, it refers to the King's
Speaker 1: constant parade of mistresses as distractions. So yeah, Carolyn went
Speaker 1: on to write a bit about their life together, and
Speaker 1: she gives this additional insight into the kind of man
Speaker 1: Leopold was. Quote every evening a steam launch took the
Speaker 1: King to appear, leading to my villa through a subterranean passage.
Speaker 1: Speaking about this, I can't help remarking on the extraordinary
Speaker 1: taste of the King for everything which had a secret
Speaker 1: and mysterious character, anyone who could sell him anyhow, so
Speaker 1: long as it was built on the site of an
Speaker 1: abandoned quarry, or if it had a secret staircase. So
Speaker 1: basically he's gone from being too cheap to rinse his
Speaker 1: fucking like a handkerchief.
Speaker 2: He's like a cartoon villain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, to like a cartoon ville with like lairs built
Speaker 1: into mountain side. It's a hidden boat like grottos and stuff.
Speaker 2: Jesus.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but Carolyn seems to have his number, so she's
Speaker 1: both got him on madly in love with her, but
Speaker 1: she also like she takes advantage of his hypochondriasm or
Speaker 1: whatever you call that, Like whenever she wanted him to
Speaker 1: leave her alone, she'd pretend to have a cough, right,
Speaker 1: and then he'd hide for days because he was scared
Speaker 1: of She's she's my favorite person in this story.
Speaker 2: She's Yeah, this gy locked down.
Speaker 1: So the King is sort of the nineteen hundreds come around,
Speaker 1: is in his late sixties, and he takes to visiting
Speaker 1: his teenage mistress in a large tricycle because again, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's getting.
Speaker 2: More and more to get.
Speaker 1: Yeah for the geno tidle murderer. Yeah, he's riding a
Speaker 1: big tricycle to hang out with his teenage girlfriend.
Speaker 2: Just as bad everyone who every white guy riding a
Speaker 2: tricycle with big old mustache.
Speaker 1: You are all as bad as king shit. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: he's riding a big tricycle, he drinks enough but hot water,
Speaker 1: and he starts referring to himself in the third person
Speaker 1: at this point in time. So, yeah, he's a weirdo.
Speaker 1: He's not entirely past his old ways at this point.
Speaker 1: There's like a story of the time his mistress bought
Speaker 1: a new hat for him and gives it to him,
Speaker 1: and he like flies into a rage, and he only
Speaker 1: calms down when she explains him that she got it
Speaker 1: for a bargain, that it was like a deal, that
Speaker 1: she bought it a quarter of its value. So like
Speaker 1: he's still he's just he's.
Speaker 2: Just a weirdo.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's a weird guy. He's like a weird old
Speaker 1: rich letcher who's just knows what's going on in the
Speaker 1: congo but doesn't like.
Speaker 2: I mean, look, here's the other part. The other way
Speaker 2: to look at that, I suppose is maybe not in
Speaker 2: such a direct degree, but as Americans, we all have
Speaker 2: similar types of blood on our hands that we're electing
Speaker 2: to not think about. Yeah, but we're not we're not
Speaker 2: driving it in the same way, but.
Speaker 1: We absolutely like we all have these phones that we know,
Speaker 1: are made by people who hate the work that they're doing,
Speaker 1: and they're like include minerals that are mined from like
Speaker 1: conflict ridden nations and often use slave labor in one
Speaker 1: And we know that, like the fabric in our clothes
Speaker 1: is often there's slave labor at some point in the
Speaker 1: production line. Leopold knows that because he's signing the orders
Speaker 1: and saying no, cut off more hands, cut off more hands,
Speaker 1: and he's just it's just amazing to me that he's
Speaker 1: able to do that all day, every day and then
Speaker 1: write a tricycle to his teenage girlfriend's house.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but that's it's amazing what you're saying. But to me,
Speaker 2: I'm like, it's a little bit just degrees. I mean, look,
Speaker 2: we're all able to.
Speaker 1: It is degrees. We're all able to compartmentalize the misery
Speaker 1: that's necessary for our comfort.
Speaker 2: Oh yea, but fuck this guy, Yeah, fuck this guy.
Speaker 1: One of the things that was interesting to me reading
Speaker 1: that pro Leopold biography is that, well it does talk
Speaker 1: about ten yeah, nineteen ten, the air after he died.
Speaker 1: He's a spoiler, So this biography of him, it's very positive.
Speaker 1: It talks about how there's atrocity, but it always kind
Speaker 1: of doesn't talk about the detail. It just said, yeah,
Speaker 1: he definitely committed atrocities, but look at this or look
Speaker 1: at how he was. Look at how and everyone did.
Speaker 1: Is like everyone did, and we'll get to that in
Speaker 1: a little. What is interesting to me is that this
Speaker 1: biography does condemn his mistress for capitalizing on the Congo.
Speaker 2: Sure, it notes.
Speaker 1: That she was called the Queen of the Congo by
Speaker 1: the people of Belgium, for she was to benefit largely
Speaker 1: by the atrocities committed in the Free State, where sweating
Speaker 1: and bleeding natives labored so as to accumulate millions for
Speaker 1: the royal favorite. So like he again, he doesn't really
Speaker 1: attack Leopold ever, Like he's like, yeah, he did some
Speaker 1: bad stuff. But this biographer goes off on her mistress
Speaker 1: for like taking money from him. That's that's blood money,
Speaker 1: which like it is blood money. But like she's the
Speaker 1: least objectionable person in this situation.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah she has a little milania. Ask I
Speaker 2: suppose she is, and she maybe knew more what she
Speaker 2: was getting into at the top.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she probably knew less about the Congo because, like
Speaker 1: I doubt just a rich guy. Yeah, she just wanted
Speaker 1: to marry a rich guy like I doubt he doesn't
Speaker 1: seem like kind of guy. We've talked to his mistress
Speaker 1: about the hands or the riks that they were murdering
Speaker 1: people with, and it's at the time, especially probably easy
Speaker 1: to ignore. Yeah, forget about it. Yeah, you don't share
Speaker 1: a lot of that stuff with your yeah, especially not
Speaker 1: your teenage child bride.
Speaker 2: No. No, And as the teenage child bride to just feel like,
Speaker 2: I don't read those books. Yeah, I don't read that article. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So in the early nineteen hundreds, more and more
Speaker 1: stories of abuse in the Congo hit the world press.
Speaker 1: People actually started to take notice and care. They read
Speaker 1: about things like an entire towns worth of boys being
Speaker 1: giving fifty lashes each, which is a fatal sentence for
Speaker 1: laughing in the presence of a white man. In nineteen
Speaker 1: oh four, one of the rubber companies in the Congo
Speaker 1: put one of its own men on trial, mostly to
Speaker 1: show that they were trying to do something about all
Speaker 1: of the horrible crimes. The guy, Charles Cadron, was accused
Speaker 1: of murdering at least one hundred and twenty two Africans.
Speaker 1: The case wound up revealing a bunch of fucked up
Speaker 1: details about like how all the hostage taking and the
Speaker 1: handtaking and stuff actually worked. But Caudrone was released due
Speaker 1: to quote extenuating circumstances. The court said that he'd had
Speaker 1: to contend with quote great difficulties under which Caudron found
Speaker 1: himself accomplishing his mission in the midst of a population
Speaker 1: absolutely resistant to any idea of work in which respects
Speaker 1: no other law than force and knows no other means
Speaker 1: of persuasion than terror. So yeah, yeah, they were asking
Speaker 1: for it defense. They were asking for it works.
Speaker 2: It also still works today, Kainda.
Speaker 1: It does, but it was it was stopping. This is
Speaker 1: at the point where it was working less and less
Speaker 1: in the Congo, and in the early nineteen hundreds, Leopold
Speaker 1: starts dealing with more and more resistance to his ideas,
Speaker 1: both in the Congo and at home. So this is
Speaker 1: also kind of the point of which socialism is starting
Speaker 1: to rise. And socialists obviously aren't big fans of kings.
Speaker 1: Leopold declared himself a mortal enemy of socialism. He fought
Speaker 1: against the universal right to vote for all Belgians.
Speaker 2: Still on the playbook yeah, both of those things. Yep.
Speaker 1: In nineteen oh two, the Belgian Labor Party called a
Speaker 1: general strike and Leopold called for it to be brutally stopped.
Speaker 1: The strikers were fired upon by city guards and eight
Speaker 1: people were killed. The massacre was a calculated message to
Speaker 1: the socialists, don't fuck with the money train. Leopold was
Speaker 1: willing to kill a hell of a lot more than
Speaker 1: eight people to keep the money coming. In Hashchild's book
Speaker 1: relates one six week campaign in the Congo that killed
Speaker 1: quote over nine hundred natives, men, women, and children in
Speaker 1: order to add twenty tons of rubber a month to
Speaker 1: one region's productivity. So that gives you an idea of
Speaker 1: the kind of calculus he's making.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, that's how I mean. Right, it's just lives
Speaker 2: for rubber. Yeah, it just lives for rubber has a
Speaker 2: commodity price.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I have to point out that none of the
Speaker 1: revelations brutality did much to hurt Leopold's popularity at home
Speaker 1: in Belgium. He was growing less popular and even hated
Speaker 1: in a lot of Europe. But even today there are
Speaker 1: Belgian museums that proudly talk about his anti slavery campaigns
Speaker 1: that ignore the whole genocide thing. The crimes against humanity
Speaker 1: didn't hurt Leeopold's legacy. The only thing Belgium couldn't forgive
Speaker 1: him for was being a shitty dad and having a mistress.
Speaker 1: In nineteen oh four, Leopold's daughter Stephanie sued her father,
Speaker 1: the king, for keeping her chunk of her mother's inheritance.
Speaker 1: Leopold fought in court for the right to deny his
Speaker 1: children their inheritance, and in fact denied them any wealth
Speaker 1: or property even after his death. Around this time, a
Speaker 1: Belgian cabinet minister noted that quote, the king has but
Speaker 1: two dreams, to die a billionaire and to disinherit his daughters.
Speaker 3: I mean, what father doesn't want that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, a lot ways kind of cool, always kind
Speaker 2: of cool. Wow.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen oh six, King Leopold finally marries the Baroness.
Speaker 1: They have two sons. His second son was born with
Speaker 1: a malformed arm that just sort of ended in a
Speaker 1: stump with no hand. Obviously, some people suggested this might
Speaker 1: be a judgment from God for all the millions of
Speaker 1: hands that Leopold ordered severed, which is almost more fucked
Speaker 1: up if you think about the morality behind Like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this guy cut off millions of people's hands, let's fuck
Speaker 1: up his innocent baby's hand.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's not how you do that, if you got well.
Speaker 2: First of all, that is definitely how God do that.
Speaker 3: God is a little punchy on the messages.
Speaker 2: Yeah, God, God ain't great with making sure these people
Speaker 2: get their just desserts. Yeah, yeah, because right, because it's
Speaker 2: so funny. It's like all these like just so kind
Speaker 2: of stories where God is just a little like tricky metaphor, man, Like, well,
Speaker 2: you didn't expect this, did.
Speaker 3: You didn't think God would do that?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Oh, just God, get it right, man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Hey, speaking of hands, why don't you use both
Speaker 1: of them to order the products that we are about
Speaker 1: to advertise.
Speaker 2: Here they go.
Speaker 3: And we're back.
Speaker 1: So the general and seemliness of the king's young bride
Speaker 1: and the disinheritance of his daughters meant the public sort
Speaker 1: of deserted Leopold. Once the human rights campaign against his
Speaker 1: atrocities really took off. In nineteen oh eight, King Leopold
Speaker 1: was forced to bequeath his control of the Congo to
Speaker 1: the Belgian government. In exchange, they paid for the colonies
Speaker 1: one hundred and ten million francs worth of debt, most
Speaker 1: of which had been accrued because Leopold used the Free
Speaker 1: State as a bank to buy gifts for his mistresses.
Speaker 1: Before he hands over control of the colony, he'd ruled
Speaker 1: with an iron fist for more than twenty years. Leopold
Speaker 1: has all of the Congo state records burned. I will
Speaker 1: give them my Congo, he said, But they have no
Speaker 1: right to know what I did there.
Speaker 2: Oh what a fuck.
Speaker 3: Such a piece of shit.
Speaker 2: So a thing that I say all the time and
Speaker 2: think about. It's like, yes, of course they're having massive
Speaker 2: conspiracies in history, and I'm sure today, but like oftentimes,
Speaker 2: like there isn't like the basic human competency to pull
Speaker 2: off some of the more far fetched, you know, like
Speaker 2: a Pizzagate style thing. You're like, how could everyone cover
Speaker 2: this up? And then it's like just hearing a story
Speaker 2: of nineteenth century to twentieth century like attention to details.
Speaker 1: He's a genius, Like he really is like a genius
Speaker 1: in the sense that like if you saw a character
Speaker 1: execute a plan like this in a movie, you would
Speaker 1: be like, that's a little far fett that he'd get
Speaker 1: away with it.
Speaker 3: But he did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he's he is an evil genius.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I guess you know what, and it's I
Speaker 2: guess it was from a time when little people were
Speaker 2: less empowered to speak up, yes, because that's the real thing.
Speaker 2: It's like it would be hard to pull off a
Speaker 2: pizza gate because it's not like the top conspirators would
Speaker 2: go to jail. But it's like there's kind of be
Speaker 2: a janitor who's like, what the fuck is this?
Speaker 1: What the fuck's going on there.
Speaker 2: Kids in this basement. Yeah, and that's like less likely
Speaker 2: to happen. That was more controllable back in the day, clearly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And even when that it started coming out, there's
Speaker 1: a lot less of a media landscape. You only get
Speaker 1: the news from your newspapers. You'll read every newspaper. Most
Speaker 1: people don't much of one newspaper. So if you're a
Speaker 1: guy like Leopold, you've got the money to make the
Speaker 1: press do what you want to a big scam.
Speaker 2: And if I understand my history correctly, which I probably don't,
Speaker 2: that was a time when the public had more of
Speaker 2: an expectation that media was biased.
Speaker 1: It was just right, well, yeah, this is like a
Speaker 1: lot of this is right around the time when America
Speaker 1: gets involved in a war with Spain. That's essentially pushed
Speaker 1: by two different newspaper magnets wanting to sell more papers.
Speaker 1: So like, yeah, the press. I mean, he doesn't have
Speaker 1: a great reputation now, yeah, but even still didn't have
Speaker 1: a great reputation then, So yeah, it's like a perfect storm.
Speaker 1: But it also is it was a legitimately brilliant scheme,
Speaker 1: and he did his best to cover his tracks. And
Speaker 1: he died in December of nineteen oh nine at the
Speaker 1: age of eighty four, super rich. And did he make
Speaker 1: that billion Well we'll get to that in a minute.
Speaker 1: What the biography published the next year said that quote.
Speaker 1: Were it not for his private life, his domestic affairs,
Speaker 1: and his avarice, he would have retained his popularity to
Speaker 1: the very last. Belgium as a nation, with the exception
Speaker 1: of the socialists, would have forgiven him the Congo atrocities. Indeed,
Speaker 1: she has forgiven him, for after all, she is destined
Speaker 1: to benefit by them, and she will not grudge her
Speaker 1: king the Royal commission he pocketed on the enterprise. And
Speaker 1: this is where again I want to point out that
Speaker 1: in some total there's no one hundred percent agreed upon
Speaker 1: death toll for Leopold's regiam in the Congo, but the
Speaker 1: likely numbers are between ten and thirteen million, possibly as
Speaker 1: high as fifteen million people. And the Congo was definitely
Speaker 1: the bloodiest of any of the colonies in Africa by
Speaker 1: a substantial margin. But they all killed a lot of people,
Speaker 1: and a lot of them killed a lot of people
Speaker 1: making rubber. And one of the things that was found
Speaker 1: out after Leopold's death is that in the bloody French
Speaker 1: and German colonies that were producing rubber, Leopold owned a
Speaker 1: majority of several of the large rubber making corporates in
Speaker 1: those colonies too, right, so he.
Speaker 2: Was also the first like pan multinational. Right, the corporations
Speaker 2: can be the conduits for the scumbags, because the corporations
Speaker 2: are the scumbags, of course. But Jesus Christ, yeah, so
Speaker 2: he's he's he's a real monster. The late king achieved
Speaker 2: his ambition of disinheriting his daughters. He left them only
Speaker 2: fifteen million francs, the exact amount he'd inherited from his father.
Speaker 2: His entire fortune went to Baroness Devaughan, the prostitute Cortison
Speaker 2: that he fell in love with and married. After his death,
Speaker 2: she immediately married Durow, her pimp, and spent the rest
Speaker 2: of her life living lavishly off the gold made by
Speaker 2: the blood of Congle's labor, which she doesn't come out
Speaker 2: as good as I don't know.
Speaker 1: I kind of like that his inheritance got stolen by
Speaker 1: a scheming prostitute and her pimp friend. Yeah, that's better than.
Speaker 2: I guess if she had murdered him.
Speaker 1: Her, if she'd strangled him with his own beard jabalize.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or poisoned. Maybe she did poison him.
Speaker 1: Maybe she did poison him. I can't hope, so I
Speaker 1: certainly don't know.
Speaker 2: Oh what a grim ass tail uck.
Speaker 1: Yeah. His biography, the nineteen ten biography summed up Leopold's
Speaker 1: life this way, Leopold the second New Belgium, New Europe
Speaker 1: and new humanity. And like a strong man, he had
Speaker 1: a deep contempt for everything and everybody. He loved his
Speaker 1: country and his own interests. For all love is after
Speaker 1: all selfish. Jesus, it's the Victorian age is a bleak
Speaker 1: ass period.
Speaker 2: It's also you know, speaking of although it's not exactly
Speaker 2: the same players, but it's the same types of institutions,
Speaker 2: every one of y'all who whenever this comes out, y'all
Speaker 2: have just enjoyed the royal wedding. Yeah, that shit has
Speaker 2: built off the back of shit, like exactly like this,
Speaker 2: well less.
Speaker 1: Artful than this a lot cool because this is if
Speaker 1: you can like the it's it's up there with the
Speaker 1: Holocaust in terms of like the greatest crimes in human history.
Speaker 1: But as a scheme, his planned is it's like almost artwork.
Speaker 1: It's like watching The Joker and the Good Krysnal and Batman.
Speaker 1: Yeah pull it.
Speaker 2: But also that one too, where you're like it has
Speaker 2: similar moments of like, I feel like some of these
Speaker 2: lives are just to do the lie. Yeah, there's not
Speaker 2: even about achieving the aid even need to do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, there's a lot of like the fuck
Speaker 2: you do that for? Well, it's crazy and so one
Speaker 2: of the more I mean, there's so many fucked up
Speaker 2: things about this. Yeah, I really recommend reading King Leopold's
Speaker 2: Ghost by Adam Hoschild. It's a great book and it
Speaker 2: really delves into the human misery caused by this regime.
Speaker 2: But you know, you're talking ten to fifteen million people killed,
Speaker 2: millions more left without hands, left maimed, starved like whose
Speaker 2: villages were destroyed. The Congo today is still probably the
Speaker 2: least stable state in Africa, or at least one of them. Yeah,
Speaker 2: because all social order was destroyed. Yeah, swats the poppet
Speaker 2: like that. It continues to this day. Leopold's profits, Yeah,
Speaker 2: roughly a billion dollars in modern currency. That's bonkers, that's
Speaker 2: I feel like, that's fucking nothing for what he did.
Speaker 2: Oh in terms of right terms of yeah, not a.
Speaker 1: Billion dollars in nineteen oh nine money, right, iland dollars
Speaker 1: into day's money is what he got for killing ten
Speaker 1: to fifteen million people and destroying Central Africa.
Speaker 2: That's Jesus. Yeah, he's not even extracting enough wealth, Like
Speaker 2: you could do that just by closing up bookshops.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think a lot of that is because
Speaker 1: he had to spend so much money on an army,
Speaker 1: on policing, the same fighting it because there were a
Speaker 1: bunch of rebellions, people who thought back. He had to
Speaker 1: suppress those rebellions, and he had to pay all these
Speaker 1: journalists and like, yeah.
Speaker 2: There you go, fucking capitalists. And he'sn't even profitable.
Speaker 3: To be the worst person in his although I.
Speaker 2: Guess that was the second lesson that everyone turned is like, oh,
Speaker 2: the real profit in pr and making people think they
Speaker 2: want to do this. Now.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you a question that occurred to
Speaker 1: me when I finished researching this, and I wonder about this,
Speaker 1: is Leopold a worse person than Hitler? Because I can't
Speaker 1: not think about that line in The Big Lebowski where
Speaker 1: what's his name Walter's like, say what you will about
Speaker 1: national socialism. At least it's an ethos. Hitler committed crimes
Speaker 1: on a similar, if not much greater scale if you
Speaker 1: include all of the war dead, but he had like
Speaker 1: an ideology behind it, as opposed to Leopold, who this
Speaker 1: was never anything but money. There's no hatred, there was
Speaker 1: no goal, there was no view of the world. It
Speaker 1: was purely if I can make money, and killing these
Speaker 1: people is the fastest way to get it. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't care what happens to them because I want money.
Speaker 2: And it was also separate. I mean, obviously, I guess
Speaker 2: it's just different things.
Speaker 1: They are very different things. Although you look at the Holocaust,
Speaker 1: and this is something that's often glossed over when people
Speaker 1: talk about the Holocaust is how much of it was
Speaker 1: a money making endeavor from the German state because they
Speaker 1: were literally mining people to death, but in terms of
Speaker 1: like taking their hair, taking the gold fillings out of them,
Speaker 1: taking their businesses beforehand, and taking their property. So I
Speaker 1: mean you have with most of like and with really
Speaker 1: with every great genocide, because like if you look at
Speaker 1: the Rwandan genocide, there was a lot of financial motivation there,
Speaker 1: people wanting each other's farms and what.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have to imagine like those are the things
Speaker 2: that allow I mean, like all look but like all
Speaker 2: conflict too. It's like like especially anything sectarian or religious,
Speaker 2: like the Crusades. You know, you can make an economic
Speaker 2: case for the Crusades or or colonialism or at large,
Speaker 2: like all that is sort of possible. I think the
Speaker 2: thing with Leopold's Evil is as as we've discussed already.
Speaker 2: It's like, though not in the same degree, anyone listening
Speaker 2: to this on a podcast thing and on a yeah
Speaker 2: exactly is complicit in something along Leopold's vector, whereas it's
Speaker 2: fewer of us listening to this podcast are complicit in
Speaker 2: some type of thing that Hitler is involved in. So
Speaker 2: I think it behooves us to say Hitler is more
Speaker 2: evil because we don't want to be part you know, like, yeah,
Speaker 2: the banality, I mean, look, not banality, but the you know,
Speaker 2: the it's in the direction of banality.
Speaker 1: Well, I think you're onto something that's great there. And
Speaker 1: I think that's why the idea of the banality of
Speaker 1: evil is so important is because Hitler is it's so
Speaker 1: easy to see the evil and Hitler because he was
Speaker 1: he was showy with like he's the most showy villain
Speaker 1: in all of history. Leopold was a weird old man
Speaker 1: who had a stupid beard and sat in his office
Speaker 1: and never shot anybody, and wrote a tricycle to his
Speaker 1: mistress and was just this weird old dude who was
Speaker 1: happy to orchestrate one of like the great crimes in
Speaker 1: human history just for some cashness pocket And that's scarier.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And you imagine, like he doesn't come up with
Speaker 2: the hands for bullets scheme. No, he's just does they
Speaker 2: need to We can't let them have bullets. We have
Speaker 2: to make sure that like we're accounting for all the bullets,
Speaker 2: that they're not saving them up for a rebellion.
Speaker 1: What can we do? Oh, well, we just make sure
Speaker 1: they prove to us they're using the bullets for a
Speaker 1: good reason when they fire them. How about we have
Speaker 1: them bringing a hand. Great, and that's probably the end
Speaker 1: of the country proof.
Speaker 2: And then the first person bring a million.
Speaker 1: People lose hands. Yeah, Like, then a crime on an
Speaker 1: unspeakable scale happens. And he's just like sitting at home
Speaker 1: being like, boy, I wonder why productions down this week.
Speaker 2: But he can also be like, I'm not the one
Speaker 2: that came up with the hands thing. Oh, it's a shame.
Speaker 2: He can even be like, all the hand things are
Speaker 2: real shame.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a real shame. One of my new guys,
Speaker 1: you know these you know the walloons. Yeah, you put
Speaker 1: him in charge of something and they mess it up.
Speaker 2: I hate that we have to do this, but of
Speaker 2: course we do need that rubber. Yeah, that's that's the
Speaker 2: thing that you know. And look, that's a version of
Speaker 2: every one of us tells ourselves every fucking day. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So that's why I think most people would say Hitler
Speaker 2: is a worse, more evil, because we don't want to
Speaker 2: be complicit in our own evil.
Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, this is Robert Evans from the future. I
Speaker 1: realized that this podcast was a teeny bit incomplete. There
Speaker 1: was some more information I wanted to give out, so
Speaker 1: I gained access to a time machine and went back
Speaker 1: in time to record it. It was either fixed the
Speaker 1: podcast or stopped nine to eleven. Hopefully I made the
Speaker 1: right decision. But I wanted to say a little bit
Speaker 1: more about the Chacota, which we talked about a little
Speaker 1: bit in this podcast. That's the hippo hyde whip that
Speaker 1: was the primary disciplinary tool in the Congo Free State.
Speaker 1: The book King Leopold's Ghost makes a big deal out
Speaker 1: of the Chacota, and it's probably true that the Belgians
Speaker 1: under Leopold whipped more people to death than any other
Speaker 1: regime in history, but that book also points out that
Speaker 1: whipping people to death or nearly to death was basically
Speaker 1: the bedrock that colonialism was founded upon. It relates the
Speaker 1: story of a guy named Roger Casement, who we didn't
Speaker 1: get to talk to you in this podcast. He's a
Speaker 1: very interesting dude. He's one of the men who investigated
Speaker 1: atrocities in the Congo. He also wound up investigating of
Speaker 1: atrocities in the Amazon at a place called Putumayo, where
Speaker 1: the Peruvian Amazon rubber company had been caught basically enslaving
Speaker 1: and murdering people to produce even more rubber, and this
Speaker 1: was for I think the British. It was mostly a
Speaker 1: British owned company, although it was like a corporation with
Speaker 1: a lot of different sort of stockholders behind it. And
Speaker 1: the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company dealt out punishments with a
Speaker 1: whip of their own that was actually a tapeer hide whip,
Speaker 1: but it was similar to the Jacota in its effect.
Speaker 1: Roughly thirty thousand indigenous people in the Amazon died mining
Speaker 1: rubber for that company. Whips, it turns out, were basically
Speaker 1: the glue that made colonialism possible. I found one book
Speaker 1: on slavery in the British West Indies published in eighteen
Speaker 1: twenty four, that admits that whips were quote the main
Speaker 1: spring of the agricultural system in that region of the Empire.
Speaker 1: Whips were also critical to the French colonies as far
Speaker 1: back as the seventeen hundreds, when a visitor to the
Speaker 1: French Antilles noticed that the use of whips was quote
Speaker 1: always excessive and barbarous, with the potential of maiming the
Speaker 1: victim by assaulting his private parts or even killing him,
Speaker 1: if not instantly as has already been the case, in
Speaker 1: due course, as is often the case. So whipping and
Speaker 1: slavery go hand in hand. Obviously, I don't think most
Speaker 1: people are surprised by that, but I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people would be surprised to know that Europeans didn't
Speaker 1: stop whipping subject people once slavery was over. The Congo
Speaker 1: and the Amazon are proof of that, but the atomic
Speaker 1: bomb is actually even more proof. After Leopold died, the
Speaker 1: Belgians continued to control the Congo region and they moved
Speaker 1: on from rubber farming to mining. In the first six
Speaker 1: months of nineteen twenty, a single gold mine is recorded
Speaker 1: as issuing over twenty six thousand lashes to his workers,
Speaker 1: more than eight lashes for every single African quote employed there.
Speaker 1: I say, you know, employed in quotation marks because the
Speaker 1: Belgians kept right on using forced labor, as did the
Speaker 1: British in Kenya up and into the modern era. By
Speaker 1: World War II, Belgium required one hundred and twenty days
Speaker 1: per year of labor for each adult male inhabitant of
Speaker 1: the Congo region, and it turns out that eighty percent
Speaker 1: of the uranium mine to make the bombs dropped on
Speaker 1: Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from Congolese mines that used force labor,
Speaker 1: which means we can thank the Chacote for the first
Speaker 1: atom bombs. The British are also famous for flogging their
Speaker 1: colonial subjects well into the middle of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: By the nineteen twenties, Kenya was the colony where the
Speaker 1: British used the most corporal punishment, or as they called it,
Speaker 1: rough justice. Flogging was seen to be necessary in order
Speaker 1: to deal with the quote raw native Africans, who were
Speaker 1: perhaps so raw because the British regularly whipped them bloody.
Speaker 1: There were attempts in the nineteen thirties to alter British
Speaker 1: penal laws in the colony to be less brutal, but
Speaker 1: they didn't exactly stop the problem of white colonists treating
Speaker 1: black natives like shit. Brutality in the Kenyan colony eventually
Speaker 1: led to the Mau Mau Uprising, which started in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty two when a bunch of rebels calling themselves the
Speaker 1: Malmou killed thirty two white people. This made England go
Speaker 1: bat shit crazy. The English forces rounded up one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand Kenyans and threw them into concentration camps,
Speaker 1: where they were starved and beaten regularly. One survivor recalled,
Speaker 1: we were forced to do work, carrying bricks to build
Speaker 1: a school. We were beaten if we moved too slowly.
Speaker 1: It was very hard work. They would just flog everyone.
Speaker 1: At times four or five guards with whips would come
Speaker 1: into the cell. So at least twelve thousand people were
Speaker 1: killed during the Mammou uprising. Although it's hard to say
Speaker 1: how many of them died from being whipped, the brutalizing
Speaker 1: effect of whipping people certainly had an impact on the
Speaker 1: British men who did it. A Kenyan judge who investigated whipping,
Speaker 1: torture and murder at one British interrogation center compared it
Speaker 1: to a Nazi labor camp and said, quote from the
Speaker 1: brutalizing of flogging, it is only a step to taking
Speaker 1: a life without qualm. So I just thought this is
Speaker 1: a good information to know. People talk about colonialism a lot,
Speaker 1: and it gets, you know, a lot of well deserved
Speaker 1: harsh criticism these days. But I think that the people
Speaker 1: who rightly view it as a horrible historical crime also
Speaker 1: tend to kind of push it further back in history
Speaker 1: and sort of assume that most of the worst stuff
Speaker 1: was done and you know, the seventeen and eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: The reality is that colonialism was still exporting wealth from
Speaker 1: African nations, you know, into Europe well into the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: and that the European nations were using brutal and in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways midia evil justice measures in order
Speaker 1: to keep the colonies compliant. So, uh, there's your happy
Speaker 1: little reminder that not only was colonialism and nightmare, but
Speaker 1: it is a nightmare that happened recently enough that a
Speaker 1: lot of people are still alive to remember it today.
Speaker 1: Uh So just keep that in mind, I guess. And
Speaker 1: now I'm going to use my magical time powers to
Speaker 1: go back to you know, when Andrew and I were
Speaker 1: sitting in the room. Yeah, and we don't want to
Speaker 1: We also don't want to acknowledge like when you go
Speaker 1: to Belgium, which I love Belgium. Yeah, and there a
Speaker 1: couple of times, beautiful country, best beer I've ever had
Speaker 1: in the world, gorgeous giant buildings. Yeah, many in like
Speaker 1: the cities and stuff like ain't really old, beautiful museums
Speaker 1: and stuff, many of which are built on Congo money. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so you don't and and like you we're shitting
Speaker 1: on Belgium here. Yeah, but that's like all of Europe
Speaker 1: you go to, you go to uh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the American North yeah yeah, like that's everything
Speaker 2: was built on the backs of that shit. Yeah. So
Speaker 2: and you know there's there were good people at all
Speaker 2: times being like.
Speaker 1: Ah it sucks, this is really messed up.
Speaker 2: But yeah, but that's the same ever you pick up
Speaker 2: an iPhone and you're like, oh, it sucks that someone
Speaker 2: had for this.
Speaker 1: I do need it though, well, and there are and
Speaker 1: this is again the thing that Leopold's ghost is a
Speaker 1: good job of going into. There are the heroes in
Speaker 1: this story. There's the guy like Colonel Washington who goes
Speaker 1: there and right, there's guys like Morel who are who
Speaker 1: like who don't even see it firsthand, but put it together. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like this can't stand. I have to do something and
Speaker 1: I hope that like, like that's the we got to
Speaker 1: focus on Leopold in this both because his story is
Speaker 1: the blueprint of every terrible person who came after him.
Speaker 1: He really is the first modern monster world like head
Speaker 1: of State, the first one to use pr in a
Speaker 1: really modern way, right, But it's important. It's just as
Speaker 1: important to think about the guys like Morell, who are
Speaker 1: probably more relevant to our own lives because they point
Speaker 1: out like, well, you can do something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you don't have to just say it's a shame.
Speaker 3: Yeah exactly, and it might take fifteen years. Yeah you can,
Speaker 3: it's right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like, these guys will still win to some extent,
Speaker 1: but you can lowerre the margins.
Speaker 3: By which they win.
Speaker 2: You can cut into their profits. Well, right, it's just
Speaker 2: a battle. All you can do is make it less profitable.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 2: Wow, well the Capitalist Revolution.
Speaker 1: Great, that is our podcast.
Speaker 3: For the week.
Speaker 1: Andrew, you want to plug your pluggables?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, well just please listen to you. Is this racist?
Speaker 2: I used to think it was the most depressing podcast
Speaker 2: on the internet, but not anymore.
Speaker 1: And I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter
Speaker 1: at at I Write Okay. You can find this podcast
Speaker 1: on the internet at behind the Bastards dot com. You
Speaker 1: can find us on social media at at Bastards Pod.
Speaker 1: I've got a book you can find on Amazon, a
Speaker 1: Brief History of Vice. So yeah, check my stuff out,
Speaker 1: check us out. We will be back every single Tuesday
Speaker 1: from now until the heat death of the universe with
Speaker 1: a new bastard. So check out as next to you
Speaker 1: though right, yes, can't wait yep okay.
Speaker 2: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 3: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
Speaker 3: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 3: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.