Disclaimer: this meme is pretty dark and the context talks about the atrocities in Belgian Congo, avoid if that’s not your thing.
I’m Belgian myself, don’t know if that’s important here.
Context: The colonial rule of Belgium in Congo is quite infamous already for its brutality.
King Leopold II used a humanitarian and philanthropic pretext to establish the “Congo Free State” as his personal property.
He sent out Henry Morton Stanley, the explorer that discovered Dr. Livingstone, to explore the area of the Congo basin and gain a foothold there using various documents and treaties that actually signed over tribal land to Leopold. All of this to give legality to his claims on Congo at the Berlin conference.
Once Congo was given to him, it got really bad really fast because Leopold had a lot of debts he needed to repay. And the way to repay that for him was to squeeze as much money as he could out of Congo.
Europe was quickly industrializing in this period and they needed a LOT of rubber. There were several plantations being set up in British India, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies.
But rubber trees take time to mature, so Leopold had a window of 20-ish years in which rubber had a high price and he could make as much money as he could before the new plantations started churning out rubber.
So things got brutal: there were rubber quotas. If you couldn’t make the quota, you would be shot. But the administration was afraid the people enforcing the quota (the Force Publique) would start selling bullets, so if you shot somebody you had to bring in their hand to prove it.
That in turn lead to the Force Publique just cutting of people’s hands to bring in and still save the bullet for themselves.
And to make this story even darker: Leopold didn’t like this practice because it cut into his profits.
He’s quoted as saying: “Cut off hands—that’s idiotic. I’d cut off all the rest of them, but not hands. That’s the one thing I need in the Congo.”
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Disclaimer: this meme is pretty dark and the context talks about the atrocities in Belgian Congo, avoid if that’s not your thing.
I’m Belgian myself, don’t know if that’s important here.
Context: The colonial rule of Belgium in Congo is quite infamous already for its brutality.
King Leopold II used a humanitarian and philanthropic pretext to establish the “Congo Free State” as his personal property.
He sent out Henry Morton Stanley, the explorer that discovered Dr. Livingstone, to explore the area of the Congo basin and gain a foothold there using various documents and treaties that actually signed over tribal land to Leopold. All of this to give legality to his claims on Congo at the Berlin conference.
Once Congo was given to him, it got really bad really fast because Leopold had a lot of debts he needed to repay. And the way to repay that for him was to squeeze as much money as he could out of Congo.
Europe was quickly industrializing in this period and they needed a LOT of rubber. There were several plantations being set up in British India, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies.
But rubber trees take time to mature, so Leopold had a window of 20-ish years in which rubber had a high price and he could make as much money as he could before the new plantations started churning out rubber.
So things got brutal: there were rubber quotas. If you couldn’t make the quota, you would be shot. But the administration was afraid the people enforcing the quota (the Force Publique) would start selling bullets, so if you shot somebody you had to bring in their hand to prove it.
That in turn lead to the Force Publique just cutting of people’s hands to bring in and still save the bullet for themselves.
And to make this story even darker: Leopold didn’t like this practice because it cut into his profits.
He’s quoted as saying: “Cut off hands—that’s idiotic. I’d cut off all the rest of them, but not hands. That’s the one thing I need in the Congo.”
More info at the[ Atrocities in the Congo Free State Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_State#). Please be warned that there are some graphic photographs there.
History: the only place where your funeral can get Yelp reviews.
Imagine getting booed at your own funeral. That’s not a legacy, that’s a roast from beyond.
I wonder if his kid would have been any popular without ww1
I mean, they always started with the family of the workers first.
They should’ve sent him to the dutch to be eaten.
Instead they built statues for that cunt.. at least they started to remove the statues and put them in museums to teach history.
Travail et progrès!
iirc Leopold II’s illegitimate son with Caroline Lacroix was born with a shriveled hand, which predictably to relentless mockery of it being karma