CZM Rewind: Part One: King Leopold II: The First Modern Bastard

Original Air Date: June 12th, 2018

Have you ever heard of King Leopold II? In Episode 7, Robert is joined by Andrew Ti (Yo, Is This Racist?) and they discuss the King of Belgium, who was the first world leader to be crappy in the true modern sense of the word. His life’s work was the blueprint for being the kind of terrible that we recognize in modern leaders like Dick Cheney or Vladimir Putin. He pioneered screwing over tens of millions of people for petty personal gain

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zon Media. Hey everyone, Robert Evans here, and you
know it's another holiday week. This is not a holiday
I tend to celebrate, but it is a holiday that
our company gives us off, and I like my team
not having to work. It's also good to not have
to work. And when we drop episodes on weeks like this,
it means you basically have to double up during the

(00:22):
week before the week after, which causes a lot of
stress that isn't necessary when you're trying to have everyone
be able to relax. So this week we are doing
another rewind our infamous and beloved episodes on King Leopold,
the Second of Belgium. So tuck in and enjoy yourselves
and enjoy a real terrible story of a real terrible

(00:46):
piece of shit. I hope you all have a good week,
regardless of what you do during it. Hello, friends, and
welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the show where we
tell you everything you don't know about the very worst
people in history. On this show, we cover monsters like
Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Eric Prince Will Wheaton, and today's topic,

(01:08):
King Leopold. But before we get to King Leopold, i'd
like to introduce my guests for the week, Andrew T
host of YO is this racist and general man about town.
Hello Andrew, what's up? Well? Today we're talking about a
little Belgian dude named Leopold. You ever heard of King
Leopold of Belgium?

Speaker 2 (01:26):
Uh, not particularly.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
King Leopold the second, if that makes sense. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
I feel like, uh, the closest I'm gonna come is
I feel like, at some point I got a box
of fancy chocolates that might have had a a Leopold.
Maybe not the bad Leopold. I assume a good Leopold.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
This is not a good Leopold.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
Yeah, That's what I'm saying. So probably not this particular Yeahold.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
Yeah. Uh. Leopold the second was King of Belgium once
upon a time, and he was, in my opinion, the
first world leader to be truly shitty in the modern
sense of the word. Oh snall, like like like the
k in a shitty that like Putin and Trump right.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Right right, So not right, we're discounting our Genghis cons.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because Genghis Khan like
did what he did, but he didn't have like a
bunch of newspapers that he justified. He was just like,
I'm gonna conquer some shit, right right, right now.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
This is the transition from barbarian bastards into media bastards exactly.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
And I think Leopold of Belgium is really where it
happens in a modern like obviously other people had toyed
with aspects of this. He really nailed it. So King
Leopold the Second's dad was obviously King Leopold the First,
and he was the first king in Belgium. Is that obvious?
Is that?

Speaker 2 (02:36):
Is it always like a like one Pagets two or
is it like, ah, your grandfather was Leopold the First,
I'm Gerald of Belgium, but you're gonna be Leopold too.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
I think that's more how it happens most of the time. Yeah,
not this time. This time Leopold the First was like
this went so, well, yeah, we're gonna have it. The
second going yeah. So Leopold the First was like the again,
the very first king of Belgium at all, because Belgium
had just been made a thing in the wake of
the Napoleonic Wars. So during the whole fighting between Napoleon

(03:07):
and everyone else in Europe, Belgium was generally the battleground
where like the everyone would sort of duke it out
between the Germans and the French and the French and
everybody else. Yeah, Waterloo is in Belgium. Oh so, after
Napoleon's butt gets kicked, the European powers who win are like, okay,
we can't have France and Germany fighting over Belgium. We're
gonna make it its own thing. And since it was

(03:30):
going to be a new country, obviously it needed a king.
So they Leopold the First got the job because he
was a German prince who didn't have a kingdom of
his own.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
Oh okay, so he was just like split off, right,
this is like we're gonna give Megan markle Wales or whatever.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
Part of Whales. Yeah, part of whales. Yeah, yeah, it's
that exactly that sort of thing. They actually tried him
out to be king of Greece first, but he didn't like,
didn't fit for whatever. Yeah, that's an option. We're gonna
find you with something, buddy, don't worry, Leopold. Oh my god,
to put you in a kingdom Greece isn't the right one.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course you try it starter kingdom.
Everyone has a kingdom to start.

Speaker 1 (04:09):
Yeah, yeah, sense, Yeah, Greece was his unsold pilot. Yeah.
And he was, by all accounts a pretty good king
of Belgium if you're into that sort of thing. Yeah. Waffles,
waffles and chocolate, hacolate, getting beer beer, yeah, get great beer,
getting jammed by the Germs, great beer. Great at getting

(04:32):
jammed by the Germans. That's Belgium in a nutshell. But yeah,
he was a good king while he was king. Midway
through his reign in eighteen forty eight, there was like
this big year of revolutions all across Europe, and all
these European countries had their monarchs overthrown except for Belgium.
So the Christian Spring we call that, yes, the white
Man's Spring. That's the last three hundred years. Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
What a time, What a time for the whites, given
up for the whites.

Speaker 1 (04:58):
Yeah, So Leopold the first solid king. I've got two
main sources for today's podcast, which I should note now.
The first is a biography called Leopold, the Second King
of Belgium. It's a pro monarchist book that was written
in nineteen ten. Great the article is critical above of
Leopold sometimes, but he thinks he was like a great king,
and he thinks kings are a good idea. Yeah. So

(05:20):
it's an interesting book because it gives you an idea
of how Leopold himself would sort of present himself and
defend himself and let you know what the propaganda at
the time.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
Was well and also right, just critical enough to be legitimate.

Speaker 1 (05:32):
Well no, no, it's totally I guess for the time
it wasn't bad.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
What I mean, you put in just the faintest of
criticism to give the exact more you know. Yeah, oh,
this is a real investigation.

Speaker 1 (05:46):
Yeah, it's like the monarch's equivalent of one of those
like celebrity biographies Ben Affleck or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
the Heraldo Interview of books exactly right, exactly. And then
the other book is a book called Leopold's Ghost by
Adam Hoschild, which takes the stance that Leopold was when
of history's great monsters. Anyway, so these are these are

(06:07):
most of what I come from, a sort of the
contrasting views that these two books.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
You read two books for a podcast out of your mind, Come.

Speaker 1 (06:16):
On, dog, there's a lot to dig into here. Oh
and there's not a lot.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
You're making me feel real bad. I'm like, usually good
for half a Wikipedia article.

Speaker 1 (06:25):
Holy shit, Well this is at least the equivalent of
like four Wikipedia articles a lot. Geez, go ahead, all right. So, uh,
Leopold the Second's mom Luis was almost a love match
is the term the book uses for his dad, the king,
And it says this because the king was already in
love with her before they get married. Hey, so that

(06:47):
makes it a love match. So nice. He liked her
when she was fourteen, so it's love. The eighteen hundreds
were hell of it.

Speaker 2 (06:55):
And she had the right land I assume, Yeah, she
had some nice land. I'm related to the right enemies
she was with I think from the oily owned family,
so she was like she had.

Speaker 1 (07:05):
Some solid s or royal pedigree. You know. You get
some German from King Leopold the first, you get a
little bit of French from his wife, and then their
baby is sort of a mix. So maybe Germany and
France won't fight over Belgium. And oh what a brave
Yeah didn't write it. Yeah, yeah, So Leopold the Second
was born Leopold Louis Philippe Mary Victor, and he was

(07:27):
his parents' second child. His older brother died eleven months
before he was born. Nice, So if you think about
that timeline a lot, it's not very fun. Because Leopold's
older brother is born. Yeah, he dies, Yeah, eleven months
later they pop out another son. Yeah, immediately, immediately, not
a lot of morning time. Nah, or maybe they just

(07:47):
kind of, you know, fucked the pain away.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
But yeah, yeah, that's probably what happened.

Speaker 1 (07:53):
That's the optimistic look, all right. So at age five,
Leopold's father declared him Duke of Brabant, which is how
he was addressed right up until his coronation. Uh, here's
he said, five, age five? Yeah, h five, great, yeah
you can you all have to be a duke at
age five.

Speaker 2 (08:07):
And he looks he looks like he looks like people
in this port a pretty little duke.

Speaker 1 (08:12):
We'll have the pictures up on our website. He has
no chin and a kind of a lopsided face, but
maybe that's just the painting looks a.

Speaker 2 (08:19):
Little bit like a ghost, like a human ghost.

Speaker 1 (08:22):
It looks like the painting of a ghost that you
find in the basement of an old house. Yeah, and
then like there's a rush of wind and the camera
falls over and like, yeah, your friend gets mauled by
a spirit.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
Yeah, and that's this guy's selfie essentially. Yeah, that's this
guy's like, this is the image we want to put
out into the world.

Speaker 1 (08:40):
Yeah, this was like hanging in palaces. Yeah. Yeah, height,
So he looks like a creeper from dad, a little
spooky boy, but he's still a baby. So the biography
notes that Leopold and his siblings were brought up in
quote the simplest manner and taught to behave as if
they were normal citizens rather than royalty. That sounds great
until you get to the next part quote. The king

(09:01):
further expressed the wish to develop in the children the
sentiment of duty and not to allow them to have
an opinion of their own with regard to their duties
and their studies. Basically, the king was trying to crush
the individuality of his kids so that they would just
fit the role of king. That's kind of yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:18):
Good, Actually is it isn't that? Well, what else are
you gonna do because they got to do.

Speaker 1 (09:22):
This dumb job? Well, I mean, you could try to
make them be healthy, fully formed people.

Speaker 2 (09:27):
Yeah, but why then they got to be king.

Speaker 1 (09:30):
Yeah. Well, okay, that's fair. I mean we're taking Leopold
the first side.

Speaker 2 (09:35):
Yeah, well he's the good one again, I'm piating his chocolate. No,
but right, isn't that the he's he's just as trapped
as everyone else, you know, Yes, so if he's got
to do this thing, you.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
Might as well make it so he can do this thing. Okay,
So you're expressing some motivation maybe to why you would
do this, why you would do what he winds up doing,
and you don't even know what he winds up doing
what they do? Yeah, what did I just defend?

Speaker 2 (10:00):
I still let me just say right now, whatever he does,
I stand behind it.

Speaker 1 (10:03):
Well, he kills about ten to fifteen million people. Yeah
that's fine. Okay, Well, what's it? So? When Leopold is fifteen,
his mom dies of some illness or another. It's one
of those things where the writers at the time aren't specific.
They're just like she took ill and was, yeah, sick
for it, like and then she dies like yeah, yeah,
it's probably diphtheria or some weirdo named it the flu disease. Yeah,

(10:26):
if it was a flu would be a big deal,
I guess. I mean it's probably is a flu like
that killed everybody back then. Yeah. Yeah. In King Leopold's Ghost,
Adam Haschild describes Leopold's childhood as being kind of stark
and cold. Quote, if Leopold wanted to see his father,
he had to apply for an audience. When the father
had something to tell the same, he communicated it through

(10:47):
one of his secretaries.

Speaker 2 (10:48):
I mean, look, this is not just eighteenth century arrested development.

Speaker 1 (10:54):
Yeah, quite a nice Yeah, yeah, that's kind of what's
going on. Like, he definitely has a buster Bluth vibe
to him.

Speaker 2 (11:01):
Again, especially once you see this fucking painting, you'll get
it audience.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
The biography that was written at the time says that
it is worthy of note that the late king never
had any comrades or playmates. His childhood was passed among
his teachers and tutors, and the disciplinarian father made even
more the relationship with his brother and sister a very
formal one. Frank, childish gaiety and brotherly expansion and confidence
were banished. The prince's thoughts thus became concentrated upon himself

(11:27):
and his natural activity and vitality. His exuberant strength were
expended on work and study. Tight, yeah about it. No, friends,
does nothing but work. Yeah, he is a duke. Yeah,
I mean he's already achieved a lot. I mean he
is kind of a boss baby. Yeah, just throw that
out there. So he grows up, He serves in the

(11:47):
Belgian military. He apparently does okay. By his early twenties,
Leopold becomes an influential figure in Belgian politics. You know,
he's the crown prince everyone, he's going to wind to
be in king. Yeah, and he kind of looks a
little like Adam Driver. He yeah, he looks here. He
looks like a anime Adam Driver. Yeah. Yeah, that's who
you would cast, is anime Adam Driver. Yeah yeah, in

(12:10):
the movie. So, like many rich young people, he traveled
far and wide in his early twenties. He went all
throughout the Middle East, North Africa, parts of Asia. But
he was not traveling for his enjoyment. It was basically traveling.
The biography says, it's like a commercial employee. So he
was essentially looking for financial opportunities for Belgium because this

(12:30):
is the period when all of Europe is colonizing the
entire world. Yeah, Belgium doesn't have a colony, so he's
traveling all around the Middle East in Asia basically being
like what can yeah, who's yeah? Whose line can we take? Yeah? Yeah,
what can we get? Does this hop ahead to the Congo?
Oh yes, oh nice, Yeah that's where we're headed.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
Tight, Okay, how do I know that tiny bit of history?

Speaker 1 (12:52):
It's one of those things that drops in every now
and then you'll hear like, oh, yeah the Belgiums did
something bad in the Congo, but you don't ever get
I don't know any tell story.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
In fact, I probably no more plot points from Michael
Crichton's The Congo than than reality is the Cogo.

Speaker 1 (13:07):
Yes, I mean there's unconfirmed reports that he tried to
find the lost City of Zine, but no, great movie.

Speaker 2 (13:16):
Is that what they were doing there?

Speaker 1 (13:18):
Yeah? Yeah, they're trying to find diamonds. That a monkey
There was a monkey city, Yeah, find diamonds. Yeah, the
monkeys were evil. Yeah, that's more what I remember. Solid,
to be honest, really solid. Now, Yeah, there's a laser.
There is a laser. There's definitely a laser in that movie.
Oh man, what a weird.

Speaker 2 (13:34):
It's a ride, Michael Crichton, We're still watching as bullshit,
I can't believe West World.

Speaker 1 (13:39):
Yeah, sorry, okay, So, uh, Prince Leopold, one of his
favorite books as he's a young man studying trying to
find a new colony for Belgium is a book about
the Dutch East Indies called Java, How to Manage a Colony.
Uh yeah, why would you?

Speaker 2 (13:56):
Oh my god, I mean, I guess that's what you
have to tell people your favorite book is.

Speaker 1 (14:01):
But yeah, that's well, no, I mean, because so the
book is all about how the Dutch colonized the island
of Java and how they got a shitload of coffee
and sugar and like dyes and tobacco, and it made
basically made so much money that they were able to
buy a bunch of railroads and canals back in Holland.
So like, the book is all about that. So it

(14:22):
outlines sort of how they were able to monetize Java
so well, and like it talks about how the king
basically brought in a bunch of private companies and became
a major shareholder in those companies. And it was the
company's job to farm the land and to produce the
resources and export them to Belgium. So the king didn't
have to send Dutch government workers over do anything. The

(14:42):
king just said, I own Java corporations. Come in, give
me a stake in your profits, and do whatever you want.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
I think it's just cool to have political leaders also
own corporations. That has never been a problem. I never
will be a problem.

Speaker 1 (14:56):
No, it seems to always work out great. It seems
to work out great one hundred perc end of the time.
The book also did note that the Dutch prophets in
Java would have been impossible without a huge amount of
forced labor, and young Prince Leopold agreed with this and
said that forced labor was quote the only way to
civilize and uplift these indolent and corrupt peoples of the
Far East. Yeah, yeah, he ain't wrong. Go ahead, what else?

(15:19):
What else you got? I thought you said this guy
was bad, all right. So late in his dukedom, you know,
a few years before he becomes king, Leopold gets him
in front of Belgium's Senate and he urges them to
take up foreign colonies. So they got a king and
a senate. Yeah yea, so uh. Basically, the king of
Belgium is kind of a ceremonial figure he's got. He's
got more power than like the queen in England has today.

(15:41):
It's heading towards but it's heading towards that. There's no
formal power, lots of soft power, lots of soft power
and a little bit of formal power. Okay, but you
can't do things as the king like just make colonies, right?
You can't do things? Is the king like sin the
army places? Yeah? Yeah, And so leop Hold's dad seems
to be okay with that. But Leopold is growing up

(16:04):
chopping at the bent to do shit and doesn't want
to become a monarch who just waves at the crowd.
Why So he gets up in front of the Senate
and he says, quote, I am profoundly convinced of our
vast resources, and I passionately wish that my beautiful country
would show the necessary pluck to derive all the benefit which,
in my opinion, it can derive. I think that the

(16:24):
moment for our expansion abroad has arrived. We must not
lose time, otherwise the best positions and markets, which are
becoming more rare every day, will be occupied by nations
more enterprising than ourselves. And when he talks about positions
and markets. He's talking about yeah, whole countries and stuff.
I mean millions of people.

Speaker 2 (16:42):
It's more chilling in the original Flemish.

Speaker 1 (16:45):
Yeah, Flemish. Yes, yeah, he nailed it, although he probably
would have been speaking just French.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
For a All right, so say Flemish.

Speaker 1 (16:55):
Well you can say, you can say Walloon if you want.
I'm kidding, what is that. That's the other group of people.
There's Belgium is made up of Flemish people and Walloons. Yeah,
the Wallunatics.

Speaker 2 (17:06):
Yeah, of course, band aid on their face.

Speaker 1 (17:08):
We got it. That's a rough name to grow into
the world stage taking on.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
Ah, well, you know, you gotta get you get enough rifles,
get enough cutlasses, everything starts to make sense.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
I don't feel like it does. I feel like Germany
was so fierce in part because German is like, that's
like an name, like the Germans are coming. Imagine if
the name got switched and the Belgians were called the Germans,
and like the Nazis had tried to invade, and everyone
was like, oh, the Walloons are invading. Yeah, that's not
going to go. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:38):
Yeah, well listen, let's boot up a risk game.

Speaker 1 (17:43):
Yeah, we'll figure it out, all right. So yeah, Leopold
the first, Leopold the Second's dad died in December of
eighteen sixty five, the same year the American Civil War ended.
Leopold is now the king and thirty years old. This
appears to be the point when he decided to grow
a gigantic mountain man beard tight, which he would maintain

(18:05):
for the rest of his day. He needed it. Yeah. Well,
there's a lot of pictures of Leopold with a beard.
We'll post him on the site. Some of them look
uncomfortably like me. Some of them are clear missteps in
the beard growing process, where he's got like gigantic mutton
chops and it's he looks like a fucking hair octopus
style of the time. Yeah, he went through some rough

(18:25):
patches in his sartorial history, for sure. That's pretty.

Speaker 2 (18:29):
That's got ain't easy we're looking at Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:33):
That's a rough picture, cheap and it's almost he's almost
wearing bell bottoms in that picture. A it's the sixties.
It is the eighteen sixties boom, all right. So yeah,
Leopold's the King of Belgium. He's super frustrated because the
king doesn't have that much in the way of power.
Leopold takes to sort of mocking the restrained role that

(18:55):
he has in Belgian politics. There's a story of like
this guy who came to visit him because like, you know,
the king's got a visit with like his donors and
benefactors and whatnot. And this guy complains about the poor
state of the roads around his property, and Leopold interrupts
him and says, I have no authority to change the roads.
You want to address yourself to the press, especially to
the small papers. The municipality and the government will do

(19:15):
anything they ask. So he was like, he was like
making a point. Yeah, I'm frustrated that, like I can't
do anything, so I'm just kind of like to take
it to the press. Your King's not allowed to do anything.
He sort of set to work making himself into kind
of an image for the Belgian people. He was the
aristocratic equivalent of an alpha male. He spent a lot

(19:36):
of time doing science work and you know, supporting the
arts and sciences. Nineteenth century science is just like beakers
of lead and shows. He's pouring colored water into beakers.
He's got goggles on, you know, you know how that goes. Yeah,
there's a quote from his biography that says he used
to sleep in a camp bed so like a military

(19:56):
cot and had a general horror of everything that could
innervate or under him. A feminate, so he's kind of
like a he's a proud boy. Proud boy.

Speaker 2 (20:05):
Yeah, that's what they call people who aren't racist soy boys.

Speaker 1 (20:09):
Is that right? Yeah? Because eating soy feminizes you again, Yeah,
that's what that's the alt right thing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:18):
Hey, well at least we know that they have a
nice historical antasy.

Speaker 1 (20:22):
Leopold would have been all about that stuff. So he's
he's grown a giant, weird beard, he's sleeping in a
palace in a military cop He's scared of girls. Uh.
He hates spending money. His biography says, quote his pocket
handkerchief was only renewed on Sunday mornings when going to Mass,
and on no account would he take another in the interval.
If his valets changed his towels more than once a week,

(20:44):
they were sure to receive a good scolding from his majesty.
What So he's like a gross miser. Yeah, don't clean
those dells. Oh, which one of those wasn't one? Of
the alt right guys living in their mom's basement.

Speaker 2 (20:56):
I think most of them are will definitely want Yeah
yeah that guy, yeah, ruche V, the pickup artist guy
that was found living in his mom's base Yeah, yeah,
that's what this guy was. Leopold was missing. Yeah, yeah,
I guess the Beard. The Beard experiment clearly on that factor.

Speaker 1 (21:15):
His mom died young, so he became a king. Yeah yep.

Speaker 2 (21:18):
Instead, okay, called peacocking everyone I interract women the kingdom.

Speaker 1 (21:24):
Yeah, kick, I mean having a castle is pretty solid peacocking,
that's true. Yeah, undeniable yeah. Uh. Leopold the Second was
noted in his biography is the first king to treat
his kingship as a corporate endeavor. His primary concern was
making money, not for Belgium, but for himself. It's all
about the bottom line. Yeah. So there's like when you

(21:48):
talk about dictators and warlords and terrorists, there's like a
tendency to call them psychopaths and sociopaths. Yeah. Sociopath is
like an actual medical diagnosis. And I don't think guys
like Hitler or Stalin, Yeah really it because they all
had histories of like warm family life and like people
who cared about them and people that they like sacrificed for.
At times, Leopold might have been a straight up like

(22:11):
the mark store level monster.

Speaker 2 (22:12):
Yeah, because that's that's what they say, right, is like
so many CEOs and Fortune five hundred whatever the fu. Yeah,
there was over represented, like psychopathic traits.

Speaker 1 (22:24):
Yeah. Even his positive biography says that while he was charming,
he was quote devoid of enthusiasm and set himself and
was quite incapable of arousing any and others. So he
just can't utually touch people's heart. Yeah, he can't motivate people. So, yeah,
we're going to get more into the soulless Leopold the second,

(22:46):
his scheme to find a colony and the colony that
he eventually founds. But first we've got some ads.

Speaker 2 (22:55):
Of course, we all realize it's a pro corporate podcast,
so let's keep it real.

Speaker 1 (23:02):
Here's some buying advice, and we're back. We're back. We're
talking about King Leopold, who is searching for a little
colony somewhere in the world to fill that hole little.

Speaker 2 (23:19):
Heart the Deuce, of course.

Speaker 1 (23:20):
Yeah, Leopold, the Deuce. Leopold I Electric Boogloo whenever you
want to call him. We were just talking about what
a Solis sociopathic creepy is. Allegedly, yeah, allegedly. Well here's
another quote again, This is from like a positive pro
Leopold biography that he probably paid for. He disliked music, hunting, tobacco,
and had no taste for physical exercises except walking. Although

(23:40):
a frequent visitor at Austin, which is like one of
his palaces, he never learned to swim. He was seen
yawning in a gala performance of Faust. So he doesn't
like plays, he doesn't like art. He hates music. Like
That's the thing. Any book you read about him, anyone
who knew him. He hated music, like not like he
hated popular music. Yeah, music itself was offensive to him.

Speaker 2 (24:02):
So that's fascinating. Well that's cutting into the American psycho narrative.

Speaker 1 (24:08):
Yeah unfortunately, yeah a little bit. Yeah, he's a weird guy.
He's very vain, but his main vanity was quite odd.
He thought he had the most beautiful hands in all
of Europe, tight his biography. What his biography notes. Another
of Leopold's hobbies was his dislike for gloves, and although
he often wore uniform he is never reported to have

(24:31):
put on gloves. It may have been a hatred of restraint,
but more probably it was a pardonable vanity on the
part of the late king, for he possessed the shapely
and beautiful hand of the Orlean family.

Speaker 2 (24:42):
That rules so hard.

Speaker 1 (24:45):
Here's the only picture I could find hands. No, he's
holding the gloves in his hand, so his hand is
not even stronger.

Speaker 2 (24:53):
Actually, yeah, like reminding people you could be wearing gloves.

Speaker 1 (24:56):
I'm the master of the Yeah, and his I mean,
in fairness to him, his hands are beauty full in
this picture. I mean they just just look at the
bone definition. Yeah, they are shapely. They good ass hands. Yeah,
they good ass hands. Oh man, So that.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
Means that he made some painter do multiple drafts on
those hands.

Speaker 1 (25:13):
That's like, this is like, isn't it wait, rested development
where the guy has a fake hands.

Speaker 2 (25:18):
Always always thought the lawyer and always Sonny always has
fake hands.

Speaker 1 (25:22):
And yeah, then there's some things to be said about
our president and hands. Nah, it's weird. It's weird that
you would even like, I never think about my hands, Yeah,
like how they look like when I'm thinking about someone
taking a picture of me. Like zero percent of the time,
and I'm like, oh my god, my hands do they
look shapely?

Speaker 2 (25:38):
Do you know what's crazy is I had to send
a picture of a piece of equipment for this job
I'm on to a technical person and I just took
a picture of my phone and send it to them.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
And I realized as I was sending the email, I
was like, my hands a fucked up in this.

Speaker 2 (25:58):
I'm having a real low hand self esteem day.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
Oh I think you have the shapely hands of the
or Leone family.

Speaker 2 (26:05):
I know you're being really nice right now, but it's
actually a little hilarious that the one day possibly in
my life, that I've noticed my hands.

Speaker 1 (26:15):
Horrible, I was like, what the fuck is up with
my hands? Only these were feet. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:19):
I've been an arm model before. My friend was doing
some not like you know, elbows down I was doing,
was doing some stock photography, which like I wanted to
take pictures of your arms, and I was like, you're
wilding out. So you know what, I'm good. I'm good
risk to elbow, wrist to elbow, Yeah, I got I
got forearm, my forearms are I'm about it?

Speaker 1 (26:37):
Well. Leopold was a hand man. Yeah, so We've got
this frustrated, greedy, gorgeous handed king on the throne of Belgium.
He keeps trying to get his countrymen to jump on
board the having a colony train that the people of
Belgium express zero interest in this. Oh okay, wait, why
what do you mean? All right? Because obviously all.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
European colonialism is pretty much the root of almost everything.

Speaker 1 (27:01):
That's wrong in the world right now. But here is.
But I don't understand why they.

Speaker 2 (27:06):
I mean, they certainly didn't I'm gonna guess not want
to do it.

Speaker 1 (27:09):
For the reasons why I don't think they should have
done it. I think the Belgians, for one thing, So
the Belgiums of this era, anyone who's like a mature
adult lived through what was at that point, he equipped
World War two, the Napoleonic Wars, like we just don't
want any trouble, Like you just want to stay in
Belgium and eat chocolate and drink beer. We don't really
want to go to Africa or Asia. And let's say

(27:31):
the first of die not the first? Can I say?

Speaker 2 (27:34):
I can continue an incredibly list, long list of ignorant
as shit. I'm about to say.

Speaker 1 (27:39):
You do you is Belgium landlocked? No? No, no, no,
it has an antwerp antwarp, that's right, Okay, a number
of small Yeah. Yeah, it's a wee little country. You
can drive across it in a couple of hours. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 (27:52):
I was just like, okay, yeah, I was just like,
it's funny to imagine a landlocked country ownings and stuff.

Speaker 1 (27:58):
But of course they can. Who gives a shit, But
they're not landlocked, so fuck me. Yeah, no they're not.
They didn't have a colony at this point, and they
seem to have zero interest in having one now. At
this same time, from eighteen seventy four to eighteen seventy seven,
when Leopold's like a decade or so into his kinghood,
there's this explorer named Henry Morton Stanley, and yeah, from

(28:19):
seventy four to seventy seven, he completes a seven thousand
mile expedition across Central Africa. Much of his travels centered
upon the still undiscovered by like white people, Congo. No
one had like mapped the extent of the Congo River.
We didn't know where it originated from at this point.
So at this time in European history, like different explorers

(28:39):
mapping Africa are kind of like the Marvel movie franchise
of the day. Yeah, Like each of these guys is
world famous and like newspapers breathlessly cover every expedition, and
whenever they finish an expedition, they write a book and
millions of people by it so automatically exactly, this is
like the thing people care about at this point in time.
It's like what these explorers are doing in Africa and

(29:00):
all over the world.

Speaker 2 (29:01):
Like that just means if I were alive then and
a white person two big f's, I would be like
struggling to get on one of the good expeditions.

Speaker 1 (29:11):
Yeah you really like fingers crossed. It's not one of
the ones where people eat each other.

Speaker 2 (29:16):
Yeah yeah, yeah, statistically a lot of them are.

Speaker 1 (29:19):
Yeah. So Stanley maps like a huge chunk of the Congo,
more than anyone had ever done before, and it's like
big news. He gets back to Europe from Africa and
he goes on tour. He's doing like speaking engagements. He's
a big celebrity.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
I feel like there's a lot of like skulls and
calipers in a talk like this.

Speaker 1 (29:36):
Yeah, and probably buckets of racism. Yeah, like totally unexamined racism.
My look, don't look. If you don't look, it's not there. Yeah,
that's the racist motto. So he's touring around and King
Leopold winds up meeting with him. Stanley had been bullish
on the idea that the Congo would be a great

(29:56):
place for a colony, and he wanted the British to
set up a colony there the Ogs.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
You want to go to the best colonizing studio first.

Speaker 1 (30:05):
Yeah, exactly, that's like the is Paramount good? Probably not.
I don't know anything about the Warner Brothers we all
live in.

Speaker 2 (30:12):
But the Disney that's the Disney.

Speaker 1 (30:14):
Yeah, Britain's the Disney of colonizing. Yeah, And instead he
goes to I don't know who's who's making DC's garbage movies,
Warner Brothers, Warner Brothers. Okay, so Leopold's Warner Brothers.

Speaker 2 (30:26):
No, they're not even in it.

Speaker 1 (30:27):
Leopold is like this has gotten very confusing. Leopold is like, uh, a.

Speaker 2 (30:32):
Snapchat making stuff, Like technically they got the our YouTube
like it's a YouTube show. Yeah, you know, like they
got the money. Let's actually call it no history for it,
but who knows.

Speaker 1 (30:42):
I feel like we actually hit upon the right thing
to compare him to, which is Amazon. Yes. Yeah, yeah.
So Stanley tries to sell his Congo idea to Disney
Slash Britain and it fails, and King Leopold aka Amazon's like, well,
we might be interested in this plan. Yeah, we'll fund this.
Why don't you, Why don't you give me your elevator

(31:03):
pitch colony in the Congo? Huh? I like it. I
like this idea. Yeah. So Leopold contracts Stanley to work
for him and he sends him back to Africa with
a new mission. So Leopold's master plan here, I'm going
to appeal back for a minute. Then we're going to
zoom into the different pieces because it's a complicated ass plant.
His master plan is to create the Congo Free State,

(31:24):
which is a supposedly independent African nation that just happened
to also be ruled by King Leopold the Second. Sure,
So he went about doing this in a few ways.
In eighteen seventy six, he hosted the Brussels Geographic Conference,
where he invited a bunch of European experts to form
the so called International African Association, which, of course had

(31:44):
no Africans as members. The association was a supposedly philanthropic organization.
I'm going to read you a selection from Leopold's speech
at the conference where he sort of lays out what
he wants to do. The subject that calls us together
today is one that demands a first place in the
attention of friends of humanity to open up to civilization.
The only part of our globe where she has not
yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness that envelops entire populations

(32:07):
is I may venture to say a crusade worthy of
this century of progress, and I am glad to observe
how very favorable public feeling is to its accomplishment. The
current is with us. So he gets this association together
and he says, this is an international group and we're
trying to civilize Africa and improve lives of people who
were there.

Speaker 2 (32:26):
I didn't realize that back then. The rhetoric was already
like the kind of like, ah, this is to help
them double speak. I actually just assumed they were like, yeah,
I'm gonna take this ship from black people.

Speaker 1 (32:39):
No, they are, and these guys the people he invites
to the Geographic conference and forms the International African Association
with these guys are a lot of people who legitimately
want to make things better for Africans who aren't even
thinking about making it. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:53):
These are the well meaning liberal white people.

Speaker 1 (32:56):
Yeah, exactly, and like missionaries who are like and well
meaning liberal white people. Because there's an Arab slave trade
in Africa, like traders moving through the Congo, and the
abolition movement is very big at this point in time,
and so these people are being like, we've got to
stop the slave trade in Africa. So Leopold's like, we
can do that. And there's a bunch of people who
are like, we've got to Christianize the Africans, and Leopold's like,

(33:17):
we can do that, and like so that's that's what
he's claiming this association.

Speaker 2 (33:21):
Okay, so this is right, This is like definitely like
colonialism two point zero or three point zero.

Speaker 1 (33:26):
He steps ahead of everyone. Yeah yeah, he's not even
framing this as colonialism. He's framing this as a charitable
endeavor to exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So he suggests that
Belgium would be a great place for this new international
body to meet because it's a neutral country and it's
centrally located in Europe. And then he suggests that he
might be a good person to run the association just
for its first year. You pitch yourself, you know, you

(33:48):
got to be for its first year. And he assures
them all that he's doing this from the goodness of
his heart. He says, Belgium is small, she is happy
and satisfied with her lot. I have no other ambition
than to serve well. And it was true that Belgians
were pretty happy with their lot. But Leopold did have
some ambitions. So he gets elected head of the International

(34:08):
African Association the first year, and then he gets elected
the head of it the second year too, even though
that was supposed to be illegal. Back to back, and
then the association kind of stops existing, and Leopold replaces
it with the Committee for Studies of the Upper Congo,
and then he replaces that with the International Association for
the Congo. On paper, these are all different international philanthropic groups.

(34:31):
Their names were deliberately forgettable and similar, so the public
would assume they were all the same thing. In King
Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hoschild writes that Leopold directly told his
aides quote, care must be taken not to let it
be obvious that the Association of the Congo and the
African Association are two different things. The public doesn't grasp that.
So in reality, all of these philanthropic groups are shadow

(34:54):
fronts for Leopold's plan to conquer the Congo. So they're
all charity organizations that he gets international aid money getting
sent into, and he's able to pour Belgian government funds
into as rights and donations, just like Hillary Clinton. Exactly
like Hillary Clinton. Yes, you've watched the documentary Clinton Catch
by Deniche Desoza. Yes.

Speaker 2 (35:16):
The thing that's amazing about this is it's so complicated
a plan that doesn't feel like I mean, I don't
you know, I'm a super smart person.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
Of course I'm not.

Speaker 2 (35:28):
Finding a place where you could improvise your way into this.

Speaker 1 (35:32):
You just gotta wait, because we're not even halfway through
the planet. Like this, he's he is a legitimate like okay,
so the villain that Marvel keeps trying to write and
like failing to write in my opinion, where it's like
the low key character where there he's got all these
plans within plans and the step ahead Leopold actually was
that guy to the whole world, but in sort of
the same villainous way. You're like, this is insane.

Speaker 2 (35:54):
There's so many things that could go wrong in this.

Speaker 1 (35:57):
So he's now created three different philanthropic associations just because
like the backers will start realizing that the association's fake
and they'll pull their money, but he'll keep the organization alive,
or he'll roll its assets into a new organization. And
nobody who got caught, who realized that this was some
weird show company, wants to admit that they got caught,
so they just don't say anything, and the public just

(36:18):
hears like, oh, it's the new thing is out the
International African Association. It's that group of people trying to
make life better in Africa, right, So he all these
groups are basically funneling money into the work of Henry
Morton Stanley, that explorer who Leopold sent back to Africa.
So Leopold sent him back in eighteen seventy nine, and

(36:38):
his job was to start building, using the association money,
a series of stations along the Congo River to act
as like waypoints for steamboat traffic. He also met with
hundreds of local chiefs all throughout the Congo, all the
different people who had chunks of land throughout the Congo,
the different villages and chiefs, hundreds and hundreds of them.
He meets with these guys and he gets them to
sign treaties giving up their rights to the land. Here's

(37:02):
a quote from Hostchild's book. The very word treaty is
a euphemism. For many chiefs had no idea what they
were signing. I few had ever seen the written word before,
and they were being asked to mark their excess to
documents in a foreign language and in legalese. These guys
weren't ignorant of the concept of diplomacy. They knew it
meant to write treaties of friendship with neighboring tribes or villages.
They understood the idea of a non aggression pact, and
that's what they thought these were. The reality was somewhat different.

(37:25):
Quote in return for one piece of cloth per month
to each of the undersigned chiefs, besides present of cloth
in hand, they promised too freely of their own accord
for themselves and their heirs and successors, forever give up
to set association the sovereignty and all sovereign and governing
rights to all their territories. So basically he gives them cloth.

(37:46):
They think that they're getting some sick ass clothes just
for Agia.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
This is this is a thing. Here's our everyone gets
a jersey.

Speaker 1 (37:54):
You give us shirts. We promise we won't shoot you.
We don't want to shoot you anyway. That sounds great.
In reality, these are all statements saying that they give
up other rights to the International African Association, and the
Association will have the right to collect taxes on the
people who gave up their rights to their land, and
those taxes, because there's no currency in most of the Congo,

(38:15):
those taxes can be paid in labor. So Leopold gets
hundreds of chiefs from Stanley to sign these agreements. Yeah, Jesus,
so Europe thinks Stanley's over there doing valuable philanthropic work
fighting with the slave traders and trying to open the
Congo up to free trade. That's the buzzword everyone's using.

(38:36):
It's like, we're going to open the congoup to free
trade and it'll benefit the Africans, it'll benefit Europe. Everyone
will benefit if there's free trade in the Congo. Meanwhile,
what he's actually doing is getting pieces of paper that
give Leopold the rights to the Congo, that make it
look like all these chiefs have come together and said,
we want this guy to be our king, and we
want to be a country. So I feel like I

(38:58):
should break for just a second and talk a little
bit more about Henry Morton Stanley. Who's the guy who's
actually doing all this leg work. He was one of
the greatest explorers in history, and he was also a
human garbage fire sort of a definitely a Darth Vader too.
He was terrified by the thought of being touched by
a woman, just like Darth Vader. He once cut off
his own dog's tail, cooked it, and fed it to
the dog for no real reason. And he basically, when

(39:23):
I say he was an explorer, he shot his way
through Africa. Yeah. Yeah. Here's a quote from a description
of one of Stanley's expeditions in King Leopold's Ghost. To
those unfortunate enough to live in its path, the expedition
felt like an invading army, for it sometimes held women
and children hostage until local chiefs supplied food. So, yeah,
he's shooting his way through these tribes taking their food,

(39:45):
taking their shit, burning down villages if there's any resistance.
One of his men described just hunting people like the predator,
like laying in wait and just shooting random strangers.

Speaker 2 (39:58):
Like less ethical than the predator who lead out has
a certain code.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
Yeah yeah, way less epical than the predators. So these
guys are predatoring their way through through Africa, but they're not.

Speaker 2 (40:09):
Particularly worse than any other explorer of the time.

Speaker 1 (40:13):
I would he's one of the worst. Okay, they vary.
So Henry Morton Stanley, you know, the doctor Livingstone. I
presume he's that guy. Yeah, yeah, And doctor Livingston was
apparently a pretty nice guy. He was also an explorer
and actually would like get to know people and like
invocate himself into the local culture. So some of these
guys are legitimately just in it for the sake of exploration,

(40:33):
and they're scientists and they're good to the people they encounter.
And some of them, like Stanley, just want to make
a shitload of money and they're creepy. And Stanley is
one of the kills thousands of people while he's exploring.
Got it, got it?

Speaker 2 (40:47):
I just want to I guess when I met not
as a mitigating thing of like everyone was doing it,
but like, uh, if not the only standard practice, it was.

Speaker 1 (40:55):
Not what you're describing is not not he's a standard
he's it's definitely common practice on a lot of these guys.
But he's not near to the only one. But he's
one of the worst, Yeah for sure. Okay, So yeah,
While Stanley's expedition is going on, Leopold also hires a
bunch of other expeditions to explore other parts of Africa.
These were deliberately showy expeditions meant to distract public attention.

(41:18):
One of them involved a team of four Indian elephants
being sent to Africa to see if they could reed
with African elephants. All of the elephants died horribly, but
the news covered the story the whole time. So nobody's
reading about what Stanley's doing because they think it's a
boring philanthropical mission and there's this crazy story about elephants,
let's read about that. It's so fucking dark, holy sh

(41:40):
So he's clearly understands the media well enough that he's
not just thinking about how to accomplish his plan, but
how to distract public attention and while he does it.
When Morton Stanley gets back from his expedition, he writes
a book. It's an instant bestseller. King Leopold edits it himself.
That's one of the things he'd insisted on is that
Stanley could write a book about this, but King Leopold

(42:01):
would get to edit it. And most of what he
did was correct the times when Stanley mixed up the
different associations and committees that he was supposedly working for,
because nobody could keep it straight but Leopold.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
That's such an attention to detail, that's unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (42:15):
Like I said, he's the first modern, truly modern bastard. Yeah,
so this book is sort of framed as like Henry
Morton Stanley's helping the Congo Free State be born and
helping these Africans like take their stab at nationhood and
joining the international community and whatnot. So that's how all
this is being played in the outside world. The reality

(42:36):
in the Congo is very different, and what happens next
is not what anyone but Leopold had expected. And we're
going to get into that in a minute. But right now, Andrew,
do you have too much money? Oh? Hell yeah? Well,
one of the great things to do with too much
money is spend it on products, products like the ones

(42:57):
that I'm going to talk about now Here's so we're
back and King Leopold has sent an explorer off to
the Congo to trick a bunch of tribes people into
signing away their rights to the land, while he's distracted
the rest of Europe with a bunch of showy expeditions.

Speaker 2 (43:18):
So it's just like it used to be, just like
cannons and soldiers swords, I guess, and now it's pr
and fake treaties and stuff.

Speaker 1 (43:27):
Yeah. Wow, it's really modern in a lot of ways.
So Leopold has this new best selling book that's talking
about the great stuff he's trying to do in the
Congo that gets the public jazz, and he's able to
sort of further push the legitimacy of his project by
getting the US President Chester A. Arthur to recognize the
Congo Free State. Leopold had charmed the former US Minister

(43:49):
to Belgium, a guy who called himself General Sanford, even
though he wasn't actually a general, but he was a
rich guy who had a lot of money and like
an orange plantation. Because he was a rich guy. He
was able to get the president's ear General Sandford appealed
to President Arthur's dislike of Arabs because again, there were
all these Arab slave traders.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
Yeah, so just yes, nothing's changed, Yeah, okay, nothing's new.

Speaker 1 (44:15):
Yeah, so Chester A. Arthur was. He also pointed out
that the Congo had been discovered by an American because
Henry Morton Stanley called himself an American. He wasn't. He
was actually British, but he light his whole life and
said he was American. Everyone lies about everything in the
eighteen hundred Yeah, internet, because there yeah, yeah, nothing like
you you run into a thousand colonels when you're reading
anything in this period, and none of them are colonels. Sure,

(44:37):
none of them were ever in the military. Like I'm
going to be fried chicken colonels. Fine, And in this
case of General anyway, Chesterry Arthur was like, sounds great,
Congo free straights, sounds like a great idea. You're going
to fight some Arabs. Hooray. Yeah. So he included this
next bit in his State of the Union speech, recognizing
the Congo free state. Quote from Chester A. Arthur, the

(45:00):
rich and populous valley of the Congo spelled with a
K in. This is being opened by a society called
the International African Association, of which the King of the
Belgians is the president. Large tracts of territory have been
ceded to the Association by native chiefs. Roads have been opened,
steamboats have been placed on the river, and the Nuclei
of states established under one flag, which offers freedom to

(45:21):
commerce and prohibits the slave trade. Oh my god, So
that's how Chester A. Arthur pictures it.

Speaker 2 (45:27):
So he got paid placement for his propaganda. Yeah, in
the State of the Union.

Speaker 1 (45:32):
Yeah, in the State of the Union. So far the
people of Belgium and the other European states are fooled
pretty well. But France and some other folks and like
the British government and whatnot are starting to catch on
the Leopold's plan and realize that he's making a power grab.
This helped us spark a general what's known as the
Scramble for Africa, where all these European powers are like,

(45:52):
oh my god, we're running out of Africa to take over,
so they start shooting out expeditions to claim the last
pieces of the continent before it fills up. This all
culminates in the Berlin Conference of eighteen eighty four to
eighty five, and a bunch of stuff is decided there.
But Leopold's main goal is to get recognition for what
he starts calling the Congo Free State. He's basically like,
I've got all these treaties. Like he gets up in

(46:14):
front of Europe and he's like, I got all these treaties. Look,
the people of the Congo want to be their own state.
They want me to be their king. They've given this
the state, the rights to their land. And if you
all back me in establishing the state, it'll be a
free trade zone, so all everyone will be able to
trade freely and buy and sell freely in there. It'll
make a bunch of money for everybody. So that's Leopold's

(46:34):
pitch man, and Europe buys it. In eighteen eighty five,
the Congo Free State is established. Leopold had to go
in front of Belgium Senate to ask if he could
be two kings at once. He promised that the Congo
would be its own independent nation and that it would
pay its own way in the world. He told Belgium
he thought it was his duty to quote help the
nations of second rank become useful members of the great

(46:55):
family of nations. Then he asked for money, a little
loone to help the fledgling new nation. And he asked
his fellow Belgians to volunteer to help in this bold
project quote more than any other. A manufacturing and commercial
people like ourselves ought to strive to obtain a market
for all its workers, for thinkers, capitalists and workmen. So
the Congo Free State is on paper a country with

(47:18):
Leopold the Second as its absolute ruler. So he's gone
from the King of Belgium. Yeah, he doesn't really have
any power to be of a country like twenty times
the size of Belgium. Jesus Christ. So the Congo Free
State is to all intends and purposes of state. It
has its own army, the Force Publique, which is made
up of African soldiers led by Belgian officers. It's illegal

(47:41):
for black men to be officers in the Army of
the Congo.

Speaker 2 (47:44):
Yeah that sounds about right.

Speaker 1 (47:47):
Yeah, So Man Leopold has acquired himself an African empire. Unfortunately,
he didn't want an empire. He had no desire to
actually rule and others wanted money. He just wanted money.
So the Congo Free State is entirely a money making

(48:08):
scheme and it's all based around rubber. So the late
eighteen hundreds is when rubber really started to take off.
That's like in the mid eighteen hundreds or so is
when they figure out how to vulcanize rubber, which is
what makes it like nice and shiny and stable and
it doesn't smell weird and fall apart. It's so the
Macintosh coat becomes popular around this time. People like in

(48:29):
Europe are just like covered headed tone rubber, Like it's
it's everywhere. It's like the fashion of the time, right,
people are just flipping out over rubber. Fetishes are born
tons exactly, hot air balloons. It's like this one. It's
a wonder material. It's like the first time people they
don't have to use glass for everything. Yeah, so everyone's

(48:51):
in love with rubber. But there's only two ways to
make rubber at that time, vines and trees. Now, rubber
vines grew wild all around the Congo.

Speaker 2 (49:00):
It was the two ways are vines and trees. There's
rubber vines and there's rubber. Yeah, I thought it was
going to be vegetation and chemistry.

Speaker 1 (49:08):
No they didn't. They do now we can make yeah, yeah,
but they hadn't figured that shit out. Yeah. Yeah. So actually,
harvesting all of the rubber from vines like the ones
who grew in the Congo required thousands and thousands of
people climbing trees in the jungle. There's the risk of
snake bite and monster attacks, and it's just a nightmare harvesting, yeah,
at large scale in the Congo. Harvesting rubber from trees,

(49:30):
on the other hand, is really easy, and some enterprising
people had already started planting groves of rubber trees in
South America, but those trees took about twenty years or
so to really get going. So Leopold standing here in
charge of the Congo, knows that he has about twenty
years to be the world's leading producer of rubber. The
Congo Free State wasn't basically just a giant rubber factory.

(49:52):
That was his whole vision for this land filled with
millions of people.

Speaker 2 (49:55):
Yeah, this is like the actual story of Willy Wonk.

Speaker 1 (50:00):
Yeah, he's the real Willy Wonka. Yeah, exactly. Jesus Christ.
So now I remember when I said that Leopold had
the right to collect taxes in the form of labor.
Mm hmm, Well, he used these taxes to make Congolese
people go harvest rubber for him. In theory, I think
he was allowed to only demand like forty hours a
month from them or something. But what happened is that

(50:21):
he would have his soldiers go from village to village
and take hostages. These hostages would be put in concentration
camps where they'd be starved and beaten until the village
met its rubber quota. So if you didn't get all
the rubber that you were supposed to get soon enough,
your family would just starve. Today, Leopold's government did have
a problem because obviously it needs soldiers to enforce these

(50:42):
nightmarish rules. But white people die like crazy in the Congo,
Like more than a third of the Belgians who went
there died there. And since again it's illegal for Africans
to be officers in the Force Publique, there would wind
up being like four or five Belgian guys commanding hundreds
and hundreds of African soldiers. So that's obviously you're treating
these guys terribly. You're making the massacre their own people,

(51:04):
and there's five of you for every five hundred of them.
That's like a recipe for a revolution, or it would
be if the soldiers had free access to bullets. One
of the ways the Belgians controlled their army was by
heavily restricting when anybody would get bullets, and by policing
their AMMO so they couldn't hide any away. So each
soldier would only be issued a certain amount of AMMO

(51:25):
when they'd go out to get rubber, and if they
fired any rounds, they had to account for them. The
general policy in the Congo became that if you fired around,
you had to provide a right hand from a corpse
for every round that you shot. This was meant to
stop people from stockpiling AMMO, and it was meant to
stop them from like hunting for animals, Yeah, when they
should have been, you know, shooting people. What this actually meant, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (51:48):
So but that creates a market for right hands exactly. Yeah,
so possibly go wrong.

Speaker 1 (51:54):
Yeah. For one thing, these soldiers aren't fed enough, so
they're starving and they start hunting, and then once they
fired a couple rounds hunt and animal they need to
pick up Okay, well we fired three rounds getting that
whatever it is. Now we need three hands. So we
need to go into a village. We need to take
some people's hands. And in addition to that, like it
becomes common if a village refuses to provide rubber, like

(52:16):
people are like, we're not going to work to you.
We're not going to give up a relatives as hostages.
The Force Publique would just burn down the whole village.
Sometimes they just kill everybody in the entire village. And
this is happening on basically an industrial scale. In nineteen
oh three, a single rubber collecting post was sent more
than forty thousand replacement rounds of ammunition to every round

(52:36):
that they're being sent. They've got a hand. Yeah, So
like the military units and the Force Publique even would
have a keeper of the hands whose job was to
smoke all of the severed hands so that they preserve,
so that you could go back to the authority of evidence.
We need twenty thousand more bullets. Here's twenty thousand human hands.
Jesus Christ. Yeah. So in eighteen eighty five, when this

(52:58):
whole operation is just getting off the ground, King Leopold
is named in British court as a client of what
the British called a disorderly house. Can you guess what
a disorderly house was? Uh? Probably not enough. It's a punishment,
is what I'll go for it. Yeah, I know it's
a brothelh So while this is all starting off, King sorry,

(53:20):
a whorehouse in England, I thought, I.

Speaker 2 (53:22):
Thought you disorderly house meant like his dukedom didn't have
like x or y like paperwork filed.

Speaker 1 (53:28):
No, no, no. While he's freshly the king of the
Belgian Congo, he's named in British court as a client
of a whorehouse, and they say that he had been
paying eight hundred pounds a month for a steady supply
of young women, some of whom were ten to fifteen
years old. That's so, I mean, that's what Leopold's doing
in between administering the Congo. Yeah. And while he's doing that,

(53:49):
his men in the Congo are building a system of roads, railways,
posts and steamboats that are meant to allow the rubber
making operation to prosper. Leopold doesn't want to pay for
all this himself, so he claimed the infrastructure is nes
so that the Free States army can fight those dastardly
Arab slavers. Got the US to pay for it, or
just generally he got everyone else to pay for it.

(54:10):
So he got in Europe on board with this by
saying the Congo is going to be a free trade zone.
But then he's like, we need to build all this
infrastructure in order to fight the slavers, so we're gonna
have to collect import taxes.

Speaker 2 (54:20):
Now nice, He's.

Speaker 1 (54:24):
Just he like. The one thing you can trust Leopold
to do is he will fuck over every single person. Yeah. Yeah.
So now even these countries who had gotten on board
because they thought this was a free trade zone, they're
getting screwed. And of course the millions of people whose
hands he's having severed being screwed. I guess the key
is just never stop lying. Yeah, no, that's the thing.
Whenever you read about any of these guys. That is

(54:45):
the most important thing. He's never ever stop lying. If
you're going to be a monster, you have to lie
consistently for decades about everything. All right, Yeah, I'm in.
It works, Yeah no, I mean I'm in. Well, you'll
be a great king of the Congo. Ha ha. So

(55:06):
to Leopold's credit. His men did fight Arab slave traders,
but most of the fighting was done by conscripted African
soldiers who were themselves basically slaves. Yeah yeah. King Leopold
personally endorsed a system where white agents of the Free
State got a bonus if they were able to find
more recruits for the Force Public. Many agents wound up
buying them in from various chiefs and effect doing the

(55:27):
same thing as the Arab slavers they bragged about fighting.
State agents also got bonuses for quote reducing recruiting expenses,
so if they outright enslaved people rather than paid them
to join, they got more money in their pocket. As
many as three quarters of all volunteers for the Force
Public died before they could receive training. Most of those
volunteers were teenagers.

Speaker 2 (55:46):
Right, yeah, so they're just volunteers quote unquote, that's fucking incredible.
So it was like, we have our indentured servant army
as going to fight your slave army.

Speaker 1 (55:58):
So basically the Congo at this point is groups of
white guys with soldiers going into the jungle to collect
a bunch of other soldiers and they'll put them in
chains and like march them through the jungle and most
of them will die, and then they'll train those guys
up to fight. Then they'll take those guys into the
jungle to tell people to collect rubber from people, and
to kill everyone who doesn't provide enough rubber, and to

(56:20):
kill a lot of the people who do provide enough rubber,
just because these kids are like starving to death, and
maybe they have to shoot an animal, or maybe there's
rebels and they get into a firefight, but they don't
have killing it. Yeah, and then you got to take
hands from these So it just keeps spiraling out of
control and becoming even more of a nightmare to everybody
but Leopold, because again he's sitting back in Belgium. This time,

(56:43):
since Leopold was the absolute monarch, he got to rule
by royal decree. His first decree was that all quote
vacant land was now property of the state. He didn't
explain what vacant meant, because obviously farmers don't live on
every inch of their farmland, so basically most of the
land in the Congo was now just his. He leased
this land to a series of private corporations, and this
gets to the real brilliance of his scheme. Because Leopold

(57:05):
didn't have to dirty his hands actually running any of
the rubber harvesting, he was able to private right. Yeah,
other people paid for the right to mine rubber and
cut off hands and do all the actual work, and
Leopold owned the rights to a huge chunk of their profits.
So basically, these companies would come in and give him
an owning stake in the corporation, they.

Speaker 2 (57:24):
Would license the scheme of enslaving people, cutting off their hands, etc.

Speaker 1 (57:31):
Yeah. Adam Hoschild in King Leopold's Ghost compares the Congo
Free State to a venture capital firm. Quote, he had
essentially found a way to attract other people's capital to
his investment schemes, while he retained half the proceeds. In
the end, what with various taxes and fees the companies
paid the state, it came to more than half Jesus.
So in the eighteen nineties, the Congo Free State really

(57:52):
starts putting out rubber, and suddenly King Leopold is one
of the richest guys in the world. He starts buying
gigantic monuments and palaces and shit for Belgium big show projects,
some of which are still there. It is to make
people like him, it's to keep him popular at home.
He's succeeding beyond his wildest dreams in the business side
of things, but his personal life is just kind of
one series of train wrecks after the other. Yeah, his

(58:14):
son had died in eighteen sixty four, which led to
an understandable estrangement between Leopold and his wife. It took
eight years before they could stand to be around each
other and try again. This passage from Leopold's biography tells
you a lot about the relationships between the sexes. In
the eighteen sixties quote, Leopold the Second was anxious to
have a male heir, and in eighteen seventy two, Queen

(58:34):
Marie Henriette consented to resume conjugal life with her royal spouse,
from whom she had separated sometime before. She sacrificed herself,
as one may say, for her country. A child was
born unto them, but alas it was a daughter and
not a son, which was given unto them. So that's
messed up for a lot of reasons, Jesus, one of
which is just that even in the pro Leopold biography,

(58:56):
it just admits that having sex with Leopold is a sacrifice.

Speaker 2 (59:00):
Actually, I'm surprised that the amount of agency she has, Like,
you know, she is the queen facing pressure, but wasn't
forced at guillotine point or whatever to.

Speaker 1 (59:11):
She kind of was. I guess that's true.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
I guess that's between the lines, of course.

Speaker 1 (59:15):
Yeah, Jesus, it's I mean, she probably has more agency
than the average, but at the same time, in a
way she has less because it's less important for a
commoner to have a son. Yeah, yeah, because like the king,
that's like the whole dynasty thing. So you might say
she has even less.

Speaker 2 (59:30):
We probably should say that, Yeah, we probably would be
respected for the record or that.

Speaker 1 (59:34):
Yeah. So yeah, Leopold did not take having a daughter
very well. This quote is from King Leopold's ghost. When
the last daughter, Clementine, was born, according to his sister Luis,
the king was furious and thenceforth refused to have anything
to do with his admirable wife from the beginning. She wrote, quote,
the king paid very little attention to me or my sisters,

(59:55):
so he doesn't pay attention to his daughters, and he
mostly seems to care when one of them, like fucks
with his garden. Here's a recollection from Luis. Large juicy
peaches grew on the walls of the gardens, and the
king was very proud of them. I had a passion
for peaches, and one day I dared eat one, which
was hidden away among the leaves. And that year peaches
were plentiful. But the following day the king discovered the theft.

(01:00:16):
What a dramatic moment. At once suspected, I confessed my
crime and was promptly punished. I did not realize that
the king counted his peaches. So while Leopold is running
a nightmare hand harvesting rubber making scheme in the Congo,
he's got enough time to make sure that his daughter
doesn't steal a peach.

Speaker 2 (01:00:34):
Fuck, Because it's like, at least Ivanka Trump has the
decency to pretend that she loved her time with her dad,
even though, like in all those stories she tells, it's
sad and weird too, But it's like, at least she's like,
I love him. He's my dad, you know, And I
believe in all this shit. He couldn't even get his
daughters to be like I.

Speaker 1 (01:00:52):
Love Well, there's gonna be more about his daughters coming
in here. He's he is not a great dad. Yeah,
if you can't tell that, huh. There's in fact, no
evidence that Leopold cared about any of his children as
anything more than vehicles for his legacy. Even that fawning
nineteen ten biography can't make it seem like Leopold had
a single fuck for his family. As King Leomara, I'm

(01:01:15):
gonna be honest, that's so far the most relatable thing
about it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:18):
I'm not liking his family, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:01:21):
Just kidding. I love your fam As King Leopold grew
older and richer, he also became a full on hypochondriac.
He took to wearing a waterproof bag around his gigantic
beard whenever he went outside in the rain or when
he swam. He required his palace tablecloths to be boiled
every day to kill any germs, which is at least
a character evolution from not letting them wash his sheets. Yeah, snapkin, Yeah,

(01:01:46):
so he's changing. He's had his own little hero's journey. Yeah, yeah,
we all get there. Yeah, hypochondriac. This wound up being
another really really long one. There was just so much research,
So this is going to be a two parter podcast,
and the second part is going to drop on Thursday,
so we'll be getting into the rest of Leopold's story
in the tremendously dark story of the Congo. So stick

(01:02:09):
around check back out on Thursday. It's going to be great.
In the meantime, you can check out Andrew T's podcast,
os This Racist. You can also check out every other
episode of Behind the Bastards. You can find us on
Twitter at Bastards Pod and Instagram as well. You can
find us on the internet at behind the Bastards dot
com and you can find me on Twitter at I
Write Okay, So Andrew and I will be back on

(01:02:31):
Thursday with more Leopold, so check us out then. Behind
the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Foolzonemedia dot
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