November 23, 2023 • 39 mins
Original Air Date: June 14th, 2018
Robert is joined again by Andrew Ti (Yo, Is This Racist?) and they continue discuss the evil actions of King Leopold II of Belgium.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also 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 week
(00:23):
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 piece
(00:47):
of shit. I hope you all have a good week,
regardless of what you do during it. Hello friends, I'm
Robert Evans and this is Behind the Bastards, the show
where we tell you everything you don't know about the
very worst people in his And this is part two
of our episode on Leopold, the Second, King of Belgium.
In part one, we sort of went over how Leopold
(01:08):
conned his way into becoming king of the Congo, how
he tricked the locals into signing over their rights to
their land, and how he conscripted thousands of them into
a slave army. So now we're going to get back
into all that and the rest of the terrible, terrible
story of the Belgian Congo. So the first five or
so years of the Congo project are great for Leopold.
(01:29):
He's in total control, richer than God, and most of
Europe still believes he's improving a lot of the Congolese people.
But in around eighteen ninety, a black journalist named Colonel
and he's not really a colonel, George Washington Williams saw
the actual Congo. So he didn't like take the tour
where you get led through the nice parts of the Congo, like,
he went on foot and he got in there and
he saw the fucking nightmare that Leopold had built. And
(01:52):
he wrote an article called an open Letter to King Leopold,
and it was the first expos of Leopold's blood soak,
rubber regime. William's document is remarkable because he's basically the
only person up to that point who actually sat down
with African people and asked them what was going on
in the Congo. He retraced a lot of Stanley's rat
along the Congo and actually talked to some of the
(02:12):
people who'd signed treaties giving their land to Leopold. He
learned that a great number of chiefs had been tricked
into signing things with magic tricks. One of the tricks
was that, like Stanley, had bought a bunch of electric
batteries in London, and when when attached to the arm
under the coat, communicated with a band of ribbon which
passed over the palm of the white brother's hand, And
when he gave the black brother a cordial grasp of
(02:34):
the hand, the black brother was greatly surprised to find
his white brother was so strong that he nearly knocked
him off his feet. When the native inquired about the
disparity of strength between himself and his white brother, he
was told that the white man could pull up trees
and perform the most prodigious feats of strength. So he
did a hand buzzer, He did a hand buzzer, and
these like, if you don't know what electricity is, yeah,
(02:55):
he's just some sort of superman. Let's sign the peace treaty.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah, yeah, oh, shit.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Another trick was to use a magnifying glass to light
a cigar and then claim that white people had sun
powers and he'll burn up your villain, basically like I
have power of the sun and a lake.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Riloge on fire. Yeah yeah, God, what a fucking bluff.
Yeah yeah, yeah. So Williams writes this open letter. He
frames it as like presuming Leopold doesn't know how terrible
things are. He writes about the taking of hands and
like all of the death and the people who are
being like starved to death as porters carrying. Is this
like sort of like modest proposal style, like of course,
(03:34):
you know, but it's an indictment or do I think
it is.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
There's a little bit of a satirical bent. Yeah, yeah,
and yeah. So Williams publishes this that but unfortunately he
dies not long after writing the letter, and Leopold's able
to clamp down on any kind of outrage after for
a little while. But seven or eight years later, another
guy who's an amateur journalist named Morel stumbles upon the conspiracy.
So he was working as a mid level employee for
(03:57):
a shipping line that had the contract to handle all
shipping in the Congo Free State, and so every so
often Morell would get sent over to Belgium and he
would report on what's going into and out of the
port of Antwerp. And so he realizes that the only
thing coming out of the Congo into Europe is rubber,
just shitloads of rubber, impossible quantities of it, larger quantities
than have been reported in fact. And the only thing
(04:18):
that's going being sent out to the Congo rather than
trade are just guns and money, and a lot more
guns than you'd need for any kind of philanthropic enterprise.
O man, Yeah, so a wire, exactly exactly. So he
starts he never actually goes to the Congo, but he
just starts digging, and he starts talking to other people
who have worked there, and basically he starts a newspaper
(04:41):
that is focused entirely on exposing King Leopold's crimes to
the world and starts publishing it all throughout Europe. He's
active all over the world and basically becomes like the
Congo equivalent of Wiki Leagues. So all these guys who
had worked in Leopold's Congo and felt bad were running
to him and be like, I saw this, this is
what happened. Here's some documents I managed.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
To Well, it's also like you're like, yeah, this is
what wikloks was supposed to be, Like this is what
it could be. And this is also why people like
that have legitimacy because and why conspiracies have legitimacy because
guess what there have been Yeah, big complex conspiracy.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Gi gantic conspiracies. So Morrell starts this newspaper and he
winds up creating was probably the first modern human rights organization,
the Congo Reform Association, which is dedicated to stopping this
this fucking nightmare in the Congo. King Leopold responded by
inventing the first modern international pr campaign. He bought a
shitload of journalists of his own, and he had them
(05:39):
all right puff pieces about how great the Congo actually was.
He would pay for journalists to go on lavish, carefully
controlled trips through the Congo. He'd give them exclusive interviews
when they got back, and he'd use his network of
agents to help them place their articles in newspapers. He
got journalists in the New York Times to write quotes
like I have witnessed more atrocities in London streets than
I have ever seen in the Congo. He would pay
(06:00):
for journalists to give public speeches, and he would lobby politicians.
Leopold's regime was heavily criticized for its widespread use of
something called the jacote, which is a hippo hyde whip,
which was used to punish laborers. Prisoners were often lashed
to death by it, and it's possible that, like literally
several million people were killed with this whip. So Leopold
starts catching flak for this, and he decides to distract
(06:22):
attention from his whipping millions of people to death by
sending journalists to British colonies and having them write lyrist
exposees of abuses in British colonies. So his pet reporters
would write stories about like how the British were using
whips on prisoners in South Africa or something terrible they'd
done to people in India, and then yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Exactly Hilary style, that's exactly it.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Like I said, he invented the modern art of being shitty,
like he's he's doing, Like what about ism on a
massive scale?
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Did he have like an antecedent for like the media,
like playing the media, or did he just make all this.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
I think he invented this playbook because other people had. Obviously,
every the media is existed for a while, other people
have used the media to one agree or other. But
he is the first person that I've ever run across
who's using it in the same way politicians use it today,
in the same way world leaders use it today, Like
this is a very modern pr campaign. He buys he
(07:18):
uses his Congo earnings to buy the editors of a
bunch of newspapers, including the London Times. So he's spending
like thousands of dollars on just yeah, owning editors so
that number one, they'll kill stories that are negative to
the Congo Free State, and so that he can place
his positive stories once he gets like positive journalists to go,
you know, have a tour of the Congo and then
(07:38):
come and write about it. And this is all basically
a delaying action. Leopold knows eventually the truth is going
to get out, but he's playing for time. He's got
twenty years before rubber stops being as profits.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
He doesn't need to do this forever, he just needs
to do it for a little while.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
He just wants to suck as much money as he
can out of the situation, and eventually the sheer way
to facts did change public opinion against him, but it
took like twenty years. At one point, Leopold is said
to have seen a cartoon of himself in a German newspaper,
and in the cartoon he's cutting the hands off of Africans,
and he reportedly laughed at that and said, cut off hands.
That's idiotic. I'd cut off all the rest of them,
(08:13):
but not the hands. That's the thing I need in
the Congo. So he's a real piece of work. Now,
in eighteen ninety five, Leopold had started dating a sixteen
year old prostitute, Nade Caroline. This is when the Congo
is that at the height of its rubber production, so
he'd been hooked up to her via a pimp named Durou,
who was a former officer in the French army. We
(08:36):
know now that Caroline's whole relationship with Leopold was likely
a con game, an incredibly successful scheme to snatch his inheritance.
But at the time, King Leopold, blood drenched, absolute ruler
of the Congo, was smitten with this teenage prostitute Adam
Hoschild writes that quote to the extent that someone like
Leopold was capable of love. This teenage prostitute proved to
(08:56):
be the love of his life, So he's really he
got it for this girl hard. He names her. The
barrenness of Vaughan and the unseemliness of their relationship isn't
really acknowledged in the nineteen ten biography. It just calls
her one of the king's quote favorites, and it dances
around the fact that they got together while the Queen
was still alive. In general, it refers to the King's
(09:18):
constant parade of mistresses as distractions. So yeah, Carolyn went
on to write a bit about their life together, and
she gives this additional insight into the kind of man
Leopold was. Quote every evening a steam launch took the
King to appear, leading to my villa through a subterranean passage.
Speaking about this, I can't help remarking on the extraordinary
taste of the King for everything which had a secret
(09:41):
and mysterious character, anyone who could sell him anyhow, so
long as it was built on the site of an
abandoned quarry, or if it had a secret staircase. So
basically he's gone from being too cheap to rinse his
fucking like a handkerchief.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
He's like a cartoon villain.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Yeah, to like a cartoon ville with like lairs built
into mountain side. It's a hidden boat like grottos and stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Jesus.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Yeah, but Carolyn seems to have his number, so she's
both got him on madly in love with her, but
she also like she takes advantage of his hypochondriasm or
whatever you call that, Like whenever she wanted him to
leave her alone, she'd pretend to have a cough, right,
and then he'd hide for days because he was scared
of She's she's my favorite person in this story.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
She's Yeah, this gy locked down.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
So the King is sort of the nineteen hundreds come around,
is in his late sixties, and he takes to visiting
his teenage mistress in a large tricycle because again, yeah,
he's getting.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
More and more to get.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Yeah for the geno tidle murderer. Yeah, he's riding a
big tricycle to hang out with his teenage girlfriend.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Just as bad everyone who every white guy riding a
tricycle with big old mustache.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
You are all as bad as king shit. Yeah, so
he's riding a big tricycle, he drinks enough but hot water,
and he starts referring to himself in the third person
at this point in time. So, yeah, he's a weirdo.
He's not entirely past his old ways at this point.
There's like a story of the time his mistress bought
a new hat for him and gives it to him,
(11:16):
and he like flies into a rage, and he only
calms down when she explains him that she got it
for a bargain, that it was like a deal, that
she bought it a quarter of its value. So like
he's still he's just he's.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Just a weirdo.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Yeah, he's a weird guy. He's like a weird old
rich letcher who's just knows what's going on in the
congo but doesn't like.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
I mean, look, here's the other part. The other way
to look at that, I suppose is maybe not in
such a direct degree, but as Americans, we all have
similar types of blood on our hands that we're electing
to not think about. Yeah, but we're not we're not
driving it in the same way, but.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
We absolutely like we all have these phones that we know,
are made by people who hate the work that they're doing,
and they're like include minerals that are mined from like
conflict ridden nations and often use slave labor in one
And we know that, like the fabric in our clothes
is often there's slave labor at some point in the
production line. Leopold knows that because he's signing the orders
(12:14):
and saying no, cut off more hands, cut off more hands,
and he's just it's just amazing to me that he's
able to do that all day, every day and then
write a tricycle to his teenage girlfriend's house.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Yeah, but that's it's amazing what you're saying. But to me,
I'm like, it's a little bit just degrees. I mean, look,
we're all able to.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
It is degrees. We're all able to compartmentalize the misery
that's necessary for our comfort.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Oh yea, but fuck this guy, Yeah, fuck this guy.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
One of the things that was interesting to me reading
that pro Leopold biography is that, well it does talk
about ten yeah, nineteen ten, the air after he died.
He's a spoiler, So this biography of him, it's very positive.
It talks about how there's atrocity, but it always kind
of doesn't talk about the detail. It just said, yeah,
he definitely committed atrocities, but look at this or look
at how he was. Look at how and everyone did.
(13:11):
Is like everyone did, and we'll get to that in
a little. What is interesting to me is that this
biography does condemn his mistress for capitalizing on the Congo.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Sure, it notes.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
That she was called the Queen of the Congo by
the people of Belgium, for she was to benefit largely
by the atrocities committed in the Free State, where sweating
and bleeding natives labored so as to accumulate millions for
the royal favorite. So like he again, he doesn't really
attack Leopold ever, Like he's like, yeah, he did some
bad stuff. But this biographer goes off on her mistress
(13:45):
for like taking money from him. That's that's blood money,
which like it is blood money. But like she's the
least objectionable person in this situation.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
So yeah, yeah she has a little milania. Ask I
suppose she is, and she maybe knew more what she
was getting into at the top.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yeah, she probably knew less about the Congo because, like
I doubt just a rich guy. Yeah, she just wanted
to marry a rich guy like I doubt he doesn't
seem like kind of guy. We've talked to his mistress
about the hands or the riks that they were murdering
people with, and it's at the time, especially probably easy
to ignore. Yeah, forget about it. Yeah, you don't share
a lot of that stuff with your yeah, especially not
(14:25):
your teenage child bride.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
No. No, And as the teenage child bride to just feel like,
I don't read those books. Yeah, I don't read that article. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Yeah. So in the early nineteen hundreds, more and more
stories of abuse in the Congo hit the world press.
People actually started to take notice and care. They read
about things like an entire towns worth of boys being
giving fifty lashes each, which is a fatal sentence for
laughing in the presence of a white man. In nineteen
oh four, one of the rubber companies in the Congo
put one of its own men on trial, mostly to
(14:53):
show that they were trying to do something about all
of the horrible crimes. The guy, Charles Cadron, was accused
of murdering at least one hundred and twenty two Africans.
The case wound up revealing a bunch of fucked up
details about like how all the hostage taking and the
handtaking and stuff actually worked. But Caudrone was released due
to quote extenuating circumstances. The court said that he'd had
to contend with quote great difficulties under which Caudron found
(15:17):
himself accomplishing his mission in the midst of a population
absolutely resistant to any idea of work in which respects
no other law than force and knows no other means
of persuasion than terror. So yeah, yeah, they were asking
for it defense. They were asking for it works.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
It also still works today, Kainda.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
It does, but it was it was stopping. This is
at the point where it was working less and less
in the Congo, and in the early nineteen hundreds, Leopold
starts dealing with more and more resistance to his ideas,
both in the Congo and at home. So this is
also kind of the point of which socialism is starting
to rise. And socialists obviously aren't big fans of kings.
(15:57):
Leopold declared himself a mortal enemy of socialism. He fought
against the universal right to vote for all Belgians.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Still on the playbook yeah, both of those things. Yep.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
In nineteen oh two, the Belgian Labor Party called a
general strike and Leopold called for it to be brutally stopped.
The strikers were fired upon by city guards and eight
people were killed. The massacre was a calculated message to
the socialists, don't fuck with the money train. Leopold was
willing to kill a hell of a lot more than
eight people to keep the money coming. In Hashchild's book
relates one six week campaign in the Congo that killed
(16:26):
quote over nine hundred natives, men, women, and children in
order to add twenty tons of rubber a month to
one region's productivity. So that gives you an idea of
the kind of calculus he's making.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yeah, Yeah, that's how I mean. Right, it's just lives
for rubber. Yeah, it just lives for rubber has a
commodity price.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Yeah. I have to point out that none of the
revelations brutality did much to hurt Leopold's popularity at home
in Belgium. He was growing less popular and even hated
in a lot of Europe. But even today there are
Belgian museums that proudly talk about his anti slavery campaigns
that ignore the whole genocide thing. The crimes against humanity
didn't hurt Leeopold's legacy. The only thing Belgium couldn't forgive
(17:02):
him for was being a shitty dad and having a mistress.
In nineteen oh four, Leopold's daughter Stephanie sued her father,
the king, for keeping her chunk of her mother's inheritance.
Leopold fought in court for the right to deny his
children their inheritance, and in fact denied them any wealth
or property even after his death. Around this time, a
Belgian cabinet minister noted that quote, the king has but
(17:23):
two dreams, to die a billionaire and to disinherit his daughters.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
I mean, what father doesn't want that?
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Yeah, yeah, a lot ways kind of cool, always kind
of cool. Wow.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
So in nineteen oh six, King Leopold finally marries the Baroness.
They have two sons. His second son was born with
a malformed arm that just sort of ended in a
stump with no hand. Obviously, some people suggested this might
be a judgment from God for all the millions of
hands that Leopold ordered severed, which is almost more fucked
up if you think about the morality behind Like, Okay,
(17:56):
this guy cut off millions of people's hands, let's fuck
up his innocent baby's hand.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
Yeah, that's not how you do that, if you got well.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
First of all, that is definitely how God do that.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
God is a little punchy on the messages.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Yeah, God, God ain't great with making sure these people
get their just desserts. Yeah, yeah, because right, because it's
so funny. It's like all these like just so kind
of stories where God is just a little like tricky metaphor, man, Like, well,
you didn't expect this, did.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
You didn't think God would do that?
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Yeah? Oh, just God, get it right, man.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Yeah, Hey, speaking of hands, why don't you use both
of them to order the products that we are about
to advertise.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Here they go.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
And we're back.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
So the general and seemliness of the king's young bride
and the disinheritance of his daughters meant the public sort
of deserted Leopold. Once the human rights campaign against his
atrocities really took off. In nineteen oh eight, King Leopold
was forced to bequeath his control of the Congo to
the Belgian government. In exchange, they paid for the colonies
one hundred and ten million francs worth of debt, most
of which had been accrued because Leopold used the Free
(19:13):
State as a bank to buy gifts for his mistresses.
Before he hands over control of the colony, he'd ruled
with an iron fist for more than twenty years. Leopold
has all of the Congo state records burned. I will
give them my Congo, he said, But they have no
right to know what I did there.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Oh what a fuck.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
Such a piece of shit.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
So a thing that I say all the time and
think about. It's like, yes, of course they're having massive
conspiracies in history, and I'm sure today, but like oftentimes,
like there isn't like the basic human competency to pull
off some of the more far fetched, you know, like
a Pizzagate style thing. You're like, how could everyone cover
(19:56):
this up? And then it's like just hearing a story
of nineteenth century to twentieth century like attention to details.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
He's a genius, Like he really is like a genius
in the sense that like if you saw a character
execute a plan like this in a movie, you would
be like, that's a little far fett that he'd get
away with it.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
But he did.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Yeah, and he's he is an evil genius.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Yeah, And I guess you know what, and it's I
guess it was from a time when little people were
less empowered to speak up, yes, because that's the real thing.
It's like it would be hard to pull off a
pizza gate because it's not like the top conspirators would
go to jail. But it's like there's kind of be
a janitor who's like, what the fuck is this?
Speaker 1 (20:40):
What the fuck's going on there.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Kids in this basement. Yeah, and that's like less likely
to happen. That was more controllable back in the day, clearly.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Yeah, And even when that it started coming out, there's
a lot less of a media landscape. You only get
the news from your newspapers. You'll read every newspaper. Most
people don't much of one newspaper. So if you're a
guy like Leopold, you've got the money to make the
press do what you want to a big scam.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
And if I understand my history correctly, which I probably don't,
that was a time when the public had more of
an expectation that media was biased.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
It was just right, well, yeah, this is like a
lot of this is right around the time when America
gets involved in a war with Spain. That's essentially pushed
by two different newspaper magnets wanting to sell more papers.
So like, yeah, the press. I mean, he doesn't have
a great reputation now, yeah, but even still didn't have
a great reputation then, So yeah, it's like a perfect storm.
(21:38):
But it also is it was a legitimately brilliant scheme,
and he did his best to cover his tracks. And
he died in December of nineteen oh nine at the
age of eighty four, super rich. And did he make
that billion Well we'll get to that in a minute.
What the biography published the next year said that quote.
(21:58):
Were it not for his private life, his domestic affairs,
and his avarice, he would have retained his popularity to
the very last. Belgium as a nation, with the exception
of the socialists, would have forgiven him the Congo atrocities. Indeed,
she has forgiven him, for after all, she is destined
to benefit by them, and she will not grudge her
king the Royal commission he pocketed on the enterprise. And
(22:21):
this is where again I want to point out that
in some total there's no one hundred percent agreed upon
death toll for Leopold's regiam in the Congo, but the
likely numbers are between ten and thirteen million, possibly as
high as fifteen million people. And the Congo was definitely
the bloodiest of any of the colonies in Africa by
(22:42):
a substantial margin. But they all killed a lot of people,
and a lot of them killed a lot of people
making rubber. And one of the things that was found
out after Leopold's death is that in the bloody French
and German colonies that were producing rubber, Leopold owned a
majority of several of the large rubber making corporates in
those colonies too, right, so he.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Was also the first like pan multinational. Right, the corporations
can be the conduits for the scumbags, because the corporations
are the scumbags, of course. But Jesus Christ, yeah, so
he's he's he's a real monster. The late king achieved
his ambition of disinheriting his daughters. He left them only
fifteen million francs, the exact amount he'd inherited from his father.
(23:24):
His entire fortune went to Baroness Devaughan, the prostitute Cortison
that he fell in love with and married. After his death,
she immediately married Durow, her pimp, and spent the rest
of her life living lavishly off the gold made by
the blood of Congle's labor, which she doesn't come out
as good as I don't know.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
I kind of like that his inheritance got stolen by
a scheming prostitute and her pimp friend. Yeah, that's better than.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
I guess if she had murdered him.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Her, if she'd strangled him with his own beard jabalize.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Yeah, or poisoned. Maybe she did poison him.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Maybe she did poison him. I can't hope, so I
certainly don't know.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Oh what a grim ass tail uck.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Yeah. His biography, the nineteen ten biography summed up Leopold's
life this way, Leopold the second New Belgium, New Europe
and new humanity. And like a strong man, he had
a deep contempt for everything and everybody. He loved his
country and his own interests. For all love is after
all selfish. Jesus, it's the Victorian age is a bleak
(24:31):
ass period.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
It's also you know, speaking of although it's not exactly
the same players, but it's the same types of institutions,
every one of y'all who whenever this comes out, y'all
have just enjoyed the royal wedding. Yeah, that shit has
built off the back of shit, like exactly like this,
well less.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Artful than this a lot cool because this is if
you can like the it's it's up there with the
Holocaust in terms of like the greatest crimes in human history.
But as a scheme, his planned is it's like almost artwork.
It's like watching The Joker and the Good Krysnal and Batman.
(25:12):
Yeah pull it.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
But also that one too, where you're like it has
similar moments of like, I feel like some of these
lives are just to do the lie. Yeah, there's not
even about achieving the aid even need to do that.
Yeah yeah, yeah, there's a lot of like the fuck
you do that for? Well, it's crazy and so one
of the more I mean, there's so many fucked up
things about this. Yeah, I really recommend reading King Leopold's
(25:35):
Ghost by Adam Hoschild. It's a great book and it
really delves into the human misery caused by this regime.
But you know, you're talking ten to fifteen million people killed,
millions more left without hands, left maimed, starved like whose
villages were destroyed. The Congo today is still probably the
least stable state in Africa, or at least one of them. Yeah,
(25:57):
because all social order was destroyed. Yeah, swats the poppet
like that. It continues to this day. Leopold's profits, Yeah,
roughly a billion dollars in modern currency. That's bonkers, that's
I feel like, that's fucking nothing for what he did.
Oh in terms of right terms of yeah, not a.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Billion dollars in nineteen oh nine money, right, iland dollars
into day's money is what he got for killing ten
to fifteen million people and destroying Central Africa.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
That's Jesus. Yeah, he's not even extracting enough wealth, Like
you could do that just by closing up bookshops.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Yeah, And I think a lot of that is because
he had to spend so much money on an army,
on policing, the same fighting it because there were a
bunch of rebellions, people who thought back. He had to
suppress those rebellions, and he had to pay all these
journalists and like, yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
There you go, fucking capitalists. And he'sn't even profitable.
Speaker 3 (26:54):
To be the worst person in his although I.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Guess that was the second lesson that everyone turned is like, oh,
the real profit in pr and making people think they
want to do this. Now.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
I want to ask you a question that occurred to
me when I finished researching this, and I wonder about this,
is Leopold a worse person than Hitler? Because I can't
not think about that line in The Big Lebowski where
what's his name Walter's like, say what you will about
national socialism. At least it's an ethos. Hitler committed crimes
(27:25):
on a similar, if not much greater scale if you
include all of the war dead, but he had like
an ideology behind it, as opposed to Leopold, who this
was never anything but money. There's no hatred, there was
no goal, there was no view of the world. It
was purely if I can make money, and killing these
people is the fastest way to get it. Yeah, I
(27:47):
don't care what happens to them because I want money.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
And it was also separate. I mean, obviously, I guess
it's just different things.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
They are very different things. Although you look at the Holocaust,
and this is something that's often glossed over when people
talk about the Holocaust is how much of it was
a money making endeavor from the German state because they
were literally mining people to death, but in terms of
like taking their hair, taking the gold fillings out of them,
taking their businesses beforehand, and taking their property. So I
(28:17):
mean you have with most of like and with really
with every great genocide, because like if you look at
the Rwandan genocide, there was a lot of financial motivation there,
people wanting each other's farms and what.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Yeah, I have to imagine like those are the things
that allow I mean, like all look but like all
conflict too. It's like like especially anything sectarian or religious,
like the Crusades. You know, you can make an economic
case for the Crusades or or colonialism or at large,
like all that is sort of possible. I think the
thing with Leopold's Evil is as as we've discussed already.
(28:48):
It's like, though not in the same degree, anyone listening
to this on a podcast thing and on a yeah
exactly is complicit in something along Leopold's vector, whereas it's
fewer of us listening to this podcast are complicit in
(29:11):
some type of thing that Hitler is involved in. So
I think it behooves us to say Hitler is more
evil because we don't want to be part you know, like, yeah,
the banality, I mean, look, not banality, but the you know,
the it's in the direction of banality.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Well, I think you're onto something that's great there. And
I think that's why the idea of the banality of
evil is so important is because Hitler is it's so
easy to see the evil and Hitler because he was
he was showy with like he's the most showy villain
in all of history. Leopold was a weird old man
who had a stupid beard and sat in his office
and never shot anybody, and wrote a tricycle to his
(29:49):
mistress and was just this weird old dude who was
happy to orchestrate one of like the great crimes in
human history just for some cashness pocket And that's scarier.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Yeah, And you imagine, like he doesn't come up with
the hands for bullets scheme. No, he's just does they
need to We can't let them have bullets. We have
to make sure that like we're accounting for all the bullets,
that they're not saving them up for a rebellion.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
What can we do? Oh, well, we just make sure
they prove to us they're using the bullets for a
good reason when they fire them. How about we have
them bringing a hand. Great, and that's probably the end
of the country proof.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
And then the first person bring a million.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
People lose hands. Yeah, Like, then a crime on an
unspeakable scale happens. And he's just like sitting at home
being like, boy, I wonder why productions down this week.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
But he can also be like, I'm not the one
that came up with the hands thing. Oh, it's a shame.
He can even be like, all the hand things are
real shame.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
Yeah, it's a real shame. One of my new guys,
you know these you know the walloons. Yeah, you put
him in charge of something and they mess it up.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
I hate that we have to do this, but of
course we do need that rubber. Yeah, that's that's the
thing that you know. And look, that's a version of
every one of us tells ourselves every fucking day. Yeah.
So that's why I think most people would say Hitler
is a worse, more evil, because we don't want to
be complicit in our own evil.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
Hey, everybody, this is Robert Evans from the future. I
realized that this podcast was a teeny bit incomplete. There
was some more information I wanted to give out, so
I gained access to a time machine and went back
in time to record it. It was either fixed the
podcast or stopped nine to eleven. Hopefully I made the
right decision. But I wanted to say a little bit
(31:26):
more about the Chacota, which we talked about a little
bit in this podcast. That's the hippo hyde whip that
was the primary disciplinary tool in the Congo Free State.
The book King Leopold's Ghost makes a big deal out
of the Chacota, and it's probably true that the Belgians
under Leopold whipped more people to death than any other
regime in history, but that book also points out that
whipping people to death or nearly to death was basically
(31:47):
the bedrock that colonialism was founded upon. It relates the
story of a guy named Roger Casement, who we didn't
get to talk to you in this podcast. He's a
very interesting dude. He's one of the men who investigated
atrocities in the Congo. He also wound up investigating of
atrocities in the Amazon at a place called Putumayo, where
the Peruvian Amazon rubber company had been caught basically enslaving
and murdering people to produce even more rubber, and this
(32:10):
was for I think the British. It was mostly a
British owned company, although it was like a corporation with
a lot of different sort of stockholders behind it. And
the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company dealt out punishments with a
whip of their own that was actually a tapeer hide whip,
but it was similar to the Jacota in its effect.
Roughly thirty thousand indigenous people in the Amazon died mining
(32:30):
rubber for that company. Whips, it turns out, were basically
the glue that made colonialism possible. I found one book
on slavery in the British West Indies published in eighteen
twenty four, that admits that whips were quote the main
spring of the agricultural system in that region of the Empire.
Whips were also critical to the French colonies as far
back as the seventeen hundreds, when a visitor to the
(32:50):
French Antilles noticed that the use of whips was quote
always excessive and barbarous, with the potential of maiming the
victim by assaulting his private parts or even killing him,
if not instantly as has already been the case, in
due course, as is often the case. So whipping and
slavery go hand in hand. Obviously, I don't think most
people are surprised by that, but I think a lot
of people would be surprised to know that Europeans didn't
(33:11):
stop whipping subject people once slavery was over. The Congo
and the Amazon are proof of that, but the atomic
bomb is actually even more proof. After Leopold died, the
Belgians continued to control the Congo region and they moved
on from rubber farming to mining. In the first six
months of nineteen twenty, a single gold mine is recorded
as issuing over twenty six thousand lashes to his workers,
(33:32):
more than eight lashes for every single African quote employed there.
I say, you know, employed in quotation marks because the
Belgians kept right on using forced labor, as did the
British in Kenya up and into the modern era. By
World War II, Belgium required one hundred and twenty days
per year of labor for each adult male inhabitant of
the Congo region, and it turns out that eighty percent
(33:54):
of the uranium mine to make the bombs dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from Congolese mines that used force labor,
which means we can thank the Chacote for the first
atom bombs. The British are also famous for flogging their
colonial subjects well into the middle of the twentieth century.
By the nineteen twenties, Kenya was the colony where the
British used the most corporal punishment, or as they called it,
rough justice. Flogging was seen to be necessary in order
(34:18):
to deal with the quote raw native Africans, who were
perhaps so raw because the British regularly whipped them bloody.
There were attempts in the nineteen thirties to alter British
penal laws in the colony to be less brutal, but
they didn't exactly stop the problem of white colonists treating
black natives like shit. Brutality in the Kenyan colony eventually
led to the Mau Mau Uprising, which started in nineteen
fifty two when a bunch of rebels calling themselves the
(34:40):
Malmou killed thirty two white people. This made England go
bat shit crazy. The English forces rounded up one hundred
and fifty thousand Kenyans and threw them into concentration camps,
where they were starved and beaten regularly. One survivor recalled,
we were forced to do work, carrying bricks to build
a school. We were beaten if we moved too slowly.
It was very hard work. They would just flog everyone.
At times four or five guards with whips would come
(35:01):
into the cell. So at least twelve thousand people were
killed during the Mammou uprising. Although it's hard to say
how many of them died from being whipped, the brutalizing
effect of whipping people certainly had an impact on the
British men who did it. A Kenyan judge who investigated whipping,
torture and murder at one British interrogation center compared it
to a Nazi labor camp and said, quote from the
brutalizing of flogging, it is only a step to taking
(35:22):
a life without qualm. So I just thought this is
a good information to know. People talk about colonialism a lot,
and it gets, you know, a lot of well deserved
harsh criticism these days. But I think that the people
who rightly view it as a horrible historical crime also
tend to kind of push it further back in history
and sort of assume that most of the worst stuff
(35:43):
was done and you know, the seventeen and eighteen hundreds.
The reality is that colonialism was still exporting wealth from
African nations, you know, into Europe well into the twentieth century,
and that the European nations were using brutal and in
a lot of ways midia evil justice measures in order
to keep the colonies compliant. So, uh, there's your happy
(36:05):
little reminder that not only was colonialism and nightmare, but
it is a nightmare that happened recently enough that a
lot of people are still alive to remember it today.
Uh So just keep that in mind, I guess. And
now I'm going to use my magical time powers to
go back to you know, when Andrew and I were
sitting in the room. Yeah, and we don't want to
(36:27):
We also don't want to acknowledge like when you go
to Belgium, which I love Belgium. Yeah, and there a
couple of times, beautiful country, best beer I've ever had
in the world, gorgeous giant buildings. Yeah, many in like
the cities and stuff like ain't really old, beautiful museums
and stuff, many of which are built on Congo money. Yeah,
(36:47):
and so you don't and and like you we're shitting
on Belgium here. Yeah, but that's like all of Europe
you go to, you go to uh.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
Yeah, and the American North yeah yeah, like that's everything
was built on the backs of that shit. Yeah. So
and you know there's there were good people at all
times being like.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
Ah it sucks, this is really messed up.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
But yeah, but that's the same ever you pick up
an iPhone and you're like, oh, it sucks that someone
had for this.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
I do need it though, well, and there are and
this is again the thing that Leopold's ghost is a
good job of going into. There are the heroes in
this story. There's the guy like Colonel Washington who goes
there and right, there's guys like Morel who are who
like who don't even see it firsthand, but put it together. Yeah,
like this can't stand. I have to do something and
I hope that like, like that's the we got to
(37:37):
focus on Leopold in this both because his story is
the blueprint of every terrible person who came after him.
He really is the first modern monster world like head
of State, the first one to use pr in a
really modern way, right, But it's important. It's just as
important to think about the guys like Morell, who are
probably more relevant to our own lives because they point
out like, well, you can do something.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
Yeah, and you don't have to just say it's a shame.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
Yeah exactly, and it might take fifteen years. Yeah you can,
it's right.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Yeah, Like, these guys will still win to some extent,
but you can lowerre the margins.
Speaker 3 (38:11):
By which they win.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
You can cut into their profits. Well, right, it's just
a battle. All you can do is make it less profitable.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Wow, well the Capitalist Revolution.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Great, that is our podcast.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
For the week.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Andrew, you want to plug your pluggables?
Speaker 2 (38:26):
Oh yeah, well just please listen to you. Is this racist?
I used to think it was the most depressing podcast
on the internet, but not anymore.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
And I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter
at at I Write Okay. You can find this podcast
on the internet at behind the Bastards dot com. You
can find us on social media at at Bastards Pod.
I've got a book you can find on Amazon, a
Brief History of Vice. So yeah, check my stuff out,
check us out. We will be back every single Tuesday
from now until the heat death of the universe with
(38:57):
a new bastard. So check out as next to you
though right, yes, can't wait yep okay.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Also 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 week
(00:23):
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 piece
(00:47):
of shit. I hope you all have a good week,
regardless of what you do during it. Hello friends, I'm
Robert Evans and this is Behind the Bastards, the show
where we tell you everything you don't know about the
very worst people in his And this is part two
of our episode on Leopold, the Second, King of Belgium.
In part one, we sort of went over how Leopold
(01:08):
conned his way into becoming king of the Congo, how
he tricked the locals into signing over their rights to
their land, and how he conscripted thousands of them into
a slave army. So now we're going to get back
into all that and the rest of the terrible, terrible
story of the Belgian Congo. So the first five or
so years of the Congo project are great for Leopold.
(01:29):
He's in total control, richer than God, and most of
Europe still believes he's improving a lot of the Congolese people.
But in around eighteen ninety, a black journalist named Colonel
and he's not really a colonel, George Washington Williams saw
the actual Congo. So he didn't like take the tour
where you get led through the nice parts of the Congo, like,
he went on foot and he got in there and
he saw the fucking nightmare that Leopold had built. And
(01:52):
he wrote an article called an open Letter to King Leopold,
and it was the first expos of Leopold's blood soak,
rubber regime. William's document is remarkable because he's basically the
only person up to that point who actually sat down
with African people and asked them what was going on
in the Congo. He retraced a lot of Stanley's rat
along the Congo and actually talked to some of the
(02:12):
people who'd signed treaties giving their land to Leopold. He
learned that a great number of chiefs had been tricked
into signing things with magic tricks. One of the tricks
was that, like Stanley, had bought a bunch of electric
batteries in London, and when when attached to the arm
under the coat, communicated with a band of ribbon which
passed over the palm of the white brother's hand, And
when he gave the black brother a cordial grasp of
(02:34):
the hand, the black brother was greatly surprised to find
his white brother was so strong that he nearly knocked
him off his feet. When the native inquired about the
disparity of strength between himself and his white brother, he
was told that the white man could pull up trees
and perform the most prodigious feats of strength. So he
did a hand buzzer, He did a hand buzzer, and
these like, if you don't know what electricity is, yeah,
(02:55):
he's just some sort of superman. Let's sign the peace treaty.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah, yeah, oh, shit.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Another trick was to use a magnifying glass to light
a cigar and then claim that white people had sun
powers and he'll burn up your villain, basically like I
have power of the sun and a lake.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Riloge on fire. Yeah yeah, God, what a fucking bluff.
Yeah yeah, yeah. So Williams writes this open letter. He
frames it as like presuming Leopold doesn't know how terrible
things are. He writes about the taking of hands and
like all of the death and the people who are
being like starved to death as porters carrying. Is this
like sort of like modest proposal style, like of course,
(03:34):
you know, but it's an indictment or do I think
it is.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
There's a little bit of a satirical bent. Yeah, yeah,
and yeah. So Williams publishes this that but unfortunately he
dies not long after writing the letter, and Leopold's able
to clamp down on any kind of outrage after for
a little while. But seven or eight years later, another
guy who's an amateur journalist named Morel stumbles upon the conspiracy.
So he was working as a mid level employee for
(03:57):
a shipping line that had the contract to handle all
shipping in the Congo Free State, and so every so
often Morell would get sent over to Belgium and he
would report on what's going into and out of the
port of Antwerp. And so he realizes that the only
thing coming out of the Congo into Europe is rubber,
just shitloads of rubber, impossible quantities of it, larger quantities
than have been reported in fact. And the only thing
(04:18):
that's going being sent out to the Congo rather than
trade are just guns and money, and a lot more
guns than you'd need for any kind of philanthropic enterprise.
O man, Yeah, so a wire, exactly exactly. So he
starts he never actually goes to the Congo, but he
just starts digging, and he starts talking to other people
who have worked there, and basically he starts a newspaper
(04:41):
that is focused entirely on exposing King Leopold's crimes to
the world and starts publishing it all throughout Europe. He's
active all over the world and basically becomes like the
Congo equivalent of Wiki Leagues. So all these guys who
had worked in Leopold's Congo and felt bad were running
to him and be like, I saw this, this is
what happened. Here's some documents I managed.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
To Well, it's also like you're like, yeah, this is
what wikloks was supposed to be, Like this is what
it could be. And this is also why people like
that have legitimacy because and why conspiracies have legitimacy because
guess what there have been Yeah, big complex conspiracy.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Gi gantic conspiracies. So Morrell starts this newspaper and he
winds up creating was probably the first modern human rights organization,
the Congo Reform Association, which is dedicated to stopping this
this fucking nightmare in the Congo. King Leopold responded by
inventing the first modern international pr campaign. He bought a
shitload of journalists of his own, and he had them
(05:39):
all right puff pieces about how great the Congo actually was.
He would pay for journalists to go on lavish, carefully
controlled trips through the Congo. He'd give them exclusive interviews
when they got back, and he'd use his network of
agents to help them place their articles in newspapers. He
got journalists in the New York Times to write quotes
like I have witnessed more atrocities in London streets than
I have ever seen in the Congo. He would pay
(06:00):
for journalists to give public speeches, and he would lobby politicians.
Leopold's regime was heavily criticized for its widespread use of
something called the jacote, which is a hippo hyde whip,
which was used to punish laborers. Prisoners were often lashed
to death by it, and it's possible that, like literally
several million people were killed with this whip. So Leopold
starts catching flak for this, and he decides to distract
(06:22):
attention from his whipping millions of people to death by
sending journalists to British colonies and having them write lyrist
exposees of abuses in British colonies. So his pet reporters
would write stories about like how the British were using
whips on prisoners in South Africa or something terrible they'd
done to people in India, and then yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Exactly Hilary style, that's exactly it.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Like I said, he invented the modern art of being shitty,
like he's he's doing, Like what about ism on a
massive scale?
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Did he have like an antecedent for like the media,
like playing the media, or did he just make all this.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
I think he invented this playbook because other people had. Obviously,
every the media is existed for a while, other people
have used the media to one agree or other. But
he is the first person that I've ever run across
who's using it in the same way politicians use it today,
in the same way world leaders use it today, Like
this is a very modern pr campaign. He buys he
(07:18):
uses his Congo earnings to buy the editors of a
bunch of newspapers, including the London Times. So he's spending
like thousands of dollars on just yeah, owning editors so
that number one, they'll kill stories that are negative to
the Congo Free State, and so that he can place
his positive stories once he gets like positive journalists to go,
you know, have a tour of the Congo and then
(07:38):
come and write about it. And this is all basically
a delaying action. Leopold knows eventually the truth is going
to get out, but he's playing for time. He's got
twenty years before rubber stops being as profits.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
He doesn't need to do this forever, he just needs
to do it for a little while.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
He just wants to suck as much money as he
can out of the situation, and eventually the sheer way
to facts did change public opinion against him, but it
took like twenty years. At one point, Leopold is said
to have seen a cartoon of himself in a German newspaper,
and in the cartoon he's cutting the hands off of Africans,
and he reportedly laughed at that and said, cut off hands.
That's idiotic. I'd cut off all the rest of them,
(08:13):
but not the hands. That's the thing I need in
the Congo. So he's a real piece of work. Now,
in eighteen ninety five, Leopold had started dating a sixteen
year old prostitute, Nade Caroline. This is when the Congo
is that at the height of its rubber production, so
he'd been hooked up to her via a pimp named Durou,
who was a former officer in the French army. We
(08:36):
know now that Caroline's whole relationship with Leopold was likely
a con game, an incredibly successful scheme to snatch his inheritance.
But at the time, King Leopold, blood drenched, absolute ruler
of the Congo, was smitten with this teenage prostitute Adam
Hoschild writes that quote to the extent that someone like
Leopold was capable of love. This teenage prostitute proved to
(08:56):
be the love of his life, So he's really he
got it for this girl hard. He names her. The
barrenness of Vaughan and the unseemliness of their relationship isn't
really acknowledged in the nineteen ten biography. It just calls
her one of the king's quote favorites, and it dances
around the fact that they got together while the Queen
was still alive. In general, it refers to the King's
(09:18):
constant parade of mistresses as distractions. So yeah, Carolyn went
on to write a bit about their life together, and
she gives this additional insight into the kind of man
Leopold was. Quote every evening a steam launch took the
King to appear, leading to my villa through a subterranean passage.
Speaking about this, I can't help remarking on the extraordinary
taste of the King for everything which had a secret
(09:41):
and mysterious character, anyone who could sell him anyhow, so
long as it was built on the site of an
abandoned quarry, or if it had a secret staircase. So
basically he's gone from being too cheap to rinse his
fucking like a handkerchief.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
He's like a cartoon villain.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Yeah, to like a cartoon ville with like lairs built
into mountain side. It's a hidden boat like grottos and stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Jesus.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Yeah, but Carolyn seems to have his number, so she's
both got him on madly in love with her, but
she also like she takes advantage of his hypochondriasm or
whatever you call that, Like whenever she wanted him to
leave her alone, she'd pretend to have a cough, right,
and then he'd hide for days because he was scared
of She's she's my favorite person in this story.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
She's Yeah, this gy locked down.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
So the King is sort of the nineteen hundreds come around,
is in his late sixties, and he takes to visiting
his teenage mistress in a large tricycle because again, yeah,
he's getting.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
More and more to get.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Yeah for the geno tidle murderer. Yeah, he's riding a
big tricycle to hang out with his teenage girlfriend.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Just as bad everyone who every white guy riding a
tricycle with big old mustache.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
You are all as bad as king shit. Yeah, so
he's riding a big tricycle, he drinks enough but hot water,
and he starts referring to himself in the third person
at this point in time. So, yeah, he's a weirdo.
He's not entirely past his old ways at this point.
There's like a story of the time his mistress bought
a new hat for him and gives it to him,
(11:16):
and he like flies into a rage, and he only
calms down when she explains him that she got it
for a bargain, that it was like a deal, that
she bought it a quarter of its value. So like
he's still he's just he's.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Just a weirdo.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Yeah, he's a weird guy. He's like a weird old
rich letcher who's just knows what's going on in the
congo but doesn't like.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
I mean, look, here's the other part. The other way
to look at that, I suppose is maybe not in
such a direct degree, but as Americans, we all have
similar types of blood on our hands that we're electing
to not think about. Yeah, but we're not we're not
driving it in the same way, but.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
We absolutely like we all have these phones that we know,
are made by people who hate the work that they're doing,
and they're like include minerals that are mined from like
conflict ridden nations and often use slave labor in one
And we know that, like the fabric in our clothes
is often there's slave labor at some point in the
production line. Leopold knows that because he's signing the orders
(12:14):
and saying no, cut off more hands, cut off more hands,
and he's just it's just amazing to me that he's
able to do that all day, every day and then
write a tricycle to his teenage girlfriend's house.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Yeah, but that's it's amazing what you're saying. But to me,
I'm like, it's a little bit just degrees. I mean, look,
we're all able to.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
It is degrees. We're all able to compartmentalize the misery
that's necessary for our comfort.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Oh yea, but fuck this guy, Yeah, fuck this guy.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
One of the things that was interesting to me reading
that pro Leopold biography is that, well it does talk
about ten yeah, nineteen ten, the air after he died.
He's a spoiler, So this biography of him, it's very positive.
It talks about how there's atrocity, but it always kind
of doesn't talk about the detail. It just said, yeah,
he definitely committed atrocities, but look at this or look
at how he was. Look at how and everyone did.
(13:11):
Is like everyone did, and we'll get to that in
a little. What is interesting to me is that this
biography does condemn his mistress for capitalizing on the Congo.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Sure, it notes.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
That she was called the Queen of the Congo by
the people of Belgium, for she was to benefit largely
by the atrocities committed in the Free State, where sweating
and bleeding natives labored so as to accumulate millions for
the royal favorite. So like he again, he doesn't really
attack Leopold ever, Like he's like, yeah, he did some
bad stuff. But this biographer goes off on her mistress
(13:45):
for like taking money from him. That's that's blood money,
which like it is blood money. But like she's the
least objectionable person in this situation.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
So yeah, yeah she has a little milania. Ask I
suppose she is, and she maybe knew more what she
was getting into at the top.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yeah, she probably knew less about the Congo because, like
I doubt just a rich guy. Yeah, she just wanted
to marry a rich guy like I doubt he doesn't
seem like kind of guy. We've talked to his mistress
about the hands or the riks that they were murdering
people with, and it's at the time, especially probably easy
to ignore. Yeah, forget about it. Yeah, you don't share
a lot of that stuff with your yeah, especially not
(14:25):
your teenage child bride.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
No. No, And as the teenage child bride to just feel like,
I don't read those books. Yeah, I don't read that article. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Yeah. So in the early nineteen hundreds, more and more
stories of abuse in the Congo hit the world press.
People actually started to take notice and care. They read
about things like an entire towns worth of boys being
giving fifty lashes each, which is a fatal sentence for
laughing in the presence of a white man. In nineteen
oh four, one of the rubber companies in the Congo
put one of its own men on trial, mostly to
(14:53):
show that they were trying to do something about all
of the horrible crimes. The guy, Charles Cadron, was accused
of murdering at least one hundred and twenty two Africans.
The case wound up revealing a bunch of fucked up
details about like how all the hostage taking and the
handtaking and stuff actually worked. But Caudrone was released due
to quote extenuating circumstances. The court said that he'd had
to contend with quote great difficulties under which Caudron found
(15:17):
himself accomplishing his mission in the midst of a population
absolutely resistant to any idea of work in which respects
no other law than force and knows no other means
of persuasion than terror. So yeah, yeah, they were asking
for it defense. They were asking for it works.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
It also still works today, Kainda.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
It does, but it was it was stopping. This is
at the point where it was working less and less
in the Congo, and in the early nineteen hundreds, Leopold
starts dealing with more and more resistance to his ideas,
both in the Congo and at home. So this is
also kind of the point of which socialism is starting
to rise. And socialists obviously aren't big fans of kings.
(15:57):
Leopold declared himself a mortal enemy of socialism. He fought
against the universal right to vote for all Belgians.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Still on the playbook yeah, both of those things. Yep.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
In nineteen oh two, the Belgian Labor Party called a
general strike and Leopold called for it to be brutally stopped.
The strikers were fired upon by city guards and eight
people were killed. The massacre was a calculated message to
the socialists, don't fuck with the money train. Leopold was
willing to kill a hell of a lot more than
eight people to keep the money coming. In Hashchild's book
relates one six week campaign in the Congo that killed
(16:26):
quote over nine hundred natives, men, women, and children in
order to add twenty tons of rubber a month to
one region's productivity. So that gives you an idea of
the kind of calculus he's making.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yeah, Yeah, that's how I mean. Right, it's just lives
for rubber. Yeah, it just lives for rubber has a
commodity price.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Yeah. I have to point out that none of the
revelations brutality did much to hurt Leopold's popularity at home
in Belgium. He was growing less popular and even hated
in a lot of Europe. But even today there are
Belgian museums that proudly talk about his anti slavery campaigns
that ignore the whole genocide thing. The crimes against humanity
didn't hurt Leeopold's legacy. The only thing Belgium couldn't forgive
(17:02):
him for was being a shitty dad and having a mistress.
In nineteen oh four, Leopold's daughter Stephanie sued her father,
the king, for keeping her chunk of her mother's inheritance.
Leopold fought in court for the right to deny his
children their inheritance, and in fact denied them any wealth
or property even after his death. Around this time, a
Belgian cabinet minister noted that quote, the king has but
(17:23):
two dreams, to die a billionaire and to disinherit his daughters.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
I mean, what father doesn't want that?
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Yeah, yeah, a lot ways kind of cool, always kind
of cool. Wow.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
So in nineteen oh six, King Leopold finally marries the Baroness.
They have two sons. His second son was born with
a malformed arm that just sort of ended in a
stump with no hand. Obviously, some people suggested this might
be a judgment from God for all the millions of
hands that Leopold ordered severed, which is almost more fucked
up if you think about the morality behind Like, Okay,
(17:56):
this guy cut off millions of people's hands, let's fuck
up his innocent baby's hand.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
Yeah, that's not how you do that, if you got well.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
First of all, that is definitely how God do that.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
God is a little punchy on the messages.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Yeah, God, God ain't great with making sure these people
get their just desserts. Yeah, yeah, because right, because it's
so funny. It's like all these like just so kind
of stories where God is just a little like tricky metaphor, man, Like, well,
you didn't expect this, did.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
You didn't think God would do that?
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Yeah? Oh, just God, get it right, man.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Yeah, Hey, speaking of hands, why don't you use both
of them to order the products that we are about
to advertise.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Here they go.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
And we're back.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
So the general and seemliness of the king's young bride
and the disinheritance of his daughters meant the public sort
of deserted Leopold. Once the human rights campaign against his
atrocities really took off. In nineteen oh eight, King Leopold
was forced to bequeath his control of the Congo to
the Belgian government. In exchange, they paid for the colonies
one hundred and ten million francs worth of debt, most
of which had been accrued because Leopold used the Free
(19:13):
State as a bank to buy gifts for his mistresses.
Before he hands over control of the colony, he'd ruled
with an iron fist for more than twenty years. Leopold
has all of the Congo state records burned. I will
give them my Congo, he said, But they have no
right to know what I did there.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Oh what a fuck.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
Such a piece of shit.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
So a thing that I say all the time and
think about. It's like, yes, of course they're having massive
conspiracies in history, and I'm sure today, but like oftentimes,
like there isn't like the basic human competency to pull
off some of the more far fetched, you know, like
a Pizzagate style thing. You're like, how could everyone cover
(19:56):
this up? And then it's like just hearing a story
of nineteenth century to twentieth century like attention to details.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
He's a genius, Like he really is like a genius
in the sense that like if you saw a character
execute a plan like this in a movie, you would
be like, that's a little far fett that he'd get
away with it.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
But he did.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Yeah, and he's he is an evil genius.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Yeah, And I guess you know what, and it's I
guess it was from a time when little people were
less empowered to speak up, yes, because that's the real thing.
It's like it would be hard to pull off a
pizza gate because it's not like the top conspirators would
go to jail. But it's like there's kind of be
a janitor who's like, what the fuck is this?
Speaker 1 (20:40):
What the fuck's going on there.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Kids in this basement. Yeah, and that's like less likely
to happen. That was more controllable back in the day, clearly.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Yeah, And even when that it started coming out, there's
a lot less of a media landscape. You only get
the news from your newspapers. You'll read every newspaper. Most
people don't much of one newspaper. So if you're a
guy like Leopold, you've got the money to make the
press do what you want to a big scam.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
And if I understand my history correctly, which I probably don't,
that was a time when the public had more of
an expectation that media was biased.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
It was just right, well, yeah, this is like a
lot of this is right around the time when America
gets involved in a war with Spain. That's essentially pushed
by two different newspaper magnets wanting to sell more papers.
So like, yeah, the press. I mean, he doesn't have
a great reputation now, yeah, but even still didn't have
a great reputation then, So yeah, it's like a perfect storm.
(21:38):
But it also is it was a legitimately brilliant scheme,
and he did his best to cover his tracks. And
he died in December of nineteen oh nine at the
age of eighty four, super rich. And did he make
that billion Well we'll get to that in a minute.
What the biography published the next year said that quote.
(21:58):
Were it not for his private life, his domestic affairs,
and his avarice, he would have retained his popularity to
the very last. Belgium as a nation, with the exception
of the socialists, would have forgiven him the Congo atrocities. Indeed,
she has forgiven him, for after all, she is destined
to benefit by them, and she will not grudge her
king the Royal commission he pocketed on the enterprise. And
(22:21):
this is where again I want to point out that
in some total there's no one hundred percent agreed upon
death toll for Leopold's regiam in the Congo, but the
likely numbers are between ten and thirteen million, possibly as
high as fifteen million people. And the Congo was definitely
the bloodiest of any of the colonies in Africa by
(22:42):
a substantial margin. But they all killed a lot of people,
and a lot of them killed a lot of people
making rubber. And one of the things that was found
out after Leopold's death is that in the bloody French
and German colonies that were producing rubber, Leopold owned a
majority of several of the large rubber making corporates in
those colonies too, right, so he.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Was also the first like pan multinational. Right, the corporations
can be the conduits for the scumbags, because the corporations
are the scumbags, of course. But Jesus Christ, yeah, so
he's he's he's a real monster. The late king achieved
his ambition of disinheriting his daughters. He left them only
fifteen million francs, the exact amount he'd inherited from his father.
(23:24):
His entire fortune went to Baroness Devaughan, the prostitute Cortison
that he fell in love with and married. After his death,
she immediately married Durow, her pimp, and spent the rest
of her life living lavishly off the gold made by
the blood of Congle's labor, which she doesn't come out
as good as I don't know.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
I kind of like that his inheritance got stolen by
a scheming prostitute and her pimp friend. Yeah, that's better than.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
I guess if she had murdered him.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Her, if she'd strangled him with his own beard jabalize.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Yeah, or poisoned. Maybe she did poison him.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Maybe she did poison him. I can't hope, so I
certainly don't know.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Oh what a grim ass tail uck.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Yeah. His biography, the nineteen ten biography summed up Leopold's
life this way, Leopold the second New Belgium, New Europe
and new humanity. And like a strong man, he had
a deep contempt for everything and everybody. He loved his
country and his own interests. For all love is after
all selfish. Jesus, it's the Victorian age is a bleak
(24:31):
ass period.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
It's also you know, speaking of although it's not exactly
the same players, but it's the same types of institutions,
every one of y'all who whenever this comes out, y'all
have just enjoyed the royal wedding. Yeah, that shit has
built off the back of shit, like exactly like this,
well less.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Artful than this a lot cool because this is if
you can like the it's it's up there with the
Holocaust in terms of like the greatest crimes in human history.
But as a scheme, his planned is it's like almost artwork.
It's like watching The Joker and the Good Krysnal and Batman.
(25:12):
Yeah pull it.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
But also that one too, where you're like it has
similar moments of like, I feel like some of these
lives are just to do the lie. Yeah, there's not
even about achieving the aid even need to do that.
Yeah yeah, yeah, there's a lot of like the fuck
you do that for? Well, it's crazy and so one
of the more I mean, there's so many fucked up
things about this. Yeah, I really recommend reading King Leopold's
(25:35):
Ghost by Adam Hoschild. It's a great book and it
really delves into the human misery caused by this regime.
But you know, you're talking ten to fifteen million people killed,
millions more left without hands, left maimed, starved like whose
villages were destroyed. The Congo today is still probably the
least stable state in Africa, or at least one of them. Yeah,
(25:57):
because all social order was destroyed. Yeah, swats the poppet
like that. It continues to this day. Leopold's profits, Yeah,
roughly a billion dollars in modern currency. That's bonkers, that's
I feel like, that's fucking nothing for what he did.
Oh in terms of right terms of yeah, not a.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Billion dollars in nineteen oh nine money, right, iland dollars
into day's money is what he got for killing ten
to fifteen million people and destroying Central Africa.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
That's Jesus. Yeah, he's not even extracting enough wealth, Like
you could do that just by closing up bookshops.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Yeah, And I think a lot of that is because
he had to spend so much money on an army,
on policing, the same fighting it because there were a
bunch of rebellions, people who thought back. He had to
suppress those rebellions, and he had to pay all these
journalists and like, yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
There you go, fucking capitalists. And he'sn't even profitable.
Speaker 3 (26:54):
To be the worst person in his although I.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Guess that was the second lesson that everyone turned is like, oh,
the real profit in pr and making people think they
want to do this. Now.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
I want to ask you a question that occurred to
me when I finished researching this, and I wonder about this,
is Leopold a worse person than Hitler? Because I can't
not think about that line in The Big Lebowski where
what's his name Walter's like, say what you will about
national socialism. At least it's an ethos. Hitler committed crimes
(27:25):
on a similar, if not much greater scale if you
include all of the war dead, but he had like
an ideology behind it, as opposed to Leopold, who this
was never anything but money. There's no hatred, there was
no goal, there was no view of the world. It
was purely if I can make money, and killing these
people is the fastest way to get it. Yeah, I
(27:47):
don't care what happens to them because I want money.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
And it was also separate. I mean, obviously, I guess
it's just different things.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
They are very different things. Although you look at the Holocaust,
and this is something that's often glossed over when people
talk about the Holocaust is how much of it was
a money making endeavor from the German state because they
were literally mining people to death, but in terms of
like taking their hair, taking the gold fillings out of them,
taking their businesses beforehand, and taking their property. So I
(28:17):
mean you have with most of like and with really
with every great genocide, because like if you look at
the Rwandan genocide, there was a lot of financial motivation there,
people wanting each other's farms and what.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Yeah, I have to imagine like those are the things
that allow I mean, like all look but like all
conflict too. It's like like especially anything sectarian or religious,
like the Crusades. You know, you can make an economic
case for the Crusades or or colonialism or at large,
like all that is sort of possible. I think the
thing with Leopold's Evil is as as we've discussed already.
(28:48):
It's like, though not in the same degree, anyone listening
to this on a podcast thing and on a yeah
exactly is complicit in something along Leopold's vector, whereas it's
fewer of us listening to this podcast are complicit in
(29:11):
some type of thing that Hitler is involved in. So
I think it behooves us to say Hitler is more
evil because we don't want to be part you know, like, yeah,
the banality, I mean, look, not banality, but the you know,
the it's in the direction of banality.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Well, I think you're onto something that's great there. And
I think that's why the idea of the banality of
evil is so important is because Hitler is it's so
easy to see the evil and Hitler because he was
he was showy with like he's the most showy villain
in all of history. Leopold was a weird old man
who had a stupid beard and sat in his office
and never shot anybody, and wrote a tricycle to his
(29:49):
mistress and was just this weird old dude who was
happy to orchestrate one of like the great crimes in
human history just for some cashness pocket And that's scarier.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Yeah, And you imagine, like he doesn't come up with
the hands for bullets scheme. No, he's just does they
need to We can't let them have bullets. We have
to make sure that like we're accounting for all the bullets,
that they're not saving them up for a rebellion.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
What can we do? Oh, well, we just make sure
they prove to us they're using the bullets for a
good reason when they fire them. How about we have
them bringing a hand. Great, and that's probably the end
of the country proof.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
And then the first person bring a million.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
People lose hands. Yeah, Like, then a crime on an
unspeakable scale happens. And he's just like sitting at home
being like, boy, I wonder why productions down this week.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
But he can also be like, I'm not the one
that came up with the hands thing. Oh, it's a shame.
He can even be like, all the hand things are
real shame.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
Yeah, it's a real shame. One of my new guys,
you know these you know the walloons. Yeah, you put
him in charge of something and they mess it up.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
I hate that we have to do this, but of
course we do need that rubber. Yeah, that's that's the
thing that you know. And look, that's a version of
every one of us tells ourselves every fucking day. Yeah.
So that's why I think most people would say Hitler
is a worse, more evil, because we don't want to
be complicit in our own evil.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
Hey, everybody, this is Robert Evans from the future. I
realized that this podcast was a teeny bit incomplete. There
was some more information I wanted to give out, so
I gained access to a time machine and went back
in time to record it. It was either fixed the
podcast or stopped nine to eleven. Hopefully I made the
right decision. But I wanted to say a little bit
(31:26):
more about the Chacota, which we talked about a little
bit in this podcast. That's the hippo hyde whip that
was the primary disciplinary tool in the Congo Free State.
The book King Leopold's Ghost makes a big deal out
of the Chacota, and it's probably true that the Belgians
under Leopold whipped more people to death than any other
regime in history, but that book also points out that
whipping people to death or nearly to death was basically
(31:47):
the bedrock that colonialism was founded upon. It relates the
story of a guy named Roger Casement, who we didn't
get to talk to you in this podcast. He's a
very interesting dude. He's one of the men who investigated
atrocities in the Congo. He also wound up investigating of
atrocities in the Amazon at a place called Putumayo, where
the Peruvian Amazon rubber company had been caught basically enslaving
and murdering people to produce even more rubber, and this
(32:10):
was for I think the British. It was mostly a
British owned company, although it was like a corporation with
a lot of different sort of stockholders behind it. And
the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company dealt out punishments with a
whip of their own that was actually a tapeer hide whip,
but it was similar to the Jacota in its effect.
Roughly thirty thousand indigenous people in the Amazon died mining
(32:30):
rubber for that company. Whips, it turns out, were basically
the glue that made colonialism possible. I found one book
on slavery in the British West Indies published in eighteen
twenty four, that admits that whips were quote the main
spring of the agricultural system in that region of the Empire.
Whips were also critical to the French colonies as far
back as the seventeen hundreds, when a visitor to the
(32:50):
French Antilles noticed that the use of whips was quote
always excessive and barbarous, with the potential of maiming the
victim by assaulting his private parts or even killing him,
if not instantly as has already been the case, in
due course, as is often the case. So whipping and
slavery go hand in hand. Obviously, I don't think most
people are surprised by that, but I think a lot
of people would be surprised to know that Europeans didn't
(33:11):
stop whipping subject people once slavery was over. The Congo
and the Amazon are proof of that, but the atomic
bomb is actually even more proof. After Leopold died, the
Belgians continued to control the Congo region and they moved
on from rubber farming to mining. In the first six
months of nineteen twenty, a single gold mine is recorded
as issuing over twenty six thousand lashes to his workers,
(33:32):
more than eight lashes for every single African quote employed there.
I say, you know, employed in quotation marks because the
Belgians kept right on using forced labor, as did the
British in Kenya up and into the modern era. By
World War II, Belgium required one hundred and twenty days
per year of labor for each adult male inhabitant of
the Congo region, and it turns out that eighty percent
(33:54):
of the uranium mine to make the bombs dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from Congolese mines that used force labor,
which means we can thank the Chacote for the first
atom bombs. The British are also famous for flogging their
colonial subjects well into the middle of the twentieth century.
By the nineteen twenties, Kenya was the colony where the
British used the most corporal punishment, or as they called it,
rough justice. Flogging was seen to be necessary in order
(34:18):
to deal with the quote raw native Africans, who were
perhaps so raw because the British regularly whipped them bloody.
There were attempts in the nineteen thirties to alter British
penal laws in the colony to be less brutal, but
they didn't exactly stop the problem of white colonists treating
black natives like shit. Brutality in the Kenyan colony eventually
led to the Mau Mau Uprising, which started in nineteen
fifty two when a bunch of rebels calling themselves the
(34:40):
Malmou killed thirty two white people. This made England go
bat shit crazy. The English forces rounded up one hundred
and fifty thousand Kenyans and threw them into concentration camps,
where they were starved and beaten regularly. One survivor recalled,
we were forced to do work, carrying bricks to build
a school. We were beaten if we moved too slowly.
It was very hard work. They would just flog everyone.
At times four or five guards with whips would come
(35:01):
into the cell. So at least twelve thousand people were
killed during the Mammou uprising. Although it's hard to say
how many of them died from being whipped, the brutalizing
effect of whipping people certainly had an impact on the
British men who did it. A Kenyan judge who investigated whipping,
torture and murder at one British interrogation center compared it
to a Nazi labor camp and said, quote from the
brutalizing of flogging, it is only a step to taking
(35:22):
a life without qualm. So I just thought this is
a good information to know. People talk about colonialism a lot,
and it gets, you know, a lot of well deserved
harsh criticism these days. But I think that the people
who rightly view it as a horrible historical crime also
tend to kind of push it further back in history
and sort of assume that most of the worst stuff
(35:43):
was done and you know, the seventeen and eighteen hundreds.
The reality is that colonialism was still exporting wealth from
African nations, you know, into Europe well into the twentieth century,
and that the European nations were using brutal and in
a lot of ways midia evil justice measures in order
to keep the colonies compliant. So, uh, there's your happy
(36:05):
little reminder that not only was colonialism and nightmare, but
it is a nightmare that happened recently enough that a
lot of people are still alive to remember it today.
Uh So just keep that in mind, I guess. And
now I'm going to use my magical time powers to
go back to you know, when Andrew and I were
sitting in the room. Yeah, and we don't want to
(36:27):
We also don't want to acknowledge like when you go
to Belgium, which I love Belgium. Yeah, and there a
couple of times, beautiful country, best beer I've ever had
in the world, gorgeous giant buildings. Yeah, many in like
the cities and stuff like ain't really old, beautiful museums
and stuff, many of which are built on Congo money. Yeah,
(36:47):
and so you don't and and like you we're shitting
on Belgium here. Yeah, but that's like all of Europe
you go to, you go to uh.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
Yeah, and the American North yeah yeah, like that's everything
was built on the backs of that shit. Yeah. So
and you know there's there were good people at all
times being like.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
Ah it sucks, this is really messed up.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
But yeah, but that's the same ever you pick up
an iPhone and you're like, oh, it sucks that someone
had for this.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
I do need it though, well, and there are and
this is again the thing that Leopold's ghost is a
good job of going into. There are the heroes in
this story. There's the guy like Colonel Washington who goes
there and right, there's guys like Morel who are who
like who don't even see it firsthand, but put it together. Yeah,
like this can't stand. I have to do something and
I hope that like, like that's the we got to
(37:37):
focus on Leopold in this both because his story is
the blueprint of every terrible person who came after him.
He really is the first modern monster world like head
of State, the first one to use pr in a
really modern way, right, But it's important. It's just as
important to think about the guys like Morell, who are
probably more relevant to our own lives because they point
out like, well, you can do something.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
Yeah, and you don't have to just say it's a shame.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
Yeah exactly, and it might take fifteen years. Yeah you can,
it's right.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Yeah, Like, these guys will still win to some extent,
but you can lowerre the margins.
Speaker 3 (38:11):
By which they win.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
You can cut into their profits. Well, right, it's just
a battle. All you can do is make it less profitable.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Wow, well the Capitalist Revolution.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Great, that is our podcast.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
For the week.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Andrew, you want to plug your pluggables?
Speaker 2 (38:26):
Oh yeah, well just please listen to you. Is this racist?
I used to think it was the most depressing podcast
on the internet, but not anymore.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
And I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter
at at I Write Okay. You can find this podcast
on the internet at behind the Bastards dot com. You
can find us on social media at at Bastards Pod.
I've got a book you can find on Amazon, a
Brief History of Vice. So yeah, check my stuff out,
check us out. We will be back every single Tuesday
from now until the heat death of the universe with
(38:57):
a new bastard. So check out as next to you
though right, yes, can't wait yep okay.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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