As 10,000 people took to the streets of Brussels on Sunday (7 June 2020) to protest as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, there was one landmark which drew their ire more than any other: the equestrian statue of King Leopold II outside Belgium’s royal palace.
“Murderer!” the protesters cried as they climbed the statue and waved the flag of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Had the statue been flimsy enough to pull down they would have done it, just as fellow BLM protesters toppled Edward Colston’s statue across the channel in Bristol. Estimates vary, but the consensus figure is that 10 million Africans were killed during Leopold’s brutal reign (1885-1908) in his ironically named Congo Free State.
The global BLM movement has sparked renewed calls for the 14 statues of Leopold scattered throughout Belgium to be taken down (as one in Antwerp has been) and the many places named after him to be renamed. A petition to remove the most egregious monument in the seaside town of Ostende, which depicts a group of Congolese people kneeling below Leopold in “gratitude”, has attracted 65,000 signatures in a week. In 2004, activists cut off the hand of one of the Africans – the act Belgian soldiers inflicted on Africans who hadn’t met their rubber quota. (Protesters have promised to return it if the current king acknowledges the imperial atrocities.)
Leopold and Colston were not contemporaries, but they both did deep and lasting damage to Africans. And their legacy, now in focus as never before, is complicated by their pivotal role in building their modern cities and countries.
As his name might suggest, Leopold II was the second king of Belgium, and by far its most important. His 44-year reign coincided with that of his cousin, Queen Victoria. Many historians believe that without his shrewd diplomacy during the Franco-Prussian wars, Belgium would not exist today. Known as the “builder king”, Leopolad’s grand projects shape the Brussels skyline: he built the Cinquantenaire Arch next to the EU Commission building, along with the unmissable National Basilica in the west, and he put the gaudy finishing touches to the gargantuan Justice Palace, whose gold dome can be seen across the city.
The dark secret behind these buildings is that they were built with Congo blood money. Leopold II was determined to make Belgium a European power player, and he was obsessed with acquiring overseas colonies. “I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake,” he once remarked.
Leopold got his opportunity with the 1884 Berlin Conference. He promised to create a free state which improved the lives of the native inhabitants, and was awarded an area 76 times the size of Belgium as his personal property. Unlike the other African colonies, this one belonged to a man rather than a state.
Leopold quickly showed he had no intention of improving the lives of Africans and set about establishing a brutal, exploitative regime presided over by the murderous gendarmerie and military force, Force Publique (an army and police force). He amassed an exorbitant personal fortune from the exploitation of ivory and later rubber. Much of this money was used to fuel Belgium’s rapid industrialisation, but Leopold also spent plenty on himself and lavish gifts for his mistress, a 16-year-old French prostitute.
Leopold’s attitude toward Africans was little different from those of his fellow imperial rulers and family members. But his nakedly ruthless rule, and his failure to honour the artifice of “improving” the continent, risked exposing colonialism for what it was. In the early 1900s the great powers turned against him, and their newspapers began running stories about the Congo atrocities. The pressure built to such an extent that the Belgian parliament stripped the colony from the king and assumed control. Leopold died a year later, in 1909. His funeral procession was booed by the Belgian crowd, such was the outrage at the time.
But it didn’t take long for the Congo atrocities to fade from the world’s memory. For obvious reasons, the British and other colonial powers were reluctant to continue highlighting the mistreatment of Africans. The Belgian statues to Leopold were erected in the decades that followed at the instigation of his nephew King Albert I. Many were built in the 1930s, a time when the very existence of Belgium was being challenged after the country’s devastation in the First World War. The Belgian government created a mythology around Leopold II, erasing the public memory of the Congo atrocities and replacing it with a narrative of a benevolent king who brought glory to Belgium.
The subject of the Congo atrocities remained unexamined, both in Belgium and the world, until Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost in 1999. Belgian politicians reacted furiously to the book, which detailed what had happened using contemporaneous accounts. In 2010, the former Belgian foreign minister Louis Michel, the father of future prime minister and present EU Council president Charles Michel, called Leopold “a hero with ambitions for a small country like Belgium” and described the Congo stories as “exaggerations”.
For the past 20 years, the debate has periodically recurred. But the statues remain, and the subject is still glossed over in Belgian schools. Many Belgians remain reluctant to confront the truth about the king that shaped their country; it would be akin to the British acknowledging the atrocities committed by Queen Victoria. And some allege that the historic accounts used for Hochschild’s book were purposefully exaggerated by British media in order to banish the Congo Free State.
As with Colston, there were two Leopolds – one at home and one abroad. There was Belgium’s “builder king” who gave the public grand buildings and a higher standard of living, and kept Belgium independent. And then there was the Congo’s “despot king” who worked Africans to death and destroyed a land he never even visited. It is unsurprising that many Belgians don’t want to contemplate how much of their wealth originated from horrific exploitation over a century ago. The same can be said of many in the UK.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
The US has been threatening Iran for more than 20 years. Already during the Clinton administration, US Central Command (USCENTCOM) had formulated “in war theater plans” to invade both Iraq and Iran. This posting which includes selected articles from our archives was originally published by Global Research 12 years ago in May 2005. In the wake of the war on Iraq (2003), the Bush administration officially identified Iran and Syria as the next stage of “the road map to war”. Bush’s National Security doctrine contained in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a continuation of Clinton’s “strategy of ...
Part IEthnolinguistic SerbdomSerbia’s Prince Miloš’s schemes to solve the „Serbian Question“ were based exclusively on the historical (state) rights of the Serbs. However, during his reign, a new and cardinal dimension on an understanding of Serbian national identity and, therefore, the idea of the creation of the national state of the Serbs was introduced into Serbian political thought by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787–1864) who framed the concept of a linguistic Serbdom.In his brief essay “Срби сви и свуда” (“Serbs All and Everywhere”),[1] V. S. Karadžić established the linguistic criteria for determining Serbian national self-identity and reformulation of the whole concept ...
Daniel Goldhagen blamed the Holocaust on «the Germans» (by which he meant the German people), and said that they perpetrated the Holocaust because they positively enjoyed murdering «the Jews». But, as has long been well understood by historians (except when they fail to point to it as being a disproof of Goldhagen’s bigoted and indefensible anti-German thesis), Hitler had to work long and hard in order to bring about a consensus, first amongst his own leadership group, and then in the population as a whole, favoring the extermination-option. Hitler, Der Fuehrer, «The Leader», clearly was the catalyst turning the chemical ...
The name of the modern land-locked country north of Greece, with its capital at Skopje, has returned to the news. It is officially called FYROM, but embedded in that name is “Macedonia” which is a reflection of the longstanding attempt to take over the modern Greek province of Macedonia as reflected in maps used in many places, including schools.It is clear that this naming implies territorial ambitions which have long been understood (http://macedonia-evidence.org/documentation.html). If that threat to the stability of the southern Balkans is to be stopped permanently, I suggest that the following must happen:1) the country should be named ...
By all accounts from Greece and Macedonia, a majority in both countries will be happy that a new name for Macedonia has been agreed upon by the governments in Athens and Skopje. After years of facing Greek vetoes to join the European Union and NATO under the name “Republic of Macedonia,” the Greek government agreed to drop its opposition, so long as Macedonia change its name to “Northern Macedonia.” Northern Greeks always objected to Macedonia’s use of that name because they believed it represented a goal of Slavic and Albanian Macedonians to lay claim to the northern Greek region that ...
Twenty years ago, on 24 March 1999, Operation Allied Force began – the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia that led to the country’s dismemberment – and the independent state of Kosovo was proclaimed. Yet these events were far from historically contingent, as some people claim. So who orchestrated the breakup of Yugoslavia and how?These days, few remember that the Bulgarians were at the start of it all. Even the Bulgarians themselves don’t like to think about it.In early March 1999, Bulgaria’s National Intelligence Service told Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) that it had information about a secret plan by the Yugoslav ...
Bosnian Muslim Kasim Blekic was allegedly murdered by Bosnian Serbs but was, in fact, alive outside of Sarajevo.One of the fundamental legal principles or concepts of jurisprudence is that before a person can be charged with a crime, evidence must be shown that a crime has occurred. This is known by the legal principle of “corpus delicti”, the body of a crime, meaning that there must be evidence that a crime has occurred before a defendant can be charged or prosecuted for the crime. The 6th edition of Black’s Law Dictionary (1990) gives the meaning of corpus delicti as “the ...
Source: VPN MentorOrigins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
Imagine that Vladimir Putin were not a murderous autocrat and kleptocrat who has spent his fourteen years in power living up to his KGB past and dragging Russia ever back towards Communist autocracy, illiberalism, and expansionism. Imagine that instead he were one of the greatest leaders that Russia has had, whose policies have helped produce a massive rise in living standards and life expectancy, recuperation of national pride, and enforcement of the rule of law, who has tackled kleptocrats and gangsters wisely and well, whose foreign policy has on balance been realistic, diplomatic, and conducive to peace, who has presided ...
Hitler was a very good student. Those who read Mein Kampf will find therein many good words about America. More precisely, not about the whole of America, but about the numerous attempts of the American socialists to change the foundations of the American way of life.The ideas of forced sterilization and forced abortion were adopted by Hitler from the founder of feminism, American socialist Margaret Sanger. Madame Sanger even founded a special clinic to promote mass abortions of black people to reduce their number with the aim of completely eradicating blacks in America. This organization still exists–it is called Planned ...
Part IPart II The policy of language and political parties until the prohibition of the Illyrian name (1843)During the years of 1832–1836 the Hungarian assembly (Dieta) hold several sessions in Pozsony (Bratislava/Pressburg), where Croatia-Slavonia’s deputies, particularly count J. Drašković, fought for the introduction of the national (Croat) language in Croatia-Slavonia instead of the Latin or Hungarian, as well as for the Croatian state-historical rights (the so-called Croatian pravice) as they were claimed as such by the Croat political leadership. At the same time, in 1834 Ljudevit Gaj obtained a permission from the Habsburg Emperor Francis I (1806–1835) to publish the first ...
Myth #1 – Jews and Arabs have always been in conflict in the regionAlthough Arabs were a majority in Palestine prior to the creation of the state of Israel, there had always been a Jewish population, as well. For the most part, Jewish Palestinians got along with their Arab neighbors. This began to change with the onset of the Zionist movement, because the Zionists rejected the right of the Palestinians to self-determination and wanted Palestine for their own, to create a “Jewish State” in a region where Arabs were the majority and owned most of the land.For instance, after a ...
For the approximately 200 Canadian military trainers currently deployed to Ukraine, it is likely that on the first of January they would have witnessed a torch lit procession. Throughout Kiev and numerous other towns in Western Ukraine, thousands of civilians took to the streets – not to usher in the New Year – but to celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of a man named Stepan Bandera.This was not the first time Ukrainian nationalists marched with torches to celebrate Bandera’s birthday, but it was the first time such a spectacle was an officially sanctioned affair.On December 28, 2018, Ukrainian ...
There is less talk about the rump-Ukraine in the news these days, especially in the western corporate media, and there is a good reason for that: that short-lived Urkonazi “Banderastan” is falling apart. This is hardly surprising since the entire concept was never viable in the first place. Let’s remember how it all began.It is crucial to remember that there was no spontaneous revolution or insurrection in the Ukraine, the Euromaidan had nothing to do with Europe and everything to do with the USA. Oh sure, the Ukrainian people were told that it was about “joining the EU”, but that ...
In this Talking Point Dr Marcus Papadopoulos says that ordinary people in the West were not told that after Serbia lost control of Kosovo, following the Nato bombing campaign against Belgrade and other Serbian cities in 1999, the region became a centre-point in Europe for the trafficking of people, drugs and organs. When Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, Western politicians hailed the event.The United States, which engineered the disputed act of independence, led the way in recognising the new Balkan state, with its allies quickly following suit.Many of the leading figures in today’s Kosovan government are ...
Thursday marked the 150th anniversary of the founding of America’s deadliest terrorist organization: the Klu Klux Klan.Since September 11, extremists associated with various far-right wing ideologies, including the KKK and Jewish extremists, have killed far more people in the United States than extremists motivated by radical Islam.One centuries’ old example of US government double standards when it comes to terrorism, is the infamous Klu Klux Klan. The Klan has terrorized and killed far more Americans than Islamic terrorists ever have; and despite being America’s oldest terrorist organization, the US government does not officially consider the KKK a terrorist organization, classifying ...
After the first ever cabinet meeting in the Golan Heights, Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech on April 17, 2016 that the territory “will remain under Israel’s sovereignty permanently.” This elicited admonitions from some of Israel’s greatest allies, the United States and Germany, and renewed attention on the issue.The Golan Heights were opportunistically occupied by Israel after its victory in the 1967 six-day-war. A United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) has monitored the region since 1974, when Israel and Syria signed a ceasefire agreement, and it has been considered an occupied territory of the UN and the ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Can we face it in this election season? America is a weapons factory, the White House a war room, and the president the manager of the neoliberal conspiracy to recolonize the planet. It exports war and mass poverty. On the economic front, usurious neoliberalism; on the military front, illegal wars. These are the trenches of America’s battle for world domination in the 21st century.If not stopped, it will be a short century.Since 1945, America’s Manifest Destiny, posing as the Free World’s Crusade against the Red Menace, has claimed 20 to 30 million lives worldwide and bombed one-third of the earth’s ...
On October 21, 2016 a typical Estonian school witnessed an opening ceremony of the bronze bust of Harald Nugiseks. He was an SS-Oberscharführer (Sergeant) in World War II, who served voluntarily in the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS. According to the director of this education institution, the memory of Harald Nugiseks will lead to the increase in feelings of patriotism among students and must increase their willingness to protect their country in case of external aggression.So who is this Nugiseks? – During the Second World War, he was awarded with the second highest military award in the ...
