• Honestly, British people can congratulate themselves as never being as bad a Belgium in Africa.

  • I think you do (well not really, no congratulations to be had by anyone there), but it's an extremely, extremely low bar. Many people don't appreciate how truly shocking the Belgian devastation of Congo was. Most who know something about it know that many people died and there was a lot of forced labour. But that does not come close to describing the horrors. Millions died, the hacking off of hands and feet were routine, and that includes children specifically as a means of punishing the parents. I'm quite interested in history and you come across a lot of extremely nasty human behaviour, but this is one of those that really made me sick reading about it. I first heard about it when I came across a text by Mark Twain and that left quite a deep impression on me (probably because I was quite young too).

    The determined viciousness and complete and utter disregard for any possible inherent worth of the victims' lives even as a concept is rather reminiscent of the Holocaust, even though of course the actual circumstances were very different and you can't directly compare it.

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