AE

This book encompasses a 100+ year history of the Arabic people within the Middle East, touching briefly in Muslims within Central Asia. It is the longest book I've ever gotten through. And it may be a controversial opinion, but I'm gonna say it: the Middle East region is complicated. Yeah. I said it.

Regarding the book itself: I found it highly informative, straightforward, and balanced. I wish it drew more through-lines of ‘how this event happening now connects to that event from 50 years ago'. The author did that a bit, but not enough IMO. Also not nearly enough about the US-Saudi Arabia relationship. I'mma need to read another book about that.

But my overall thoughts on the historical events are this:
US and European meddling has done more harm than good in the Greater Middle East region and to the Arabic people. The best thing to be done is for the West to remain as neutral and un-involved as possible. Everything we touch turns to shit. Leave these people alone.

The majority of this book was about Israel and its shenanigans over the last 100 years. Skip to the final section to see my thoughts on that kerfuffle.

Good place to start
“Western policymakers and intellectuals need to pay far more attention to history if they hope to remedy the ills that afflict the Arab world today. All too often in the West, we discount the current value of history. [...] This could spare them not from repeating history so much as from repeating historic mistakes.”

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Culture Clash
• In the late 1700's, The French brought post-Revolution classical liberalism to Egypt, and argued that their ideals were “universal”. There is truly no better tool for a zealot or conqueror than to claim that their firmly held beliefs are the pinnacle and all others are “barbaric”.
• I do hold many of the liberal, materialist beliefs espoused by the European invaders of the time, including “the exercise of human reason over revealed religion”, it's clear their intentions were not to improve the material conditions of the people they sought out, but to conquer their lands and stick it to their centuries-long enemy, Britain.

Ironically, before WW1, Europe helped the Ottoman Empire stay afloat to keep Russia from annexing Ottoman land and to keep the peace in the Mediterranean.
“In a secret appendix to the London Convention of 1840, the governments of Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia gave a formal commitment to ‘seek no augmentation of territory, no exclusive influence, [and] no commercial advantage for their subjects, which those of every other nation may not equally obtain.' This self-denying protocol provided the Ottoman Empire with nearly four decades of protection against European designs on its territory” But...well...time ticks on.

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Pre-WW1 Imperialism, Colonialism, and Neo-Colonialism

• Tunisia, a small African country just south of Italy would be a victim of Europe's newest plot of conquest: Not gunboat diplomacy, but something more insidious.
• After Tunisia's 1861 constitution, a guy named Khayr al-Din was appointed president of the Grand Council, but didn't like how things were run, “and so in 1863 he tendered his resignation. The issue that provoked his resignation was the government's decision to contract its first foreign loan, which Khayr al-Din predicted would drag his adoptive country ‘to its ruin.' [...] “The result was the surrender of Tunisia's sovereignty to an international financial commission.” And there it is. That's how they get you.
• I always thought that the Neo-Colonial “dollar diplomacy” of Europe and the US started after regular old colonialism fell out of fashion in the mid-1900's. Turns out they were both happening in lock-step for over 150 years.
• Long-story short: Europe offers usurious loans to developing countries, the country can't pay the loan back, thus the European empire takes over whatever is making the country money, and drains the wealth as quickly as possible, while diverting any funding that benefits the people of that country. It's a story as old as time. It's still going on today, and it's never stopped happening in over 150 years. Though now it's mostly done by “The World Bank” and the “International Monetary Fund”, which are puppets to the interest of US & EU corporate interests. That's how the world works. This is neo-colonialism, AKA neo-liberalism.
• “The single greatest threat to the independence of the Middle East was not the armies of Europe but its banks. Ottoman reformers were terrified by the risks involved in accepting loans from Europe. In 1852, when Sultan Abdulmecid sought funds from France, one of his advisors took him aside and counseled strongly against the loan: ‘Your father [Mahmud II] had two wars with the Russians and lived through many campaigns. He had many pressures on him, yet he did not borrow money from abroad. [...] If this state borrows five piasters it will sink. For if once a loan is taken, there will be no end to it. [The state] will sink overwhelmed in debt.'”
• Thus these countries and the Ottoman Empire itself sank deeper and deeper into the claws to the European empire without even firing a shot.
• “[Europe] gained tremendous power over the finances of the Ottoman Empire as a whole, which the European powers used not just to control the actions of the sultan's government but to open the Ottoman economy to European companies for railways, mining, and public works.”
• “Open up the economy” is one of those euphemism capitalists have been using for centuries to describe “let the oligarchs suck the country dry”. That's what that phrase has always meant. Remember that the next time CNN or the NYT suggests it for some poor under-developed nation.
• “Between 1862 and 1873, Egypt contracted eight foreign loans, totaling £68.5 million ($376.75 million), which, after discounts, left only £47 million ($258.5 million), of which some £36 million ($198 million) were spent in payments on the principal and interest on the foreign loans. Thus, out of a debt of £68.5 million ($376.75 million), the government of Egypt gained only about £11 million ($60.5 million) to invest in its economy.”
So 23% of the loan was actually usable by the country and the rest was stolen back by Europe. If that's not the textbook definition of usury I don't know what is.
• Then these countries exploited by Europe began selling their assets. And who was there to buy for pennies on the dollar? Why the exploiters, of course!
• “As this desperate measure failed to staunch the hemorrhage, the viceroy sold the government's shares in the Suez Canal Company to the British government in 1875 for £4 million ($22 million)—recouping only one-quarter of the £16 million ($88 million) the canal is estimated to have cost the government of Egypt.” Truly truly evil.
• The vultures of Europe picked clean the carcass they themselves killed. But their “financial advisers” had no interest in returning these countries to fiscal solvency. “With each plan, the foreign economic advisors managed to insinuate themselves deeper into the financial administration of Egypt.” That was their goal, of course.
• The insatiable European powered couldn't stop there. “Over time, informal imperial control hardened into direct colonial rule, as the whole of North Africa was partitioned and distributed among the growing empires of Europe.”
• Ultimately, England stole Egypt, France stole Algeria & Tunisia, Italy stole Libya, France & Spain stole Morocco. And again this is BEFORE WW1.
• The imperial nations stole these countries' autonomy and wealth. The countries' people fought back, and ultimately the imperial nations had to occupy the under-developed nations to put down any further notion of independence fro European domination. This is a very common pattern we see in history.

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Nationalism
• “By the end of 1912 the entire coast of North Africa, from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Suez Canal, was under European colonial domination. Two of the states—Algeria and Libya—were under direct colonial rule. Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco were protectorates ruled by France and Britain through their own local dynasties.”
• Before the Europeans came the Arabs didn't really care much about nationalism. “Before the age of nationalism, identity was linked to either one's tribe or town of origin. If Arabs thought in terms of a broader identity, it was more likely to be based on religion than ethnicity.”
• I genuinely believe that the European notion of the “Nation-State” is what doomed not only the Middle East but the planet as a whole. Forcing this concept onto the people of the world that did not want it has resulted in endless suffering and strife. For this reason, I have become vehemently anti-nation: Anti-nationalist. No more nations. City-states I can get behind. nation-states, nah.

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Arab Nationalism and the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt
• Despite my aforementioned support of “anti-nationalism”, what I hate more than nations is imperialism. The rise of Arab Nationalism, and the merging of Arab nations into a united singular nation seemed like viable opponent to European imperialism.
• Resistance to European & US imperialism after WW2 resulted as anyone might expect with some Arab countries asking for help from the big bad USSR.
• Egypt even had the audacity of extending diplomatic relations to the People's Republic of China in 1956. How dare these countries do what's in their own best interest instead of falling in line with US, British, & French hegemony‽
• So Egypt wanted to build a dam, and the Brits and US saw that as a perfect opportunity to do more Neo-Colonialism.
• “[T]he United States and Britain never intended to give the full amount Egypt needed, pledging only one-third the sum requested—not enough to guarantee the dam but rather just enough to exercise influence over Egypt during the years it would take to build it.”
• Remember this whenever you hear people talk about “why are we giving money to these other countries”? It's so we can control them. That's always the goal. Never altruism, or the betterment of humanity, but to advance the interests of the USA, usually meaning the interests of the multinational corporations that control the USA.
• But so Egypt had a plan: pay for the dam by nationalizing the Suez Canal, which was at the time owned by a corporation listed in France with the British government as the largest shareholder.
• Britain didn't want that because that would weaken their control over their former colony. I mean...the idea of a country believing that the wealth generated by that country belongs to its people and not international corporations and foreign empires? how could anyone believe such a thing‽ (Fun fact: Any time a weaker nation under the thumb of Europe or the US ever “nationalizes” anything or does “land reform,” you best believe that country is about to get invaded)
• This became known as “The Suez Crisis,” AKA “The Tripartite Aggression” because after Egypt nationalized it, Britain, France, and Israel went to war with Egypt. This obvious act of imperial aggression destroyed the credibility of both France and Britain among the Arab countries, helping to ferment Arab nationalism and ended their influence in the region (except for in Israel, of course)
• The US was appalled by this needless aggression, simultaneously “the Central Intelligence Agency had itself been plotting a coup against the Syrian government, to be executed on the very day the Israelis began their attack.” Why don't these countries like us again? Silver lining: the crisis derailed the US's regime change efforts in Syria. We're not the good guys, folks.
• Credit where credit is due: “Eisenhower administration resorted to outright threats against Britain and France to secure compliance with their demands for an immediate cease-fire. Both countries were threatened with expulsion from NATO, and the U.S. Treasury warned it would sell part of its Sterling bond holdings to force a devaluation of the British currency.” Sometimes wielding a big stick can actually be anti-imperialist.

• Arab nationalism when so far as to merge Egypt and Syria into a singular country for a few years. That was pretty crazy.
• Since before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, The West has been terrified of Arab unity. That's one of the reasons why they were so obsessed with meddling in Arab affairs. A united Arab people challenged European & US hegemony. So who can truly blame them for turning to the USSR? What's that? ‘The reactionaries in charge at the time?' Oh....

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Mesopotamia [Iraq]
• Conquered by Britain in 1918, the region's 3 ethnic groups (Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shiites) had different ideas on how the new country's relationship with the British Empire would work. The capitalist class wanted the power of the state to maintain stability, and thus economic growth. The people wanted independence from foreign occupation.
• Guess who won out. And wouldn't you know it? Occupying Iraq was really difficult for Britain. Britain kept saying they would strive to let Iraq be self-governing, but actually strove to achieve direct colonial rule, just like in India. The Iraqis rose up in 1920, resulting in an authoritarian crackdown, hardening the resolve of the freedom fighters. Why does this story sound familiar?
• Britain sent Indian soldiers (colonized peoples to subjugate colonized peoples) to retake the country. “The British were relentless in pursuing the insurgents and refused all negotiations.” Hmmmm.... “The Uprising of 1920, referred to in Iraq as the “Revolution of 1920,” has a special place in the nationalist mythology of the modern Iraqi state comparable to the American Revolution of 1776 in the United States.”
• Britain, having not learned its lesson after 100+ years, kept on fighting. They tried to legitimize their rule by propping up a banana republic with unpopular elections and a treaty for the electors to ratify.

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Arabia, Ibn Saud, Wahhabism, bin Laden, US Terrorism
• A book covering this massive swath of information is bound to have a few things missing, but I was very disappointed in seeing no mention of FDR's meeting with Ibn Saud after WW2. I found a new book that I might read that is just about the US-Saudi Arabia relationship. Hopefully it's not as long as this one.
• Ibn Saud conquered Arabia with the radical Muslim sect, known as “Wahhabism”. He took over the country and slapped his name on it. And now we call it “Saudi Arabia.” What an absolute flex.
• “The fact that Bin Ladin and fifteen of the suicide hijackers in the September 11 attacks were citizens of Saudi Arabia, and that private Saudi funds had bankrolled al-Qaida, only worsened relations between the Saudis and the Americans.” Hmmmmmm.........
• The Arab states found themselves under irreconcilable pressures after 9/11. If they opposed America's war on terror, they risked sanctions that might range from economic isolation to outright calls for regime change by the world's sole superpower.” (Makes sense. The US does that all the time).
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Post-WW1 and King-Crane
• Read my review of “A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East” by David Fromkin (1989), which is about the Middle East during and after WW1. It's because that book was so limited in scope that I decided to read this one.
• But basically: Britain lied, cheated, and stole to secure pretty much everything they wanted after WW1, blindly carving up the region with no sense of understanding its history, peoples, or sectarian concerns. This has resulted in the issues the region has faced ever since.

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Occupied Palestine - ‘One cannot fill a cup that is already full.'

• The colonization of Palestine by Imperial-backed zionists is one of the most contentious issues of the modern era.
• This is the 3rd or 4th book I've read that covers this topic. Something like half of this book ended up being about the creation of Israel, its internal strife, and the decades of external conflicts with its neighbors.
• After reading these books, watching documentaries, and following the news about what's going on most recently, I can emphatically say that I cannot in good conscious support this country's “right to exist” as it keeps demanding from anyone and everyone. Fun fact: If a country needs a propaganda arm to force people from other countries to pledge their support for the country's “right to exist” then it might be...trying to compensate for something... at the very least.

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Occupied Palestine - Yes, the Nazis are incomparably bad

• Britain's 1939 White Paper set strict standards on how many colonizers could enter the region, and set up the plan for creating an independent PALESTINIAN state by 1949.
• Then this big asshole with a stupid mustache started committing horrible atrocities in Europe.
• The more radical zionists temporarily put aside their dissatisfaction with the Brits' insufficient support for colonization to deal with the bigger issue: Fascism, Nazism, etc.
• Once that was all wrapped up, the Brits realized that the Palestinian question had gone full FUBAR, and turned to the newly created Inited Nations: “The United Nations assembled an eleven-nation Special Committee on Palestine, known by the acronym UNSCOP. Aside from Iran, none of the UNSCOP members had any particular interest in Middle Eastern affairs: Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, and Yugoslavia.” What a bizarre assortment of countries.
• While the UN was trying to figure out what to do, waves of illegal Jewish immigrants, including many holocaust survivors, flooded into Palestine. This is understandable given the circumstances.
• The Brits tried to stop this immigration because they were trying to adhere to their 1939 White Paper.
• Britain's unpopular handling of Jewish refugees resulted in violence between the Jewish community and Britain, eventually resulting in the hanging of 2 British sergeants.
• The hangings so angered the British people that “Only two years after the liberation of the Nazi death camps, swastikas and slogans such as ‘Hang All Jews' and ‘Hitler Was Right' stained British cities.” This is unconscionable.
• The book “Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook” by Mark Bray (2017) talked about this and other post-WW2 fascist rumblings throughout Europe and the US. Good book.

This book report is getting too long. Goodreads needs to increase its review character limit. I had to cut out 1/3rd of this review and I didn't even cover everything in the book. I can't reasonably fit all I want to say about the stuff this book talks about into one concise essay.

Here is my final favorite quote:
“The inconvenient truth about democracy in the Arab world is that, in any free and fair election, those parties most hostile to the United States are most likely to win. This is not because of any animosity toward Americans per se, but because Arab voters are increasingly convinced that the U.S. government is hostile to their interests. The war on terror has only confirmed Arab voters in this view. American hostilities against Muslim and Arab states, combined with unconditional American support for Israel, led many Arab citizens to conclude that the U.S. was exploiting the war on terror to extend its domination over their region.”

The smartest move in this game is not to play. Leave these people alone. Close the bases. End the sanctions. Normalize relations. Stop trying to control them because it always makes things worse.

For continued reading on the subject, see these other books I recommend:
• “Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East” (2020) by Philip Gordon
• “Imperial Ambitions: Conversations with Noam Chomsky on the Post-9/11 World” (2005) by Noam Chomsky

I'm not gonna pretend to know what it's like being black in the USA. But after reading this book and “We Were 8 Years in Power: An American Tragedy” (2017) by Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2019, and a few others, I'm starting to pick up some patterns. There seems to be two camps in the black community:

• Those who see the poverty and brutality and suffering faced by people in their communities as being directly caused by their material conditions and those in power. This is exemplified by Coates, MLK, Ibram X. Kendi, and Du Bois. And...

• Those who see the poverty and brutality and suffering faced by people in their communities as being the fault of those suffering in the communities. This is best exemplified by Booker T. Washington, Bill Cosby, Barrack Obama, Ben Shapiro, every conservative ever, and most white Democrats.

As an aside, it's always a lot of fun reading really old books and seeing the author dedicate an entire chapter to just completely trashing their intellectual colleagues in the most eloquent ways possible. Couldn't tweet your shade back then, had to send it through a publishing house. Du Bois had an entire chapter dedicated to verbally destroying Booker T. Washington and it's the best chapter of the book, IMO.

So anyway, I fall into the former of those two categories and this book provides fascinating insight into the failure of Reconstruction. We've never reconciled with this failure and we're still reeling from it to this day.

I found this book fascinating and would recommend it to anyone interested in a snapshot of history not discussed enough.

This falls into the category: “The Lie of American Exceptionalism”

Short book. And a little bit closer to what I want: a book arguing that intellectual property laws hinder art more than they help. The author's biography proves that he walks the walk. And while he does not call for the complete abolition of all IP laws, he does call for a sensible middle ground that prioritizes the interests of artists and the security of the people over the interests of the mega-corporations. This is a middle-ground I can get behind.

I am still looking for a book elaborating on what a society with zero IP laws might look like, and how it would be a net benefit to society. My next book on this journey will be: “Against Intellectual Monopoly” by Michele Boldrin & David Levine. Though I worry that it will be more libertarian theorizing....

This book focuses on how copyright laws as they exist today are not well equipped to function in the internet age, and that the calls for more stringent enforcement mechanis are resulting in, and will continue to result in a less secure, more surveillance-riddled internet that benefits no one except for the already rich & powerful, as well as authoritarian governments.

The current enforcement of copyright laws have resulted in intentionally insecure products that are designed to deliberately disobey their owner in order to primarily protect mega-corporations. The laws criminalize individuals from simply being able to access their own legally purchased content in the privacy of their own homes in ways that outside eyes do not appreciate. Want to rip your Blu-Rays? That's a crime. Want to jailbreak your device? Well now it's intentionally bricked.

Digital locks like DRM do not benefit the artist, only the distributor. We do not own our content if purchased with DRM. It can be locked away at any time for any reason by the corporate middleman. This has happened before. Books we buy getting deleted because of some rights issue, entire digital libraries getting destroyed because the service shuts down. And they call pirates “criminals.” Piracy is the only rational action in this insanely irrational landscape.

“We can't stop copying on the Internet, because the Internet is a copying machine. Literally. There is no way to communicate on the Internet without sending copies. You might think you're ‘loading' a web page, but what's really happening is that a copy is being placed on your computer, which then displays it in your browser.”

Stronger laws or more stringent enforcement cannot stop violations without fundamentally destroying the Internet. Though destruction of the fundamental principles of the internet are ultimately the goal of the corporate middlemen that benefit from trademark laws and the corrupt, out of touch, authoritarian members of government.

“Viacom told the court that its industry couldn't peacefully coexist with an option to keep your personal data private.” If that is the case, then I choose privacy over the existence of Viacom and the capitalist system that perpetuates them.

“Though SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, the TPP, the WCT, and their ilk differ in their specifics, they share certain broad themes that represent the legislative agenda for the entertainment lobby. And if you wanted to sum up that agenda in a single sentence, it would be this: More intermediary liability, with fewer checks and balances.”

“Adding censorship to the Internet means adding surveillance to the Internet. Creating Great Firewalls means creating secret, unaccountable lists of censored material that result in mass abuse, even in the most liberal of democracies. It doesn't matter if you're censoring for copyright infringement or for human-rights reports. The result is the same: a surveillance state.”

“If you weaken the world's computer security—the security of our planes and nuclear reactors, our artificial hearts and our thermostats, and, yes, our phones and our laptops, devices that are privy to our every secret—then no amount of gains in the War on Terror will balance out the costs we'll all pay in vulnerability to crooks, creeps, spooks, thugs, perverts, voyeurs, and anyone else who independently discovers these deliberate flaws and turns them against targets of opportunity.
So where does all this tie in with the copyfight? The laws behind digital locks make it illegal to determine what your computer is doing. They make it illegal to stop your computer from doing things you don't like. And they make it illegal to tell other people about what's going on inside your computer.
As you read this, digital locks are proliferating in new and deadly ways.”

His reasonable middle-ground is thus: Blanket licenses. “Here's how blanket licenses work: first, we collectively decide that the ‘moral right' of creators to decide who uses their work and how is less important than the ‘economic right' to get paid when their works are used Then we find entities who would like to distribute or perform copyrighted works, and negotiate a fee structure. The money goes into a ‘collective licensing society.'
Next we use some combination of statistical sampling methods (Nielsen families, network statistics, etc.) to compile usage statistics for the entity's pool of copyrighted works, and divide and remit the collective-licensing money based on the stats.”

This is how radio DJ's are able to play almost any song. It's a noble solution that would “enables the largest diversity of creators making the largest diversity of works to please the largest diversity of audiences.” Though I still think full abolition would be better.

I think this book really needs a new edition, as a lot of its references and statistics appear dated. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in knowing more about copyright in the digital age.

One of the most groundbreaking anti-colonial history books of the entire genre.
An absolute requirement for all who want to know about the intentionally obfuscated history of colonial capitalism and their brutal murderous regimes.

Here's what I learned:
__The Scramble for AfricaThe scramble for Africa began in the late 1800's. Why was this scramble happening? Why the unquenchable thirst of capitalism, of course! “Underlying much of Europe's excitement was the hope that Africa would be a source of raw materials to feed the Industrial Revolution, just as the search for raw materials—slaves—for the colonial plantation economy had driven most of Europe's earlier dealings with Africa.”Britain, in particular claimed they wanted to bring “civilization” to the peoples of Africa. This is a lie. They wanted to drain the wealth of the nation to feed their economies. They claimed they were “combatting the slave trade” when in reality...“Britain, of course, had only a dubious right to the high moral view of slavery. British ships had long dominated the slave trade, and only in 1838 had slavery formally been abolished in the British Empire. But Britons quickly forgot all this, just as they forgot that slavery's demise had been hastened by large slave revolts in the British West Indies, brutally and with increasing difficulty suppressed by British troops.” If we look at history through the leans of dialectical materialism, slavery abolition became a strong cultural phenomenon both in the US and Europe not because of the “virtues” of the Yankees or Brits, but because of the industrial revolution. Slavery was becoming less economically viable with the rise of machinery. British imperial interests strove to end chattel slavery everywhere to replace it with wage slavery and colonialism (with British elites at the top, of course). “During the nineteenth-century European drive for possessions in Africa and Asia, people justified colonialism in various ways, claiming that it Christianized the heathen or civilized the savage races or brought everyone the miraculous benefits of free trade.”Leopold has entered the chatBut let's get to our book's namesake. Leopold, king of the country of Belgium (about the size of the state of Maryland) NEEDED a piece of the pie: “Leopold's letters and memos, forever badgering someone about acquiring a colony, seem to be in the voice of a person starved for love as a child and now filled with an obsessive desire for an emotional substitute, the way someone becomes embroiled in an endless dispute with a brother or sister over an inheritance, or with a neighbor over a property boundary. The urge for more can become insatiable, and its apparent fulfillment seems only to exacerbate that early sense of deprivation and to stimulate the need to acquire still more.”King Leopold didn't pretend he wanted to “civilize the savages”. He wanted to extract as much wealth as he possibly could as quickly as he possibly could: “‘Belgium doesn't exploit the world,' he complained to one of his advisers. ‘It's a taste we have got to make her learn.'”The coastal nations were all taken by other European colonies, so Leopold sent his colonizers deeper into the mainland, trying to find where the Congo River came from. They pretended their new colony was to create a “confederation of free negro republics.” This was an obvious smokescreen. “As one of Leopold's subordinates bluntly wrote to Stanley: ‘There is no question of granting the slightest political power to negroes. That would be absurd. The white men, heads of the stations, retain all the powers.'”The colonizers did what all colonizers (like our forefathers) did to garner more wealth and power: lie, cheat, and steal. They wrote up treaties and lied to the people who could not read said treaties what they specifically entailed: “The texts varied, but many of the treaties gave the king a complete trading monopoly, even as he placated European and American questioners by insisting that he was opening up Africa to free trade. More important, chiefs signed over their land to Leopold, and they did so for almost nothing. At Isangila, near the big rapids, Stanley recorded, he was able to buy land for a station by paying some chiefs with ‘an ample supply of fine clothes, flunkey coats, and tinsel-braided uniforms, with a rich assortment of divers marketable wares ... not omitting a couple of bottles of gin.'”“The very word treaty is a euphemism, for many chiefs had no idea what they were signing. Few had seen the written word before, and they were being asked to mark their X's to documents in a foreign language and in legalese.” This isn't ‘negotiations between two independent parties,' this is criminally scamming entire tribes, villages, and territories. They used phony treaties to justify incalculable theft and horrible atrocities. Truly ghoulish. Florida Man?But here's a crazy twist in the story: Henry Shelton Sanford, some failson who managed to only invest in enterprises that end up going under, was good homies with the King. To my fellow Floridians, that last name might sound familiar to you because it's the same Sanford of which the town north of Orlando got its name. This guy became head propagandist in the US to try and legitimize the king's exploits through US recognition of Belgium's claim over the region. The USA loved the idea of Europeans colonizing another country (obviously). And Sanford didn't have to go far in Washington to find some friends: “Senator John Tyler Morgan of Alabama, a former Confederate brigadier general, was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Like most white Southern politicians of the era, he was frightened by the specter of millions of freed slaves and their descendants harboring threatening dreams of equality. [...] Morgan fretted for years over the ‘problem' of this growing black population. His solution, endorsed by many, was simple: send them back to Africa!” Since they couldn't own black people anymore, the only logical solution was to send them back to the continent their ancestors came from hundreds of years ago. (Fun fact: The whole “send em back to Africa” idea came into popularity in 1865, the year the Civil War ended. This is not a coincidence.) The USA was the first country to internationally legitimize the King's crimes, because of course it was. Never miss a chance to be an embarrassment, USA. In a redemptive arc, the first person to effectively blow the whistle on the atrocities happening there came from an American by the name of George Washington Williams, who went there to see the viability about getting black Americans to emigrate there. What he saw shook him to his core. He penned “An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of Congo, by Colonel the Honorable Geo. W. Williams, of the United States of America.” It's a great read and a damming exposé of the horrors. Much shorter than the book. Strong recommend. Unspeakable BrutalityYou might be asking: how did the native people of the Congo fair under subjugation by Belgium? Well...not great. The Danish were nothing less than brutal savages. And yet they had the audacity to call the victims of their reign of terror “savages.” Their rule came alongside the invention of the machine gun, which was used liberally to murder as many civilians as possible as quickly as possible when they deemed it necessary. They worked people to death. They raped, pillaged, burned, mutilated, killed, kidnapped, terrorized, forced conscription, enslaved, stole land, created child soldiers, tortured, and committed every other possible atrocity one person could do to another at the time. Why? To suck the wealth out of the country, as quickly and effectively as possible, of course. They established children's colonies with the help of Catholic priests to create armies of child soldiers, many of their parents having been killed by the occupying military or simply worked to death. These were the only “schools” Belgium constructed. “Among the traumatized and malnourished children packed into both the state and Catholic colonies, disease was rife and the death rate high, often over 50 percent. Thousands more children perished during the long journeys to get there.”The Europeans who went to Africa to serve as colonial rulers were not particularly evil (prior to doing all the atrocities). They were young white men looking for adventure and to make a little more money. “For a white man, the Congo was also a place to get rich and to wield power. As a district commissioner, you might be running a district as big as all of Holland or Belgium. As a station chief, you might be a hundred miles away from the next white official; you could levy whatever taxes you chose in labor, ivory, or anything else, collect them however you wanted, and impose whatever punishments you liked. If you got carried away, the penalty, if any, was a slap on the wrist.“ It didn't matter as long as the wealth kept flowing. Why get stuck in some factory or clerk job in Europe when you could run your own little fiefdom in Africa? And the more brutal you were, the more money you made! A guy wrote a fictional book about these atrocities called “Heart of Darkness.” Pretty much everything he wrote in there was just what he really saw happening. This book was the basis for the movie “Apocalypse Now,” which takes place during the US-Vietnam war. I'll let you put two and two together there. RUBBER!For a while, Belgium was only extracting ivory. Then some asshole named “Goodyear” supposedly spilled some sulfur onto rubber on his stove, inadvertently inventing vulcanization, and in the 1890's, rubber became all the rage. The atrocities kicked into high gear when the King realized that he was sitting on a proverbial gold mine of wild rubber trees. He knew that eventually these trees would be grown in plantations, which would take a few years to get going. So he had a head start and limited window to extract and export as much rubber as he possibly could. “'An example of what is done was told me up the Ubangi [River],' the British vice consul reported in 1899. ‘This officer['s]...method ... was to arrive in canoes at a village, the inhabitants of which invariably bolted on their arrival; the soldiers were then landed, and commenced looting, taking all the chickens, grain, etc., out of the houses; after this they attacked the natives until able to seize their women; these women were kept as hostages until the Chief of the district brought in the required number of kilogrammes of rubber. The rubber having been brought, the women were sold back to their owners for a couple of goats apiece, and so he continued from village to village until the requisite amount of rubber had been collected.'”When I say they were “draining the wealth” of the Congo, I mean this as literally as I possibly can. Not only does the harvesting of rubber literally entail cutting it from the bottom of the dangling vines and draining it, but...“We now know that the value of the rubber, ivory, and other riches coming to Europe each year [...] was roughly five times that of goods being shipped to the Congo that were destined for Africans. In return for the rubber and ivory, Morel knew, it was not possible that the Congo's Africans were being paid in money—which he knew they were not allowed to use—or in goods that came from elsewhere, for Elder Dempster had the cargo monopoly. Clearly, they were not being paid at all.”The world was slowly coming round to recognize how particularly brutal Leopold's regime was. So did he work toward creating more humane working conditions for the Congolese? Of course not! Like all capitalists, he used propaganda to downplay the atrocities he oversaw, buying good press and slandering those spreading bad press. And who was spearheading opposition in Belgium's parliament? Unsurprisingly, the Socialists. Europe continually pointed the finger at Belgium while ignoring the atrocities being committed in each other their own countries (sounds familiar). They weren't anti-colonialist, they were just anti-being really super mega evil. We have that now with the “ethical capitalists” who think a system designed to be exploitative can somehow be reigned in despite that never working. Leopold often pointed to the double-standard he was facing, with Britain's countless crimes against humanity all across the globe. The cold, hard numbersSo where does this land on the scoreboard of historical atrocities? Well, the King had most of the records burned up to prevent that ever coming to light. but what we do know is astounding. “King Leopold II's personal État Indépendant du Congo officially existed for twenty-three years, beginning in 1885, but many Congolese were already dying unnatural deaths by the start of that period, and important elements of the king's system of exploitation endured for many years after its official end. The rubber boom, cause of the worst bloodletting in the Congo, began under Leopold's rule in the mid-1890s, but it continued several years after the end of his one-man regime.”All in all, with the genocides and plummeting birth rate, a conservative estimate is that 10,000,000 human beings died under this brutal regime. “An official Belgian government commission in 1919 estimated that from the time Stanley began laying the foundation of Leopold's state, the population of the territory had ‘been reduced by half.'” Half of what, exactly? “In 1924 the population was reckoned at ten million, a figure confirmed by later counts. This would mean, according to the estimates, that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people.” Half the population killed. Ten million people.And how much wealth did Leopold successfully drain? The true number may not ever be known, but scholars “estimate, not including some smaller or hard-to-trace sources of money, of 220 million francs of the time, or $1.1 billion in [1999] dollars,” which is about $2 billion dollars in 2022. But why isn't this horrible event covered in schools? Because the colonizers want you to forget their atrocities, and the colonizers write the history books. The colonizers locked up the files, too. A Commission of Inquiry created by the King (a kangaroo court if there ever was one) still managed to collect a vast trove of testimony about the atrocities committed from the victims themselves. “However, no one read them. Despite the report's critical conclusions, the statements by African witnesses were never directly quoted. The commission's report was expressed in generalities. The stories were not published separately, nor was anyone allowed to see them. They ended up in the closed section of a state archive in Brussels. Not until the 1980s were people at last permitted to read and copy them freely.” Whitewashing of history. Par for the course. The King's Reign Ends, but the Terror merely evolvesUltimately, the brutal regime didn't stop their crimes against humanity because of the international outcry or because the King died, but because of evolving material conditions. Plantations and taxation replaced brutality and murder in Belgium-ruled Congo. And they found even more resources to suck up! “More than 80 percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs came from the heavily guarded Congo mine of Shinkolobwe. The Allies also wanted ever more rubber for the tires of hundreds of thousands of military trucks, Jeeps, and warplanes.“ Forced labor practices continued for decades into the 20th century. __
Not an anomaly

The Congo was a concentrated area of colonial brutality. Other colonial powers were just as brutal, but they weren't as concentrated. “If you draw boundaries differently—to surround, say, all African equatorial rain forest land rich in wild rubber—then what happened in the Congo is, unfortunately, no worse than what happened in neighboring colonies: Leopold simply had far more of the rubber territory than anyone else.” France, Portugal, and Germany used the Leopold model for their own brutal colonial exploits. Same forced labor. Same unfathomable wealth extracted.

“The population loss in the rubber-rich equatorial rain forest owned by France is estimated, just as in Leopold's Congo, at roughly 50 percent. [...] between 1904 and 1907, the month-by-month rise and fall in rubber production correlated almost exactly to the rise and fall in the number of bullets used up by company ‘sentries'—nearly four hundred in a busy month.”

This is what Marx called “primitive accumulation of capital”. The brutal, murderous colonial regimes gobbling up as much wealth as possible. This is why Europe is rich and Africa is poor. This terror campaign never stopped, it merely evolved.

A major reason why Belgium's been left of the hook is because they were major victims of the Nazis in WW2. But remember: Fascism is when Imperialism comes home. The Nazis didn't invent anything they did to Europe. It was all the same stuff Europeans were doing to Africa for centuries.

Anyway, this book is really sad but really good and you should read it if you're into this sort of stuff.