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Quote by Leopold II

“Ludwig is overal traceerbaar. Hij is bouwer en verstandig planner van monumenten die het hart en de ziel van het hele Duitse volk raken. Op een dag moet de Belgische vlag wapperen op alle vijf continenten”

Quote by Leopold II

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Leopold II

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“King Leopold’s private fiefdom in the Congo was precisely the counterfactual to colonial rule and the best argument for colonialism. His inability to control his native rubber agents who continued their pre-colonial business of slave-trading and coercive rubber harvesting showed the problems that would arise if European freelancers allied with native warlords and slave-traders to establish regimes with no outside scrutiny.”

ColonialismLeopold IiCongo Free StateBelgian Colonialism
Book:The Case for Colonialism: A Response to My Critics
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“For all our modernist beliefs in truth, evidence, logic, and fairness, perhaps we have reached a point of no return in the writing of history where modern progressives attack the historical record with malice aforethought, leaving us stupider than we were before this movement took shape in the 1960s, when the twentysomething Hochschild was at the barricades protesting Vietnam and all the rest. It is for future generations to re-colonize history using the precious intellectual resources of the Enlightenment. Until then, we do well to fight the progressive warlords like Hochschild who enslave formerly colonized peoples in distorted victimization narratives that rob them of agency, all the while keeping the white man front and center.”

ColonialismModernismLeopold IiAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostPost Modernism
Book:King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
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“Bruce Gilley is right, that I was misleading in respect to one quotation I cited from another official, Charles Lemaire. I am sorry about that and it should be corrected. Lemaire was a more complicated case. His early diaries, which I quote elsewhere in the book, unroll a lengthy list of villages he ordered burned to the ground and a triumphant roster of death tolls: “20 natives killed” here, “around 15 blacks killed” there, and many more such boasts. But later in life, to his credit, Lemaire had deep regrets, and in fairness to him I should have referred to them.”

FakeLeopold IiAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold IiHoax
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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“Most centrally, how did approximately 10,000 people killed in skirmishes between the EIC police and natives in a small portion of the territory over a 20-year period mushroom into 10 million dead, “mass murder on a vast scale” and “a forgotten Holocaust”? Rather than climb down from this ludicrous claim, which the doyen of Congo studies, Jean Stengers, called “absurd” and “polemical,” Hochschild repeats it. His source? The same Jan Vansina whose work, I noted, was based on an erroneous reading of an earlier report (a Harvard study that rejected the report of the Permanent Committee for the Protection of the Natives of 1919 that Hochschild cites in his letter) and whose own work was based on nothing more than “oral traditions.”

HolocaustLeopold IiAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold Ii
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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