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Kurtz Quotes

Browse 6 quotes about Kurtz.

Kurtz Quotes

“he main point is that Conrad realistically described the terrible things done by Belgians in the Congo. Hochschild certainly wishes this was Conrad’s purpose. He repeats an old theory that Kurtz was based on the EIC officer Léon Rom whom Conrad “may have met” in 1890 and “almost certainly” read about in 1898. Visitors noted that Rom’s garden was decorated with polished skulls buried in the ground, the garden gnomes of the Congo then. But Kurtz’s compound has no skulls buried in the ground but rather freshly severed “heads on the stakes” that “seemed to sleep at the top of that pole.” As the British scholar Johan Adam Warodell notes, none of the “exclusively European prototypes” for Kurtz advanced by woke professors and historians followed this native mode of landscape gardening. By contrast, dozens of accounts of African warlords and slavers in the Congo published before 1898 described rotting heads on poles (“a wide-reaching area marked by a grass fence, tied to high poles, which at the very top were decorated with grinning, decomposing skulls,” as one 1888 account had it). Far from being “one of the most scathing indictments of [European] imperialism in all literature,” as Hochschild declares it, Heart of Darkness is one of the most scathing indictments of the absence of European imperialism in all literature. Kurtz is a symbol of the pre-colonial horrors of the Congo, horrors that the EIC, however fitfully, was bringing to an end.”

CongoCongo Free StateHeart Of DarknessAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostConradRomKurtz
Book:King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
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“Reich’s genius birthed tools we’ve yet to fully grasp: his character armor and muscular armoring concepts seeded ego psychology, body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy (Fritz Perls), bioenergetic analysis (Alexander Lowen), primal therapy (Arthur Janov), and the Radix of Charles R. Kelley. Beyond these, his mind-body vision ripples through newer somatic therapies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Somatic Experiencing (Peter A. Levine), healing trauma via bodily sensations; Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Pat Ogden), merging somatic and cognitive trauma work; Core Energetics (John Pierrakos), blending bioenergetics with spirit; Hakomi Therapy (Ron Kurtz), mindful body-centered discovery; Bodynamic Analysis (Lisbeth Marcher), trauma through body-mind interplay; and Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE®, David Berceli), freeing tension with neurogenic tremors.”

GestaltReichKurtzKelleyLowenMarcherOgdenBerceliJanovNeurogenic
Book:Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion
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