User:KamiLazer

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please send your name and message here for any ongoing edit wars

my username on discord is kamilazernew

-Scottish Socialist, the progressive ideology is entirely a social position like how conservatism is friendly with conservative socialists and liberals, progressivism is entirely on the social axis. So parties that are more than that are better summarised on more specific pages (though VPP, Hippies and Wu all are progressive) just like how Sunak and Trump aren't just hurled onto the conservative page but fiscal conservatism and right wing populism. Hope that clears things up :)

kamilazer- thanks scottish!

on leopold

Bro you're so freaking stupid, you're using a guy who wrote a pro-colonialism book as "proof" here when the historical consensus is that there we're horrible atrocities in the Free Congo State, from mutilation to rapes to cannibalism, while the death toll and it's origins is questioned, you're using a guy whose work goes AGAINST HISTORICAL CONSENSUS and is heavily politicized while being criticized by historians here, Giles is literally a pro-colonial pundit, blud is onto nothing🗣️🗣️🔥🔥

response to plumdit- first of all, all the information i have gotten was from a congolese family that has stretched back generations in the congo so dont try to paint me as some white suprmacist when it was the anglo's and other colonial powers spreading the lies you are believing. anglos dont get to dictate belgian and congolese history.

you can use weasel word all you want but you havent demonstrated anything and that is why your argument isnt taken seriously and why my edit is still up. i provided sources and demonstrated my point you did not. All university research and scholarship is based on evidence, and your own assessed work as a student is no different. To convince your marker that you know what you’re talking about, you can’t just make a statement and expect them to accept it; you will need to provide robust evidence to justify your point, show how you have arrived at your conclusions and prove that it’s based on solid grounds. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and we are interested in your ideas, but you need to supply proof and show how it supports your statement, to persuade others of what you think. You might have seen this reflected in marking criteria, assignment guidelines or feedback that say you should ‘use evidence’, to ‘support your argument’ and ‘back up your point’.  

i will now explain weasel words:Weasel words are words that are used to make a dubious claim appear strong claim and avoid outright lying.  You can think of weasel words as a form of intentional vagueness to mislead an audience. Common weasel words are: “up to x percent/x number”, “some”, “as many as”, “reportedly”, “virtually”, “many”, “seems”, “perhaps”, “may” “one of”.

more evidence

For the past 25 years, the idea of the Congo has been closely linked in the Western imagination to the 1998 book King Leopold’s Ghost by the American journalist Adam Hochschild. The book is widely assigned in high schools and colleges, and it regularly tops best-seller lists in colonial, African, and Western history. Hochschild has become a sort of king of the Congo, or at least of its history. The book is reflexively cited by reputable scholars in their footnotes any time they wish to assert that it is “well known” and “beyond doubt” that sinister men in Europe wrought havoc in Africa over a century ago. Any discussion of the Congo, or of European colonialism more generally, invariably begins with the question: “Have you read King Leopold’s Ghost?”

I have read it. And I can declare that it is a vast hoax, full of distortions and errors both numerous and grave, a few of which I will detail in this short essay. Some people might view “King Hochschild’s Hoax,” as we might call it, as an empowering fable for modern Africans at the expense of the white man. But its debilitating effects on Africa, and on the Congo in particular, make the opposite more nearly the case. It is a callous and negligent chicotte (hippo whip) lash on the backs of all black Africans, narcissistic guilt porn for white liberals at the expense of the African. The Congolese lawyer Marcel Yabili calls it “the greatest falsification in modern history,” a compliment of sorts, I suppose.

Hochschild’s book is a history of the private domain of the Belgian King Léopold II in the Congo river basin that was founded in 1885 and then handed over to the Belgian government in 1908. The book alternates between diabolical accounts of Léopold and hagiographic accounts of three of his critics: the British campaigner E.D. Morel, the British diplomat Roger Casement, and the black American missionary William Henry Sheppard. The narrative style is dark and conspiratorial, from the initial plans for the domain to its final dissolution. All along, Hochschild’s aim is to elevate the story into one of the greatest evils ever perpetrated by the West upon the Rest.

There have been two documentary films about Hochschild’s fable, both travesties of art as well as fact. But the worst is yet to come. A dramatized Hollywood version by the American directors Ben Affleck and Martin Scorsese, co-produced with the singer and activist Harry Belafonte, has been in development since 2019. The history of the Congo might have survived one gut punch from California (Hochschild did his research entirely at libraries in the state and teaches at Berkeley). But once Hollywood weighs in on the matter, history as such will be impossible. Before that happens, let’s set the record straight and end this most malicious form of imperial plunder.

The first and biggest deceit at the heart of King Leopold’s Ghost is the attempt to equate Léopold’s “État indépendant du Congo” or EIC (long mistranslated as the Congo Free State) with Western colonialism. Yet the EIC was a short-term solution to the absence of colonial government in the Congo river basin. The deal was simple: Léopold was to open the area to trade and eliminate endemic Arab slave empires and African tribal wars. In return, he hoped to bring glory to the Belgian people for having done what no other European ruler dared (one in three Europeans who traveled to the Congo died, usually of illness). The EIC had nothing to do with the Belgian government. To the extent that limited abuses and misrule occurred in some parts of his domain (discussed below), this was a direct result of its not being controlled by a European state. As no less than Morel insisted (not quoted by Hochschild), “Let us refrain from referring to the Congo as a Belgian colony, let us avoid writing of ‘Belgian misrule.’”

In a pattern of misrepresentation that is repeated on other issues, Hochschild at first mentions this inconvenient fact and then proceeds to say the opposite for the entirety of the book. The fiefdom “was shared in no way with the Belgian government,” which “had no legal authority over [Léopold] as ruler of the Congo,” he alerts readers. Yet not only the subtitle of the book but laced throughout are constant smears against European colonialism. The book shows “colonial brutality” and “the wrongs of colonial rule” resulting from the “logical consequence of the very idea of colonialism.”

This distortion is no mere technicality. Rather, it is the central lie of King Leopold’s Ghost. The freelance EIC had at its peak just 1,500 administrative officers and about 19,000 police and soldiers for an area one third the size of the continental United States. As such, it exerted virtually no control over most areas, which were in the hands either of Arab slave-traders and African warlords, or of native soldiers nominally in the employ of Belgian concession companies without a white man for a hundred miles. Hochschild’s description of the EIC as “totalitarian” is bizarre, as is his claim that Léopold exerted a “framework of control…across his enormous realm.” If only this were true.

That is why Congo reformers like Morel, much to the annoyance of Hochschild, advocated either German or British colonization of the area. Morel’s view, according to Hochschild, speaking ex cathedra from the hallowed seat of modern California, “seems surprising to us today” and was among his “faults” and “political limitations.” Quite the opposite. The moment the Belgians colonized the Congo in 1908, a miraculous improvement was noted on all fronts. Seeking to debunk colonialism, Hochschild’s book demonstrates the opposite. This is the first and biggest lie at the heart of King Leopold’s Ghost.

The second, but more visible, untruth is the claim that for 23 years, EIC officials throughout the territory sponsored violent actions such as chopping off hands to force natives to collect rubber, leaving millions dead in a horror that should be directly compared to the Holocaust. There are about a dozen little cheats here, one embedded in the other like Russian nesting dolls.

Here are the facts. By 1891, six years into the attempt to build the EIC, the whole project was on the verge of bankruptcy. It would have been easy for Léopold to raise revenues by sanctioning imports of liquor that could be taxed or by levying fees on the number of huts in each village, both of which would have caused harm to the native population. A truly “greedy” king, as Hochschild repeatedly calls him, had many fiscal options that Léopold did not exercise.

Instead, he did what most other colonial governments and many post-colonial ones in Africa did: He imposed a labor requirement in lieu of taxes. In a small part of the upper Congo river area, he declared an EIC monopoly over “natural products,” including rubber and ivory, that could be harvested as part of the labor requirement to pay for the territory’s government. From 1896 to 1904, an EIC company and two private companies operated in this area, which covered about 15 percent of the territory and held about a fifth of the population. The resulting rubber revenues temporarily saved the EIC, but only until rubber prices collapsed. Still, the preservation of the EIC meant the preservation of its life-saving interventions against disease, tribal war, slavery, and grinding poverty that had bedeviled the region since recorded time.

The rubber quotas imposed on natives in this 15 percent of the territory were enforced by native soldiers working for the companies or for the EIC itself. In many areas, the rubber came with ease and the natives prospered. The rubber station at Irengi, for instance, was known for its bulging stores and hospitable locals, whose women spent a lot of time making bracelets and where “no one ever misses a meal,” noted the EIC soldier George Bricusse in his memoirs. Elsewhere, however, absent direct supervision, and with the difficulties of meeting quotas greater, some native soldiers engaged in abusive behavior to force the collection. Bricusse noted these areas as well, especially where locals had sabotaged rubber stations and then fled to the French Congo to the north. In rare cases, native soldiers kidnapped women or killed men to exact revenge. When they fell into skirmishes, they sometimes followed long-standing Arab and African traditions by cutting off the hands or feet of the fallen as trophies, or to show that the bullets they fired had been used in battle. How many locals died in these frays is unclear, but the confirmed cases might put the figure at about 10,000, a terrible number.

{snip}

Hochschild thus takes a very limited, unintentional, unforeseen, and perhaps unavoidable problem of native-on-native conflict over rubber harvesting and blows it up into a “forgotten Holocaust” to quote the subtitle given to the French edition of his book. {snip}

{snip}

Third, as a self-proclaimed human rights activist, Hochschild can be forgiven for his economic illiteracy. But since it is the keystone that begins his tale, it is another fib worth correcting. The EIC’s large trade surplus (more physical goods going out than coming in) was because virtually none of the revenue from the goods sold in Europe was sent back to pay for labor, which was “paid for” as a fulfillment of the EIC labor obligation. Instead, the revenue paid for European administration, infrastructure, and trade services in the Congo as well as profits that were parked in Belgium (an overall payments deficit). For Hochschild to claim that Africans were getting “little or nothing” for the goods they produced because fewer goods were being sent to Africa displays a stunning economic ignorance. It is like saying that the empty container ships returning to China from today’s port of Long Beach show that China’s workers are being paid “little or nothing.”

Fourth, the big headline of the book, a whopper really, is Hochschild’s claim that the population of the Congo fell by 50 percent or 10 million on Léopold’s watch. The EIC, he claims, caused “depopulation” and “mass murder” of “genocidal proportions” due to its drive for rubber profits. In fact, the most knowledgeable estimates today suggest that the general population of the Congo rose slightly during the EIC era and that any deaths attributable to the limited abuses in the rubber areas were far outweighed by the lives saved and created by the EIC’s direct interventions in other respects. Even if we can agree that any life lost to senseless violence and negligent governance is always and everywhere deserving of condemnation, Léopold’s regime was a monumental achievement in saving and promoting black lives.

How could Hochschild go so wrong? He was highly motivated from the start to “find” a genocide because, as he notes, his project began by reading the American humorist Mark Twain’s claim that eight to ten million people had died in the EIC. But no scholar has ever made such a charge. His source was a chapter by the Belgian ethnographer Jan Vansina, citing his own work on population declines in the entirety of central Africa throughout the 19th century that included only what became the northern areas of the EIC. In any case, Vansina’s own source was a Harvard study of 1928 that quoted a 1919 Belgian claim that “in some areas” population had fallen by half, but quoted it in order to assert that it was almost certainly false.

The first proper sample-based census was not carried out until 1949, so demographers have to reconstruct population totals from micro-level data on food supply, settlement patterns, village counts, birth records, and the like. The most sophisticated modeling by French and Belgian demographers variously suggests a population of 8 to 11 million in 1885 and 10 to 12 million by 1908. The Belgian Jean-Paul Sanderson, using a backward projection method by age cohorts, found a slight decline, from 10.5 million in 1885 to 10 million in 1910. This estimated change in total population governed by changing birth and death rates over a 25 year period represents a negligible annual net decline in population.

Even taking Sanderson’s pessimistic estimate as correct, does this mean that Léopold’s rule “killed” 500,000 people? Of course not, because, in addition to the misplaced personalization of long-term population changes, the rubber regions, as mentioned, experienced both population increases and declines. Even in the latter, such as the rubber-producing Bolobo area in the lower reaches of the Congo river, population decline was a result of the brutalities of freelance native chiefs and ended with the arrival of an EIC officer. More generally, the stability and enforced peace of the EIC caused birth rates to rise near EIC centers, such as at the Catholic mission under EIC protection at Baudouinville (today’s Kirungu). Population declines were in areas outside of effective EIC control. The modest population gains caused by EIC interventions were overwhelmed by a range of wholly separate factors, which in order of importance were: the slave trade, sleeping sickness, inter-tribal warfare, other endemic diseases (smallpox, beriberi, influenza, yellow fever, pneumonia, dysentery, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and venereal disease), cannibalism, and human sacrifice.

{snip}

Hochschild is at pains to convince the reader that anyone opposing the EIC was good, whether brutal slave trader, inveterate cannibal, fetish priest, or ethnic-cleansing warlord. His treatment of the 1895 rebellion by native soldiers at a military camp named Luluabourg in the southern savannah strains to portray the rebels as noble savages pining for freedom and a return to pastoral life. In his telling, the Belgian commander Mathieu Pelzer was a “bully” who “used his fists” and thus got his comeuppance at breakfast with a knife to the throat. Actually, Pelzer had nothing to do with it. The rebels were former soldiers for a black slave king. The EIC had brought them to the southern camp to reintegrate them as government soldiers. But their loss of royal prerogatives to whore, steal, and maim caused them to rebel. The group never exceeded 300 (Hochschild speculates that it reached 2,500) and petered out in the northern jungles in 1897, a rag-tag criminal gang gone to seed.

This egregious example of “Belgians bad, natives good” is the conceptual foundation of King Hochschild’s Hoax. And it bleeds into what is, for most readers, the enduring imaginative impact of the book, to have put a nasty Belgian face onto Mistah Kurtz, the phantom who draws Marlow’s steamboat up the Congo river in Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella Heart of Darkness. Like generations of English professors, Hochschild has misread the book as an indictment of colonialism, which is difficult to square with its openly pro-colonial declarations and the fact of the “adoring” natives surrounding the deceased Kurtz.

More evidence

According to Jean Stengers, and Etienne van de Walle, Aline Désesquelles and Jacques Houdaille, the 10 million number cited by Hochschild is extrapolated from a 1924 estimation of the population and from the opinion of a 1919 Belgian government official commission that the population had been halved since 1880.

They argue that American and British writers have highlighted the Congo to distract attention from the contemporary massacre of the North American indians and the Boer War.

Under the headline 'a scandalous book', members of the Royal Belgian Union for Overseas Territories claim: 'There is nothing that could compare with the horrors of Hitler and Stalin, or the deliberate massacres of the Indian, Tasmanian and Aboriginal populations. A black legend has been created by polemicists and British and American journalists feeding off the imaginations of novelists and the re-writers of history.' Professor Jean Stengers, a leading historian of the period, says: 'Terrible things happened, but Hochschild is exaggerating. It is absurd to say so many millions died. I don't attach so much significance to his book. In two or three years' time, it will be forgotten.' Leopold's British biographer, Barbara Emerson, agrees: 'I think it is a very shoddy piece of work. Leopold did not start genocide. He was greedy for money and chose not to interest himself when things got out of control. Part of Belgian society is still very defensive. People with Congo connections say we were not so awful as that, we reformed the Congo and had a decent administration there.'

It is true too that some of those reporting scandals had their own knives to grind. Some were Protestant missionaries who were rivals to Belgian Catholics in the region.

Emerson claims Leopold was appalled to hear about the atrocities in his domain, but dug his heels in when he was attacked in the foreign press. He did indeed apparently write to his secretary of state: 'These horrors must end or I will retire from the Congo. I will not be splattered with blood and mud: it is essential that any abuses cease.' But the man who (as Queen Victoria said) had the habit of saying 'disagreeable things to people' was also reputed to have snorted: 'Cut off hands - that's idiotic. I'd cut off all the rest of them, but not hands. That's the one thing I need in the Congo.' Although few now defend him, strange things happen even today when the Congo record is challenged. Currently circulating on the internet is an anguished claim by a student in Brussels called Joseph Mbeka alleging he his thesis marked a failure when he cited Hochschild's book: 'My director turned his back on me.' Daniel Vangroenweghe, a Belgian anthropologist who also published a critical book about the period 15 years ago, says: 'Senior people tried to get me sacked at the time.

Emerson claims Leopold was appalled to hear about the atrocities in his domain, but dug his heels in when he was attacked in the foreign press. He did indeed apparently write to his secretary of state: 'These horrors must end or I will retire from the Congo. I will not be splattered with blood and mud: it is essential that any abuses cease.' But the man who (as Queen Victoria said) had the habit of saying 'disagreeable things to people' was also reputed to have snorted: 'Cut off hands - that's idiotic. I'd cut off all the rest of them, but not hands. That's the one thing I need in the Congo.' Although few now defend him, strange things happen even today when the Congo record is challenged. Currently circulating on the internet is an anguished claim by a student in Brussels called Joseph Mbeka alleging he his thesis marked a failure when he cited Hochschild's book: 'My director turned his back on me.' Daniel Vangroenweghe, a Belgian anthropologist who also published a critical book about the period 15 years ago, says: 'Senior people tried to get me sacked at the time.

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/may/13/features11.g22

Hochschild Adam — Les fantômes du Roi Leopold. Un holocauste oublié - Persée (persee.fr)

https://books.google.com/books?id=r-MwAQAAIAAJ

While Hochschild has said that his intention was to tell the story in "a way that brings characters alive, that brings out the moral dimension, that lays bare a great crime and a great crusade", he was criticised for his overly moralistic dimension, and former Belgian officials deplored his comparison of Leopold with Hitler and Stalin.[4] Belgian historian Jean Stengers commented, "Terrible things happened, but Hochschild is exaggerating. It is absurd to say so many millions died."[4] Other historians have painted a picture similar to Hochschild's of the high death toll in Leopold's Congo, among them Jan Vansina, who appeared in the documentary based on the book, and the demographer Léon de Saint-Moulin [ln].[15]

What is Known of the Demographic History of Zaire Since 1885," in Bruce Fetter, ed. Demography from Scanty Evidence: Central Africa in the Colonial Era(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1990), p. 303.

leopold letter

This is a letter from King Leopold II to Minister Beernaert of the Congo Free State, July 3, 1890:

Dear Minister,

I have never ceased to call the attention of my countrymen to the need to turn our view toward overseas lands.

History teaches that countries with small territories have a moral and material interest in extending their influence beyond their narrow borders. Greece founded opulent cities, bastions of arts and civilization, on the shores of the Mediterranean. Later, Venice built its grandeur on its maritime and commercial relations no less than on its political success. The Netherlands have 30 million subjects in the Indies who exchange tropical products for the products of the mother country.

It is in serving the cause of humanity and progress that peoples of the second rank appear as useful members of the great family of nations. A manufacturing and commercial nation like ours, more than any other, must do its best to secure opportunities for all its workers, whether intellectual, capitalist, or manual.

These patriotic preoccupations dominated my life. It is they that caused the creation of the African effort.

My pains were not sterile: a young and vast State, led from Brussels, has peacefully taken its place in the sun, thanks to the kind support of the powers which have applauded its beginnings. Belgians administer it, while other compatriots, more numerous every day, are already making a profit on their capital.

The immense river system of the Upper Congo opens the way for our efforts for rapid and economical ways of communication that will allow us to penetrate directly into the center of the African continent. The building of the railroad in the cataract area, assured from now on thanks to the recent vote of the legislature, will notably increase the ease of access. Under these conditions, a great future is reserved for the Congo, whose immense value will soon shine out to all eyes.

Soon after that memorable act, I thought it my duty, when death will come to strike me, to make it easy for Belgium to profit from my work, as well as that of those who helped me to found and direct it and to whom I give thanks here once again. I thus made, as Sovereign of the Congo Free State, the will that I am sending you; I will request that you communicate it to the legislative Chambers at what seems to you the most opportune moment.

The beginning of enterprises such as those that have so preoccupied me is difficult and onerous. I insisted on bearing the charges. A King, to give service to his country, must not fear to conceive and pursue the realization of a project so adventurous in appearance. The riches of a Sovereign consist of public prosperity. That alone can appear to his eyes as an enviable treasure, which he should try constantly to build up.

Until the day of my death, I will continue with the same thoughts of national interest that have guided me until now, to direct and sustain our African efforts, but if, without waiting for that date, it makes sense for the country to contract closer ties with my Congo possessions, I would not hesitate to make them available to it, I would be happy, while I am alive, to see it in full benefit towards the Chambers as towards the Government for the aid that they gave to me on several occasions in this creation.

I do not think I am mistaken in affirming that Belgium will gain genuine advantages and will see opening before her, on a new continent, happy and wide perspectives.

Believe me, dear Minister,

Your very devoted,

Leopold.

logic

The narrative of King Leopold II killing 10 million Congolese is a ridiculous lie.

Killing ones own potential labor force is not a mere matter of “bad policy”, but rather, full fledged self-destructive insanity.

Keep in mind that Empire Building is not as simple as the mainstream makes it out to be. It is extremely expensive to waste not just money on the mainland to improve the land, but to waste even more on colonies in order to build basic infrastructures and essential buildings that never existed prior.

The FP (Force Publique) had to deal with impunitive tribal militia that simply didn't want to cause tribal conflict towards their rival.

King Leopold II established the first lights of modernity in the last dark corner of Africa. Missionaries, teachers, civil engineers and architects and business people all started to bring civilization to the Congo. The first roads, schools, hospitals and modern cities were built because of Leopold II. When word reached him that some local officials were abusing their authority and being cruel to the natives it was Leopold II who sent an official commission to investigate this and they were very honest in reporting the good things that had been done as well as the very terrible things. Because of this, these problems were corrected and the abuses ended. King Leopold II was not a cruel man and he hated to see anyone being mistreated or even having criminals put to death. In his private life he was often insensitive but Leopold II, as king, made Belgium a much more important country, much greater and more advanced and prosperous. He was also a great king for Belgium.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uki_oqvLEZo

alternative hypothesis video on the congo

think about it dude do you want to be blocked off the page entirely because you cant do this, or do you just want to leave it and go enjoy the other stuff on the page? the second one is more appealing dont waste your time on this.

Did you just try to copy and paste the article by the same guy i mentioned his research wasn't valid and widely critcized by other historians as "evidence" to your proof? Like i didn't even paint you as a white supremacist and yet you're accusing me of doing so because you're so fragile and think any criticism to you believing in BS written by a pro-colonialism guy with a agenda is true when even the fellow colonialists of the time were horrified by what Leopold was doing.

Also, i love how you say i'm not presenting any evidence like i need to state every historian who believes the Holocaust is real, like, you entirely ignored every single historian who has noted Leopold's atrocities in there, including the historical consensus in order to support a guy whose work is not only motivated by agenda but also fails to cite any sources when making claims like blaming all of the violence by Free State Troops on local recruited natives who without supervision engaged in brutality or saying that it was actually in the areas wgere the lack of of control by the Free State was more presente that more deaths/rapes/slavery happened, while at the same time ignoring the freaking Casament Report that confirmed every single thing we know today about the colony at a time human rights didn't even exist.

Oh yeah, and two things i love: Him talking about the whole "Leopold helped fight off arab slaves" when the Congo Free State initially colaborated with the arabs until hostilities grew between the two and he tried using this as part of his humanitarian campaign propaganda, and you using Leopold's letter as "proof" (do you also use Albert Speer's memories as a accurate report on the Reich?) of his benevolence when he has another letter where he scoffs at officials chopping hands because that's the only things he needa from the natives.

Lastly, the fact that Gilley things fucking heart of darkness is pro-colonialism because it has stereotypical depictions of african natives (On a 19th century book? Shocker!) showcases he never fucking read the damn thing because this is how the "white man's burden" and the colonialists are described, word-for-word:

"To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe."

response

you need evidence something you didnt demonstrate and continue not to do, so congrats the page will be unlocked and if you continue you will be locked too. but since you gave the casement report i will rape that

A number of people have used the image of King Leopold II of the Belgians and his rule of the Congo Free State to attack, not only colonialism/imperialism and the King himself but monarchy in general and the Belgian monarchy as a whole. Given that, it is worth looking at who were, in his own time, the most outspoken enemies of King Leopold II and what sort of men they were. Two were most prominent and effective in their criticism. One was the British Consul to the Congo Free State Roger Casement who wrote a report damning the colony which had far-reaching consequences. So, who was Roger Casement? Many of you, particularly those hailing from the British Isles, may have heard of him.

Roger Casement was an Irishman, born in Dublin to a Protestant military officer (his Catholic mother had him re-baptized in the Roman rite when he was 3) in 1864; the same year Leopold II became King of the Belgians. The connections of his father allowed him to become a British diplomat and he spent most of his career both in Africa and Brazil raising the alarm about mistreated native peoples. It is safe to say that he was, very early on, an enemy of monarchy and colonialism in general. This caused quite an international sensation and King George V of Great Britain even gave him a knighthood but Casement, evidently, was less than grateful for this honor from his monarch. After he retired from diplomatic service in 1913 he became a full-time republican revolutionary in Ireland.

Oddly enough it was the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland that had been among the most forceful in picking up and joining in on his condemnation of the Congo Free State yet he devoted the rest of his life to the destruction of this very government. He became a major figure in the Irish republican, nationalist crowd and raised money in the USA for the revolutionary cause. This would have been enough to condemn him as a traitor in Great Britain but things became worse with the outbreak of World War I when he actively sought out and negotiated an alliance with Britain’s greatest enemy, the German Empire, in the planned rebellion in Ireland. He even tried to convince Irish prisoners-of-war to form their own unit to fight alongside the Germans against the British. Those plans culminated in the Easter Uprising in 1916 and the proclamation of the first Irish republic.

This uprising, as everyone knows, did not succeed and Casement along with numerous others was arrested, tried and convicted of numerous charges, the most serious of which was treason. The trial also led to the discovery of his diaries which proved Casement to have been a rampant homosexual and pederast, perhaps even a pedophile. He was found guilty and hanged for treason against his King and country in quick order. In short, hardly the stuff of which heroes are made unless you are an anti-monarchist republican revolutionary it seems.

The other most significant figure in the business of opposing King Leopold II and the Congo Free State was Edmund Dene Morel. He was a British journalist, English on the side of his father, French on that of his mother, and had been born in Paris. He also eagerly spread stories, each more horrid than the last, of atrocities in the Congo, all of which he blamed squarely on the King, and he founded the Congo Reform Association in which capacity he made effective use of the report by Casement among his many activities. He recruited numerous famous literary figures to champion his cause, a long list of almost exclusively liberal and very anti-monarchist individuals. He left this work in 1911 and from there his story mirrors that of Casement to a large extent.

Despite being a British subject and born in France he was, very early on, openly sympathetic toward Germany. He wrote in support of Germany during the crisis over Morocco in 1912 and as the build-up to the First World War began he was again openly pro-German. His hatred of King Leopold evidently extended to the whole nation of Belgium as he advocated abandoning them to the Germans, did not think Britain or France should lift a finger to help defend the country and argued against France of Great Britain going to war against Germany. He became very much associated with far-left pacifist groups in Great Britain, particularly the Union of Democratic Control. When it was discovered that his longtime friend Casement had been plotting with the Germans to cause rebellion in Ireland and after he was hanged for treason because of this, Morel began to be suspected of being a German agent.

Morel was put in prison for a time for his anti-war activities and though he was on the side of some issues that were ultimately proven correct, he continued to drift farther and farther to the radical left. He later admitted that he had been a lifelong socialist and remained adamantly so up to his death in Devon in 1924. Now, it must also be said that the misdeeds of these men in no way excuse the misdeeds of King Leopold II, but they are not often even mentioned by those who hold them up as great heroes. However, the core ideologies of these men ultimately caused more death and more misery than even the most exaggerated accounts of the crimes of Leopold II. It is also noteworthy that most monarchists will certainly not hold up the late King as an example of monarchy at its best and yet the enemies of monarchy will hold up socialists, pederasts and traitors as heroes of their own.

you are a weasel who uses weasel words dude, you say"historians as a way to avoid any real discussion, you dont use name beacause all the names of the historians i know you would use like casament and hothscild would get destroyed by these articles.

https://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Fake-News-All-Time/dp/B09FCCCFKV

So the counter-argument you're using (which isn't even yours, but taken from another article and copy-and-pasted) is that casement... was a republican who fought for Irish independence and accepted German backing so that makes him a traitor to his own country and the fact his diary reveals his homosexuality (how is this in any way relevant?) and his possible pedophilia (there's no indication of this is his Black Diaries and the author literally pulled it out of his ass), which isn't a rebuttal at all but poisoning the well.

Well, an attempt at poisoning the well since describing the guy as a "republican socialist Irish independence fighter who fought against the monarchies in Europe" seems like a hero figure to me. So yes, unless there's actual proof that these people somehow lied in their report (which were corrobated by Casement's own worst enemy, the British Empire), i would rather trust the irish revolutionary human rights fighter than the absolutist tyranical king (which was an actual pedophile unlike Casement given his run-ins with underage prostitutes)

kami-Here's the deal i already have multiple people on the council rule in my favour and lock the page, you don provide anything but statements. what you do provide is easily destroyed by the sources i use, your response telescope on useless things and you try to say you have no bias which is entirely wrong.i know you didnt watch any of the videos or read any of the sources because you just skim them find a buzzword and focus. if you continue at this point it will be considered vandalism and you will be punished. so at this point find something else to do bro. find another page to edit