Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Henry Morton Stanley: The Explorer Who Shot His Way Through Africa

Episode Date: April 16, 2020

Robert is joined again by Soren Bowie to continue discussing explorer, Henry Morton Stanley. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What? I don't know. Fuck it. We're still out of introductions. The shipments are still coming. We've been told the supply lines are holding out, but they have not been trucked into us yet. So, you know, we will see at some point this introduction shortage will end.

I will promise you, my fellow Americans that, but it just hasn't yet. We're still out of intros, but we're not out of Soren Bowies. Soren! We are flush in Soren Bowies. I would dare say lousy with Soren's. Yeah, filthy with Soren's. Yeah, filthy with Soren's. This is the most we've ever had in this podcast, at least.

And tied for the most that I've ever had during that 10-year period where we worked together. Yes, and I'll say, completely useless during a disaster. You don't want these. They can't help you. Now, that's not true, because one of the things, Soren, you're a number of things. You are currently a writer for the TV show American Dad. You were formerly my co-worker at Cracked. You are a host of the, co-host of the podcast.

Quick question with my friend Daniel O'Brien. And you have also helped discover a lost city in the desert. And I'm not going to give any more detail to my audience than that, but that's not a joke. That's just a thing Soren did one time, which he has in common with our host today. Kind of, not really. Henry Morton Staley, yeah. You'll find along the way that there are a lot of things he and I have in common. You have discovered a city and again, no more detail will be given.

So off we go into the tale. So, I think it's, it's hard to adequately convey to people what Africa... Oh, also, this is behind the bastards. You probably knew that because this is part two of the episode. Thank you. It's hard to adequately convey to people today, like what African explorers were to Europeans in the mid-1800s and late-1800s. Like the closest thing we have today would be like a cross between a major YouTube star and a pop musician. Like you have to think about these guys kind of the way people think of Beyonce and Rihanna today.

Like they are that level of worshiped and adored by a lot of people, which is hard to get your head around because they're all like Stanley. So as Stanley stared out towards Africa, you know, at this point in his career, age 27, two of the most famous explorers in the world were Richard Burton and John Speck. They just finished their epic journey from Africa's east coast to Lake Tanganyika, which is the longest freshwater lake on earth. And they had quote-unquote discovered Lake Victoria, the largest body of water in Africa during this trip. It was considered to be like this huge deal. Everyone was very excited. People couldn't shut the fuck up about Lake Victoria and about Burton and Speck. And Americans were obsessed with them too.

Now, one of the most famous explorers of this day was David Livingston. He was a physician and a Christian evangelist from Scotland. Now, Livingston was an abolitionist and his focus was on ending what is often referred to as the Arab slave trade in Africa. And you hear about the Arab slave trade in Africa today, usually when people are explaining how the Confederacy wasn't all that bad because Arabs were the real villains of the slave trade. Yeah. So Livingston, the Arab slave trade was a real thing, but it's probably wrong to call it the Arab slave trade. A decent number of the people who were running the trade were Arabs, but they were North African Arabs. And a lot of them weren't Arabs.

A lot of people are Swahili and stuff like that. These are people from North Africa. Some of them are Arabs. Some of them aren't. It gets reduced to being the Arab slave trades that people can blame Arabs. But it's a bunch of people from one part of Africa enslaving people from another part of Africa and selling them somewhere. It's a bad thing, but it's not quite the way it's portrayed today. So Livingston was committed to ending this kind of slavery.

I didn't hear much about him on the Civil War. I think he probably was anti-Confederacy in this, but England itself wasn't necessarily in anyway. We'll move on. He was convinced that the answer, he was committed to ending slavery in Africa. He was committed to ending slavery in Africa and he was convinced that the answer to doing so was what he called legitimate trade. Livingston was a believer in Christianity, commerce, and civilization. That was one of his catchphrases, saying that Christianity, commerce, and civilization would free black Africans from slavery. That the violent colonial domination of millions of people was the only way to achieve this was not something that Livingston ever really said,

but it was the inevitable result of his beliefs. So, it's cool. Yeah, when you're trying to build a utopia, you got to break a few eggs, man. Yeah, and Livingston felt a powerful desire to connect the different villages, towns, and ports of Central Africa in order to facilitate easier trade and allow missionaries to move around more easily and Christianize the continent. He wanted to use the many lakes and rivers of Central Africa as highways to facilitate this trade. But in order to do that, he had to map them. And that's just what Livingston set out to do.

He started mapping out the Congo River and he had a series of daring adventures on the way. For one example, at one point he was he agreed to help a village by trying to kill a lion that was hunting them. And he hit the lion, but like the lion still attacked him and his arm was horribly mauled. So he's like, he's the kind of things this guy gets up to. And he gets very he writes books which are very popular and he's he becomes, you know, moderately famous. He's not the most popular explorer, but he's up there. And Stanley reads one of his books and he's enthralled. Now, the height of Livingston's fame came in the late 1850s when he succeeded in convincing a series of backers

to fund his effort to map the Zambezi River so that he could create a major artery through which he could pump Christianity and capitalism into the heart of Africa. He succeeded in working at a deal with the London Missionary Society, but sort of misled them about the extent to which the government supported his efforts. The result of which of this is that he brought a shitload of missionaries into a place that was extremely dangerous and a bunch of them and more importantly, their young children died horribly. This disaster was not good for Livingston's PR. And by 1866, he was seen as something of a has been.

You would say he's like the Jeremy Renner of guys who explore Africa in this period. Now, I'm curious when he's like when his goal is to find out where the like this, find this river and explore this river so that he can pump Christianity into that area. Yeah, my phrasing. Yeah. Yeah, I'm curious like how that what that looks like logistically like I can get that you would import and export stuff but something as nebulous as religion. Are you just pumping a bunch of white Christians into that area and being like, essentially this will take root?

Yeah, basically you're sending a lot of them there to form little communities to have businesses and also to witness to people and kind of the assumption I think Livingston makes is that the benefits of white Christian civilization will just be so obvious that eventually this will take root and take over, you know, the way things had been. He wants what you'd call a soft genocide. He doesn't want to kill any of the people. That's not the kind of guy Livingston is, but he wants to completely change every aspect of their old life and destroy the old culture because his is better. So like like a soft genocide.

Yeah. Again, the English were the slow Nazis. Like that's the way to look at them. Yeah. And they have a way higher death told them the Nazis because being slow lets you do that. But anyway, so yeah, he it's cool. So in 1866 sort of disgraced Jeremy Renner type David Livingston sets off on another one of his adventures to find the source of the Nile. He went missing and for years very little was heard from the doctor.

By 1868 all of Europe was in an uproar over the fate of David Livingston. Within several English social clubs gears began churning to raise money for an expedition to rescue the good doctor or to find evidence of his demise. But sitting over in the United States, keeping an eye on the news, Henry Morton Stanley was able to see something important in the disappearance of David Livingston. An opportunity for Henry Morton Stanley. Yes. Get to Africa now, Henry. Yeah. If he could somehow convince his new employer to send him to Africa and then track down Livingston himself, he would have the biggest scoop in all of journalism.

It would be the kind of story that would not just make his career, but make him into a global celebrity. And there was nothing Henry Morton Stanley wanted more. He spent quite a lot of time trying to convince the publisher of the New York Herald to fund his expedition. He succeeded once, but then Livingston turned up briefly again and Stanley put it around the Middle East, you know, doing that sort of journalism instead. It took until 1869 for things to really start to happen with this story. So like four years after Livingston goes missing. And Stanley's version of the story of how he got approval to do this is a lie, but it's also the most coherent version of the tale. So we're going to start here. I'm going to quote Adam Haaschild's right up of it.

In 1869, Stanley received an urgent telegram from Bennett, his boss, come to Paris on important business. A journalist, Stanley wrote with the self importance that had now become part of his public persona is like a gladiator in the arena. And he flinching and he cowardice and he is lost. The gladiator meets the sword that is sharpened for his bosom. The roving correspondent meets the command that may send him to his doom. He dashed off to Paris to meet his publisher at the Grand Hotel. There a dramatic conversation about Livingston climaxed with Bennett saying, I mean that you shall go and find him wherever you may hear that he is and to get what news you can of him and perhaps the old man may be in want. Take enough with you to help him if he should require it. But do what you think is best, but find Livingston.

Now, none of this actually happened. It's a lie that Stanley cooked up because it made a good introduction for the book he eventually wrote about his expedition. And he tore up the pages of his diary from those days, so we will never know what actually went down. The whole Livingston journey? No, no, no, just the whole story of how he convinced his boss to send him. The real story seems to basically be that he got approval because it was a big story and then his boss backed out a bunch of times and eventually Stanley kind of conned his way into pulling out money out of the company accounts and then disappearing in Africa. And when he reappeared with the story, his boss agreed to pretend that nothing bad had happened.

That's kind of the gist of it, I think. It's a weird story. There's nothing you want more in a journalist than a really good liar. And that's exactly what he was. And I'm sure his plan was to go there and be like, it does not matter if I find him or not. The story will be good. I will tell people I found him. We live in 1860, nobody knows.

Yeah, if I can get there, I will make a fucking story out of this. I just need the money to get to Africa and hire a bunch of people to help me not die. So he finally begins his journey into the interior of Africa in March 1871. The trip started out well, if you believe Stanley, and he found himself falling in love with the native fauna and floor of Africa. He wrote that he felt like an English nobleman in a massive private park. Quote, I felt momentarily proud that I owned such a vast domain inhabited by such noble beasts, the pride of the African forests. So he is, one thing you can say about Stanley, he is the most fucking pedal to the fucking metal colonialist. There is not even a second that it takes him to be like, yeah, this feels like mine.

Yeah, I feel like Africa's mine. He's so obsessed with being a nobleman that even in Africa, he's like, this, this feels like it, right? This is what it's like. This is what it's like. If I squint, these look like my moors that I'm wandering around on my horseback on. It rules. So for a little while, Stanley was in paradise. He was followed as always by much younger men whose job it was to see to his every need and to adore him.

His translator, Salim, fit this bill to a tee. As did Kalulu, the young slave that he had bought and made into a butler. So he owns a slave. And as a friend has to do a lot of, he's got to do a lot of groundwork to try to turn this one around. Sorry. I'm very curious about his acrobatics. It is hard to turn a slave owner into not a racist, but Jill gives it the old college try. Yes.

He describes, Jill describes Kalulu as quote, the slave boy whom he would free by purchase to be his butler and valet. Henry would be reminded of the boys at the workhouse who had been his de facto family during his adolescence. Not that his affection for them would stop him from beating both Salim and Kalulu for crimes such as stealing food and breaking things. So the way that he describes it, he washes it away. He has an affinity for him because he reminds him of the slaves at the workhouse where he used to live. He still beats the shit out of this slave. Don't get me wrong. Beats the shit out of this slave.

It's also worth noting in Jill kind of brushes over this that Stanley doesn't like Kalulu's original name and he just changes it. Oh, nice. He just gives him a new name. This is a better name for you. Stanley's relationship. Your Carl from now on. Who again, Jill repeatedly points out what an anti-slavery crusader Stanley is. Owns a slave whose name that he changes and whom he beats.

And this is different from slavery for a variety of reasons that neither Jill nor I have the time to get into right now. Do we know the name change? Oh boy. Yeah, it's somewhere in here. Oh man, I hope he named him like Karen. No, no, no. Kalulu is the name he changes it to and it's what Kalulu goes by for the rest of his life. Or what the kid goes by for the rest of his life.

Like Stanley brings him back to England and stuff. I don't know, it is one of those things. A lot of times people will defend these guys by pointing out that these people who they very clearly abused and owned, liked them and spoke pleasantly about them the rest of their days. That's really not the point. There's a lot of former terrorist like kidnapping victims and fucking Stockholm or whatever, you know? Who will speak fondly of them. Yeah, he wrote a book about Kalulu years later called My Kalulu, Prince, King and Slave,

which he called a romance for boys. So that's not great either. Henry, deal with your sexuality, man. Yeah, yeah, and he renamed him from Kalulu's real name was Nogudu Mahali, which means my brother's wealth. Yeah, and yeah, he renamed him Kalulu, which means a young male antelope and then made him carry his gun. That was Kalulu's big gig. So that's cool.

Cool and good. Sorry, Nogudu. How? Nogudu Mahali. He changed his name and turned him into a gun rack. Yeah, which is not racist. And you know what else is not racist, Soren? Abraham Lincoln.

He was profoundly racist, but he gets a partial pass for destroying the Confederacy. Oh. I would say partial, yeah. Okay, what's not racist? What's not racist? A haircut. A haircut. I mean, actually, there's a lot of politics around haircuts.

That could go badly as well. Oranges, not racist. Incapable of racism by dint of being a fruit. So this podcast is supported by Oranges, the fruit that hates racism. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you've got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

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He was broken, abandoned in Central Africa, and was regularly terribly ill. But he was also like just kind of hanging out in a house in a village as the local white guy. And he wasn't in more danger than like any given white dude was in a place where they had no natural immunity to all these different horrible diseases that were flopping around in the flies and stuff, you know? So this isn't like a heart of darkness situation where he's gone down there and become a god in some remote area. No, no, he just kind of lives there. And they're like, yeah, that's the white guy we got. Yeah, we got one. Tell all the other villagers we got one. Yeah, starting in 1867, Livingston's own followers had stolen so much for him that he'd been forced to travel with Arab Swahili slave caravans for safety while like hating these people and the Arab slave trade.

And while he describes all this, our buddy Tim Geel thinks that you the reader need to know that even this kind of slavery wasn't super bad for black people. And I'm gonna give you more a Tim right now who is broadly becoming the real bastard of the story. Livingston could endure his humiliating dependence on many considered evil doers largely because he made a distinction between Arab slavery as an institution, the treatment and possession of domestic slaves, and the cruel process by which Africans were torn from their homes. The slaves journey by land and sea was appallingly cruel, but on arrival in Arabia, they were usually treated better than many British factory workers. Oh, okay. Great. Thank you, Tim Geel. Didn't need that defense of slavery. Not necessary to tell the story actually. Tim is quickly working his way up to having his own episode. Yeah, this is basically the Tim Geel episode. Stanley has the defense of growing up in a time when almost everyone was some kind of monster.

So Stanley, as Stanley got deeper into Africa, problems began to surface. Some of his men expressed displeasure under his leadership and Stanley generally responded to this by flogging them. When they were 125 miles inland, Stanley flogged his cook for incorrigible dishonesty and waste, which I think was just like wasting food. He fired the cook and told him to leave, but when the cook left, Stanley called him a deserter and sent soldiers out to bring him back. Geel says this shows his steely determination. Throughout this adventure, Stanley would send his soldiers out after disorders and order men beaten and chained for not wanting to work. This is again different from slavery because of course, Henry Morton Stanley was an abolitionist. So that's good. So yeah, Livingston had two white guys with him on this journey. When one of the two of them got sick, he abandoned him to die in a village and continued on. Stanley had very little sympathy for people whose illness rendered them unable to work for days, even though he was himself frequently and horrifically ill on these journeys.

Tim Geel, unbiased biographer, wants you to know that while he tromped through other people's land, Stanley was a pretty good guest of the Africans. Oh, great. Quote, though impatient with white colleagues, he showed commendable restraint with Africans. The Wagogo, whose territory lay midway between the coast and Lake Tanganyika, were, in Stanley's words, clannish and full of fight. And their young warriors repeatedly rushed up to within a few feet of him and shouted in his face before moving closer to inspect his clothes. The traveler in Wagogo territory, wrote Henry, was tempted a score of times each day to draw a bead with his rifle, but such an outburst of anger would be bitterly regretted afterwards. Stanley was ill with fever at the time, and on two occasions lashed out with a whip, but he paid these people generously for the rite of passage through their territory, the equivalent of $170 in gold. So he whipped them sometimes for asking what was up, but he paid them. Yeah, I also like picturing this man in a pith helmet, like feverishly hallucinating and whipping people throughout the jungle.

And Tim Geel being like, basically a good guest. What's the problem? He was a spitable. I would criticize him more for this, but I have lost count of the number of people that I have whipped in their own homes for unclear reasons while feverish. So I'm not going to give Stanley too much pain. It happens, you know? We've all whipped a few people we wish we hadn't whipped when we had a fever and wound up in their house somehow. You don't throw stones if you live in whip houses. Exactly. And every house is a whip house when you bring a whip into every house you enter. You can even bring your own whip.

Always. So Stanley did succeed eventually in his goal of tracking David Livingston down. He found him in the village of Ujiji in November of 1871. The moment the two met is one of the most famous stories in all of journalism. Stanley and Livingston, the two only white men around for miles, surrounded by black and Arab servants and soldiers, walk up to one another and Stanley dryly asks, Dr. Livingston, I presume? And the joke here is that Livingston is the only other white guy for like the fucking length of multiple states. Of course, it's Dr. Livingston.

And for his part, Gilles thinks this was a lie. Like this recitation of events was a lie and that Stanley's real introduction was like, Hi, Dr. Livingston, my name is Stanley. You know, it was a normal thing that a person would say. Dr. Livingston, my name is John. No, I'm sorry. Yeah, shit. I meant that to be so much better. His actual notes, Stanley's actual notes about their moment of meeting were again destroyed. And Livingston died a year later before ever returning to Europe. So there was never anyone to question Stanley's recitation of events or never anyone white and no other white person at the time was going to ask like a black dude what had really happened.

So, yep. But we don't ever know. The Dr. Livingston, I presume, is just something he might probably made up afterwards. He made up because it sounded better. What a dick. Yeah, and it's really funny because Gilles is more concerned. Like the honest documentarian in him means he needs to let people know that Stanley's most famous line was a lie. But he loves Henry Morton Stanley so much that he spends more time defending him about this than he does for owning a human being. Yes.

It's awesome. You get twisted into these weird priorities when you're trying to defend somebody like this. I can't get my image of this guy together in my head. But he writes, I hope this will not affect Stanley's public fame. It seems to me that his invention of an adoptive father and his setting himself the task of finding Dr. Livingston were remarkable enough in their own right to bear it remembrance. To go on from there to invent a greeting so memorable that it would be recognized by millions over a century and a quarter later places him in a class all his own. Yes, it does. A very specific class.

A very specific class. But not the one you're thinking of. Yeah, not a good one. Now, Livingston and Stanley spent four months together, which were probably the happiest four months of Stanley's life. And it does seem that the two men grew very close. In Livingston, who was 60, acted as a sort of father figure to Stanley. They explored together for a little while, but then Stanley had to go. He had a story to file and Livingston wasn't ready to go back to England or whatever.

Now, the story was a massive hit. It was the biggest news item in the world. And one fell swoop Stanley became among the most famous people on the planet. He wrote a book to go with his articles, How I Found Livingston. And in doing this, he sort of invented an entire genre. One historian notes that he's the progenitor of all the subsequent professional travel writers. Like Stanley kind of invents the discipline of travel writing. He's not like the very first person to do it, but he like, he nails it for the first time in a way that's like really echoes throughout history.

Adam Hosschild writes his articles, books and speaking tours bought him greater riches than any other travel writer of his time and probably the next century as well. In 1874, the Herald paid for him to go on another adventure. This time Stanley traced the course of a river named the Lua Laba. And in the process, he discovered the origin of the Congo River. He started this journey with 228 people and over the course of 7,000 miles, more than half of them died. As the corpses piled up, people attempted to desert. Stanley responded to this by capturing and chaining those people up. Jill notes that Stanley preferred chaining people up because it was nicer than beating them.

Our hero. Oh, so cool. Stanley also continued his marked preference of having a doring white younger men accompany him on his journey. It means nothing without a witness. Yeah, exactly. But unfortunately, all three of them die. Oh, that's a shame. They die just horribly.

Like the worst deaths you can imagine. That's basically all the white guys Stanley ever goes on trips with, die the worst deaths human beings can die. Yeah, they're all red shirts. That's great. And then Stanley gets to lie about them. Terrible. Which, they're all pieces of shit too. Like I'm not gonna, you know, whatever.

So Stanley gets back from his journey in August of 1877 and publishes his book on it in 1878 through the Dark Continent. And Henry Morton Stanley is generally credited as being the man who popularized that term and he may even have invented it. So he's like, he's the guy who makes Dark Continent a household name for Africa. And that is, there's huge consequences to that. Like he contributes to the death of tens of millions as a result of this. True to form, Stanley exaggerated every single number he could in this book. Claiming his expedition had a hundred more members than it really did. Exaggerating the number of natives his men killed in gunfights and all.

Every number is a lie, basically. In one key story. This is lying in the wrong direction to a T. I was responsible for more dead men. Oh, I got so many more people killed. In one key story, his own notes record six kills during a firefight, but his book claims 35. And again, this is a firefight because he like barged into some people's land and started stealing shit and they got angry. So it's like, I had no choice but to shoot them.

And also true to form, Tim Geel uses the fact that Stanley lied about how many people he killed as a basis for a lot of his argument that Stanley has been unfairly treated by history and was a good dude. He frames this as Stanley just being very insecure because of his childhood in the workhouse. God, what a kindred spirit Geel has found in Henry Martin Stanley. It's so good. If Geel had been alive during this time, he absolutely would have gotten hired to follow Stanley on a journey and he would have died the most unimaginably painful death here against him. He would have been eaten by fire ants. And Geel would have lied and said that he started one of the many gunfights he had with natives. Yeah, he would have lied and said that the natives natural attraction to Geel, it forced him to kill all of them.

Yeah, again, this is a guy whose crew is an adventurer, starts with getting a young boy who adores him raped with knives and then stealing that kid's money. He's such a piece of shit. So, yeah, now his acknowledgement of, yeah, it's great. So Stanley and his men try to buy passage and pay for food when possible on their journeys, but they also were very perfectly happy to kill people and wage war when local people didn't want to sell them those things. Geel writes, quote, his obsession had been whether to take food by force or risk marching on in the hope of obtaining food at the next village. On many occasions, he was obliged by destitution to throw himself on the mercy of the Arab Swahili slave traders and ask them to feed him and his followers. During my first visit to Belgium, I read a very significant passage in one of Stanley's diaries, which I have never seen quoted in any book. In this entry, Stanley showed that he had recognized the fundamental moral problem facing all European travelers.

We went into the heart of Africa self invited, he wrote, therein lies our fault, but it was not so grave that our lives when threatened should be forfeited. So Stanley, Stanley knows it's fucked up to just barge into someone's home and then take their shit at gunpoint and kill them when they say, he knows I'm invading people's homes and murdering them for food. And that's not good. But he also argues that because I'm starving, it's okay for me to do this. Right. What other choice do I have? What other, you could not be an Africa dude. No, not be reasonable, grow up. What other choice do I have?

You could just not do this. Millions of people around the world managed to not do this during the same period. That could have been you, buddy. Yes, but none of them are me. Henry Morton Stanley. Henry Morton Stanley. Now, this reasoning is dubious enough on its own, but Stanley's contribution to death and destruction in Africa went far beyond a few hundred bullets fired, or even beyond the three of his own men that he hanged. I'm going to quote now from a write-up titled Henry Morton Stanley and his critics from the Oxford University Press.

He lynched people. Of course. Soren, you're not going to go on journeys through the heart of Africa and not hang some of the people that you can't chain or whip into submission. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, of course. Quote. On his death in 1904, Sydney Low claimed that the map of Africa is a monument to Stanley. Such an epitaph draws our attention not only to Stanley's contributions to geographical science arising from various African expeditions between 1871 and 1890, but also to his role as an agent of European colonial influence.

For Stanley was a tireless advocate of commercial and political intervention in Africa. Indeed, to describe him as the Napoleon of African traveler seems particularly appropriate in view of both the scale of his ambitions and the links he was prepared to go in order to realize them. His career as an explorer bridges what is sometimes referred to as the golden age of African exploration, 1851 to 1878, and the era of the scramble for Africa, 1884 to 1901. If the 1870s were indeed a critical turning point in the history of European involvement in Africa, then Stanley himself played a significant role in the transition to new forms of imperialism in the closing decades of the 19th century. See, and this is critical. There was colonialism in Africa before Stanley. But what we think of as colonialism in Africa was invented in a lot of ways by Henry Morton Stanley. Most of Africa wasn't quote unquote owned by European powers when he gets there and his work helps inspire the political changes that leads to that changing.

He sparks was known as the scramble for Africa and some of this was deliberate. It was part of a plot by King Leopold to get control of the Congo. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. I want to talk about Stanley's specific contribution, though, to like the evolution of colonialism because he's critical in the whole worldwide thing. See, he believed like Livingston did that slavery was the ultimate evil and had to be fought by sending Europeans in to facilitate trade. Sometimes that process meant chaining or whipping or beating or executing Africans who didn't play along with this trade. Or owning slaves. Yeah, or owning slaves.

If so, this was all the regrettable necessity of freeing people. Now, I love that he always has his excuse every single time is my hands are tied. And it's crazy how this never changes. And you have literal reports from the US military in Vietnam that are like, we had to burn down the village to save it. This is always the logic of this sort of thing. But Stanley helps develop this language of justifying the most violent kind of imperialism. So at one point while sailing through Lake Tanganyika, Stanley writes, quote, the beach was crowded with infuriates and mockers. These are like local Africans who are just kind of like hooting and hollering and yelling at him because they don't want them in their area.

We perceived we were followed by several canoes and some of which we saw spears shaken at us. I opened on them with a Winchester repeating rifle. Six shots and four deaths were sufficient to quiet the mocking. So they made fun of me. So I killed four men. They were gunned down. Yeah, I walked into their home. They laughed at me.

And so I murdered four of them. And then they stopped laughing. Are you trying to tell me I'm not a hero for that? Don't try to tell Tim Geel that he will get fucking angry. So Stanley was not the first or the only white man to stumble into Africa with a pile of guns and the desire to own things. But he was one of the most influential and his writings in this period helped to inspire countless millions of white folks around the world to embrace the conquest of Africa. His writings represented Central Africa as a primeval place untouched by history yet full of possibility.

They were far from unique in this respect, of course. In the period between the publication of Stanley's Through the Dark Continent, 1878, and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, 1903, the vision of darkest Africa appears to have gained an ever more powerful hold in the minds of Europeans. As Patrick Brantlinger observes, Africa grew dark as Victorian explorers, missionaries, and scientists flooded it with light. Solid turn of phrase. The peculiar power of this myth of the Dark Continent lay in its fusion of a complex of images of race, science, and religion. The iconography of light and darkness thus represented European penetration of Africa as simultaneously a process of domination, enlightenment, and emancipation. Although Stanley did not create this myth, his writings popularized existing stereotypes,

combining the symbolism of darkest Africa with an unshakable faith and the potential for European mastery over the entire continent. His mission, as it was described in 1884, was to strike a white line across the Dark Continent. Oh, yikes. Boy, howdy. Oh, man. Now, Tim Geel, greatest biographer of all time. Let's get that out of the way right away. Tim Geel tries to patch over the kind of fundamental racism of what Stanley's doing

by just sort of sharing individual stories about times when he wasn't shitty to individual African people. Yeah, when you're not shitty 100% of the time, it means you're a good person. Yeah, he includes a lot of lines that's like, you know, Stanley would like meet a specific tribe and describe them all as attractive and intelligent and kind. And Geel's like, would a racist write this? Did you know that Hitler had a dog? Yeah, and in doing this, Geel ignores lines from Stanley's journal like this. The blacks give an immense amount of trouble.

They are too ungrateful for my fancy. Now, Geel highlights that Stanley wrote of being prepared to admit any black man possessing the attributes of true manhood or any good qualities to a brotherhood with myself. But number one ignores how racist this line is, but also ignores other lines like, the savage only respects force, power, boldness and decision. And perhaps most racist of all, this line about Afro-Arab people from non-racist Henry Morton Stanley. Quote, Holy shit, Henry.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Let us, Tim Geel is, I, I'm going to look up one of the times, he doesn't use the word racism often in his book, like he defends him from racism, but he really, there's seven matches in the entire book. And I want to read one quote from, oh, sorry, this is, we're not even at a, we're not even at, okay, before I get into something Geel wrote,

this is one of the book quotes about Geel's book by Jane Ridley of Spectator magazine when she put it on their books of the year list. And Spectator is like a right wing news website. Yeah, yeah. Why is fair and deeply researched, Geel's book sets the record straight on the great Victorian explorer, exonerating him from allegations of racism, brutality and expressed homosexuality. So Ridley, not only is like racism and murder are the same as being gay, but also he wasn't any of those things.

Meanwhile, Tim Geel repeatedly talks about him whipping people. That's wonderful. But he had to, he had no choice, Robert. He had to because they weren't, they didn't, they weren't, they weren't working hard enough. Anyway, here's the line from Tim Geel. I wanted to read you. Today, a vivid and uniquely adventurous life like Stanley's challenges our ability to be just an objective, both about his story and about the vices and virtues of his contemporary's worldviews.

His absence of racism was all the more remarkable for him having lived in the deep South. Perfect. His absence of racism. His complete absence. Well, nothing about the Confederacy washed off at all on this man who fought for the Confederacy and then it helped enslave, not a single thing. He didn't know what he was fighting for everyone. It's fine.

Yeah. Now, likewise, when Geel is forced to deal with Stanley's dark side, he tends to make very quick vague references to unfortunate floggings and beatings. He generally neglects to cite for us what Stanley wrote in his own notebook when he was flogging people and thus excludes lines like, when mud and wet sapped the physical energy of the lazily inclined, a dog whip became their backs, restoring them to sound, sometimes to an extravagant activity. Yeah.

Well, when they start to wane, you got to whip them back into shape. You got to whip them back into shape. Doesn't that race us to whip only black people? It's fine. Yeah, come on. A lot of not racist people whip only one specific type of people. They are lucky to be whipped when all of his white counterparts were eaten by fire ants and died in quicksand. I mean, hey, the least we can say for Hitler is he mostly whipped,

I think actually only whipped white people. So Hitler's whip was woker than Stanley's if you needed to categorize those two. So Stanley considered Africa to be an unpeopled country and his dream was very clearly to see it colonized with white folks, just like North America. He didn't want all the black people killed, but he kind of assumed that a lot of them would die out and be marginalized during, you know, the spread of white people all over Africa. He wrote, quote, There are plenty of pilgrim fathers among the Anglo-Saxon race yet,

and when America is filled up with their descendants, who shall say that Africa shall not be their next resting place. And true to his convictions, Henry Morton Stanley's next great career move would do what he thought was the best thing he could do to open Africa to further white exploitation. He took a gig with King Leopold II of Belgium. Now we're not going to get into crazy detail about this because we do in our two-parter on Leopold. The short of it is that the King of Belgium sneakily convinced Europe that his country owned Central Africa, and then he killed half the people there by working them to death to produce rubber.

Stanley was a key part of that, and it's easy to see why work with the King of Belgium on this project would have appealed to him outside of financial incentives. Stanley's life outside of exploring was a little bit of a disaster. He'd been engaged to a woman named Katie Gal Roberts before he set off for the Congo, but she left him for an architect while he was there, and he discovered that she'd gotten married to someone else when he got back. This isn't the first time something like this happens to him either. He's just got this thing of falling in love with girls,

promising himself to them, and then going to Africa for multiple years. And then he comes back and he's like, that woman wasn't loyal! Yeah, I will probably die where I go. I will be on the verge of death the entire time. Everyone around me will die. But wait for me. Don't fuck.

Hope you aren't still fucking! So, likewise, his fame and his wealth had not translated to very much respect by the actual English high society. The actual fancy explorers clubs didn't like him very much, and the issue was his unspeakable brutality. In 1876, explorer Richard Burton wrote a letter to the consul of Zanzibar, complaining that Stanley, quote, shoots Negroes as if they were monkeys.

And Richard Burton is a guy who killed a fuckload of innocent black people. And he's like, this dude is cut. This guy, like, fuck, man. It's like having my namesake producer Robert Evans sit you down to talk about your coke problem. The guy who's already famously terrible. Listen, this is too much. You cannot kill them like they're animals.

I don't know the difference! So this became a big topic of controversy within English society. And the specific clash that Burton was pissed about was a firefight with a tribe called the Bambira, who stole or who Henry Morton Stanley claims stole from him. In his periodic dispatches from the Congo, Stanley had bragged about the quote, 14 dead and wounded with ball and buckshot,

which although I should consider to be a very dear payment for the robbery of eight ash oars and a drum, was barely equivalent in fair estimation to the intended massacre of ourselves. So this is what he writes in one of his like public documents, is we killed 14 of them because they stole some oars. Yeah, and a drum. Yeah, and like it wasn't a totally fair exchange,

because those were nice oars, but you know, more or less. And we killed them. And yes, that is, it's a steep price to pay, but isn't their death worth less than my death? Yeah. So for Stanley, killing all these people wasn't enough. He took his 280-man force armed with muskets and spears, waving American and British flags,

and then slaughtered 42 Bambira that he'd tricked into believing he wanted to talk. The Saturday review wrote this in London, quote, he has no concern with justice, no right to administer it. He comes with no sanction, no authority, no jurisdiction, nothing but explosive bullets and a copy of the Daily Telegraph, who he's writing for at the time. So it is important to note that like,

while all of the worst parts of colonialism are going on, kind of like while all the worst crimes of our own error are going on, there's a lot of people in England who are like, oh, it seems really fucked up what we're doing. Hey guys, this is bad. This is bad. And just as now, they don't stop any of it from happening. But they are there in their pissed.

Well, that's comforting. Yeah, I guess. Ish. Yeah. So there was a lot of outrage over Stanley's behavior, but as we're all familiar with today, public outrage never stopped anyone from staying rich and famous. So if you'll recall, King Leopold's grand scheme

was to give him self-access to the Congo by conning the international community into believing that he was going to open it up to free trade for everybody. And what happened on paper is that all these tribes in Central Africa signed contracts giving up their sovereignty to a new state called the Congo Free State, which was in theory a nation of theirs. And Belgium was going to help them by providing the core of their military

and like helping them organize and become a real nation to join the community of nations. None of this was really true. None of the people who signed these contracts really knew what they were doing. And it was all just to provide Leopold with a legal justification for other Europeans so that he could rule the Congo. And Stanley is the guy who got him these justifications. He was hired by Leopold for five years to act as basically a secret agent,

traveling to Africa under an assumed name and making a series of treaty deals with different tribal chiefs. Now, depending on who you read, Stanley signed somewhere between 300 and 450 of these treaties. And the gist of them all was that these tribes would hand over their sovereignty and ownership of their land in exchange for scraps of cloth and vaguely defined trade benefits. And Gilles disagrees with academic consensus here.

Most historians will argue that Stanley basically knew what he was doing with Leopold. Gilles claims that with some evidence that Stanley didn't intend to get these tribes to sign away their sovereignty totally or forever and that Leopold tricked him and destroyed some of the original treaties and replaced them. That's totally possible because King Leopold was a piece of shit and would have had no issue with lying to Stanley because he was a way smarter liar than Henry Morton Stanley. But also, Stanley knew, if not every detail of what he was doing,

he knew the broad strokes, you know? That's really what matters. And he contributed massively to the deaths of 10 to 13 million people in the Congo Free State. And of course, the establishment of the Free State, the fact that Belgium had suddenly wound up with basically all of Central Africa, helped to spark what came to be known as the scramble for Africa, when all of Europe's powers startled by the fact that, you know, when they all started filling Africa up with colonies and conquering it and killing people

and laying the groundwork for the Rwandan genocide and all sorts of awful, awful stuff. Now, the justification used for all of this was the need to destroy the Arab slave trade and replace it with legitimate commerce, with free trade, right? That's the justification for all of this. It's the same as Stanley's personal justification. We've got to stop slavery, and the only way to do that is for us to own these people. Right. Now, under such justifications, Africa was enchained by Europe.

By 1890, the situation justification for domination had gotten so absurd that Scottish explorer Joseph Thompson dismissed the term legitimate commerce as, quote, magic words which give such an attractive glamour to whatever can creep under their shelter, words which have too often blinded a gullible public to the most shameful and criminal transaction. Wow. Wow. It's harsh words. Yep.

Not wrong, Joseph Thompson. You know what else is not wrong, Robert? The products and services that support this podcast? Absolutely. Yes. None of them have sparked the scramble for Africa. Well. Well.

Wow. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. The FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside this hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the good and bad ass way, and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! Oh, good ads.

I particularly liked the ad for conquering Africa and murdering millions of people there. Really a good way to end slavery. I know. They made the case. It was, I was hesitant at first, I'll be honest. And then hearing their position on it in the 32nd spot, I realized I was wrong. I was the wrong. Weird that they got Bill Murray to voice it.

Yeah. Yeah. Good pitchman, but I wouldn't have called it. I mean, now. Certainly a different second act than I anticipated from him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, in 1887, Stanley departed on what will become his final trip from Africa, the Iman Pasha Relief Expedition.

Hitler was an Eastern European blowhard and a pseudo grifter who ennobled himself to the English people by resisting the followers of the Mahdi in southern Sudan. And this is most similar in modern things, because we really don't have time to get into this very complicated story. It was kind of like this era is equivalent of ISIS. This guy rises up, he like beats a European army, and it's this like real shocking move and like he's, he's raises up his own Islamic kingdom. It's this like, it's a big deal at the time.

They treated him like ISIS. Like I'm not going to say that he was, he was actually like, because ISIS sucked ass. I don't know if the Mahdi did or not. I don't know enough, but that's the way they, they talk about him. Right? Yeah. So Pasha wound up surrounded and cut off by the forces of the Mahdi and Stanley was dispatched to relieve him.

And the whole operation was a shit show. Again, all of Stanley's white colleagues died. So he was able to blame sundry failures and massacres committed by his execution on dead men, which is very handy for Stanley. Cause the, this expedition massacres so many fucking people. Um, now they didn't make it hard for him to look bad. One of his white companions who didn't survive was James Jamison, the heir to the Jamison whiskey family.

He died on Stanley's second trip, but not before buying a young girl from a slave trader and paying cannibals to let him watch them eat her. Um, now Jamison was known as cannibal whiskey by many for years later. And this might not be true. A lot of people say it's not. And a lot of people who have no interest in defending Jamison's cause there's just a lot of fucking stories. Right?

Yeah. Um, I don't know the truth. This is a story people tell about this, this expedition. Um, the trip was a massive shit show and a lot of people died. And at the end of it, M and Pasha didn't really wind up wanting or needing rescue. So Stanley took him along to Zanzibar anyway, where Pasha attempted to commit suicide. Um, after all this, it seems Henry Morton Stanley had finally had enough of adventuring. He retired to England.

He lost his taste for that. Yeah, he did. How? Yeah. He retired in England. He married a Welsh artist named Dorothy Tennant. And kind of to his credit, he adopts a Welsh abandoned, a bastard child. Like he finds like a poor abandoned kid who's like he was and he adopts him and loves him.

So that's, that's good. Yeah. He's in need of a boy. Yeah. He needed a boy. He got himself another boy. He's always got a boy. And this one finally didn't die immediately.

So that's good. That's wonderful. Oh, what a happy ending for Henry. A happy ending for Henry. In 1899, Stanley became a Knight of the Order of Bath. He settled into a dignified retirement with both US and Britain proudly claiming him as their son. He became a Liberal Member of Parliament in 1895 and he died in 1904. The stigma that remained around all of his murders stopped him from winning a Westminster Abbey burial,

but he did receive a nice memorial. The epitaph reads Bula Matari, the Breaker of Stones. This was a nickname he'd been given by Africans who were like, this guy is such a brutal piece of shit. Like that's the kind of guy he is. Like he's the fucking hard enough to break stones or whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

But Stanley actually really liked this nickname, which is why you should never fucking give a piece of shit a nickname that sounds cool. Yeah. Like call him Fartmaster. You know? Yeah. Something he can live with. Something he's not going to put on his grave.

I'm going to quote from Oxford University Press again. He gloried in the name Bula Matari, the Breaker of Rocks, portraying the story of African exploration as a quest for mastery of the earth. Stanley's geography was ever a militant in manly science, dedicated to the subjugation of wild nature. Its books and maps were weapons of conquest rather than objects of contemplation. The study of geography he proclaimed in 1885 ought to lead us to something higher than collecting maps and books of travel and afterwards shelving them as of no further use.

Why traveler? You're not going to conquer. Wow. He's a bad tourist. Yeah. So for most of the last hundred years in change, a consensus has evolved that Stanley was a real big piece of shit. And this has been mostly universally, even among his biographers,

until Tim Geel came around and published Stanley, Africa's greatest explorer. And saved him. And saved him from the evils of history. Because as we know, history is written by the victims. Yeah. And I will give Geel this. This is probably the most impressively researched justification for mass murder that I've ever read.

I've never read anyone's put as much work into defending a guy who killed an enslaved people for his own benefit. Like he really, he fucking puts in the legwork to defend this monster. Yeah. It's almost sort of inspiring. I kind of wish, I kind of hope that when, if there's ever a biography written about me, someone like Geel writes it and they can frame.

Absolutely. Yeah. They can frame moments like, Robert had no choice but to vomit on the sushi of that Ukrainian couple out for a nice night at the restaurant. What were his other options? To vanish, to vomit on the people next to them. The puke was going somewhere and he made the only golly good at the time.

The most heroic choice, I would say. Yeah. Oh, Jesus. You really do. Yeah. Everybody should have a Geel in their life. Yeah. I want to have, I kind of want to hear Geel do Hitler.

I know, I know he wants to deep down. I kind of want to hear his Hitler. Oh man. His Andrew Jackson. I want to, I just. Oh yeah. So curious. He's, he, I don't think he would actually do Hitler,

but he would totally do Jackson. Yeah. Now, Geel, we've given, I think, a well-deserved drubbing in this episode. What he did didn't happen in a vacuum. And I think I need to close this out by quoting from a very important book called The Imperial History Wars, Debating the British Empire. Yeah. And it explains the context that this biography we've been talking shit about came out in.

Quote, by 2012, a new documentary series about Britain's imperial past was being aired on British TV. This one, a BBC production with Newsnight interviewer Jeremy Paxman, who guided his viewers through amazing stories of adventure. It's nothing short of a scandal, Paxman scolded, that this history is not taught in schools. The purpose of the series, he explained, was to refute the conventional view that the British Empire was a thoroughly bad thing. The TV personality, this is where people are going to be bummed. The TV personality and naturalist Sir David Attenborough apparently did not get the memo.

He complained that Paxman was far too negative about the British Empire. Other figures who felt that, yeah, yeah, yeah. Other prominent figures who felt that the public needed to be reeducated about the virtues of the British Empire and the achievements of its heroes were the popular historians Andrew Roberts, Lawrence James, and Max Hastings. The biographer Tim Geel wrote a book about Henry Morton Stanley that declared her to be Africa's greatest explorer and dismissed charges that he had massacred Africans during his expeditions and that he bore any respect. We all know Geel, yeah. Stanley became one of the leading proponents of a controversial campaign to erect a statue

honoring Stanley at his place of birth, the Welsh town of Denby. As Geel saw it, the time had come to dispense with post-imperial guilt. For Geel and those who share his views, this call to arms was fueled in part by resentment as what he dismissed as the moral brownie points politicians and others sought to accrue by well-published sized apologies for crimes committed by earlier generations. He was no doubt alluding to Tony Blair's apologies for Britain's role in the African slave trade in the Irish potato famine, Gordon Brown's role in the export of child migrants to Australia and other colonies, and David Cameron's apology for the bloody Sunday massacre in Derry.

They call it London Derry, but yeah. During a visit to India, Cameron also conceded that the British bore some blame for the conflict over cashmere and expressed regret with the Washington Post called a near-apology over the Amritsar massacre of 1919. It maybe has very little to do with Henry Morton Stanley then. Geel is just like trying to defend himself so badly. Yeah, that's all these guys are doing that, right? At the end of the day, they're defending themselves as heirs to the British Empire, which is important to them. When we come from a culture that was built and attained, you know, what would be called greatness, at least in sort of the amoral sense, just in the objective, like the British Empire was great in the same way that like a fucking,

a boxer can be great, even if they're a piece of shit. It's just a term of relative power and influence. People who come from those cultures, which is most people at one point or another, if you dig back long enough, you have to decide how do you deal with that? Do you come up with justifications for all your ancestors did horrible things? Or do you, like I think it's often wrongly written as like the options are either take pride in it or feel ashamed, and it's shitty to want people to feel ashamed for things they didn't do. And it's not that at all. I don't feel any shame, personal shame for like slavery.

It's just like, yeah, people, it's a horrible thing that people in the past did. I didn't do it, but I'm not going to pretend it wasn't a nightmarish evil that persists to this day and a lot of its harms on society, and that still has not been made close to right. It's this attitude that you have two options, which is like feel horrible as a human being for this, or pretend it was fine, and you don't have the option, yeah. You don't have to be one of those in one of those camps. You're absolutely right. You can acknowledge that this was something horrible that existed in history and that you still benefit from today,

and you think about ways in which you can try and write it within your own life, but you weren't the one who was actually killing people. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I don't know enough of my genealogy to know if the scramble for Africa had any of my relatives in it, but there's a decent chance. Yeah, the scramble for Africa, all of colonialism in Africa was a history of unspeakable historic grade war crimes, and that's bullshit, and there's a lot that we should be doing to write it,

including reparations to nations in Africa. There's a whole lot that needs to be done, and it's a very complicated discussion, and you don't have to beat yourself up about it because you didn't do anything about it to not be like, but that was fucked up, and we should do something about that, right? Yeah. Yeah, we should do something here, huh? I think what we should probably do is... I mean, we've done so much damage to that entire continent that we send a bunch of...

Unbelievable, yeah. Yeah, maybe if we were just to send a bunch of civilized people like us there to... Oh, that's a great option. We would draw basically what I would call a white line through the continent. Yeah, we can establish these little communities in there that can let us travel through it, and we can facilitate order in... Oh, Sorin, we invented colonialism again. Oh, dammit.

Oh, Jesus. Oh, fuck. I see how easy it is to fall into that trap of inventing colonialism. Really? Ooh, boy. Now that we've had this experience, I think I'm going to write an 1800-page book about how King Leopold had no other option to do what he did. We need rubber.

Everyone needs rubber. Have you seen Galash's? They're amazing. What was he to do? His hands were tied. I mean, not literally like his slaves, but figuratively. I mean, he actually did still have hands, which is much... Oh, it's a nightmare.

Oh, Sorin, how does this compare to what you'd expected for the tale of Henry Morton Stanley? He did a lot more terrible things than I anticipated. He sure did. He was a busy man. But I do. I'm very charmed by his lying. It's incredible. I'm charmed by how invested he was in making himself seem like a badass to the point where

he lost track of his lies and then just started inventing... Anytime that he needed a number, it was just a bigger number, regardless of whether it was a good or bad thing. This is a key story for all grifters. You have to be very... Whatever thing it is you do that makes you great, you have to be perfectly consistent about it. Stanley's whole thing is he lied about stuff to make a more exciting story so that he would be famous, and he never stopped.

He was unbearably consistent in his lying, and it's why he was great. It's like how L. Ron Hubbard was incredibly consistent in his lying, and so he was able to die worth $700 million being worshiped as a god. It's like how Donald Trump has done nothing but lie his entire life and is the president of the United States. They're all the same guy at a certain level. Are we allowed to say that? Yes, absolutely.

They're all fundamentally at their heart of hearts, the same individual. They share a soul, and that soul sucks so hard. Well, this has been a lot of fun. Good. Good, Zorn. You want to plug anything? No. You want to plug this new idea to establish a series of trading posts throughout Africa?

Look, I think I still need to bounce some ideas around before I really lay it on the world, because I'm sensing that they might have a couple of holes. Yeah. Well, I know one thing, which is that I'm going to hire a small child to hold my guns. Oh, obviously. That seems like a thing worth doing. It goes without saying that you bring somebody with you to witness all of your greatness. Yeah.

Good God. Oh, that's the story of Henry Morton Stanley. You can find the story of us on our website, BehindTheBastards.com. You can buy T-shirts on T-Public. You can continue. Do you want me to do it? It's fine. I feel like you like it now, Sophie.

Well, people just keep doing it. I feel like now you're angry when I do that. Well, because you do it not as good. I don't. It's fine. I should just do it. Yeah, Zorn. Do you want to give a shot?

Yeah. I don't know what we're doing, but I'm going to try it. Okay. Just do something. Hey. Well, we got all kinds of merch out there, ladies and gentlemen, go to T-Public and get our shirts. You got Anderson on some of our shirts, and we got BehindTheBastards on others.

We're also got a Patreon that you can donate to. And we've got... Nope. Oh, okay. No Patreon. Take that money that you would have... Halfway there, though. You were doing great.

Much better than Robert, actually. Nailed it. That's all we need to do. So colonize your own... Don't do anything Robert's saying. Living rooms. I don't know. Just stay the fuck indoors or go on a run.

Yeah, tell the truth. Don't lie about how many people you social distance from. Be honest about the number of people. It's about seven billion. That's the episode. Yeah. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. According to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space?

Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.