Behind the Bastards - Part Two: King Leopold II: The First Modern Bastard

Episode Date: June 14, 2018

This is Part Two of, 'King Leopold II: The First Modern Bastard.' Robert is joined again by Andrew Ti (Yo, Is This Racist?) and they continue discuss the evil actions of King Leopold II of Belgium. 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. Hello friends, I'm Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in history. And this is part two of our episode on Leopold II, King of Belgium. In part one, we sort of went over how Leopold conned his way into becoming King of the Congo, how he tricked the locals into signing over their rights to their land, and how he conscripted thousands of them into a slave army. So now we're going to get back into all that and the rest of the terrible, terrible story of the Belgian Congo.

So the first five or so years of the Congo project are great for Leopold. He's in total control, richer than God, and most of Europe still believes he's improving a lot of the Congolese people. But in around 1890, a black journalist named Colonel, and he's not really a Colonel, George Washington Williams saw the actual Congo. So he didn't take the tour, you get led through the nice parts of the Congo, like he went on foot and he got in there, and he saw the fucking nightmare that Leopold had built. And he wrote an article called An Open Letter to King Leopold, and it was the first exposé of Leopold's blood-soaked rubber regime.

Williams' document is remarkable because he's basically the only person up to that point who actually sat down with African people and asked them what was going on in the Congo. He retraced a lot of Stanley's rat along the Congo, and actually talked to some of the people who'd signed treaties giving their land to Leopold. He learned that a great number of chiefs had been tricked into signing things with magic tricks. One of the tricks was that, like, Stanley had bought a bunch of electric batteries in London, and when, quote, when attached to the arm under the coat, communicated with a band of ribbon

which passed over the palm of the white brother's hand. And when he gave the black brother a cordial grasp of the hand, the black brother was greatly surprised to find his white brother was so strong that he nearly knocked him off his feet. When the native inquired about the disparity of strength between himself and his white brother, he told that the white man could pull up trees and perform the most prodigious feats of strength. So he did a hand buzzer? He did a hand buzzer, and, like, if you don't know what electricity is,

he's just some sort of Superman. Yeah, let's sign the peace treaty. Holy shit. Yeah, another trick was to use a magnifying glass to light a cigar and then claim that white people had sun powers, and he'll burn up your villa. Basically, like, I have power over the sun and I'll light a villa on fire. God, what a fucking bluff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Williams writes this open letter. He frames it as, like, presuming Leopold doesn't know how terrible things are. He writes about the taking of hands and, like, all of the death and these people who are being, like, starved to death as porters carrying loads. Is this, like, sort of, like, modest proposal style? Like, of course you know, but it's an indictment? Or do you think it was an honest?

I think there's a little bit of a satirical bit to it. And yeah, so Williams publishes this, but unfortunately he dies not long after writing the letter, and Leopold's able to clamp down on any kind of outrage after for a little while. But seven or eight years later, another guy who's an amateur journalist named Morrell stumbles upon the conspiracy. So he was working as a mid-level employee for a shipping line that had the contract to handle all shipping into the Congo Free State. And so every so often, Morrell would get sent over to Belgium

and he would report on what's going into and out of the port of Antwerp. And so he realizes that the only thing coming out of the Congo into Europe is rubber. Just shitloads of rubber. Impossible quantities of it. Larger quantities than have been reported, in fact. And the only thing that's being sent out to the Congo, rather than trade, are just guns and money. And a lot more guns than you'd need for any kind of philanthropic enterprise.

Oh, man. Looks like the wire. Exactly, exactly. So he never actually goes to the Congo, but he just starts digging. And he starts talking to other people who have worked there. And basically, he starts a newspaper that is focused entirely on exposing King Leopold's crimes to the world and starts publishing it all throughout Europe. He's active all over the world and basically becomes like the Congo equivalent of WikiLeaks.

So all these guys who had worked in Leopold's Congo and felt bad would come to him and be like, I saw this. This is what happened. Here's some documents I managed to smuggle out. Well, it's also like you're like, yeah, this is what WikiLeaks was supposed to be. Like this is what it could be. And this is also why people like that have legitimacy because... And why conspiracies have legitimacy? Because guess what? There have been big, complex conspiracies.

Gigantic conspiracies. So Morrell starts this newspaper and he winds up creating what's probably the first modern human rights organization, the Congo Reform Association, which is dedicated to stopping this fucking nightmare in the Congo. King Leopold responded by inventing the first modern international PR campaign. He bought a shitload of journalists of his own and he had them all write puff pieces about how great the Congo actually was. He would pay for journalists to go on lavish, carefully controlled trips through the Congo.

He'd give them exclusive interviews when they got back and he'd use his network of agents to help them place their articles in newspapers. He got journalists in the New York Times to write quotes like, I have witnessed more atrocities in London streets than I have ever seen in the Congo. He would pay for journalists to give public speeches and he would lobby politicians. Leopold's regime was heavily criticized for its widespread use of something called the jacote, which is a hippohide whip which was used to punish laborers. Prisoners were often lashed to death by it and it's possible that like,

literally several million people were killed with this whip. So Leopold starts catching flak for this and he decides to distract attention from his whipping millions of people to death by sending journalists to British colonies and having them write lurished exposés of abuses in British colonies. So his pet reporters would write stories about like, how the British were using whips on prisoners in South Africa or something terrible they'd done to people in India. Yeah.

And then, yeah, exactly. What about Hillary style? That's exactly it. Jesus. Like I said, he invented the modern art of being shitty. Like, he's doing like, what aboutism on a massive scale. Did he have like an antecedent for like the media, like playing the media or did he just make all this shit up?

I think he invented this playbook. Because other people had obviously, the media has existed for a while, other people have used the media to one degree or another. But he is the first person that I've ever run across who's using it in the same way politicians use it today. In the same way world leaders use it today. Like this is a very modern PR campaign. He uses his Congo earnings to buy the editors of a bunch of newspapers,

including the London Times. So he's spending like thousands of dollars on just, yeah, owning editors. So that number one, they'll kill stories that are negative toward the Congo free state. And so that he can place his positive stories once he gets like positive journalists to go, you know, have a tour of the Congo and then come and write about it. And this is all basically a delaying action. Leopold knows eventually the truth is going to get out. But he's playing for time.

He's got 20 years before rubber stops being as profitable. He doesn't need to do this forever. He just needs to do it for a little while longer. He just wants to suck as much money as he can out of the situation. And eventually the sheer weight of facts did change public opinion against him, but it took like 20 years. At one point Leopold is said to have seen a cartoon of himself and a German newspaper. And in the cartoon, he's cutting the hands off of Africans.

And he reportedly laughed at that and said, cut off hands. That's idiotic. I'd cut off all the rest of them, but not the hands. That's the thing I need in the Congo. So he's a real piece of work. Now in 1895 Leopold had started dating a 16 year old prostitute named Caroline. This is when the Congo is at the height of its rubber production. So he'd been hooked up to her via a pimp named Duro,

who was a former officer in the French army. We know now that Caroline's whole relationship with Leopold was likely a con game, an incredibly successful scheme to snatch his inheritance. But at the time King Leopold, blood-drenched absolute ruler of the Congo, was smitten with this teenage prostitute. Adam Haaschild writes that, quote, to the extent that someone like Leopold was capable of love, this teenage prostitute proved to be the love of his life.

So he's really got it for this girl hard. He names her the bareness of Vaughn. And the unseemliness of their relationship isn't really acknowledged in the 1910 biography. It just calls her one of the King's, quote, favorites. And it dances around the fact that they got together while the Queen was still alive. In general, it refers to the King's constant parade of mistresses as distractions. So, yeah, Caroline went on to write a bit about their life together, and she gives this additional insight into the kind of man Leopold was, quote,

every evening, a steam launch took the King to appear leading to my villa through a subterranean passage. Speaking about this, I can't help remarking on the extraordinary taste of the King for everything, which had a secret and mysterious character. Anyone who could sell him any house so long as it was built on the side of an abandoned quarry or if it had a secret staircase. So, basically, he's gone from being too cheap to, like, rinse his fucking, like, a handkerchief. He's like a cartoon villain. Yeah, to, like, a cartoon villain with, like, lairs built into mountain sides

and hidden boat, like, grottoes and stuff. Jesus. Yeah. But Caroline seems to have his number. So she's both got him on madly in love with her, and she also, like, she takes advantage of his hypochondriism or whatever you call that. Like, whenever she wanted him to leave her alone, she'd pretend to have a cough. Right.

And then he'd hide for days because he was scared of her. So she's my favorite person in this story. Yeah. She's got this guy locked down. So the King has sort of the 1900s come around as in his late 60s, and he takes to visiting his teenage mistress in a large tricycle. Because again, he's getting more and more weird. Just everyone would get a moment of whimsy for the genocidal murderer.

Yeah. He's riding a big tricycle to hang out with his teenage girlfriend. Oh. By the way, just as bad everyone who, every white guy riding a tricycle with that big old mustache. You are all as bad as King Leopold. That's the same shit. Yeah.

So he's riding a big tricycle. He drinks nothing but hot water, and he starts referring to himself in the third person at this point in time. So yeah, he's a weirdo. Yeah. He's not entirely past his old ways at this point. There's like a story of the time his mistress bought a new hat for him, and gives it to him, and he like flies into a rage.

And he only calms down when she explains him that she got it for a bargain, that it was like a deal that she bought at a quarter of its value. So like he's still, he's just a weirdo. Yeah. He's a weird guy. He's like a weird old rich letcher who's just like, knows what's going on in the Congo, but doesn't like. I mean, look, here's the other part.

The other way to look at that, I suppose, is maybe not in such a direct degree, but as Americans, we all have similar types of blood in our hands that we are electing to not think about. Yeah, but we're not. I guess. We're not driving it in the same way, but. We absolutely, like we all have these phones that we know are made by people who like hate the work that they're doing, and they're like include

minerals that are mined from like conflict-ridden nations and often use slave labor at one. We know that like the fabric in our clothes is often, there's slave labor at some point in the production line. Leopold knows that because he's signing the order. Yeah. He's saying, no, cut off more hands. Yeah.

Cut off more hands. And he's just, it's just amazing to me that he's able to do that all day, every day, and then write a tricycle to his teenage girlfriend's house. Yeah. But that's. It's amazing. I ain't here what you're saying, but to me, I'm like, it's a little bit just degrees.

I mean, look, we're all able to. It is degrees. We're all able to compartmentalize the misery that's necessary for our comfort. Oh, yeah, yeah. But. Yeah, fuck this guy. Yeah, fuck this guy.

One of the things that was interesting to me reading that pro-Leopold biography is that, well, it does talk about. So those were written in 1910? Yeah, 1910, the year after he died. Jesus. Boiler. The biography of him. It's very positive.

It talks about how there's atrocities, but it always kind of doesn't talk about the detail. It just said, yeah, he definitely committed atrocities, but look at this or look at how smart he was. Look at how. And, and everyone did is like. Everyone did. And we'll get to that in a little bit.

What is interesting to me is that this biography does condemn his mistress for capitalizing on the Congo. Sure. He also notes that she was called the queen of the Congo by the people of Belgium for she was to benefit largely by the atrocities committed in the free state where sweating and bleeding natives labored so as to accumulate millions for the royal favorite. So like, again, he doesn't really attack Leopold ever. Yeah.

Like, yeah, he did some bad stuff. Yeah. But this biographer goes off on her mistress for like taking money from him. That's blood money. Which like, it is blood money, but like, she's the least objectionable person in this situation. So yeah. Yeah. She is a little Melania-esque, I suppose.

She is. I mean, she maybe knew more what she was getting into at the top. Yeah. She probably knew less about the Congo. Oh, maybe. Yeah. Because like, I doubt. Just a rich guy.

Yeah. She just wanted to marry a rich guy. Like, I doubt he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who talked to his mistress about the hands or the whips that they were murdering people with. Right. And it's at the time, especially, probably easy to ignore. Yeah. To forget about the stuff.

Yeah. You don't share a lot of that stuff with you. Yeah. Especially not your teenage child bride. No, no. And as the teenage child bride to just be like, I don't read those books. Yeah. I don't read that article.

Yeah. Yeah. So in the early 1900s, more and more stories of abuse in the Congo hit the world press. People actually started to take notice and care. They read about things like an entire town's worth of boys being giving 50 lashes each, which is a fatal sentence for laughing in the presence of a white man. In 1904, one of the rubber companies in the Congo put one of its own men on trial, mostly to show that they were trying to do something about all of the horrible crimes.

The guy, Charles Codron, was accused of murdering at least 122 Africans. The case wound up revealing a bunch of fucked up details about like how all the hostage taking and the hand taking and stuff actually worked. But Codron was released due to quote, extenuating circumstances. The court said that he'd had to contend with quote, great difficulties under which Codron found himself accomplishing his mission in the midst of a population absolutely resistant to any idea of work, in which respects no other law than force and knows no other means of persuasion than terror.

So yeah, they were asking for it to fence. They were asking for it to fence. Still works. It works. That also still works today kind of. It does. But it was stopping. This is at the point where it was working less and less in the Congo.

And in the early 1900s, Leopold starts dealing with more and more resistance to his ideas. Both in the Congo and at home. So this is also kind of the point at which socialism is starting to rise and socialists obviously aren't big fans of Kings. Leopold declared himself a mortal enemy of socialism. He fought against the universal right to vote for all Belgians. Still on the playbook. Yeah.

Both of those things. Yeah. In 1902, the Belgian Labour Party called a general strike and Leopold called for it to be brutally stopped. The strikers were fired upon by city guards and eight people were killed. The massacre was a calculated message to the socialists, don't fuck with the money train. Leopold was willing to kill a hell of a lot more than eight people to keep the money coming in.

Haaschild's book relates one six-week campaign in the Congo that killed quote, over 900 natives, men, women and children, in order to add 20 tons of rubber a month to one region's productivity. So that gives you an idea of the kind of calculus he's making. Yeah, yeah. That's how, I mean, right, it's just lives for rubber. Yeah. But rubber has a commodity price. Yeah.

I have to point out that none of the revelations of brutality did much to hurt Leopold's popularity at home in Belgium. He was growing less popular and even hated in a lot of Europe. But even today, there are Belgian museums that proudly talk about his anti-slavery campaigns that ignore the whole genocide thing. The crimes against humanity didn't hurt Leopold's legacy. The only thing Belgium couldn't forgive him for was being a shitty dad and having a mistress. In 1904, Leopold's daughter, Stephanie, sued her father the king for keeping her chunk

of her mother's inheritance. Leopold fought in court for the right to deny his children their inheritance and in fact denied them any wealth or property even after his death. Around this time, a Belgian cabinet minister noted that, quote, the king has but two dreams to die a billionaire and to disinherit his daughters. I mean. What father doesn't want that. Yeah.

In a lot of ways, kind of cool. In a lot of ways, kind of cool. Wow. So, in 1906, King Leopold finally marries the Baroness. They have two sons. His second son was born with a malformed arm that just sort of ended in a stump with no hand. Obviously, some people suggested this might be a judgment from God for all the millions

of hands that Leopold ordered severed, which is almost more fucked up if you think about the morality behind, like, okay, this guy cut off millions of people's hands. Let's fuck off his innocent baby's hand. That's not how you do that, if you've got this. First of all, that is definitely how God do that. God is. He's a little punchy on the messages. Yeah.

God ain't great with making sure these people get their just desserts. Yeah. Yeah. Because, right, because it's so funny, it's like all these, like, just so kind of stories where God is just a little, like, tricky metaphor man, like, oh, you didn't expect this, did you? Didn't think God would do that. Yeah.

Oh, just, God, get it right, man. Yeah. Hey, speaking of hands, why don't you use both of them to order the products that we are about to advertise? Here they go. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S.

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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.

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Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So the general unseemliness of the King's Young Bride and the disinheritance of his daughters meant the public sort of deserted Leopold once the human rights campaign against his atrocities really took off. In 1908, King Leopold was forced to bequeath his control of the Congo to the Belgian government. In exchange, they paid for the colony's 110 million francs worth of debt, most of which

had been accrued because Leopold used the free state as a bank to buy gifts for his mistresses. Before he hands over control of the colony, he'd ruled with an iron fist for more than 20 years. Leopold has all of the Congo state records burned. I will give them my Congo, he said, but they have no right to know what I did there. Such a piece of shit. So I think that I say all the time or think about it's like, yes, of course, there have

been massive conspiracies in history and I'm sure today, but oftentimes there isn't the basic human competency to pull off some of the more far-fetched, you know, like a pizza-gate style thing. You're like, how could everyone cover this up? And then it's like just hearing a story of 19th century to 20th century, like a tension to detail. Well, he's he's a genius, like he really is like a genius in the sense that like, if you saw a character execute a plan like this in a movie, you'd be like, that's a little

far-fetched that he'd get away with it, but he did. And he's he is an evil genius. Yeah. And I guess, you know what? And it's, I guess it was from a time when little people were less empowered to speak up. Yes. Because that's the real thing.

It's like, it would be hard to pull off a pizza-gate because it's not like the top conspirators would go to jail, but it's like, there's going to be a janitor who's like, what the fuck is this? What the fuck's going on? There's kids in this basement. And that's like less likely to happen. That was more controllable back in the day, clearly. Yeah.

And even when that it started coming out, there's a lot less of a media landscape. You only get the news from your newspapers. You read every newspaper. Most people don't read much of one newspaper. Yeah. So if you're a guy like Leopold, you've got the money to make the press do what you want to a big extent. And if I if I understand my history correctly, which I probably don't, that was a time when

the public had more of an expectation that media was biased. It was just that, right? Well, yeah, this is like a lot of this is right around the time when America gets involved in a war with Spain that's essentially pushed by two different newspaper magnets wanting to sell more papers. So like, yeah, the press, I mean, he doesn't have a great reputation now, but it still didn't have a great reputation then. So yeah, it's like a perfect storm, but it also is, it was a legitimately brilliant scheme.

And he did his best to cover his tracks. And he died in December of 1909 at the age of 84. Super rich. Yeah. Did he make that billion? Well, we'll get to that in a minute. What? The biography published the next year said that, quote, were it not for his private life,

his domestic affairs and his avarice, he would have retained his popularity to the very last. Belgium as a nation with the exception of the socialists would have forgiven him the Congo atrocities. Indeed, she has forgiven him for, after all, she is destined to benefit by them. And she will not grudge her king, the royal commission he pocketed on the enterprise. And this is where, again, I want to point out that in some total, there's no 100% agreed upon death toll for Leopold's regime in the Congo. But the likely numbers are between 10 and 13 million, possibly as high as 15 million

people. And the Congo was definitely the bloodiest of any of the colonies in Africa by a substantial margin, but they all killed a lot of people. And a lot of them killed a lot of people making rubber. And one of the things that was found out after Leopold's death is that in the bloody French and German colonies that were producing rubber, Leopold owned a majority of several of the large rubber-making corporations and those colonies, too. Right.

So he was also the first pan multinational, right. The corporations can be the conduits for the scumbags, because the corporations are the scumbags, of course. But Jesus Christ. Yeah. So he's a real monster. The late king achieved his ambition of disinheriting his daughters. He left them only 15 million francs, the exact amount he'd inherited from his father.

His entire fortune went to Baron Estevan, the prostitute courtesan, that he fell in love with and married. After his death, she immediately married Duro, her pimp, and spent the rest of her life living lavishly off the gold made by the blood of Congolese labor, which she doesn't come out as good as that. I don't know. I kind of like that his inheritance got stolen by a scheming prostitute and her pimp friend. That's better than not.

I guess if she'd murdered him, it would be a little bit better. That would have been the best if she'd strangled him with his own beard, Jabalite. Yeah. Or poisoned him. Maybe she did poison him. Maybe she did poison him. I can't. I hope so.

What a grim-ass tale, fuck. His biography, the 1910 biography, summed up Leopold's life this way. Leopold II, New Belgium, New Europe, and New Humanity. Like a strong man, he had a deep contempt for everything and everybody. He loved his country and his own interests, for all love is, after all, selfish. The Victorian age is a bleak-ass period. There's also, speaking of, although it's not exactly the same players, but it's the same types of institutions, everyone of y'all who, whenever this comes out, y'all have

just enjoyed the royal wedding. That shit is built off the back of shit like this. Exactly like this. Well, less artful than this. A lot cooler. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Not even this good.

Because this is, it's up there with the Holocaust in terms of the greatest crimes in human history. But as a scheme, his plan is, it's like almost artwork. It's like watching the Joker and the good Chris Nolan Batman pull out. But also, that one too, where you're like, it has similar moments of like, I feel like some of these lies are just to do the lie. Yeah. It's not even about achieving the aims. You didn't even need to do this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of like, the fuck you do that for? Well. It's crazy. Yeah. One of the more, I mean, there's so many fucked up things about this. Yeah. I really recommend reading King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Haaschild.

It's a great book and it really delves into the human misery caused by this regime. But you're talking 10 to 15 million people killed, millions more left without hands, left maimed, starved, like whose villages were destroyed. The Congo today is still probably the least stable state in Africa or at least one of them. Yeah. The Congo was destroyed. Yeah.

He swaths the pot. It continues to this day, Leopold's profits, roughly a billion dollars in modern currency. That's bonkers. I feel like that's fucking nothing for what he did. Oh. In terms of right, in terms of not a billion dollars in 1909 money, a billion dollars in today's money is what he got for killing 10 to 15 million people and destroying Central Africa.

That's... Jesus. Yeah. It's not even extracting enough wealth. You could do that just by closing up bookshops. Yeah. And I think a lot of that is because he had to spend so much money on an army, on policing the state, on fighting it, because there were a bunch of rebellions, people who fought

back. He had to suppress those rebellions and he had to pay all these journalists and... Yeah. Yeah. There you go, fucking capitalists. It doesn't even be profitable to be a slave of water. To be the worst person in history. So I guess that was the second lesson that everyone turned is like, oh, the real profits

in PR and making people think they want to do this. Now, I want to ask you a question that occurred to me when I finished researching this and I wonder about this. Is Leopold a worse person than Hitler? Because I can't not think about that line in the Big Lebowski, where what's his name, Walters, like say what you will about national socialism, at least it's an ethos. Hitler committed crimes on a similar, if not much greater scale, if you include all of the war dead.

But he had an ideology behind it, as opposed to Leopold, who this was never anything but money. Yeah, yeah. There was no hatred, there was no goal, there was no view of the world. It was purely if I can make money and killing these people is the fastest way to get it. Yeah. I don't care what happens to them because I want money. And it was also separate, I mean, obviously, I guess it's just different things.

They are very different things, although when you look at the Holocaust, and this is something that's often glossed over when people talk about the Holocaust, is how much of it was a money-making endeavor from the German state, because they were literally mining people to death, both in terms of taking their hair, taking the gold fillings out of them, taking their businesses beforehand, taking their property. So I mean, you have really with every great genocide, because if you look at the Rwandan genocide, there was a lot of financial motivation there, people wanting each other's farms and whatnot.

Yeah. I have to imagine those are the things that allow, I mean, like all conflict, too. It's like, especially anything sectarian or religious. The Crusades, you can make an economic case for the Crusades or colonialism at large. All that is sort of possible. I think the thing with Leopold's evil is, as we've discussed already, it's like, though not in the same degree. Anyone listening to this on a podcast thing, and on an iPhone or an Android phone, is complicit

in something along Leopold's vector, whereas fewer of us listening to this podcast are complicit in some type of thing that Hitler's involved in. So I think it behooves us to say Hitler is more evil, because we don't want to be part, you know. Yeah. The banality, I mean, look, not banality, but the, you know, it's in the direction of banality. Well, I think you're onto something that's great there, and I think that's why the idea

of the banality of evil is so important, is because Hitler is, it's so easy to see the evil in Hitler, because he was showy, like he's the most showy villain in all of history. Leopold was a weird old man who had a stupid beard and sat in his office and never shot anybody and wrote a tricycle to his mistress, and was just this weird old dude who was happy to orchestrate one of like the great crimes in human history just for some cash in his pocket. And that's scarier. Yeah, and you can imagine, like he doesn't come up with the hands for bullet scheme.

No, he's just like, we can't let them have bullets. We have to make sure that, like, we're accounting for all the bullets so that they're not saving them up for rebellion. What can we do? Oh, well, we just make sure they prove to us that they're using the bullets for good reason when they fire them. How about we have them bring in a hand? Great.

And that's probably the end of the conversation. I'll just bring proof. And then the first person brings in a hand. 20 million people lose hands. Yeah. Like, then a crime on an unspeakable scale happens, and he's just like sitting at home being like, boy, I wonder why production's down this week. But he can also be like, I'm not the one that came up with the hands thing, oh, it's a shame.

He can even be like, oh, the hand thing's a real shame. Yeah, that's a real shame. One of my new guys, you know these, you know, the Walloons, you know, you put them in charge of something and they mess it up. I hate that we have to do this, but of course we do need that rubber. That's the thing that, you know, and look, that's a version of everyone of us tells ourselves every fucking day. So that's why I think most people would say Hitler is a worse, more evil person because

we don't want to be complicit in our own evil. Hey everybody. This is Robert Evans from The Future. I realized that this podcast was a teeny bit incomplete. There was some more information I wanted to give out, so I gained access to a time machine and went back in time to record it. It was either fix the podcast or stop 9-11. Hopefully I made the right decision.

But I wanted to say a little bit more about the Chacote, which we talked about a little bit in this podcast. It's the hippohide whip that was the primary disciplinary tool in the Congo Free State. The book, King Leopold's Ghost, makes a big deal out of the Chacote, and it's probably true that the Belgians under Leopold whipped more people to death than in the other regime in history. But that book also points out that whipping people to death or nearly to death was basically the bedrock that colonialism was founded upon.

It relates to the story of a guy named Roger Casement, who we didn't get to talk to in this podcast. He's a very interesting dude. He's one of the men who investigated atrocities in the Congo. He also wound up investigating a lot of atrocities in the Amazon at a place called Putamaio, where the Peruvian Amazon rubber company had been caught basically enslaving and murdering people to produce even more rubber. This was for, I think, the British.

It was mostly a British owned company, although it was like a corporation with a lot of different sort of stockholders behind it. The Peruvian Amazon rubber company dealt out punishments with a whip of their own that was actually a tepihide whip, but it was similar to the Chacote in its effect. Only 30,000 indigenous people in the Amazon died mining rubber for that company. Whips, it turns out, were basically the glue that made colonialism possible. I found one book on slavery in the British West Indies, published in 1824, that admits that whips were, quote, the main spring of the agricultural system in that region of

the empire. Whips were also critical to the French colonies as far back as the 1700s. When a visitor to the French Antilles noticed that the use of whips was, quote, always excessive and barbarous with the potential of maiming the victim by assaulting his private parts or even killing him, if not instantly, as has already been the case in due course, as is often the case. So whipping and slavery go hand in hand, obviously, I don't think most people are surprised by that.

But I think a lot of people would be surprised to know that Europeans didn't stop whipping subject people once slavery was over. The Congo and the Amazon are proof of that, but the atomic bomb is even more proof. After Leopold died, the Belgians continued to control the Congo region, and they moved on from rubber farming to mining. In the first six months of 1920, a single gold mine is recorded as issuing over 26,000 lashes to his workers, more than eight lashes for every single African, quote, employed there.

I say, you know, employed in quotation marks because the Belgians kept right on using forced labor, as did the British in Kenya up and into the modern era. By World War II, Belgium required 120 days per year of labor for each adult male inhabitant of the Congo region, and it turns out that 80% of the uranium mine to make the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from Congolese mines that used forced labor. Which means we can thank the Chakote for the first atom bombs. The British are also famous for flogging their colonial subjects well into the middle of the 20th century.

By the 1920s, Kenya was the colony where the British used the most corporal punishment, or as they called it, rough justice. Flogging was seen to be necessary in order to deal with the, quote, raw native Africans, who were perhaps so raw because the British regularly whipped them bloody. There were attempts in the 1930s to alter British penal laws in the colony to be less brutal, but they didn't exactly stop the problem of white colonists treating black natives like shit. Ritality in the Kenyan colony eventually led to the Mao Mao uprising, which started

in 1952 when a bunch of rebels calling themselves the Mao Mao killed 32 white people. This made England go batshit crazy. The English forces rounded up 150,000 Kenyans and threw them into concentration camps where they were starved and beaten regularly. One survivor recalled, �We were forced to do work carrying bricks to build a school, we were beaten if we moved too slowly, it was very hard work, they would just flog everyone at times, four or five guards with whips would come into the cell.�

So at least 12,000 people were killed during the Mao Mao uprising, although it's hard to say how many of them died from being whipped. The brutalizing effect of whipping people certainly had an impact on the British men who did it. A Kenyan judge who investigated whipping, torture, and murder at one British interrogation center compared it to a Nazi labor camp, and said, quote, �From the brutalizing of flogging, it is only a step to taking a life without qualm.� So I just thought this is a good information to know.

People talk about colonialism a lot, and it gets a lot of well-deserved, harsh criticism these days, but I think that the people who rightly view it as a horrible historical crime also tend to kind of push it further back in history and sort of assume that most of the worst stuff was done in the 17 and 1800s. The reality is that colonialism was still exporting wealth from African nations into Europe well into the 20th century, and that the European nations were using brutal and in a lot of ways medieval justice measures in order to keep the colonies compliant. So there's your happy little reminder that not only was colonialism a nightmare, but

it is a nightmare that happened recently enough that a lot of people are still alive to remember it today. So just keep that in mind, I guess, and now I'm going to use my magical time powers to go back to when Andrew and I were sitting in the room. We also don't want to acknowledge, like, when you go to Belgium, which I love Belgium, I've been there a couple of times, beautiful country, best beer I've ever had in the world, gorgeous giant buildings, many in the cities and stuff, like really old beautiful museums and stuff, many of which are built on Congo money.

And so you don't, and like we're shitting on Belgium here, but that's like all of Europe, you go to London to see, and they're American North, like that's everything was built on the backs of that shit, so, and, you know, there were good people at all times being like, ah, it sucks. This is really messed up. But yeah, but that's the same every, you pick up an iPhone and you're like, ah, it sucks that someone had to suffer for this. I do need it though.

Well, and there are, and this is again the thing that Leopold's ghost is a good job of going into, there are the heroes in this story. There's the guy like Colonel Washington, he goes there and right, there's guys like Morel who were, who like, who don't even see it firsthand, but put it together, like, this can't stand. I have to do something. And I hope that like, like that's the, we got to focus on Leopold in this, both because his story is the blueprint of every terrible person who came after him.

He really is the first modern monster world, like head of state, the first one to use PR in a really modern way. But it's important, it's just as important to think about the guys like Morel who are probably more relevant to our own lives because they pointed out like, well, you can do something. Yeah. And you don't have to just say, ah, this, it's a shame. Yeah, exactly. And it might take 15 years, but you can, yeah, like these guys will still win to some

extent, but you can lower the margins by which they win. You can cut into their profits. Well, right. It's a, it's just a battle. All you can do is make it less profitable. Yep. Wow. Well.

The capitalist revolution. Great. That is our podcast for the week. Uh, Andrew, you want to plug your plugables? Oh yeah. Well, just, just, uh, please listen to yo, is this racist? Uh, I used to think it was the most depressing podcast on the internet, but not anymore. And I'm Robert Evans, you can find me on Twitter at atirideok.

You can find this podcast on the internet at behindthebastards.com. You can find us on social media at at Bastards pod. Uh, I've got a book you can find on Amazon, a brief history of vice. Um, so yeah, check my stuff out, check us out. We will be back every single Tuesday from now until the heat death of the universe with a new bastard. So check us out next year. That is next year though, right?

Yes. Can't wait. Yep. Okay. There we go. 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 were like a lot of guns, but our 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 iHeart 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, 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. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.