Behind the Bastards - The Congo After Leopold

Episode Date: August 21, 2018

What happened to the Congo after King Leopold? Unfortunately, Belgium the Nation was not much better to the Congolese people than their King had been. In Episode 18, Robert is joined by comedian Teresa Lee to discuss the aftermath of King Leopold.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, friends, and welcome again to Behind the Bastards. I'm Robert Evans, and this is a podcast where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. Now, with me today is a guest who I'll be reading a story to. My guest is coming in cold to this tale and does not know what I'll be talking about today, except for in a very broad term, and my guest's name is Robert Evans. My guest is coming in cold to this tale and does not know what I'll be talking about today, except for in a very broad term, and my guest today is Ms. Teresa Lee.

Hello. How are you doing, Teresa? I'm doing okay. Well, I'm really cold because I had to ask before what it was about, and then even that changed, so I don't really know. Well, you listened to the two part we did on Leopold. I did, yeah, but I visualized it, so it was like I was watching it at the same time. Well, this is another episode set in the Congo, and it's about what happened after Leopold. And when I started working in this, I wanted to do an episode about the dictator who took over the Congo after the Belgians left,

a guy named Boutou Cisse-Sickel. But as I started researching it, there was just way too much bullshit that Europeans in America got up to in the Congo between Leopold dying and Boutou taking over. And so that's what we're going to talk about today, is how the West continued to fuck the Congo even after, like, you'd think it had been fucked enough, like that you couldn't really screw over a group of people more than Leopold had, but then everything I've written about happens. Yeah, it's like getting out of an abusive relationship. You're probably going to get into another one is what the studies show.

Yeah, and it's actually, it's kind of like getting out of an abusive relationship and getting hit by a bus, and then the doctor who helps put you back together, you get into an abusive relationship. It's also a bus. Oh, okay. It's also a bus. That's a solid sitcom. My doctor's a bus. My doctor husband, the bus.

Well, that's the season two finale, maybe, is the wedding. My husband bus. Busbend. My busbend. He's a busbend. Someone's going to Photoshop a poster for that, and it's going to be great. Yes, please, too. Well, first off, let's let the audience hear a little bit about you.

You and I worked together for years, and you are a writer, comedian, actress. Yeah, we did. Well, we are most most famously worked together on a video about ancient drugs based on or to promote the book you wrote. And recently it keeps resurfacing, and I know when it resurfaces because I'll get messages. And last week I got a few that were like, so how was doing so much? And I was like, oh, that video must have popped up again. Yeah, we took legal mushrooms. Legal.

Amonita mascara, and unexpectedly tripped very hard. Yeah. To the point where all of us who were together had to get a hotel room to the night to just kind of sit it out and wait until we were not actively tripping to go back to our homes. Yeah, it was real crazy. The biggest part is that video is just like the beginning of the trip. It got so much more intense after we wrapped. Yeah, it was not intended to be that intense. But yeah, if you want to, we'll post a link in this episode, I guess, to us doing tremendous amounts of mushrooms.

It's great fun. Now, let's get into an episode that I have tentatively titled, The Congo After Leopold. So if you're listening to this podcast for the first time, you may want to go back and download the two episodes we did on King Leopold of Belgium. But I'm going to give a little sort of run through of what happened with that guy here just in case you're joining us for the first time, or maybe you forgot since then, because there have been a lot of bastards in between him and now. So King Leopold was a Belgian king, obviously, who had a chip on his shoulder because Belgian kings did not have much power in the late 1800s. He concocted an incredibly complex scheme in order to take over a huge chunk of Central Africa. He named it the Congo Free State. On the surface, the Free State had a philanthropic mission to civilize the tribe's people and fight Arab slavers.

In reality, it was all one gigantic rubber mining operation. Leopold's men enslaved armies of child soldiers, three quarters of whom died without being trained. And he enforced order through brutal, sometimes fatal, whippings and the severing of millions of hands between 10 and 15 million people died during Leopold's reign in the Congo. So that's the story. Sounds like a good guy. Sweet dude, sweet beard. By the early 1900s, word had gotten out of what was happening in the Congo. And by 1908, the international community forced Leopold to cede control of his Congo to the Belgian nation.

And that's sort of where the last podcast ends, you know, Leopold dies and I thought long after that. Now, today we're going to talk about what happened in the Congo in the intermediate period. Like, so Belgium is in charge of the Congo. But, uh, yeah, so you would expect things to get a lot better now that this absolute monster is out of power. But it turned out that Belgium, the nation, was not much better than King Leopold had been for the Congolese people. The Chacote, which is that brutal hippohide whip that Leopold's men used to keep order, wasn't banned until... Hippohide? Yeah, it was hippohide.

From hippo. How do you even get a hit? Like, aren't they very dangerous? Super dangerous. They'll kill the hell out of you. You get to shoot them with a real big gun. Wow. Yeah. Oh, I guess they had guns back then. They had tons of guns for shooting hippos. For shooting. So they could make more whips. I was thinking this was so long ago. I'm like, hmm, they were using spears.

No, I mean, yeah, they did use spears to kill hippos, but not as efficiently. But, uh, there was just a weird little side thing. Adolf Hitler carried a dog whip his entire life. Oh, a whip to whip dogs or made out of dogs? It was two whip dogs. It was called a dog whip because you were supposed to use it to whip dogs, and he would whip dogs with it when he wanted to impress girls. But he also mainly used it for fighting. Dude, this is confusing because the hippohide whip is named hippohide whip because it's made of hippohide and so if you, like, follow the logic of that, the dog whip should be made out of dogs.

Like, there's no consistency in the naming of whips right now. But you wouldn't want to hit a, would you, I don't think a whip would do much to a hippo. No, but I'm just saying these naming conventions, somebody needs to organize the naming here. What if they called it a whippo? A whippo. There we go. All right. We should go back in time. What's Indiana Jones' whip made out of? Probably leather. You like...

That's probably true. So it's a cow whip. No, it's a whip for...it's a Nazi whip. It's a Nazi whip. Yeah, that's a fucking Nazi whip right there. Yeah, so Belgium continued to use forced labor. Pretty much the entire time they were in charge of the Congo, they claimed it was a labor tax, so they would basically force people to work for, like, half the year or more to mine minerals and extract rubber from the Congo. All of the uranium used to make the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was mined in the Congo

by people who were regularly whipped bloody to guarantee their compliance. So this goes on the early 1900s through the 40s, right? Now, in a tiny bit of fairness to the Belgians, they didn't do nothing in the Congo. They built one of the biggest hospitals in Africa and established a really good infrastructure, so, like, good power system, good roads, better than most African colonies got. So if you're just looking at what the Belgians had sort of installed, the buildings they'd put together, the municipal-like stuff, Congo seemed like it was in a good position, like, for when it was finally freed.

But it's all stuff for Western civilization, right? It's like they needed to make it so that Western people could see a familiar life there. Yes, zero of the things they built in the Congo were meant for Africans, and in fact, the society was super segregated. Like, they were building nice houses for Belgians, and then the Africans could live in huts. They were building nice houses for white people, and they were building schools for white kids. And they weren't really building it. The Africans were probably building it. And they were being forced to build it through labor taxes, yeah.

Yeah, so it's amazing how shitty they continue to be to the Congo even after this monster leaves, and because it's yet another one of the stories where the world gets angry, like, stories come out about how badly appalled it is, and the world gets furious, and the demand, he not be in charge anymore, and then as soon as he's gone, they're like, well, guess the problem's over, we can stop caring about the Congo. They just need to place blame somewhere. Yeah, and once that guy gets out, the story's done, and nobody pays anymore attention. Yeah.

Remarkable. So, the capital of the Belgian Congo was Leopoldville, and it was divided into African and Western areas, like I said. It's called Leopoldville? Yeah, it's Kinshasha today, but it was called Leopoldville. Wow. Yeah, classy, right? Not creative at all.

No, name it after the guy who did the worst things of anyone in the country. Black people were not allowed in the European parts of town after dark, and would not be served in whites-only hotels and restaurants. Belgians considered most Congolese people to be macaques, which literally means monkeys. The good ones were called evolue, which means basically the evolved. Evolved. Yeah.

Wow, you got that French real quick. Oh, yeah, yeah, speak French. Oh! Is it differently pronounced? Did I fuck it up? No, no, that's right. Evolue? Okay, yeah, so yeah, the evolved. So these people would be allowed to, the evolved would be allowed to say,

buy wine if they let a white inspector come to their home first and make sure their toilet was clean. What? Specifically their toilet. If you're evolved, you can pay me money. How awful. No wine unless your toilet's clean, which college would be different if that's how it worked, is all I'll say.

True. Evolved children were allowed to attend school with white kids, but they had to agree to be regularly checked for fleas. Children are literally not done growing. That's the definition of children. Yeah. Yeah, that's how it can be evolved. Even white children are not evolved.

Yeah. It's not internally consistent, the logic of racist colonialists. Yes, I see. No, it's a good, yeah, it's frustrating. The language they use is always really frustrating, because it's also so, it's just the dick thing to call people. Sure, yeah. Dick thing to call yourself too, which, yeah,

that's more like a Nazi end of things. Everybody, that's one of the big stories of the 20th century. It's like the first half of the 20th century is just everybody getting Charles Darwin's theory of evolution wrong, and using it like, well, I hate people who aren't white, so that means I'm just going to take this book that's popular right now and use it to justify my hatred of people. Yeah, they're like, I just trust that I'm,

like they assume that they're evolved or whatever, and then they're like, so then I must be right all the time, because that's how I'm here. Yeah, scientists is like animals that are more fit, survive better, and so a guy is like, oh, I've got a big house, that means I'm more evolved. Oh no, I stole all my stuff from other people. Yeah, people.

The deductions we come to, it's remarkable. So yeah, the few African children who were allowed to attend schools in the Congo had to endure lessons on why King Leopold, the guy who had killed, by some counts half the country, was a great hero. Jacques Delpecin, a historian interviewed for the documentary version of King Leopold's Ghost, grew up in the Congo during this time, he's an African,

and he said this, quote, what we learned in the textbooks was that Leopold was the greatest benefactor the Congo ever had, because he sacrificed his fortune for the Congolese. Is he like a Thanos character, because he killed half the country, and then some people celebrate him, but he's actually evil? Yeah, kind of, except for like, wasn't Thanos' goal to like... He wanted to eliminate half the population to create more resources.

Yeah. But he was killing people to do that. Leopold wanted to build sweet houses, and was willing to kill half the population for that. Also, he wanted a tricycle. He bought a really cool tricycle. So that's different than Thanos. Sure.

Well, there's going to be more Marvel movies. The tricycle might show up. The tricycle might show up. He might write a tricycle to his teenage prostitute bride's house. Yeah. God, if that's Infinity War II, I will be in the front row. Aw, this is an testing super-wild for Disney.

Are you, do we need the teenage prostitute bride? Actually, I feel like the teenage prostitute bride is very Disney, because most of those princesses are like 14 years old. Oh boy. Yep. There's always a king in those stories. There is, yeah. Okay.

Anyways. So, most kids in the Congo were not even lucky enough to benefit from a shitty education. Educating black Africans was not considered a priority by the Belgians, because Congolese independence was assumed to be decades away. So they were just going to be working in mines anyway. Why teach them how to read? When the Belgians were suddenly forced to hand over control of the Congo to the Congolese in 1960, only 17 Congolese people actually had university degrees.

Now, a major source for this episode was a book called In the Footsteps of Colonel Kurtz by Michela Wong, a journalist who lived and worked in the Congo in the early 1990s. As part of her research for the book, she talks to a Belgian professor named Stingers. She was asking this guy if he thought that Leopold's legacy of exploitation had had any impact on the continued disastrous mismanagement of the Congo's resources under African rule since, in the decades since independence.

And Professor Stinger claimed that since Congolese people don't have any memories of that time, because there's not a lot of passed down recollections of what happened during the Leopold years, Leopold couldn't be at fault for the modern state of the Congo, because people didn't even remember him, which ignores the fact that he... Sounds very much like just a frat boy who, like, it's like, oh, she didn't remember it. She didn't remember it. What's the crime? Because I roofied her, so I can't be at fault, because she has no memory. That is exactly what's going on. This is, like, the national version of that.

Yeah, this is gaslighting. They don't remember what happened, so it's fine. Yeah. Yeah, it's ignoring the fact that this guy killed between a third and more than half of all of the human beings in the Congo, which probably would not leave a lot of strong memories. Like, it's like, if you've ever met a Jewish person who's whole family, but one person died in the Holocaust, they don't have a lot of stories of that time, but it has an impact, like, surviving that sort of trauma does something to you. Right, the people with the worst memories are gone because they're dead.

Yeah, and there's just an absence in their place, and that is a kind of trauma in and of itself, and that's the kind of trauma that the Congo was going for. So in her book, Michelle Wong sums up what she sees as Leopold's impact on modern Congolese people. Quote, So that second great dictator would be Mobotu Sisei Siku, who we will talk about on a future episode about the Congo. But before we talk about that guy and what this episode is about, is about the first hopeful attempts at reform and happiness for the Congo and the bastards who ruined it all. Because there was a chance in 1960 that things were going to go okay for the Congo,

that it was going to become a prosperous, democratic nation. And yeah, this is an episode about how that was all shattered. Yeah! You look super excited. Can't wait, but just really can't wait for the good mood this is going to put me in. Yeah. Well, it all starts with a guy named Elias. Elias Okitesombo, who would grow into a man named Patrice Emery Lemumba. Wait, he changes his name when he becomes a man? Yeah, he changes his name.

Oh, it was a cultural thing. I don't know if it was a cultural thing, but he did it. I became a man, and now my name is different. And I think there was a little bit of like, Patrice Lemumba is kind of a more Europeanized name than Elias Okitesombo, and so he was like, might have been a little bit of that. He was born on July 2nd, 1925 in a small village in a part of the Congo called the Kasai Oriental. Patrice is something of a hero to very large numbers of people, particularly Africans. Now, Patrice is a big hero to very large numbers of people, particularly in Africa,

and we are going to go into some detail on him because he's an interesting dude, but not as much as we'd go into for someone like Saddam Hussein, because alas, this podcast is behind the bastards and not behind the chill dudes who got fucked over by politics. Now, Patrice received a minimal education from a missionary school, so one of those schools where he's learning about how greatly appalled was, and he wound up as a young adult in Stanleyville, named after a frequent bastard podcast side character, Henry Morton Stanley, the explorer who discovered the Congo, mainly by shooting his way through it and murdering thousands of people.

Yeah, so basically every city in the Congo was named after someone who'd killed huge numbers of Congolese people. Great. Yeah, it's pretty sweet. Is that also what the Stanley Cup's named after? I hope not. I'm not aware of him inventing hockey. That would be a very surprising turn for his life. I think he died poor and filled with syphilis. I hope so. Good. Yeah, so Patrice grew up conscious of all of this, of the fact that he was living in a city named after a murderer that the Congo had been essentially conquered by this terrible king.

He was aware of all this, like the propaganda did not take, and he grew up resentful of the cruel and obvious plunder of his people. He eventually moved to the capital, Leopoldville, and worked as a postal clerk, press correspondent, and then brewery sales director. So that's cool. Sounds like very modern life. Yeah, just you gotta keep a lot of the irons in the fire. Yeah, those were all just ways to pay the rent. Patrice's passion today would be a podcast,

but back then it was anti-colonial activism. He was charismatic and good at giving speeches, so he got pretty popular, and he looked like some guy you went to high school with. Oh, is this him? Yeah. Oh, okay, yeah. Yeah, his picture will be up on our website. He's smirking, like he's kind of like, I want to take a picture.

He does not want to take a picture of this, but he just looks like some guy. Yeah, nice guy. Now Patrice was the head of the Congolese National Movement, the largest political party in the country. It was dedicated to achieving independence within a, quote, reasonable time frame. Their main foe was the center-right alliance of Bacongo, who demanded immediate independence. Both parties applied a lot of pressure to the Belgian administrators of the colony. Things reached a fever pitch in 1959 with protests that descended into rioting

so bloody and violent it convinced Belgium to abandon the Congo ASAP. So before, and like recently as the late 50s, they had been sure that it was decades away. Probably the 80s or 90s is when they'd have to give up the Congo. But this unrest convinces them, we just got to fucking leave now. So it's all really modern, or really... Yeah, very recently. Like they were in the 1940s, they were whipping people to death for not mining uranium fast enough. And that uranium is what made all of the first nuclear weapons that the U.S. used in the Cold War,

or had in the Cold War. It's also in Mission Impossible, the new one coming out. Oh, cool. Well, I'm sure that was a less exploitative use of the Congo, although they probably filmed it in Canada, right? Probably, I don't know. Or the green screen. So Independence Day was set for June 30th, 1960. Now, Belgium's king, Bowdoin I,

flew to the Central African nation to give the colony away to itself. Bowdoin was the great-great-grandson of Leopold. I'm pretty sure I did the math in my head. In pictures, he looks no judgment here, but he looks like the biggest nerd ever. And in fact, everyone in this story kind of looks like a guy you'd have played D&D with in Junior High. If you were going to cast Bowdoin I in a movie, you would want to travel back in time to 1985, steal Crispin Glover off the set of Back to the Future and stick him in a uniform.

There's a picture of Leopold's descendant. Oh, yeah. Oh, he's such a nerd. He's a huge nerd. Which, you know, no judgment, but you have an accurate picture. But you kind of want, yeah, like a contrast from villain-ness. Because Leopold looks like a villain. Right, kind of nerdy, like, I'm sorry. I don't really want to be in charge of the Congo.

Yeah, so we're going to learn about what happened during that independent ceremony, which is a big story, and of course, what happened afterwards. Next, but first, before we get into more of the Congo's history, we're going to sell some products. Ooh, I loved drugs. Well, maybe. No, that's when you say products. It sounds like drugs. It's possible that the ad that comes up will involve a drug.

It is, and actually, that might be happening. But before we do that, Teresa, do you like Doritos? I love Doritos. Let me ask you, is it the crisp crunch of biting into one for the first time, or is it the way that the coating of the Doritos, the way the flavor builds upon itself as you eat more? Yeah, it's like an orchestra. It just builds, and then the beat drops, and you're like, yeah, cheesy, cheesy, cheesy, yeah.

I love it when that cheesy beat drops. That's what really gets me going. And let it get you going, too. Buy some Doritos today. All right, here's the ads that paid us. For most experts, we're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say.

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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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that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We have just been talking about the Congo after Leopold of Belgium gave it up and then died. But yeah, we've been talking about a guy named Patrice Lumumba who's become something of a rabble rouser and an advocate for independence.

And he's gotten his wish, protesting and rioting, got bad enough that the Belgians decided to abandon the colony. And yeah, their new king, the great-great-grand descendant of Leopold, a guy named Bedouin I, flew on down to give the colony away to itself. Now, Bedouin had visited the Congo once before in 1955, and at that point there'd been a big parade for him. They'd all been cheered, they'd all been super, because Leopold never even visited the Congo.

So this guy does get some points in my book for like, if you, country winds up owning a chunk of land that it should never have been in for any reason, at least go there, at least look at what it is to just sit and count the receipts, which is what Leopold did. So Bedouin had gone and he'd had a good reaction. People had liked him, but then he'd come back in 1959 and he'd been pelted with bottles and feces and like,

the temperature had changed. Some of that, a lot of that was due to guys like Patrice Lumumba, who had sort of educated everyone on like, how fucked they had been by Belgium, because a lot of people hadn't really known, because the education wasn't there, everyone who'd gotten, who worse fucked over had died. There weren't a lot of oral traditions,

and so the temperature was high at this point, and there was a lot of anti-colonial scent within. They should have just been like, oh no, this is our tradition to welcome people. No, it's the poop. Yeah, you haven't been here, it's changed. It's just our quaint tradition. Yeah, we yell at you and throw poop at you.

Yeah, I'm just gonna cut you with this razor blade and smear some poop in the wounds. That's not poop wounds or our thing. Yeah, it's religious or whatever. Yeah. We're just gonna use a hippohide whip on you. Yeah, everybody who comes here has to have that done to them, by this whole line of people.

Yeah, Boudouin I goes to the Congo to prepare to release it. Yeah, he clearly had a more positive view of his ancestor Leopold's deeds in the Congo than the facts would support. During the speech that he gave, they have the Big Independence Day thing, and so there's all of these Congolese Africans, the people who are going to be taking over the government

once a lot of the Belgians leave, and there's also all of the Belgians. So it's like a bunch of white people and a bunch of black Africans all together for this ceremony in a place where these two groups have been segregated. So it's kind of a big deal that they're all in it, but like black people are allowed in the same room as the white people in the king,

because again, it's a super racist colony. So the king gets up in front of this mixed group and praises Leopold's civilizing mission in the Congo, calls him a genius for foreseeing the Congo, and basically gives a speech that's one giant, you're welcome to the whole country. Now, Patrice Lumumba was again a big figure at this point, and he was set to be the prime minister

when the Congo got its freedom. So it was a speech that was already kind of peppery, because this was his big chance to get up in front of the nation and really tell the Belgians what he thought. And while the king is giving this speech about how cool Leopold was and how great the Congo colony worked out for everyone, Patrice is writing furiously in the margins of his speech,

just red-faced and just adding to what he was going to say. So shit was already really hot, and the king's speech makes people angrier, because it's being broadcast through loudspeakers across the city. So there's just crowds of Congolese people in the streets. Hearing this guy talk about how his psycho great-great-granddad had been so good at civilizing them. So they get really, really, really pissed.

And then Patrice Lumumba takes the stage, and he proceeds to say this to king shit-ass and every other European in the audience. And I'm going to read a decent chunk of this speech, because it's cathartic. Although this independence of the Congo is being proclaimed today as an agreement with Belgium, an amiable country with which we are on equal terms,

no Congolese will ever forget that independence was one in struggle, a persevering and inspired struggle carried on from day to day, a struggle in which we were undaunted by privation or suffering and stinted neither strength nor blood. It was filled with tears, fire and blood. We are deeply proud of our struggle, because it was just and noble and indispensable in putting an end to the humiliating bondage forced upon us.

This was our lot for the 80 years of colonial rule, our wounds are too fresh and much too painful to be forgotten. We have experienced forced labor in exchange for pay that did not allow us to satisfy our hunger, to clothe ourselves, to have decent lodgings, or to bring up our children as dearly loved ones. Morning, noon and night we were subjected to jeers, insults and blows because we were Negroes.

Who will ever forget that the black was addressed as two, not because he was a friend, but because the polite vu was reserved for the white man. We have seen our land seized in the name of ostensibly just laws, which gave recognition only to the right of might. We have not forgotten that the law was never the same for the black and the white, that it was lenient to the ones and cruel and inhumane to the others. We have experienced atrocious sufferings,

being persecuted for political convictions and religious beliefs, and exiled from our native land. Our lot was worse than death itself. So this is... Very well spoken too. When you were saying he was jotting furiously, I was expecting it to be really vengeful and angry, but it comes off almost too nice for what they did,

but in a very political way. You get the underlying text, but also can see him as a leader, because he's very composed. It's very composed and eloquent range, and he's getting up there in front of the guys who had done this to them and telling them y'all they're fucking assholes. It's more of a fuck you that he can say it so calmly,

because you're like, oh shit, we're wrong. The whole speech, I recommend reading it. It's much longer, and it continues to just throw shitloads of shade on the Belgians. It's kind of intoxicating to read, especially if you've listened to the Leopold podcast. If you've been sort of inundating yourself with how shitty the Belgians were to the Congolese,

just this guy getting up in front of them and really letting them have it. You don't get a lot of moments like this in history. It's like if a council of rabbis right before Hitler had died had gotten to just roast him for an hour and a half, like that sort of thing, the kind of thing that never happens in history. It puts a face to a lot of the injustices they did,

because I'm sure so much of colonialism is built on the idea that the colonized are less than human, because then people can justify it by thinking like, this abstract idea, we're better people, and that's why we can do this. We're civilizing them. Right, but then you see a guy like that get up and speak eloquently, and you're like, oh yeah, they're just people that we fucked over.

That we really fucked over for like a century. Yeah, so the image of Patrice, this kid from the Congo, standing up in front of his former masters in the most eloquent terms telling them, fuck you when the horse you rode in on, it gets around. It goes viral, and it is a huge moment in like African liberation, and is to this day a really significant moment

in the continuing struggle to, yeah, unfuck what the Europeans did in that continent. So Lamumba just lays into the Belgians while they're all standing around, looking at him surrounded by Congolese citizens and unable to do anything to stop him. And this is, remember, a place where just a few years earlier, African children were whipped bloody for things like laughing in the presence of a white man.

That was a real crime, yeah. People died for laughing in the presence of a white man. A couple of years before this. What is even the logic behind that? Like the fact that they want to regulate their joy? Or is it like maybe it's telepsing less human? It's like, well, they don't have emotions. They're not human.

I think it's, they don't want to be mocked. Oh, okay, but in the press, oh, and they're not, they're not sure if they're laughing at them or with them. If you're laughing near a white man, they're laughing at him and they can't let that be happening. Wow, that is some petty ass shit. That's some petty ass shit. That's colonial Europeans right there.

They are the pettiest ass people you'll ever read about. So it probably won't surprise you to hear that Lumumba's speech was, yeah, as I said. So Lumumba's speech became one of the most positive and iconic moments in the whole African struggle for independence, but he didn't just throw shade in the speech. He also outlined an optimistic and even utopian vision of what Congolese society could be after independence.

Quote, we shall eradicate all discrimination, whatever its origin, and we shall ensure for everyone a station in life befitting his human dignity and worthy of his labor and his loyalty to the country. He also said, we shall institute in the country a peace resting not on guns and bayonets, but on conquered and goodwill. So, he's saying all the right things.

On conquered? Concord. Oh, concord. Yeah, sorry, I pronounced it weird. Oh, okay. Oh, like the grape. Well, like people getting along. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

As opposed to... I mean, yes, it is the same spelling. Like the grape. As opposed to being conquered. Are you okay? Yeah, yeah, he built on grapes and goodwill. Yeah, English isn't my first language. Okay.

It's not mine either. Screaming is. Oh, okay. Yeah. So, that is Patrice Lumumba in a nutshell. Seems like a pretty sweet dude, right? Yeah, nice guy, well-spoken. Says the right things.

But. Believes in human dignity. Oh, no, there's no buts. Oh. He was a good man. Oh, okay. Well, it counts, he was a good man. So, yeah, let me tell you why Dwight D. Eisenhower decided he needed to die.

Oh, no. Yeah. I mean, this is the podcast it is. It wasn't gonna end well for the nice guy. So, under the terms of the independence agreement, the Congo was set up to be one of those democracies with both a president and a prime minister in a parliament, right? Lumumba was set to be the first prime minister.

And it is possible that Lumumba's speech angered up some folks because a bunch of Congolese soldiers mutinied and murdered their Belgian officers that night. The mutiny turned into a general assault on all white people in the area and like a thousand people died. Now, at this point, the Belgians hadn't had time to hand everything over, so the Congolese army was commanded by a Belgian and the Congolese units were commanded by Belgian officers.

And that seems to be what started the mutiny. These African soldiers were like, oh, we're independent now. And then their officers come by and say, but we're still in charge of the army. And they're like, the fuck you are. I just heard we're independent. I'm gonna shoot me an officer or two.

So, yeah, it gets bad. Yeah, there's always chaos and changing of power. Well, not always, I guess, but like in unstable governments there is because it's like everything's up for grabs. And it happens so suddenly. There's less than a year where they've known they're going to be handing it over. So the Belgians are not doing what you would want to do for this to go well. Right.

Because you do have cases like Taiwan was handed over from, I mean... Yeah, except that also, they're now dealing with transitional justice and a lot of stuff that wasn't dealt with that I didn't even know growing up because my parents' generation was fed so much propaganda that like about Chiang Kai-shek and everything that now it's like, oh, there's a lot of people that were killed. Yeah. And yeah, I don't know. Yeah, so this is never a smooth process.

And it's especially not smooth when the country in charge just immediately cuts ties in the space of a few months. Right. So, yeah, something that is hard is made impossible. Once the murder spree starts, the soldiers start killing people. All of the white people, at least a huge chunk of the white people in the country, run the fuck away and just start getting on boats and planes, getting the hell out of there, which leaves the country with a distinct lack of people who have experience actually running infrastructure.

Because again, the Belgians, number one, the Africans usually hadn't benefited from most of the infrastructure the Belgians had built and they certainly hadn't been taught how to run it. It was all white people doing it. Well, they weren't allowed in the same rooms. Yeah, and they weren't allowed in the same rooms and there hadn't been time to train people because they just cut ties. This causes additional instability in addition to the fact that handing over control

of a huge region of land, the Congo is twice the size of Texas. So, it's just a gigantic mess all the fuck around. So, Patrice Lumumba and the president, like, are working overtime to try to calm things down, to stabilize shit. Patrice tries to calm the mutineers by firing the Belgian guy in charge of the army. He replaces him with a soldier he trusted, a colonel named Mabutu, Cesse Siku, again, we will hear about in the subsequent episode. Mabutu managed to get the army back under control,

but things continue to get messed up during this time and basically things go from fuck to fuckter. So, the Congo is very, very wealthy. If people were robots, right, and the sole determining factor of how wealthy your nation was was its natural resources. The Congo is probably in the top 10 on the planet, maybe in the top five. Because they have gold, they have copper, they have cobalt, they have uranium, and they have a bunch of stuff, and they don't just have these minerals.

They're usually purer in the Congo than they are anywhere else on the planet their mind. They have the purest copper, they have the purest cobalt, they have the best uranium. They also have this gigantic river in it that, in its own with technology that has existed for quite a while, you could, if you properly made use of the Congo River's hydroelectric potential, the just the Congo state could provide enough power to power all of Africa. Oh, wow.

So that's what, like, they're set up in a good position, but all of these minerals, all of these valuable minerals, means there's shit that people want to steal. And the Belgians, who again hadn't expected to give up the Congo for a few decades yet, had kind of been counting on having access to all of those minerals. So what do they do when they suddenly lose control of the Congo? They could take it back. Yeah, yeah.

So they send some mercenaries and some guns, and they go to different tribal groups in a couple of provinces in the Congo, and they're like, you know, you guys should really be your own country. You've got all these nice resources in this province. You've got all this gyms or whatever the hell you've got. What if we just gave you some machine guns and helped you secede from the Congo and then you let us mine your minerals? What if that happens?

So, yeah, two provinces secede from the Congo and a civil war begins. Both of the provinces are backed by Belgian guns and Belgian money, and in many cases, the people running these rebel provinces are Belgians, like they're appointed leaders in big chunks that are also Belgians. So it's essentially Belgium gives the Congo away and then immediately foments a civil war within it. There's just changing the name of, it's all just ceremonious, but it's like in the first episode that Leopold kept changing the name of his organization so people wouldn't catch on.

Yeah, he would start, like this is the society, the African society, the international African society, and then it's the African society or whatever. They came up with all these different names so that it seemed like a philanthropic gesture. Yeah, so they're doing that again, except now they're like, oh, we gave you your independence. Oh, you didn't say we couldn't start a civil war. Yeah, you didn't say. Well, and if you're not the Congo anymore, then we can take it over. We just said we were going to give you your independence.

We didn't say we weren't going to start a three-way civil war. Right, right. Did you want that in the car? You didn't mention it, so we just thought it was fine. This is normal in Europe. Well, actually, that is normal in Europe. It was probably. Shitload of civil wars.

But yeah, so two of the Congo's most profitable and resource-rich provinces, Katanga and East Kasai, rebel against the government. So now it is important to note that I think still to this day when people talk about like, there's this big controversy over Syria with the White Helmets because the White Helmets have received funding from the United States and NATO forces. And so there's this myth that they're essentially a US-supported terrorist group faking chemical weapons attacks over. And they're definitely like the White Helmets have gotten support from Western powers,

but it's like there's this tendency among a bunch of groups to assume that if the West gets involved in one of these countries and backing aside in a fight, then that's where all of the divisions started. And no, there were pre-existing divisions, so the Congo was never a nation before Leopold came there. It was different tribal groups. It's like in those Real Housewives shows when the producers or a bachelor or whatever, they will get the contestants to fight, but they don't come out of nowhere. They're like, yeah, we saw that. You guys don't like each other.

Exactly. So I heard she said this about you, but they wouldn't just start it out of nowhere. So there's something already brewing. Exactly. These provinces were mainly consisting of people who were members of tribes who had issues with the dominant tribes in the Congo and with the tribes, because Lumumba was largely supported by members of a specific tribe, like that's the way politics worked at that point in the Congo. And so the Belgians would go to these other tribes who controlled or who were dominant in areas they wanted

and would be like, you guys deserve to be independent. And these guys already kind of wanted their independence. And now this Western power shows up offering them machine guns and military aid and stuff. Yeah, let's give it a shot. So, yeah, that's the way that works. But they're offering it to all sides, right? But then each side thinks like they're being favored. No, they're only offering it to two sides or two sides, but two provinces that want independence.

But the two sides are also fighting each other or the two sides fighting against the one side. They're not fighting together, but they're fighting against the government. They just both want to be independent and the Belgians want those two breakaway provinces independent so that they can keep getting those sweet, sweet minerals. Right. Yeah. So it breaks out. Lumumba and Mobotu are overworked trying to deal with it.

It becomes clear very quickly that they cannot beat the Belgian-backed separatists. So they call in the UN. You know, they try to do it legally. You know, the UN, basically the cops, somebody's fucking with your shit. You call the police. You try to get it done, dealt with a legal way. So the UN sends in troops, but all they'll agree to do is basically help the Congolese government maintain control in the areas they already hold.

They will not help the Congo beat the rebels. They won't do anything about the Belgians. So we're going to find out what happens next. Was Belgium not part of the UN? Oh, it was. So they're okay. I see. So everything's kind of fucked up.

Everything's super fucked up. Yeah. I guess cops are a good example for this, then. They're a great example for this. You call the cops when the cops are bullying you. Yeah. And you're like, hmm, they're going to take the side of the cops. Yeah.

Or if guys who are retired cops are bullying you and you call the cops, it's probably not going to go well for you. So we will talk more about throw more shade on the UN and probably throw more shade on cops. But first, let's do the opposite of throw shade, shine some sunlight on these products and or services. 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. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock.

And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads?

From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. 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 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? 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So when we last left this, the Belgians had definitely kind of helped start a couple of civil wars within the Congo so that they could get their hands on some more minerals. And Patrice Lumumba had called in the UN for help dealing with these rebellions. And the UN had basically been like, can't really help you with the fact that the Belgians who are also UN members are the ones responsible for all this. So Lumumba's like, that's some bullshit. And he goes to the Soviet Union. And he says, we need support. And some vehicles and shit.

And the Soviet Union's like, we'll totally give you guys whatever you need. If you communist a little bit. And Lumumba was like, I'll communist a little bit. Because he was a socialist. But he wasn't a communist really. And he didn't actually do anything terrible or whatever. He wasn't stalling his purging people. He was just taking the Soviet Union's offer of aid in a time when his country needed it because the UN had said no. So pretty soon Soviet technicians and military advisers are flooding into the country. And unfortunately for Patrice Lumumba and everyone really, the CIA was also in the Congo. And they start counting every Russian they see step out of an airplane.

Now Larry Devlin was the big CIA guy in Leopold Bill at the time, the station chief. And he's still alive and around today. I think he's still alive. He was still alive pretty recently because you can watch interviews of him talking about everything that happens here and giving his opinions on it. So if you want to see Larry Devlin, the CIA guy's opinion of all this, you can find it. So Devlin counts like a thousand some odd Soviets who are in the country and he starts sending this information back to Washington. And this stuff goes up the food chain and it gets to Dwight D. Eisenhower's ear. Now this is right when the Cold War is ratcheting up. And the way it's presented to the president is the communists are gaining influence in the Congo.

And thanks to this Lumumba guy, the Congo might go red. And the Congo is full of uranium, which you need to make nukes. So like fuck Eisenhower is going to let that happen. Now for a long time the exact chain of command for everything was in doubt, but in 2000 the Guardian dug up some information from the National Archives. A 1975 interview with a guy named Robert Johnson who had been the minute taker in the White House on the fateful day when they discussed all this. Quote, Robert Johnson said in the interview that he vividly recalled the president turning to Alan Dulles, director of the CIA, in the full hearing of all those in attendance and saying something to the effect that Lumumba should be eliminated.

So Dwight D. Eisenhower says, kill this fucking guy. Essentially. He says he should be eliminated and the CIA reads it as kill this fucking guy. Yeah, I see. But so he's because it's like the US, they don't want to help, but so they just want to like kind of like put a little pause on the situation because they don't want this civil war. They just don't want to be involved in the civil war, right? They're not going to try to get involved and help that way, but they also don't want to help this guy.

So even though this guy went to the Soviets for help, they're just like, oh, we can't have that. So we're just going to kill the guy. Yeah. But then someone else will just come in. Well, but they can make sure it's someone else who wants to do things in America's way. Who they're in charge of. Yeah, they don't like this guy. I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that Patrice Lumumba was not somebody they owned or could own.

And he had and he and the people who supported him had their own view of what the Congo should be. And they didn't really give a shit about being part of the US's sphere of influence. And the US was definitely most worried about because the domino theory was big at this time, which is the idea that like, if one nation falls to communism, it'll lead other nations around it to fall. And soon all of Africa will be red. But there's also this very real concern that they have that like, well, this is full of uranium. And if the Soviets gain influence here, that's going to go to them. So it's a few things going on.

But it all comes down to the fact that they didn't think they could control this guy. And so they decided to have him killed. Mr. Johnson recalled after Eisenhower said that there was a stunned silence for about 15 seconds and then the meeting continued. Because this is one of the first times that anything like this had ever happened. The CIA was not super experienced murdering people at this point. Now, in 1984, the New York Times published an expose, the CIA in Lumumba. It revealed that on September 19th, 1960, the CIA's Leopold Ville station chief received a top secret message telling him to prepare for the arrival of, quote, Joe from Paris.

Now, Devlin, the CIA chief guy, was warned to keep all this information to himself. Joe wound up being a guy named Sidney Gottlieb. He was the CIA special assistant for scientific matters. That's a fancy way of saying he was the agency's top scientist, and in this case, top poisoner. Yeah. So Sidney brought with him a bizarre bespoke virus that had been engineered by the CIA to mimic the deadly effects of a local Congolese disease. The scientist told the station chief that this poison was meant for Patrice Lumumba, something he put in his beverage or whatever to assassinate and...

And be undetected. Yeah, exactly. He just got some terrible Congolese disease and died. I'm going to quote the New York Times here. The poison, the scientist said, was somehow to be slipped into Lumumba's food or perhaps into his toothpaste. Poison was not the only acceptable method. Any form of assassination would do so long as it could not be traced back to the United States government. Now, at this point in history, the CIA is very new, and they don't have a lot of experience murdering foreign leaders.

In fact, I think they'd only done it one time before this that we have any kind of evidence about. Now, considering Castro's history, you might argue that they never did good at killing world leaders, but this is sort of the proving ground for that tactic, you know, just murdering people who disagree with America. And they're not great at it yet. The poison winds up expiring before they can give it to Lumumba in a few different... Poison expires? Yeah, this one did. Wow.

Yeah, they suck at this so far. They're going to get better at it. Isn't poison... Okay. I think it's like a virus. Oh, I see. Oh, so it's not potent anymore. Yeah, no.

The CIA sent a chemical weapon over to assassinate a world leader. They're like poppers. Once it's out too long, the effects are gone. Just like poppers. Yeah, okay. We should have an episode of this podcast we do while taking poppers. Sophie, can we do a line-up for that? Just take a lot of poppers or it'll be a very short episode.

So, yeah, all of the different plans they have for Lumumba kind of fall through, at least for a while. Now, as I had said before, Lumumba's a hero in Africa and certainly within the Congo. He's very popular at this point, a philosopher of liberation. Different to the mostly white American cold warriors of the Eisenhower era. Now, they'd gotten to meet him face-to-face shortly after Congolese independence, because Lumumba had visited the New York City to talk to the UN Secretary General when he was still asking for help with the Civil War thing. He'd been invited down to Washington during that same trip.

Here's how the New York Times described it. For both Lumumba and the United States, it was a decisive encounter. The new Secretary of State, Christian Herter, received him and spent a frustrating half hour trying to persuade him to rely exclusively on the United Nations and refrain from calling to outside powers for assistance. But, obviously, the UN wasn't willing to help him do what needed to be done, and Lumumba didn't take well to this considering the rebels were being funded armed and in many cases led by Belgian military officers.

Quote, his arguments fell on deaf ears. Dylan, Under Secretary of State, who was present at the meeting, testified that Lumumba had struck him as, quote, an irrational, almost psychotic personality. The impression that was left, Dylan said, was very bad that this was an individual whom it was impossible to deal with and the feelings of the government as a result sharpened considerably during this time. Now.

Well, they say impossible to deal with, they just mean impossible to control. Yeah, and I think they also mean black and talking like he's equal to a white guy. I really do think that's most of why they consider him crazy because Devlin, the CIA chief who actually knew Lumumba, I don't think was a racist and did not describe him as a crazy person. He said, quote, I didn't regard Lumumba as the kind of person who was going to bring on World War III. I saw him as a danger to the political position of the United States and Africa,

but nothing more than that, which is reasonable. Right. And he did not. They just kind of want to stay out of the conflict. Yeah, yeah, and Devlin, the CIA guy, tried to help kill him but didn't want to. Like he was one of those like, well, that's the orders. I'm a CIA guy. I kill people if I got to kill people.

But that's part of why I think Dylan, the undersecretary of state, is just a racist. Like he sees a black man with an opinion and he's like... I just thought he was a person. He's crazy. He's so crazy. We got a poison this guy. Wow. Yeah, and I'm guessing Eisenhower had some racism in him, too.

Yeah. Probably. Ike doesn't come off well in this story. One thing I do think is important to note is kind of how the artificial nature of the Congo exacerbated the civil war that had just started off, made it easier for the Belgians to foment, which we've already talked about a little bit, and also was responsible for a lot of the continuing violence that's there today. There's a U.S. diplomat named Robert McNamara who worked in the Congo for a while.

He traced a lot of the political problems they had directly to King Leopold. He said that the Congo, as it was put together by King Leopold, was an artificial entity. It had no relationship to anything African. It had to cut across tribal, ethnic, and national geographic lines. Few of the people in Africa had any real identity with the Congo as a nation. So, it's a big mess that we've got into right now, right? This is like a fake thing that's been cobbled together. Lumumba's trying to make it into a real country because you can force that sort of thing.

But it's also very easy for the Belgians to... It's unstable. They can come in and... Exactly. So, local politics in the Congo moved faster than CIA. Lumumba's initial military campaign to suppress the rebels did not go well and his decision to seek Soviet aid was controversial within his own nation. In September of 1960, President Kasa Vubu dismissed Prime Minister Lumumba.

So Lumumba went before parliament directly and gave a big speech and convinced them to reinstate him, which seemed to prove to the Americans that this young socialist was just so charismatic he could only be stopped by death. So, the CIA went to a guy who happened to be the second in command of the army at the time, Colonel Joseph Mabutu. And they were like, it'd be great if someone could coup this current government out of power. And so Mabutu did exactly that. He kicked the Soviet advisors out of the Congo and deposed Lumumba and his supporters.

At this point, the Congo had effectively two different governments, Patrice Lumumba's, which was like half legitimate, and President Kasa Vubu's, which was backed by Mabutu and was also like half legitimate. And then, of course, there are the two different breakaways. So there's four governments. They're still fighting, yeah. Yeah, so now we've gone from three to four governments in the Congo at this point in time. So the UN chose to recognize Kasa Vubu's government because they didn't like Lumumba.

And Patrice Lumumba fled the capital for the town of Stanleyville, where he had all of his supporters. Because again, it's a tribal sort of thing. So like the tribes who supported him are mainly there. He has his people there. But he gets caught along the way by Colonel Mabutu's men. And they imprison him in a place called Ticeville near the capital. But after a couple of weeks, like Lumumba's in this prison guarded by soldiers, and he starts talking to the soldiers.

And again, he can talk anybody in any. He's a charismatic dude. He's charming. And so within a couple of weeks, they're mutinying for higher pay because he's essentially convinced them that they deserve more. And they threaten to put him back in charge of the country. Mabutu sends in some soldiers and very quickly pulls Lumumba out of there before things can get worse and puts him on a plane to Katanga, the rebel province,

where he had been prosecuting a war against. So the plane that flies him there is piloted by Belgians. The mercenaries who are guarding him on his flight to the rebel thing are Belgian soldiers. And they drop him off in the heart of rebel territory, blindfolded and with his hands tied behind his back. He was beaten badly by Katangan soldiers and then executed in front of several of their officials, including some Belgians who were officials in the Katangan government.

So Lumumba has just been horribly murdered with heavy help from the Belgians. Right, but technically the U.S. did it, but they did it through the Belgians. And the Congolese and like it's hard to say how much of this was the CIA, but it was they seem to have been guiding all of this because they wanted Lumumba out of power and I think they had something to do with him getting sacked in the first place. And then when he managed to talk his way back into power, the U.N., which is really the U.S., backs the government that doesn't want him back in power and forces him to flee and then just so happens that he gets captured

and Belgian soldiers fly him to go be murdered. So, CIA is not the only person at fault here, but they're definitely... I guess nice guys really do finish last. Nice guys get murdered in front of their enemies. Yeah, so it probably won't surprise you to learn that Lumumba's assassination was treated as a wonderful thing by the Belgian people in press. I'm going to read a quote from an important book, The Assassination of Lumumba by Ludo de Wit. At one point he reviews Belgian newspaper coverage of the murder,

which is mostly focused on shifting the blame from Belgium to the Congolese. What has occurred demonstrates alas that in Africa and certain other countries at the same stage of evolution, access to the democratic process remains a murderous affair. It was from like, yeah, a Belgian colonial newspaper. Another newspaper noted, Patrice Lumumba has died the way he always wanted violently. What? Yeah. That's some gaslighting.

Yeah, it's super gaslighting. Oh, he was asking for it. He was asking for it. He wanted it. Belgium's leading financial paper, their equivalent to the Wall Street Journal, considered the assassination to be a dangerous but crucial sort of surgery, quote. Surgery? Yeah.

The very existence of Lumumba was an abscess, which had already infected the Congo and was threatening to infect it further. What? Yeah. So the West breathes a sigh of relief as soon as this guy is horribly murdered. But people across Africa were very much pissed off by the murder of a liberationist icon. Kwame Nakruma, then the president of Ghana, gave a fiery speech that was heard across the continent. Once the news of this broke.

Oh, no. Yeah. It really is an abusive relationship. Yeah, for sure. The speech goes on, and it's a really good speech. DeWitt considers Lumumba's assassination to be, quote, the most important political assassination of the 20th century. And it's hard to argue with him.

Lumumba was not the first CIA-backed overthrow. Alan Dulles had mastermind at the end of Yacobo Arbeza's democratically elected government in Guatemala in 1954 in an operation called PBS Success. Yeah. They pick weird names. They're proud of themselves. Yeah. But Lumumba's death was probably the most significant of the CIA-backed coups that came mostly after this.

Not only was the Congo an enormous nation for the CIA to have directly sort of intervened to change the course of its politics. But this is kind of like popping a hole in the dam. And after this, the CIA just goes fucking nuts for regime change. So they tried it once before in 1954. But after they successfully get Lumumba out. They had a taste for control, and they were like, oh, we could do this more.

If we just do this everywhere. That's how America works now. Yeah. So the CIA targets Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic in 1961. They support him. They support Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic in 1961. They support the Boethists and our old pal Saddam Hussein in overthrowing Iraq's President Qasim in 1963. There are dozens of confirmed and suspected regime changes all over the world carried out by the CIA in the 1960s and early 70s.

One of the most striking cases was the killing of Salvador Allende. He was the democratically elected socialist leader of Chile. Here's how the Washington Post described his politics. Quote, he had rejected the Cuban model as too extreme. Shea's revolution is too violent. He was adamantly against armed struggle. Winning the presidency on September 4th, 1970, he vowed to overturn Chile's harsh economic injustices. He put forward a doctrine of geo-economic sovereignty and self-determination, a U.S. free future in which Chile would make its own way alone.

The United States must realize that Latin America has now been changed, he said during one of his campaigns. Once in office, he would try to prove it so. Probably not going to end well for him just based on that speech. Yeah, they probably don't like that he wants independence. But yeah, it's like weird because hearing all this, I know we're supposed to talk about villains in other countries, but the U.S. is coming off like a terrible villain. We're the bastard of this for sure. Yeah, 100%. So one of Allende's first orders of business, once he was elected legally to be in charge of Chile, was to nationalize the copper and nitrate industries, making them property of all Chileans.

The U.S. did not appreciate this since these industries at the time were run by Americans and Brits. So he nationalizes copper and nitrates because he wants Latin America free of what he called multinational vampires. He thought it was unfair that U.S. corporations made enormous profits off Chilean resources while paying Chilean workers a pittance. Here's the Washington Post again. As Allende's presidential campaign gained traction in 1970, corporations with interest in Chile, PepsiCo, Chase Manhattan, ITT, Anaconda, Kennecott, Ford, made their panic known to the U.S. government. Kissinger activated the CIA's FUBELT plan, which involved encouraging a variety of subversive elements in Chilean society. Nixon ordered U.S. intel agencies to, quote, make the Chilean economy scream. He said to Kissinger, all's fair on Chile.

Kick him in the ass, okay? Oh, no. Yeah. Nixon's a great guy. I don't know if I like us in this story. Well, you can blame it on Nixon if it makes you feel better and pretend it wasn't PepsiCo as I sip a delicious PepsiCo beverage. There was a similar situation with Dole, I think, or Chiquita Banana. Yeah, that's what was happening in Guatemala.

That was Guatemala, okay, because I remember learning about that long time ago. We will go into more information on several of these clues in the future. But I'm going over this all now because this is all sort of Lumumba's assassination is, again, like the door is open now. They've done it successfully. Yeah. They're like, yeah, well, one lie leads to another. Yeah. One coup leads to another.

Yeah, and in this case, one coup leads to a fucking shitload of coups all over the world. So, yeah, the CIA tried to stop Allende from being sworn in at all after his election. This kind of was found out in 2000 that the CIA had supported kidnapping, Chile's top general, when he refused to use the army to stop Allende from being sworn in as president. The kidnapping failed, but this general was shot and killed two days later, probably by the CIA. But Allende wound up in power. They had tried to stop him from even taking office, and then once he took office, they escalated their plan. So on September 11th, 1973, a military coup seized power in Chile.

Allende was surrounded in his home and wound up either killing himself or being shot to death through other means. The CIA has been very heavily rumored to have been involved, and they've always denied it. In the modern interviews, you'll find with these guys, because the CIA agents, again, like with Devlin, these guys are all giving interviews now for documentaries, because some of this has been declassified. And they will admit the CIA knew a coup was brewing within the military and claim they just kind of decided not to stop it and maybe helped it along once they knew it was happening, but they didn't spark anything. They didn't start it. It didn't happen because of them. We only found out about it two days beforehand.

That's the CIA's line about this guy who we know they tried. They killed a guy because he wouldn't stop this dude from taking office. Yeah, they're like, we saw somebody getting robbed, and they screamed for help, but we weren't the one robbing them. Also, we told the guy we'd give him crack if he robbed them. Yeah, also, we blocked the police. We told the police it was a different alley. Yeah. But we didn't do it. It was not a fault. And we shot him after he got robbed, but you can't really blame any of this on us.

Yeah, and then we also robbed him. Then we robbed him, too. Stole his organs. It's fine. We're the CIA. We're the good guys. There's a new movie coming out about Jack Ryan, CIA agent. We're the good guys. Jim from the office is playing one of the good guys. Yeah, our propaganda, because other countries have propaganda. It's so blatant, but Hollywood is our propaganda. Yeah.

I mean, that is, wow, well, my mind is blown. There you go. I don't know. So, yeah, the guy who took power from Allende in Chile was a general named Augusto Pinochet. He was the dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990 and remained in charge of the army until 1998. During that time, he killed at least 3,000 people and tortured thousands more, but at least, at least, Teresa, Chile remained safe for PepsiCo. Yeah.

They should put that on the cans of Coke. Like, instead of the names, like, share Coke with Diane, it should be like, like, steal a government from Chile. Steal a government. No, I think you nailed. That's a great marketing campaign. Open a can of coup. That's the CIA's internal soda.

It just tastes like the tears of colonized peoples. Yeah. So, fun fact, there are also allegations that the CIA tried to overthrow or kill Charles de Gaulle several times. Yeah, you wouldn't have called France. So, not even a colonial nation, like one of our staunchest allies. Now, with Lumumba, we do know for sure that the CIA wanted him gone and that Eisenhower asked for him to be eliminated. That shit is documented. The de Gaulle assassination is murkier.

The CIA has not admitted shit, and in fact, this is officially a conspiracy theory. Right, because that'd be crazy if they admitted that. But then I feel like also the U.S. and France have always been kind of weird. They're frenemies. They're frenemies, yeah, because whenever shit hits a fan, like, technically, because the two big world powers are always like, okay, yeah, we support each other. But then when something happens, like, people are like, I don't know, we're going to wait this one out. See how everyone else feels.

Like, after September 11th, like, France was like, we'll wait. Well, they just didn't want to invade Iraq. We'll wait. Of course. Right, but it's like that's... They were right about that one. They were right, but also the U.S. has done shit like that, too. And every time it's always like, I want to jump in right away.

I mean, yeah, we're friends, but like, you know, she also owes me like $20. And she's like, I don't know, did I really owe her? I don't really like talking to him. I mean, he's, I guess we're friends, but like, it's fine if, you know, we're all hanging out in a group. But if it's just him and me... I'll like pregame with her, but like, I don't want to like hang out with her one-on-one. Yeah, this has got to be awkward. That's France and America.

Yeah. So yeah, here's how we tried to have Charles de Gaulle killed. So basically, in 1962, four retired French generals attempted to overthrow the government of France. They captured Algiers in the French colony of Algeria, but they failed to capture Paris. Their coup was put down four days later. Now, the goal of this coup was to stop Charles de Gaulle from freeing Algeria. He wanted to decolonize at least that French colony. This angered the French far right, and it also freaked out the CIA.

According to this theory, Alan Dulles, the same CIA director who'd backed the coups of Lumumba and Allende, was scared Algeria would go communist if it was let go, which is exactly the reasoning we had for killing Lumumba. So according to this theory, we backed the coup and probably had a hand in several of the 30 attempts on de Gaulle's life between 1958 and 1966, because people kept trying to kill him. I see. Well, the other thing that everyone being afraid of communism, it's like that you're showing them, you're like, we're capitalism, here's a free democracy, and then you're all, but the side they see is like colonialism and dying and not having resources.

So when you leave them, of course, they're like, well, okay, let's try something else. Yeah, let's try something not capitalist. Oh, how about do a good version of the democracy, let them see how good, like, I don't know. Just don't fuck with them. Just don't fuck with them, but also if you're going to show them a terrible time, they're probably going to try something different. Yeah. Now, the CIA denies all this.

Alan Dulles, while he was alive, denied all this. The French generals in charge of the coup denied this. Much of the evidence you'll find for this comes from a book called The Devil's Chestboard by Salon.com co-founder David Talbot. The CIA says he's full of shit. I'm going to read one quote from the book. De Gaulle was convinced that the coup was supported by the Alan Dulles-led CIA, and the French press was filled with leaks alleging the secret involvement. But Kennedy took pains to assure De Gaulle that he did not back the coup,

and in fact, he offered to defend the embattled French government with US military firepower. De Gaulle acknowledged that JFK himself was not behind the French officers' rebellion, but the incident made it clear to both leaders something equally ominous. Kennedy was not in control of his own government. So this is a book by the guy who founded Salon.com, which is not the most credible journalist institution in the world. Anything with.com. It's hard to tell what happened here.

We do know for a fact that in 2015, the CIA admitted that back in 65, several French dissidents had asked the CIA for help killing De Gaulle. They claimed they did not do anything. I'm going to read a quote from The Guardian here about this plan that the CIA was supposed to be warned of. These guys came to the CIA and told them basically they wanted to kill De Gaulle. They said, quote, the killer was to be an old soldier. He was to wear a poisoned ring on one of his fingers, and he was to shake the general's hand. What?

Yeah. This sounds fake. This is like Game of Thrones shit. My ring is poisoned. Touch my hand. They just made a virus to kill a guy. A poison ring? Do you poison anybody?

With a ring? Can you really die from a... If the poison's deadly enough, the Soviet Union killed a guy once with a... It might have been Putin's guy. I forget which, but they had like a ricentipped dart inside an umbrella. They shot into a dissident's leg when he was in England. A dart makes sense. The ring is like, that would be the ultimate revenge,

as if you like, you know, get someone to propose to you that you hate, and then like when they put the ring on their face that they die. It kills them. That's a long con. Ha ha ha, tricked you. Motherfuck. Yeah, that's a long, long con. Well, it's hard to say what happened.

The CIA has been willing to admit they knew about attempts on De Gaulle's life, but has denied having any part in it. It's hard to think that the CIA wouldn't have tried to kill someone for this back then, because they were trying to kill a shitload of people for out of worry that their colonies would go communist, so I don't know. It's worth noting that, like, this usually gets wrapped into the JFK killing conspiracy theory and stuff, so there's a lot of... There's a lot of messy conspiracy theories in here.

We can't get too much more into it. I will say that all the CIA fuckery we've talked about today, which descended from the assassination of Lumumba, led eventually to the church committee in 1975, which was a congressional committee that revealed, that basically looked over what the fuck the CIA had been doing, because you keep cooing governments without... Because a lot of time the president wouldn't even say,

I want this done, the CIA was moving on its own for a significant amount of it, or it would be something like the president would be like, boy, I don't like these guys, and Alan Dulles would be like, I think that means the president wants these people killed. Let's go get our murdering on. So in 75 Congresses, like, we should do something about all the murders. Because they don't want the president to be implicated? Is that so he has to speak in code, or did they literally just were like,

do you want to ask him what he meant by that? No, let's just do it. I think it was sort of understood, like, because Eisenhower didn't say kill Lumumba, he said he should be eliminated. Right. Alan Dulles went back to the CIA and said, all right, president's on board. But is it because, oh, I see.

But I'm wondering why the president was something so big, why they wouldn't make it more explicit. Like, is it out of protection so they can't get in trouble on international trouble? Yeah, you don't want the president to be able to, or anyone to be able to say, yes, the president ordered for this person to be killed. Right, so they can say, oh, he didn't say it, but he implied it. Yeah, yeah, the CIA sort of ran with it. So, yeah, this all leads to the church committee in 1975,

which revealed to the nation a bunch of shady shit about the CIA, like that they had been assassinating people across four presidencies, two Republican and two Democratic, so it's murdering people for the sake of American economics is bipartisan. I will say that, which is nice that we can all agree on something. Mass murder is very American. Yeah, this led to the church committee, led to the establishment of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,

which is a congressional committee that's supposed to be some oversight for the CIA, rather than just letting them do whatever they want. It also prompted the issue of an executive order by President Gerald Ford. The EO basically restricted the CIA from gathering intel in a lot of different ways inside the U.S. So, Ford's response to hearing about all this assassinations was to try to protect Americans, rather than to stop the CIA from doing more foreign murders. But at least it was something, you know? Another result of the church committee was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,

or FISA, in 1978. Most of the restrictions on the CIA placed after their wild years have, of course, been repealed, gutted, or otherwise removed post-911. One of the sources I said it earlier, that New York Times article, the CIA in Lumumba, was actually published in the mid-1980s, during a time when the Reagan administration was starting to push back on the limitations placed on the CIA after the church committee. They basically said, the Soviet Union is funding terrorism all over the world,

and the CIA doesn't have the freedom to track down these terrorists and murder them, wherever they happen to be, even if they're Americans or whatever. We should lose the strings on the CIA so they can keep us safe. It's hard to have oversight over secret intelligence, because it does rely on a certain amount of... There has to be a little trust if it's a secret intelligence committee, but then, of course, people in power are never good, I don't know. Yeah, it has never worked out. There's all these different cases you can look into where we backed the overthrow

of a democratically elected leader through assassination or not. It never ends well. You never wind up with a good dude, like Patrice Lumumba, who was at least seemed to be a reasonable guy, who was very popular with the people, gets replaced by Mobotu Ceceseco, who knew how to play ball with the UN in the United States, and then robbed the country blind. Like, he wasn't even a killing guy. He killed plenty of people, but his whole thing was just stealing.

He just wanted to be wealthy. Well, I think that's what happens is they know how to pick people who are weak because they're hungry for power, and so most of the time it's just a selfish need for private wealth and private power. I mean, in a way, that's kind of like... I mean, I don't know what else to brush this up, but Trump is very much the kind of guy who is selfish. Even that he wants anything specific for the country, it's that he wants personal gain.

So those are the best types of figures for other countries to put in power, because... Because they're easy to manipulate. Well, the United States was the first nation to recognize Leopold's Congo Free State, to bring this back to the Congo. Back when Leopold was trying to make it a thing, he sent a rich guy out to Khan, our president at the time, into recognizing the Congo, and we did. We were also one of the nations that pushed Leopold to give up his colony to Belgium, which is good.

But then we kind of ignored everything that happened in the Congo for decades because we needed their uranium. Now, Patrice, yeah, as I said, LaMumba was... Patrice LaMumba was seceded by Mobotu Ceceseco, and as soon as Mobotu took power, the UN passed Resolution 161, which authorized UN forces to go on the offensive against the Catangan breakaway state, just like LaMumba had asked in the first place before he was murdered. UN and US forces ended the rebellions in the Congo by 1963.

Mobotu wound up as dictator and, yeah, stole everything that wasn't nailed down in the Congo. We will talk about him later. But it's important to know that as a result of Mobotu's reign, which was a result of the CIA's fuckery, living standards in the Congo actually fell over the course of the 20th century, so much so that by 1990, the population had tripled, but their GDP remained unchanged since like the late 1950s. So, it is worth noting that very recently, the Belgian state, at least, has taken some responsibility for their share of the Congo's horror.

In 2001, Belgium took, quote, moral responsibility for the assassination of Patrice LaMumba. This June, 2018, they dedicated a square in Brussels to Patrice LaMumba. So, Belgium has apologized in a couple of tiny ways. The CIA still won't admit they really had all that much to do with the assassination of LaMumba and still won't take any credit for the continuing and current fucked up state of the Congo. Yeah, I mean, it's probably a cognitive dissonance. It's hard for them to face it.

And like, even the apologies are never really enough because it's like changed the course of history, right? You can't go back and change it. I mean, unless they're going to be like, all right, let's trade. You guys take Belgium, we'll take Congo. They're not going to do that, so it's like, well, you can't. Well, and the effects of this, like all, like the Congo is still really messed up today, and Belgium is more responsible for the Congo's state than the United States. But we've got a hand in there.

And if you look at, like, right now, where all of these, the families of people who are fleeing for asylum in the United States, one of the countries that they come from the most is Guatemala, which in 1954, we backed an overthrow of their democratically elected government. And then decades later, we backed essentially another civil war that led to a genocide, which the violence of which is still continuing in the country. Like, all of this CIA fuckery is still very much with us in the world. And that's kind of why I had initially planned to just do this episode about Mabutu,

but the more I learned about Lumumba and what had been done to overthrow him, I felt like this is a necessary interstitle story. It's like we looked in the mirror and we're like, oh, it's us. Yeah, we were the slasher the whole time. And it's kind of a messy story, because again, with the CIA, it's not as easy as like, oh, this battle was here. This guy was in charge then, and he ordered this. Like, it's like, 40 different journalists have made these allegations based on all this stuff,

but the CIA denies it and says they're all liars, and, you know, how do you... Yeah, well, I'm also sure with things like national security, there's all, I mean, it doesn't justify anything, but there's probably also a lot of facts we don't know at the time. Like, it's like a spiderweb, right? It's not as simple as like, should we kill this guy? It's probably like, oh, there's also this person who might die if this happens, or if we don't kill him, then we're fucked here or whatever.

I mean... That's the problem with these secret agencies, too, is that like... Secret. There's deals and things happening that we can't know about. Yeah, which is like, I guess that's, to some extent, how it's going to be in geopolitics, but also it makes it really easy to just ignore people criticizing you for fucking up the world when you're like, oh, but it would have been so much more fucked up if... Well, I can't tell you. Just trust me.

Right. We're good. Yeah, and it's hard to trust the government if they continue to show that they can't be trusted. Yeah. I don't know if they do stuff like that. Well, yeah, I guess values are important because if you share those same values and you see that they're following that, then it's easier to trust that they'll do the right thing, but if you start to see there's corrupt people, then they're going to be taking advantage and manipulating you.

And we pretty much just back the corrupt people, because the people who aren't corrupt are like, why do American companies own all of my nation's mineral rights? I don't think this is okay. The corrupt people are able to... We always want to think of villains and manipulators and liars. We think they must be evil, but they got there because they're good at lying. So when you meet them, they're probably like, okay, this is boring to you. All right.

What? Because you're yawning. Oh, no. This is our second podcast of the day. No, it's okay. It's cool. I just went on a rant. Three.

Wow. No. No, you're right. These people are good at... I was just kidding. I was rousing you. And it's possible maybe Patrice Lumumba would have wound up being a monster. The list knows Robert Yon really, really widely in my face.

Now this, I'm the bastard today for yawning. He nodded and went, oh. I'm taking a lot of flack in this room right now is how I'm feeling. I'm just kidding. Well, so that's the Congo in between its first dictator and its second dictator. And also a little bit about the CIA murdering people all around the world. Cool. Yeah.

You're going to join the CIA now, Teresa? Well, I can't tell you that. Oh, fair. Oh, it's fair. Solid. Solid. Okay. Well, I'm just going to hope you don't shake my hand with a poison ring.

With a poison ring. Okay. You got a pluggables to plug? Sure. Yeah. I have a podcast. It's kind of related to lying. It's called You Can Tell Me Anything.

This feels like the weirdest transition, but people confess secrets to me. You should come on. Ooh, yeah. All right. I've got so many secrets. Well, anyways, yeah. Well, my name is Robert Evans. I am the host of this podcast.

As always, I will be back next Tuesday with another tale of someone terrible. Until then, you can find me on Twitter at I write okay, two letters. You can find this podcast at Bastards Pod on Twitter. And you can find us on the World Wide Web at BehindTheBastards.com. So until next week, have a great time. And remember, I love like 40% of you. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

Thanks for watching.