Historically High - King Leopold II of Belgium and The Congo Free State

Episode Date: December 24, 2025

In 1830 Belgium became its own country after winning independence from the Netherlands. Founded as a Constitutional Monarchy the national congress elected Leopold I (who of course was tied to the British Monarchy) to serve as king. Following Leopold as monarch was, surprise surprise, Leopold II. Being a new country, Belgium was late to the party establishing any colonial holdings. Leopold II heard about the Congo in Africa and crafted one of the biggest cons in human history. Under the guise of ruling the country to help advance and civilize the people and region, Leopold was made sole ruler of the Congo with no one to answer to. He used his total and utter control of the Congo to brutalize the people and strip the country of its resources to enrich himself personally. This happened over a period 20 years until the atrocities he committed were brought to light. Murder, Mutilation, Slavery, nothing was off the table for Leopold II. Join us as we discuss one of histories worst humans and his reign of terror. Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I don't know how we keep doing this. I feel like you do like a Dwayne the Rock Johnson thing before you. I feel like you do that. Finally. The podcast has come back. We're in the holiday season. I don't know why we started this trend, and I fear that it was me that suggested to you that right around Christmas time,

we end up doing a bad guy. I think we've put out Mussolini around this time. I know we put out a two-parter on Stalin right around this time. You had no argument for me, though. Yeah. You just said it and I was like, of course we do that. It's not necessarily because we're just so jacked up on holiday cheer that we need to bring down. It just kind of feels like a not a fun thing to study during this time.

You know what I think it is? You can't be redlining, holiday redlining the entire time. So what this does is this gives you a chance to take a step back from all of the bombardment of fucking Mariah Carey and all that stuff. And Kelly Clarkson's not too bad actually. but I'll fucking Jonas Brothers Christmas has been hearing about that shit Anyway what I'm saying though Is that we're here to kind of take you away from that

And let you just get Experience pure hatred For one of Is this history's greatest con man Quite possibly I mean I think And credit to I'm sorry I know you wrote me an email

You suggested this guy I want to give you your credit But I'm pretty sure you're probably sure you're probably the only one that emailed us about it. So understanding your heart that this is directly from you. I didn't know about Leopold II. You didn't know about Leopold II. There was enough confusion at the very end to be like, oh, a Holy Roman emperor.

Yeah. No. This is King Leopold II of Belgium. And it could be that this is a blind spot because it's Belgium. This is kind of our first push beyond Egypt into Africa as far as looking at some of the other colonialism that goes on there. I know we've talked about the North African campaign also, but again, that's more recent history. History has taken us around Africa. It's basically what it is. Like the historic, yeah. And getting into Leopold II, kind of figuring out how Belgium

became their own independent state. Seeing how their government kind of takes shape, it's pretty interesting because at this point in time, you're talking about after the French Revolution, so we don't have any more kings in France. Kings and France are done. That doesn't mean that France isn't still kind of perpetually at war with Britain, obviously, because of Napoleon and everything that happens after that. You still have the kingdom of Britain, who has a king. You still have the Netherlands, I believe.

Mainland Europe is Lucy Goosey. Yeah, a lot of land up for grabs. So it does make sense that as Belgium becomes independent, that they would become a monarchy. It's such a new country. And it's it's the old way of doing things. It's not this brand new idea that's going on in France. But at the same time, this is the first time I believe that a king takes a step outside of his kingdom and just becomes a sole sovereign owner of another country.

Yeah. But doesn't have any of the I guess like because this ends up being a situation. I know we're already getting in the weeds. Bear with me for a second on this thought. he ends up having a Senate. So it's a constitutional monarchy. So he doesn't really, almost it's a, like, it's not a token thing, but he lacks a lot of the control of a traditional king. He looks down at this other country and he says, I can really be a king down here.

And for a period of what, 20 years or so? 23, I think, yeah. Yeah, he does some real messed up stuff. Hey, on a more positive note, before we get into the truly depressing shit, We're starting a Patreon. I for, yes, yes, we are. Sorry, I forgot that we were going into it, even though we talked about it right before the episode. We got a new slurdy strain that we're hitting here that's kind of doing some fun stuff.

But yeah, our Christmas gift to you after all of these years. And hopefully and unselfishly a gift to us. Yeah. A Patreon. Something that we can do a couple episodes a month on, probably put out a teaser on a Monday, have a traditional episode on Wednesday, free everywhere. And then on Friday maybe is when we're planning on throwing out a Patreon episode. It's not going to be a full episode like we do.

I mean, we put a hell of a lot of research into these two and what feels progressively more like three hour episodes are. This one is going to, this one will just sail past three. I'm already guessing. Who knows? But yeah, it's a good hit. 30 minutes, hour, somewhere in there of pretty much anything. probably what a lot of the patterns are going to be or going to be something from this episode that we want to eat into a little bit more but can't put out a four-hour episode intentionally.

Or we've had a list of stuff from previous episodes that we've done, that we were like, this can't support a full episode, but it's still interesting. So we're going to be going back. Think of them almost as a little like companion podcast. Sometimes they're going to have nothing to do with it because a standalone topic just comes out of, you know, out there and there's nothing to tie it to. but a lot of it is going to be just tied into something that we've probably already done. It's going to be $5 a month.

You'll get two episodes. And honestly, what this kind of allows us to do is how many times have you been listening to podcasts for research and you're like, Jesus Christ, it's a lot of ads? So we've been relatively ad-free. We've made certain attempts. But we like the concept of trying to remain ad-free, at least not having a ton to kind of interrupt the flow. the podcast and you guys listening to it. Patreon is our way to basically continue doing this, try to do it a little bit more, try to find some other mediums to get information out. We would love to do a video companion where we could have a, I want a fucking green screen

behind us so bad so we can just have images of things while we're talking. But that's the kind of goals we have for this. And you guys subscribing to this and supporting the podcast that you have loved for the last three years and listen to. But no, this is just something that allows us to remain ad-free or mostly ad-free on the longer-form stuff by just getting a little love, I guess. Yeah, imagine that an investment into Patreon and could potentially lead to seeing Chris and I reenacting a civil war. For less than a cup of coffee a month, you can support us. Yeah, we're not going to play the sad music that they do for the ASPCA. but we'll have some more details probably next week

as we kind of get things settled up and kind of ready, but it's going to be a lot of fun. We have already kind of front-loaded some of the recordings, and it's just cool to be able to know that we can kind of zero in on something instead of knowing that we have a full history to tell. It's just a very deep look into something. Not saying that they will get picked, But this also gives us an opportunity when we get recommendations that maybe it's not

media enough to do two. We love to do the two and a half three a little bit longer. That kind of feels like our wheelhouse. And I think you guys like the longer form stuff. This allows us to not have to skip over interesting stuff just because we can't talk about it for three hours. So it gives us a chance to get into more niche stuff. And yeah, got anything else?

No, I think we've held you for long enough. It's time to figure out who Leopold the second one. was. All right. Oh my God, big announcement. I'm still right now. Yeah. I can't believe I forgot it after we talked about it.

Belgium's a pretty interesting story geographically because it's kind of in the worst place that you could ever want to be. So Belgium is just like, this is why I feel like this is going to be a long podcast and why this strain might be the new strain to go to. Belgium is like that lot in the town where kids just came to fight because the parents wouldn't let the kids have fights on their property. And so, you know, I'm sure that it really exists. You know, in real life that probably did exist. But this is just where people fought.

So like if they're like, we're going to go to war, France is going to war with Prussia or whatever. They're like, fucking that area that we always fight in right there, we'll meet you there and that's where we're going to fight. That's where Waterloo happened, right? Yeah, and it's one of those things where it's like, whoever wins just to keep or gets to keep it until the next war. And you got to imagine, even if that was a country before this, the territory is just like, Jesus Christ, every couple years, the guys just come in here and like ruin our shit. It has to not be a super desirable place to start a country. No, that probably the most job, secure job that you could have in the Belgian territory back then was the flag changer. because you knew that you were going to be running up a different flag every couple years probably.

A mason or a builder would be good because you're just like, oh, they torch the town again. Yeah. Like, oh, no. A cannonball repair service. You have a mobile cannonball repair service. Yeah. But we're not talking about that long ago. So basically where Belgium is now, this territory was passed around like prison cigarettes,

between France, between Austrian, Netherlands, Spain. There's going to be some other players that show up. but as far as what's being hit here, it's kind of interesting because Britain doesn't always come up where Belgium is. It's almost like Britain thinks, yeah, it's too far south for us to worry about. We're driving or we're driving directly into France. Whereas France is like, we're touching you, so we're just going to sneak over. They never had a chance to focus on anything but France.

Pretty much. Fucking France. Following the dissolution of the first French empire, which was Napoleon. Belgium was under the control of the Netherlands. This is 1815. So it's the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, not to be or not to be confused with the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

And I believe it's because there's the lowlands and then there's kind of more the Netherlands proper. So yeah, so this is the Netherlands, then there's Luxembourg, and then there's Belgium, Benelux. It's just there's so much stuff in such a little compact area. 1830, Belgian Revolution gave the area its freedom finally pretty much they wouldn't be recognized by everyone, Netherlands, until like 1839, which is funny because they already have a king and a government and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, of course they're not. They're just like, you guys just.

So you just left and then you want us to be like, yeah, we're cool. 1830, like I said, Belgian Revolution happens. It's put under a provisional government and then a parliament. July 21st, 1831, Leopold I becomes king. Now, this wasn't Leopold, or this wasn't Britain's first hope for Leopold. He was actually going to be put in Greece,

as the king of Greece that was just had newly won their independent, or I guess you can't call it independence, but we're under a crown that was mightily weighed upon by Great Britain. How do you end up picking this place over? Greece. And this is not Belgium bashing. This is me just saying like, did he, maybe he didn't go down there?

Because if you go down there and he's like, look at this water. Like, look at this place. Greece was situated, but it was still a little shifty for a king. You were very far away actually from the, your support system. Okay, that makes much more sense. You were and it wasn't really rock solid that you weren't going to be challenged pretty quickly.

The Ottomans are right there. Yeah. You're pretty far. south to be, you know, feeling pretty good about it. So he does end up becoming king of Belgium. He had spent some time, I believe it was in the Russian army just from where he had come from before this. Russian or Russian? I believe Russian at this point is where he was.

He was 40 years old at the time. He had already had a wife. She had died in childbirth. This is Leopold Uno, right? One. Yes. Okay. the Belgian government, partly because he wasn't French, because they're like, France is still too close. And if we get a French king in here, he's going to be much more likely to flip us

back into France. Yeah. We just want to be free. So of course, the Brits are like, yeah, he's not French. This is going to be great. He was also a Lutheran, which seems like kind of a weird choice at the time because you have Protestants and you have Catholics. I'm just trying to figure out if you're like a, you're like a diplomat for a country and you're trying to explain and figure out who you want to support. They're like, okay, who do we have that we can support for the crown of Belgium? And they're like, we have like three guys. And they're like, okay, what about him? He's like, no, he's this religion. They're like, okay, damn it, but he's French. And then he's like, well, how about this? He's a good religion. He's like, oh, he's also part French. He's like,

God damn, we can't pick him either. You're having to find the mix of like they have to be a nationality and a religion just so for you to support them. Or you just get desperate enough that you go one way or the other, I guess. And it's not personal preference. It's the strategy of making sure that they're not beholden to one of your future enemies. Or someone that you can marry into very easily. It's just, it's like having a head coach of a college football team be chosen by all of the other teams around it. I know we, I always say this every time we do a European episode. It's so fucking weird.

Yeah. No, we're going to get some weird stuff. It is literally, it is like a Mexican soap opera. Pretty much. Yeah. The dance. who's up for the king, Eduardo, and you just see the guy turn. Well, and this even throws more into it.

He marries Prince Luis, or Prince Louise of Orleans. She was French, so he couldn't be French, but he could marry a French Catholic woman to ingratiate himself to not only the Catholics, but to the French to say, hey, even though we're independent, you guys have a queen that's installed in this country. The French still got their foot in the door. Yeah. Okay, so.

His mother, Luis, was Louis's daughter, right? I believe so. Okay, so King Louis, Philippa, France. Yes, his daughter was Luis and then married Leopold I first. Who, Leopold's the first last name was, what was it like? Saxe-Coburg, Sawfeld or something? It was his order. The Sax-Coburg, I believe, was where they come from, like their lineage, their line.

It's so much easier to talk about someone when there's only like two of them up to that point. Yeah. Yeah, Louis the 16th. That's going to be fun. At what point, like how many Louies were before this and what did they change their name? Well, and we even ran into this because we haven't gotten to the Habsburg part of this. I was like, can you believe that Leopold II was a Habsburg? I was right.

Leopold the second was a Habsburg. It was Leopold the second of the Holy Roman Empire that was a Habsburg. Okay. But because the Habsburgs are. are fucking everywhere. You still get, you found your way, you thought it was going to be a Habsburg, and then you're like, oh, it's not a Habsburg.

And then they fucking snuck a Habsburg on you. I didn't catch it there. I caught it with his wife. Yes. So, Louise and Leopold I have a child. I believe it survived like nine months. It was a boy named Philippe.

This is going to be something that's going to return. Their second son, child Leopold, Luis, Philip, Maria, or Mary, Victor. Just to clarify, we weren't saying that

Philip one, or Leopold one's wife was a Habsburg. We were just simply saying that that's where the naming and everything. Yeah, it all comes back in. The Habsburgs will sneak into every monarchy that we talk about. So yeah,

King Leopold is actually the second son that they had, the way this pretty much always works, the first son is going to be the error in most of these situations. He ends up dying nine months later after he's born. They have Leopold. Leopold's going to be the heir apparent. He was born April 9th, 1835,

followed by Prince Philippe, who got the name of his dead older brother in 1837. Then you have Charlotte that comes around in 1840. I feel like she kind of got the short end of the naming stick with Leopold and Philippe and then Charlotte. He also had two legitimate brothers because, of course, back in that day,

you just kind of always had a side check if you were a king. Relations with Leo or Leopold the first and Leopold the second really fucking weird. Weirder than I think I would expect out of a royal as far as

if Leopold the first ever had to talk to Leopold the second about anything. thing, he would just send one of the scribes in the court to go tell Leopold the second thing. Go talk to the boy. Yeah. And then if Deuce ever wanted to talk to his dad, he had to, what was it? He had to petition for an audience to be able to go in and speak to his father.

Dad's fucking busy, man. Yeah, but it's so weird. Because that's going to create a productive, well-rounded human being. Yeah. His mother was better. this is at a fun time in his so the first son so because i thought this too i was like obviously he's getting the name leopold is his first name if he's the first son so i was like philippe's grandpa no what i was saying is what i'm getting at is i was like well obviously the first son the one that died yeah his name had to be leopold and

then after they died they're just like okay so we're going to name the next one leopold too it wasn't actually leopold the kid that died was louis philipold and then i'm sorry philipald the kid that died was louis philipal Louis Philippe was his name. So they named him after the grandfather. Yeah. And so it just happened that the second kid was just named Leopold from the get-go. And then the third boy, they just dropped to Louis and went with Philippe. They were just, it was a named salad that they were spinning around.

It's starting to sound pretty French in there. Yeah, for sure. But they're right next to him. So of course it's going to be that way. His mom was a sweeter lady. She still had a good time. making fun of Leopold's nose because Leopold had quite the beak on him. I think it was one of those situations because they didn't get along.

The parents didn't get along. And I think it was one of those situations where they just talked shit about each other to the kids. Or the mom saw the kid and was just like this, oh, you're your father's heir. And so she was mean to him. But yeah, he did not have. And I'm not putting any of this on the parents. No. Because what this guy's going to do goes above and beyond that.

but weirdly enough, like, yeah, this dude did not have what you would consider a conventional childhood. No, and he loved his mom. I think she was certainly nicer than the scribes that came from Leopold I first to talk to the son. I'm sure the scribes didn't make fun of his nose. He had this interesting penchant, even though he was a dog-shan.

Even though he was a dog-shut student, he liked drawing and he liked geography. Those were like the two things that he cared about. But another thing that he cared about was the social politics of what was going on. So he would hang around the court. Even though he wasn't able to talk to his dad about the things that were going on, basically everybody in his dad's cabinet would sit around and have political conversations with dues. So you basically have a king and you have a Senate.

So it's a constitutional monarchy. And that's how it's founded from like the very gick, the very gico. So what's crazy about this too is you have this kid who your dad is the first. First king of this new country. I can't remember when the last time like a country was formed or anything like that. But that sounds kind of weird to be like, oh yeah, like we're this new country. So you're just a new country. Do you think the reason they also did that and were able to kind of get their independence from the Netherlands,

is because it was getting to that point in history when borders were kind of getting real hard to push and to get other land from other countries. And so once they formed theirs, they were just like, if we could just get support from other countries that don't like the Netherlands, I bet they'll support us from our sovereignty and everything. And the Netherlands was like, fuck, they teamed up with Britain. It was just a strange bedfellows, I think, in Europe. Everybody was kind of swinging with each other and it depended on who was causing a ruckus where. And also, who was married into the families to be like, okay, I really like that daughter. they're going to help me out. I'll jump in on France's side. But think about this. Like, think about Europe in the sense of once there was a certain point when there were just a number of countries in

Europe. Countries were never really added. They were always just swallowed up by another country, and the countries that maintained there got bigger. France moved its borders in on this area, but then it got pushed back, but it never like really opened up the door for new countries. I guess Belgium would be, in this situation, more northern Europe. I'll always. I'll be, I'll be in this situation more northern Europe. know why I'm fix-hitting on this. I just completely forgot about all the new countries in Eastern Europe. We're in the Soviet bloc and everything like that that got carved out of there. Yeah, and then you also have to factor in everybody that was under colonial rule that didn't gain their independence.

Until later, they become countries. We've got to move on them spiraling on this. But I also think that there's a big deal, too, because borders have to be redrawn after World War I. Well, even before that, when Napoleon, Oh, yeah, yeah. Rolls in and starts taking everything for the French Empire. Like, you have to, once you finally beat Napoleon, you've got to be like, okay, this territorial line was drawn here.

We want all of our shit back. Then all the countries that beat him is like, no, no, move the light, move the line. Yeah, there's going to be arguments about that stuff. So it's never going to be a very clean situation. So Belgium has a fairly solid king. I believe Leo the first was actually a pretty good king as far as what he did. I think he was pretty well liked. unfortunately he was a bad dad yes and again the king is this is kind of a figurehead type deal the king isn't

just like an oh my rule it's not a monarchy in the sense of being like what i say goes for the entire country that's going to be a little bit later in this story the senate is where the power of the people comes in that's how things happen the king is almost a like ceremonial ambassadorial role because guess what it's Europe you just have a king well he also can be in charge of like public works and shit like that like he's not he's not running the day to days but he's like we need a castle here we need a hippodrome here people love buildings yeah you get to be you get to design all the buildings yeah do you get to put all the museums in this country you basically are just like here's some blocks build us something cool yeah i probably spent

most of his day watching HGTV, just trying to figure out how to do some of this stuff. At 18, after being a lazai fair student, having a not-great-dad, having his mother die, I believe, when he was 15 years old. He's put into an arranged marriage in 1853 at the age of 18 with a Habsburg daughter of Archduke Joseph of Austria. Her name was Marie Henriette of Austria. Marie-Henriette says like she was an awesome girl. Marie Antoinette Marie Henriette Yeah

Maybe one of them had a grandfather named Antoine And one of them had a grandfather named Henry Not saying there's any like really I'm not like a tin pole Had they'd be like same but no No it's it was just weird how it was that like Yeah There's a lot of endings of names

That always seem to stay the same in these So You don't I think Marie was cool Because like Marie was down to earth She's like girl next door She's a Hasberg So I'm not sure how attractive if she was. But

she had an appreciation for like people that were kind of like lower social, you know, lower social classes took care of our own horses. Loved him so much. And she kind of comes in with this, what did they call them when they were

together? They said a stable boy and a nun but it was like flipped. So they said stable boy and none, but when they said none they were talking about Leopold. And the stable boy they were talking about Marie. Marie loved the last. Which is a real bad thing, unfortunately, if you get married to Leopold II, because he was not a laughing man.

He didn't enjoy the kind of footloose and fancy free lifestyle that Marie liked to live. Also, in a way aroundabout way, so Marie is the granddaughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold II. Fucking Europe, man. She marries a guy who has her grandfather's name and is even in the right order. Yeah. It blows me away. You think she thought that for a second? She's like, oh my God, are we related? You're a Habsburg. Honey. Chances are good?

Yeah. Yep. Yeah, it's all just one weird cauldron. They just didn't like each other. Leopold again was just oddly serious. He only really liked politics and geography. Marie was fun. She was always a blast at parties.

At the age of, I believe it was five. Leopold the second is crowned Duke of Brabant I think we decided in 1840 Basically the Duke of Robin is the guy that's in charge of Receiving and traveling to kingdoms for like royal visits Does it serve in a Prince of Wales type situation where it's just it's that ceremonial position That you know that's the heir but it's also supposed to kind of get them used to the diplomacy Yeah, aspect of it

And he was dog shit at the diplomacy It's like king training is what it is. Probably. He goes... You're getting made that and you're just like, fuck. He goes over to France, and the French are like, this guy sucks. But his wife is awesome. So Leopold has to sit there and just eat shit in the French court is his wife that he doesn't particularly...

Marie comes away wine, bong. Yeah. He has to sit there on his hands while his wife is the life of the party. But again, if you're trying to foster good relationships, you need to be. somebody like Marie there because Leopold's just going to tank everything. It's like game night. Yeah. You can't have just a fucking downer.

Like the only reason, if you got a downer in a relationship, the other spouse has to be cool enough that you're like, okay, no, bring him because she's got a lot of energy. You know, she'll make up for it. I think that's why when Leopold II ends up getting sick, he basically gets told by his doctor, hey, I want you to go spend some time in Egypt. I'm sure the dryness of the air and the heat was probably. good for whatever was ailing him. You need to go down there and heal yourself.

They weren't going to let Leopold go by himself because he sucks. I know there are probably still places where people can go to try to recover from certain things just because of the climate. Altitude, climate. Yeah. But just at one point, that was literally just like the thing that wrote on the prescription. It's like, I don't know. What do I do, Doc?

And it's just hands it to him. It's like, fuck, you got to go to Tibet, man. You got to get up in the mountains. What do I take for this? I don't know, go to Egypt. Yeah, maybe. So that way if you die, you're far enough away that it's not my fault. Well, it's like, if you're a doctor, have you been to Egypt?

Do you know exactly what's going to cure? Is this just something you've heard 100 other doctors send people to? What do they call those pharmaceutical reps? There's just an Egypt rep that comes in and is just like, you know, Egypt's pretty nice if people like that dry air that should go to Egypt, giving them a little kickback. He's the one Arab guy in Belgium that's the Egyptian. pharmaceutical rep. We're in a vest that says Egypt on it. Penns that say Egypt.

Marie has to go with him on this healing adventure. This is at the time, and this is kind of a little foreshadowing. The Arab empires, which Egypt was at the time, they had a Pasha, didn't still get long. We're past the Crusades, but we're still in a time frame where this, I guess, is. Are we ever really past the Crusades? still going on today, I want to say. But the fact that it was sending him to Egypt into Arab territory as this Christian nation's

era parent, it seems odd to me. He goes, he spends time down there. Is you sure I'm going to be okay? Yeah. He floats along the Nile. He sees all of the beauty and all of just the things that make Egypt great, the pyramids, the sphinx, all that stuff. And he just takes it in and he's looking around and he's thinking, wow, this.

is a part of an Arab kingdom. This is something that's really incredible. And then he looks at Belgium and he's like, we don't got shit. No. Because again, this was a country where people just kind of like came in to fight. So country's not really that rich. And now has the ability to do taxes and actually make its money's

not going outside the country and everything. But he's seeing all these places of these like long standing established kingdoms where there's been a huge like history to it. And he starts to kind of put together the theme of some of these places he's going to are owned by places that are like his neighbors. So he's constantly seeing colonialism. And he's just like, he goes through someplace and it's really cool. And he's like, so like, do you guys run yourself?

They're like, no, we're part of the British Empire. And he's like, you don't say. Huh. What about those islands over there? French Polynesia. And they have a ton of money. Yeah, this doesn't sound too bad. So the two continue to travel.

They'll go through Greece. I believe they hit India. And they hit Italy. Somehow he is, I'm sure, was raised potentially a Lutheran. Maybe he was raised a Catholic by his mother more. Is this during the like the 50 or 1854 to 1865 timeframe? Yeah, I believe this is when they go up to meet the Pope. Yeah.

So I think and I would imagine you would just kind of work your way because he goes India, China. He goes to Egypt, other North African coastal countries. like along the Mediterranean. I don't think you can come back up through the Mediterranean without making a stop and seeing the Pope. Yeah. Any ruler, I'm sure, but if he was Catholic... The Pope finds out that you were close

and you didn't come by and pay tribute or whatever. You just get a nasty letter like a month later. It's like, heard you were in the area and you know where I live. The Holy See. There's a fucking city. It's safe, man. It's behind walls.

You'll be fine. Don't worry about it. just to prove maybe how much Leopold II loved his country of Belgium, Leopold spoke English, he spoke German, and he spoke French. French is the language of basically like of diplomats in Belgium. Most of the country spoke Flemish. He didn't even bother himself to learn the language of the majority of his people. Because that's what they spoke in the Netherlands, correct?

I believe so. in that area that kind of Flanders-ish area, they spoke to Flemish, which of course we talked about. That was fucking Flanders too, wasn't it? Yeah, this is Antwerp. This is the diamond heist that we talked about. This is that area.

So not only are we talking about them in the future going to be transporting in rubber and ivory, this is also where the diamonds start flowing in. Where are the diamonds coming from, Chris? Africa. I'm trying to do the time frame of saying like, what what country is the quickest to fuck up as soon as it's a made a country and I'm like okay United States 1776 when was the civil war or anything like that over and oh fuck when was the

Mexican-American war I don't know if another country we're gonna have to go back and figure out what that time frame is because it doesn't take long for Belgium to start being known for the wrong well actually they're not known for the wrong reasons for a while but they're doing that stuff for a good period of time before they go zero to crazy unless than 80 years. That's one generation. Pretty damn fast. Another place that he ends up hitting

is Spain. Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing. If you want to go see the spoils of colonialism, go to Spain. He goes and he looks at all of the ledgers from like the, I believe it was the

17th and 18th centuries. He's just walking through with whoever's running in Spain at that time and they're walking through like a cathedral ruler of the palace and he's like see that over there he's like yeah south america he's like see that big fucking gold statue over there and he's like yeah and he's like south america see that uh golden statue over there yeah central america are you guys still over there uh i mean kind uh not really yeah he'll see that with his brother-in-law in the the attempt to go back but to pull up the 17th and 18th century ledgers of all of the ships coming from the new world

and just seeing how much money they're bringing in in his mind he's like it's got it's calling your bust yeah belgium needs this this is how you put yourself on the map we are never going to get any bigger uh-uh i think that was his mindset because he said belgium is a small country of small people and he's like at this point in his head i think he's looking at like the precariousness of the situation and thinking to himself, new countries probably, statistically speaking, might not last that long, actually, because we wouldn't know that because they're no longer in existence. But you have to have that economic strength. And that's not going to exist within this small area that you've just been able to carve out

for yourself. You can get started on it, but you need something that you can start drawing as like an outside sorts of income. And that's all he's seeing examples of all these kinds of. countries he's probably trying to emulate. Well, there are a time when a lot of colonial possessions have already been eaten up.

So his father Leopold I was going around too because he has a belief that they could use a colony. But again, he has the belief. The rest of parliament and the rest of the Belgian people are like, no. We saw what it was to be passed

around from country to country. Run stuff here. Like, we have just been a country. for the bananas haven't turned yet and you guys are like oh hey I know we're now

a country but let's go out and put in resources to try to find someplace else and they're like no we need to make sure

that no one else takes us over for a little while we need to keep like stuff locked down all resources stay here let's keep our guards up

let's try to build ourselves up we might be able to do that later but also we don't really want other people to feel like we felt

just basically never knowing who was in charge. The Senate's barely running this country. We're brand new. You want us to run a second country? Surrounded by other countries' possessions that could easily take them over. And there were some pretty nuts things that were put on the table. I didn't realize this, but the time frame kind of lines up. Leapold I was making incursions into Texas because Texas wasn't a part of Mexico anymore.

And they weren't a part of the United States yet. So they were trying to figure out if they could go in and buy colonial properties in the name of Belgium and Texas. That's fucking weird. Yeah. They also tried to make a move on the Philippines, talking to Spain. Okay, no, okay. It doesn't seem that weird because I have a list of it. They tried to buy it.

And I think this is mostly proposed by Leo Deuce. One and two, depending on when it happens. Yeah. island off Argentina they're like no thanks lakes in the Nile Delta Egypt was like nah land in Fiji

you're not getting rid of that like little real estate as there is mm-mm have you seen it there Taiwan or part of Taiwan everybody wanted that and then the Philippines and everyone that had them was just like

no man like we've had these for a while you can't have them you don't have that much money. You can't afford it. And why would we give away a moneymaker? You're not going to pay us more than what their expected value is going to be to us. It's just, yeah, can you imagine that? Like, you see the offers that, like, corporations get and you're just like, how are they worth that much? And you're like, it's that possibility of what they're going to be making in the future and their potential growth for a country. You're like, well, we plan on having this thing forever. So we really

don't know what price to tell you, except no. And there's also, this is a pretty sped up history, but you have Leopold the second, who wasn't around for when the Netherlands were really bothering Belgium, reading a book written by somebody in the Netherlands about taking control of Java down in Indonesia and about how they ran that colony down there and about how they made so much money for the Netherlands. So somebody who's in line to be king of a nation that was just overrun by the Netherlands for hundreds of years back and forth is now reading about how the Netherlands went and colonized Indonesia. How did they do it? Was it called Java, how to manage a colony?

Yeah, that's what it was. And it was like it was a VOC book. It was the East India Trade Company book that they were just like thinking of starting a colony, huh? This is what you need. Yeah, it's like the video in Dodgeball. Yes. First look at the patches of O'Hul-A-N. Except for Patches-A-Hul-A-N is wearing wooden shoes and he wasn't in a wheelchair.

Leopold's just reading this. He's like, it seems so simple. Well, and his dad's probably like, hey, so, oh, no, he wouldn't have said, hey, son, what are you reading? Somebody else on the court that had remembered the time when they were fighting with the Netherlands. Like, hey, man, what are you reading? Like, uh, how to start a colony from the Netherlands? And they're like, oh, you don't know because you weren't alive. Hey, do you want to talk about it?

They're like, no. I will tell you it works. It is effective. You're reading the right material if you want a colony. 1850, like I said, just tracing back a little bit. Leopold's mother dies. He's 15 at the time of tuberculosis. He's 15 at the time.

Yeah. Tuberculosis is a real nasty bitch back then. His sister Charlotte would end up marrying Maximilian the first in 1864, only for him to be executed in 1867 as the emperor of Mexico by the Mexican Republic, because this was kind of like the French's attempt to push back in after Mexico had tried to take its independence from Spain. Because Louisiana and Louisiana territory and everything. So Maximilian goes back in. Not around for a long time. Mexican Republic felt pretty good about getting away from Spain. They're not going to have any more incursions

from Europe over there handling it. Think of trying to explain that and be like, oh my God, where did he die? Hold on. It was some place called Mexico. Well, where's that? Apparently there's Americas across the ocean and he was trying to fight Spain for it. But then there were also these other people that are now the Americans. And then there's these other fucking crazy people called, was it Tahikins or whatever?

Texians. Texians and everything. They seemed crazier. Yeah, he died over there. What was he fighting for? I don't know. Well, this was the Mexican Republic. So this wasn't even the Spanish he was fighting.

This was the Mexican people that just beat the Spanish. And then they had the incursion come back in from Europe. I'm like, nah, we're not doing this shit again. So Maximilian will play back into this role or back into this story in a pretty weird way. But Charlotte, who's now Carlotta, because that sounds a lot better over in Mexico. than Charlotte. That's the whitest girl thing. I'm trying to think what that would equate to.

Okay, your name's like Sherry. And you go to France and like, I went to school in France and I came back as Shetty. Shetty. Like, no, you're fucking Sherry still. Carlotta comes back over and she's pleading in Spain. Charlotte. Pleading in France, Charlotte. And she's pleading in Belgium saying, you need to go over and help my.

husband, he's getting his ass cleaned up by these Mexicans that are just, they're not, they don't want us back. Please go rescue my husband. She bounces around just hoping, driving herself into madness. And eventually, I believe it's in 18, or it's like a month or two after 1867 when he gets killed. She returns to Belgium. And Leopold the second's like, hey, your husband's dead. Sorry. She goes into this madness and she just basically stays in Leopold the second's court for the entirety of the rest of her life,

just kind of ranting and raving because she lost her husband. She just becomes like the court I'm trying to think like, who's that? Honestly, she just kind of showed up one day and she fucking talks to herself and shit and people are actually scared to go over

and like say anything. So like, but I mean, she doesn't mess with anything. She doesn't hurt anybody. She's the mist of mista lady. Get me out of here. Oh my God. Can you imagine that is like when people come into his court and there's just this woman walking around?

They're like, who is that? They're like, you're not going to believe this. She's kind of like a pet, to be honest. She has no real power. She's my sister. The marriage between Leapold and Marie actually did bear. some fruit. It was bad. They did produce four children.

Kind of intermittently, they would be angry at each other. Then they would try to have an error because, again, Leopold II's going to need an error. And he has to do it with his wife because that's how you keep the line going. That's how you make sure your kids have. It's this weird balance of like Game of Thrones type shit

being based off of like historical stuff. Your bastards were no good to you. Maybe for like a weird, like little not very important alliance or something, but you had to make sure that your kids were legitimate. You wanted a son first, maybe two sons first, and then you wanted daughters,

because then you could just be like, oh, fuck it. They're just girls, we can just give them out to this guy. Political pawns. Yep, and join our kingdoms together. They were bait together. Kids were fucking currency, man. They were.

Very much were. The second child that they did have was a boy. He would be Leo's heir. I say would be Leo's error because in 1861, he ends up dying at the age of nine from pneumonia. The daughter that they had before that, Louise, again, we're getting into the fun name, ends up marrying somebody named Prince Philip. Prince Philip was somebody outside of the family in 1875.

They break up in 1896. She never remarries. Second daughter, Stephanie, 1881, marries Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria. They have one child together. It's a girl. She ends up finding out that she's not going to be. be able to bear any more children. Rudolph kind of goes off into a drunken haze,

starts hooking up with as many people as possible, ends up committing a murder or a murder suicide with this side piece. Her name was Baroness Marie von Estra. I love Europe so much. There's such a love-hate relationship with it. And everybody sees this. This is all on full display. That happens in 1889.

His third daughter, Clemmy, glad to hear that this happened, ends up marrying Napoleon the fifth. So the Napoleon. line made it to a fifth. Napoleon that had to be vanquished for Belgium to become a country. His fifth in the generation, it's not his sons,

but the Napoleonic family. You still got to be kind of like, at what point, how many generations away are you just like, yeah, that was my great, great grandfather. Yeah,

I fucking know what he did, man. I can't change my name. We're good again. Somehow we're good again. Yeah, she would end up marrying Napoleon the 5th. Leopold treated his daughters pretty poorly, just like Leopold's dad treated him. It's very generational in how this goes.

We're going to talk kind of after his life about the things that he did to try to keep his daughters from inherited money. I mean, that's what it was. They weren't important to him. He didn't need to pay them attention or anything. Fuck, he barely paid his wife attention except for the times that they had to get together to try and to make it. all of a sudden he's got another girl and he's like, motherfucker. Yeah, he has himself another

little side piece later, a little tenderoni later. We'll talk about that. And he ends up having two more daughters, but he wants to figure out how to disinherit his daughters. Not because they were bad. Not because they failed him. Not because their marriages all didn't work

out besides Clemmies. Just strictly because he didn't want them to have anything. And this is kind of jumping ahead when we're talking about the marriages of his daughters. just because we're not going to come back and talk about his daughters. We're not going to keep hitting you with like, and then his daughter in this year did this. We're moving on from the family stuff,

and then we're going to get into the heinous. Yeah, that was a good actually move, not to put like the family stuff in with the heinous shit. Well, and we're just, they're kind of ancillary. This is just explaining how weird this whole place was. Okay. Before you get into it, I got to hit this because this is incredible.

Leopold the second. Okay. His first cousin, Queen Victoria. of England. Yes. First cousin. Also, first cousins with her husband, Prince Albert. And apparently they got busy.

All three first cousins, meaning that Victoria and Prince Albert were both first cousins, correct? Yeah. And they're the kings and prince or the queen and prince of England? Europe, baby. It's crazy. So there's like an anecdote about Queen Victoria of England actually teaching, like, teaching, like, Leopold, like, how sex works. Oh.

Because he never had, there was no reason his mom was going to have that. His mom died when he was 15. His dad wasn't going to be like, I don't need to, is there, do I have a royal servant that can explain to my son how it works? And so finally, cool aunt. I just imagine her as that weird aunt that drinks too much and hits on the high school friends. It's just like, Leo, come here.

Come here. And she's got her weird husband, cousin, that they have a really good relationship and everything. And she's like, so this is what you did. Women love it when you do this. She just told them, right? She didn't show them anything. Europe, baby.

I don't know, man. I don't put anything past Europe. Yeah. Yeah, there's really not a whole lot else. Are we at the day for you, December 17th, 1865? Okay, so his dad dies, December 10th. 10th, 1865, King Leo the first. That's how fast they moved on.

At the same time, I get that because, again, you're just handing over the crown. You're not handing over the country. When you had the air. You already knew what was going on. There wasn't a succession crisis. It was just time for the administrative work to be done on it and everything. Probably time for, oh, funeral. Yeah.

I would imagine they tried to cram the funeral in there. You can't let the body sit too long. Yeah, so December 17th at 30 years old. uh leopold the second becomes king of austria or not jesus king of the belgians king of the belgians belgians belgians belgians from belgium well it's the most important thing about it belgian waffles or is it belgium waffles or is it belgian waffles belgian because stuff that comes out of it is belgian okay belgian he becomes king of the belgians who still don't have a colony they don't fucking want one it's like it's not only just the descendant's like, no, we're not getting a fucking colony. The public's perception is

like, no, we're not getting a fucking colony because shit still needs to get fixed at home. We don't need to share resources with some other country. Yeah. And us not see the benefit of that because guess who's going to get rich off of it? King? Yeah. His mission statement, kind of for his rule, was laid out in a note or a letter that he wrote to his brother read, the country must be strong prosperous therefore have colonies of her own beautiful and calm so he didn't even like put that at the end this motherfucker also said belgium doesn't yeah belgium doesn't exploit the world it's a taste we have to make her learn sounds kind of forceful sounds maybe not consensual we have to force ourselves on the world he actually doesn't start out too bad he wants this colonial empire.

People of Belgium and parliament have no desire for a colonial empire. Doesn't stop Leopold. What he does kind of in the beginning, because social unrest is happening pretty consistently, because they don't have universal male suffrage yet. It's only the elites that can vote these people into parliament and Congress. So if they're setting the rules, eventually there's going to be uprisings from the people. Yeah. he ends up signing off on an amendment to the Constitution in 1893 for universal male suffrage.

Women, sorry, Belgian women still can't vote in 1893, but at the same time it at least opens things up a little bit. Prior to this, you have France and Prussia basically bouncing off of each other, getting ready to fight a war. And where do they traditionally fight? Well, not necessarily in Belgium, but Prussia is taking lands around France. and so they're basically growing the size of what they're bringing into France. France is like, well, we have Belgium sitting out in the back of our back of the house. Here, take them. Take them.

We'll take Belgium. We'll fight Belgium again. We'll take them. They have 102,000 people in their army. That's 102 more thousand people we can use to fight Prussia. And eventually, France and Prussia kind of starts tango a little bit. Well, Leopold II's like, more military. Let's spend some more.

money on defense. This is where I said it's like the Ben Affleck meme where he just hears them like Prussia and France going at it and he just is out with the cigarette just looking up at the sky. It's like fuck. Once France and Prussia kind of get their stuff together, they sign a little secret

understanding that Prussia would be fine with France taking Belgium. Is Molotov-Riebentrop pack kind of divided poland type shit? Belgium then jumps in a boat, heads across the English channeled it. England, they're like, felons. Is that you knocking with their wooden

shoes? Or did that actually drop off, when they cast off, instead of a yoke of oppression, was it that they cast off their wooden shoes of oppression? Perfect. Yeah. Guys,

France is trying to take us again. Hey, we know you hate France. They're trying to take us. If you let them take us, that's just more people. We're going to have to fight against you. going to make us. You know how much closer they're going to be to you guys? They're going to have so much more of the land border on the other side of the channel. We're keeping them out. He does end up kind of able to steer France away. We're like, we got the Brits behind us.

You guys still have your problems with Prussia. We're not going to let you take this land again. We're going to put our foot down and we're going to say no. Eventually, right Britain? Yeah. Making sure, making sure that the Union Jacks. flying behind him as they're saying this. And so France does back off a little bit. And so his mind immediately, he's like, all right, safe. We're going to pursue neutrality through defense, whereas everybody else in the country's like, why don't we just be neutral to be neutral and don't have to have an army?

He's like, that's not how you stay neutral. You don't stay neutral by not having an army. That's how you get taken over. I've seen what Europe does. People don't have an army. You guys live here. You know how this all works. No, they're like, it's like

No, no, like we totally don't have an army. You don't need one? It's time to meet a new character in this play. His name is Henry Morton Stanley. Henry Morton Stanley was born John Rollins in Wales in 1841. John Rollins was eventually abandoned by his family. And now I'm telling you this story

because this is the story that John Rollins tells about how he becomes Henry Morton Stanley and basically concox probably most of his life. Born in 1841 in Wales, ends up coming to the United States through kind of like a boarding school

because his family had abandoned him or they died. Some way he makes it over there. Lansing New Orleans. Boarding school is a fancy name for an orphanage. Probably. You guys, or thinking of this way, is this still, oh no, this is at a time when America is America.

Why would they send, it's still at a point when they like, are like, listen, I still got some strings to pull. They still need cheap labor in America. We're going to send them our troublemakers, our orphans, things like that. Yeah, they could use them over there. He supposedly runs into this wealthy New Orleans trader. He ends up taking two names from him in the Henry and the Morton and the Morton and Stanley basically changes his whole image.

Interestingly enough, Henry Morton Stanley fights for both the South and then the North and the Civil War. So he doesn't really have a side in this civil war. He just kind of wants to get his beak wet in a little war, decides that the South isn't the right place for him, goes over and fights in the north. After that, he bounces around for a little bit, goes and fights kind of overseas, comes back, becomes a journalist for the New York Herald.

1871, he goes on this African quest with 192 porters from Zanzibah to find Dr. David Livingstone. Livingston. Um, Dr. Livingston, I presume. Yep. He writes that shit down. He says that this is what he says to Dr. Livingston when he meets him. Uh, it's nowhere in his diaries. It's nowhere in his writings. This was a phrase that was created out of whole cloth when he got back. Dr. Livingston never writes about him saying this to them or to him. In fact, Livingston in his own notes writes that he writes about the reaction of his actual like servant when he sees another European man.

I think it's because he wants credit for saying it. I'll tell you this. I didn't even know beforehand we did that or before studying for this episode that that's who said, Dr. Livingston, I presume. I've seen it on, like, TV shows and movies and shit. Yeah, I would say it came from a cartoon before it came from this guy. Okay. So this dude spends three years making a 7,000 mile journey kind of across the... It's his second one.

Oh, he does one first? Yeah, so he hits up, goes find's Livingston. it's a 700 mile journey this first time he ends up coming back to England and the press just eats it up they absolutely love this story that makes sense 7,000 is pretty that's a pretty big journey

for it's going to be your first attempt he goes into the 192 porters he comes out with less than 50 because while Henry 400 miles well Henry Morton Stanley is hailed as a pretty incredible explorer

he was a pretty bad leader, and he killed a lot of these African porters, or he put them in situations... Oh, this guy's a piece of shit. Yeah, bad guy. Yeah. Regardless, he comes back, and the press just eats it up. The press is like, this is awesome.

You... Tell us about the dark continent. Yeah, you've done something that very few people have. You're going to end up going back for a second journey. This is like people's form of entertainment. Oh, yeah. Like stories like this, you know, in books and things, like that, that's how people experience

the rest of the world. This may be the first introduction that anybody has to West Africa. Yeah. When they're reading about this. Before we jump on the second journey, you want to take a bathroom break? Yeah. Well, hey, there, all you sexy historians, how are you guys doing?

It is time for socials. Where can they find us on Instagram? If they want to follow us, they can find us at historically high on Instagram. That goes the same for threads as well.

You can also find us on Twitter. Tell them about Twitter. Historically high. That's historically H-I on Twitter. And if you want to email any of your comments or suggestions, where can they find us at Adam? Historically High Podcast at gmail.com. Gmail.

All right, and back to the show. Okay, so we got a second journey of Henry Morton Stanley. HMS. He does end up picking up the Daily Telegraph, too. So now he's working for the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph. So now he's got the British attention, the British eye. And of course, that kind of slips into Europe. You have Leopold II just glued to HMS stories in the newspaper.

This is a completely off-topic question. So it was like print media first. Then it was before radio and like actual talking over it, it was the Morse code, the tapping, the telegraph. The telegraph and everything. Were there people that could learn it well enough to listen to stories over telegraph? And that was the first version of radio? I would assume they had messengers, pages that were going back and forth. And not to mention if you're down in Africa, if a great Britain is holding.

I don't mean just in general with the telegraph. Was it ever big enough to where people would learn it from an entertainment standpoint? I don't think you could. Imagine sitting there and you're sitting around the radio and it's just beeping at you and all of you could look at each other at the same time because you understand and you're just like, no, that didn't happen. You're hanging in suspense for something to happen and then the line just goes dead. There's higher pitched and lower pitched beeps for like the male and the female rolls.

Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. So, Leapold's watching this whole thing unfold. this expedition is to basically go down for a complete exploration to map the Central African Great Lakes and rivers, try to find a source of the Nile, which seems like it's always something that's been very important. Think of that story, man. Everyone has heard of the Nile. I found the source of the Nile. Yeah, pretty big deal. Between 76 and 77, they chart the La Lalaba River as it becomes a Congo River. And this is insane. Don't understand it.

Don't get why. The La Laba flows kind of in central Africa. Okay. Loops up north as it comes around the bend and starts to head southwest down to the Atlantic Ocean. Okay. Is where it becomes the Congo River. So there's no break in the confluences of it. It's just the La Laba ends up turning into the Congo River without like a piece of land in between it.

Do you think that's just because that's where it enters the Congo? that's like the delineation. Imagine this. Okay, you have a river in, you have a river in South Korea, and it flows into North Korea. Do you think people know that as the South Korean River or if it was called that?

No, as soon as that thing entered the space, you know, that would be called the North Korean River. Yeah. Or the Kim Jong-un River or whatever. I don't know if they had hard and fast borders like that, because it's literally almost like, is it peaks? Is it going up north?

and then it starts heading down southwest is where it changes from the Lao Lava into the Congo. I don't know. It's so weird. But it also could be maybe the La Laba is where it's flowing from from the source. Yeah.

Yeah, I have no clue. As a guy who still doesn't understand how rivers... That's what it's still known as. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, still knows the La Laba and then it turns into the Congo. So we would have to... Oh, we're... We're...

Oh, we're brahawling so bad. So it would have to be internationally recognized as a, basically, a dual-named river. I would assume so. Why is this so interesting? I don't know. I'm sure there's other ones out there. This is just the first one. Someone let us know.

Yeah. I mean, I still can't figure out how a river can run from south or a river can run from south to north. So this just doesn't make any more sense to me. I get it, but I don't understand it. Dropping water on a globe. It always goes down. It never goes up. It never goes up.

Basically, as they're going in, he's got 228 people. 114 people survive this 900 day driving. Like totally 228 like white people carried his shit, right? It's all African porters. All Congolese porters pretty much at this point. I believe they, no, they started out in Zanzibar for this one again. They would end up tracing the Congo River all the way down to the sea. So they go east to west?

Yes. Okay. All three of the white colleagues that came along. with HMS end up either abandoning or dying. And one of them got real close. He was almost to the end of the track and ended up dying. Is this one, not to jump ahead, but is this the one where he barely comes out alive or is that the first one? That's the first one, I think.

Yeah, he comes out pretty good shape for this. That was probably when he got fucking malaria or something. And the second time they went down, he didn't get it. And the next person, he goes, he's like, oh, okay, so it is a thing. Now listen, this is what's going to happen. happened. You're going to shit a lot of blood. But it happened to me, and I'm fine. I'm still here. Yeah. I didn't die.

I'm back here. Well, ends up coming out the other side. He becomes the second, I believe it was the second European or the second white person to ever cross from east to west, basically to cross Africa. You're always going to have our records. It's cheating and it's bullshit because it's not the fat part of Africa. It's not the top portion that's super long through the Sahara. It's more in central Africa and the shorter distance between. the two. Well, yeah, but it's still

across it. Yeah, yeah, but it's not like you went across the Sahara. I'm not trying to shit on his accomplishment here, but... No, I don't like this guy. I don't know why I'm defending this. Yeah, again, started out 220... Bitch move, dude, go across the fat part. 228 people ends up with 114 survivors.

He ends up lying in his books about how it was more people, which doesn't make any sense to me because I feel like it lessens some things. But at the same time, Leopold's eating all of this up. Stanley puts out a book where he basically says there may be hope for the dark continent.

I believe it's named Dark Continent is the book that he puts out or The Dark Continent, talking about Africa. Leopold's just going through books. He's like, okay, I've got to figure out if he says who owns this place. And that's all he looks for. It's just who owns it.

He's like, oh my God, he never says, is this place unowned? Well, yeah, that's a great thing because the Portuguese had actually ended up laying claim to the mouth of the Congo River on the Atlantic side in 1482. So where they were exploring or where they came out of after they traversed Africa,

the end of it, the most important part to get into the river to get to all the resources is owned by the Portuguese. But it's owned all the way back of 1482, so I'm sure the Portuguese aren't exactly flexing their land ownership. They were just around the coast, it said, because that's all they ever needed to be. Well, in the Portuguese, again, fucked like everybody else, really big into slavery, they didn't have to go into the internal parts of Africa

to get the slaves. The slaves were being brought out and then sold to them. So the system didn't necessitate. Required them going in any further. Yeah, the Portuguese to go in any further. All this stuff is happening. I hate who we've been jaded by history so much

it's such a casual statement. Yeah, they just didn't go in and get their slaves because they just got delivered to them. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where everybody did it and it still doesn't make it right. Yeah. But you can only really get so mad about it for each one of these countries because they did it so much. And it's disgusting and horrible, but this just was their time.

Doesn't make it right. Different part of history. Stanley would return to Great Britain and he would recommend a parliament, which he had done before saying, hey, Central Africa is pretty great. I think we should probably look into getting into there more. He goes on like a fucking book tour. Yeah. is what happens. He's going around Europe.

Yeah. And so he's promoting this story, this new book he's going to write all across Europe. And he ends up meeting up with Leo. It's not even in Belgium. Isn't it in Spain where they end up? Yeah. No, no, no. He said an emissary.

I thought he is in England. I think that's where he ends up meeting him. Possibly. It wasn't Leopold. It was an emissary basically saying, my boss, the king of Belgium, has a deal for you. It's like, hmm. Yeah, I'm not really interested. I'm trying to get the people in Great Britain to sign on.

to this. Maybe I'll come and talk to you later. After Great Britain ends up shooting him down, Stanley's like, I still got that guy in Belgium. Who are you guys with? We're with Belgium. Remind me where? Where's Belgium? Okay, France. Yeah, France right here. And then you have the Netherlands right here. And then we're right here. Okay.

But you have a legitimate country. Like you got a flag and everything. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Pulls this flag out of his pocket. This one. Stanley would end up signing on to a contract. for a yet to be mentioned company for five years, $250,000 a year. He signed a five-year, $1.5 million, or $1.25 million franc contract with a yet-to-be-mentioned company. And the reason that I talk about the company is because we have to go back to Leopold's efforts to try to maybe hide why he would want Central Africa.

Do you think he got so much money? I'm trying to think of like what, because of what he does going forward, he's obviously a person that like has some type of intelligence. Yeah. He's an evil fuck. He's just like Leopold. But when you're looking at it and oh my God, I completely forgot my chair and thought, hang on, I'm going to find it again. Keep going, you're going to remind me. Okay.

Stanley is basically laying out what he sees is the vision for what Central Africa. could be. I got it. Sorry about that. Oh, my God. Sorry about that. Glad we made it back. Yes. Do you think it was a rarity to find like a white guy who had been to Africa twice? And they were like, holy shit, dude, you're still alive? Do you know how many people?

Like, it's rare. One of you guys comes back, but no one comes back a second time. Livingston didn't make it back. Yeah. And so they're just like, oh my God, this guy, we need to pay you a lot of money because we can just keep sending you to Africa. And we don't have to worry about training. new guy. Well, and I think he understood. That's what I say he's also intelligent. They knew what

they were sending him down there for. He knew where to exploit shit. And that's just it is he knew how to exploit shit. Leopold was hoping for a way to exploit shit, but he needed a cover of trying to stop the Arab slave trade. Because at this point, when we're talking about the 1870s, slavery's been banned in the United States less than a decade ago. It's banned in Great Breast. It's banned in Great It's banned in France, but the Arab states are still in full-blown slavery mode. Yeah, just to kind of give a little bit of a time comparison, the year that Leopold II, actually, you know, a sense of the throne, which is 1865. Yep. Same year as the Civil War is.

So history is more recent than you would think that all this is happening. This is when the Christian world has maybe wizened up to the idea that they need to appear to be. be anti-slavery. I say appear to be anti-slavery because we know that indentured servitude and many other ways of basic forms of slavery were still instituted against a lot of different races at that point in time. But you had to come out as completely anti-slavery in the sense of like having auctions for people.

That was how they were looking at it. And the Arab slave traders were still... No more seldom in public is basically... Exactly. We need to appear like we're fucking developed. You need to make them sign a phony. contracts, so you have the rights for their life for seven years. Make them sign it under duress like people normally do.

Interesting, we're talking about that. So, Leopold's going around and he's trying to figure out how he makes this happen. He ends up creating this convention inside of Brussels called the International African Association. He invites multiple different countries. There's scientists there. There's geographers. Everybody is coming in Belgium to me. meet in 1876, as Leopold lays out this campaign to aid and help the people of Africa,

out from under the slave bonds of the Arabs, spread the word of God. We're going to build these stations that have schools for children and have living quarters for missionaries. He's had 11 years to cook this shit up. Yeah. Uh-huh. He's literally just been scheming. This is kind of getting to a point in, because like you said, this kind of shift in the

world and everything where exploiting a country is going to be pretty frowned upon, especially like a third world country. Unless you already had the colony. Of course, unless you've had the colony for, you know, your grandfathered in to some

places. But no, so it's really frowned upon. So he has to basically cook up this thing of making it look like this benevolent, like philanthropic reason that this foundation or this conference, this Brussels geographical conference, he's going to propose this thing,

and he gets these people together, forms this thing called the International African Association. It's made up of all these experts from, you would assume Africa, because they're going to be contributing to how they show their country, all that. No, it's made up of European experts on Africa, which probably didn't know that much. And they want to open up Africa for the betterment of Africa. Like, it's the same shit that's always been touted, but it's something. It's something. somehow phrased in such a way that all the other countries are like, hmm, it's like, yeah, we're going to go, we got to civilize the savages. We want to make this an international thing so we can all pat ourselves on the back.

Being the benevolent philanthropist turned full on rapist that Leopold II was, he goes ahead and he cedes his time to one of the experts on slavery that isn't an expert on. African slavery. So he doesn't really know a whole lot about Africa. He's more looking at what's happening in Spain down there or in the Americas, in South America. And he knows a little bit more about that.

As this guy says he doesn't know a whole lot about what's going on to the slave trade in Africa. Leopold sneaks back yetly goes, if I may, I would just like to volunteer for a one-year term, of course. I would just like a one-year term as the head of the IAA,

the International Africa Association, to be able to lead this. Everybody go back to your countries. Create your own subcommittees in those countries. We will meet again to talk about the problems. Because the slave trade then was being run by who? Arabs. Okay.

So he's looking at this and this is his way in. He's going to have to try to kind of do this a little bit from a public perception. He's got to be perceived to be doing the job he's sent there down to do. Yeah. But what this guy is going to do. do. And I know we keep foreshadowing this and everything is he's going to basically use this as the veneer to hide all the nasty shit that he's actually doing there. Some of the worst stuff. And that's saying a lot. We've talked about some evil fucks. We were having this conversation before

we started recording like, I'm trying to think about how to put this to. Okay. So you have like evil fucks that we've covered before. You have Hitler, you have Stalin, who else will we cover Mussolini, all that stuff. But when you look at what's more evil, is it the ones who have a philosophy that they follow, evil as it is, or is it the one that its philosophy is simply just monetary gain? So it's so indiscriminate. Yeah, I want to say that the ones that have an idea of what they want to do probably has to be more evil because that's directed more of the people of the atrocity that it's going to happen to. Whereas somebody that just understands that the death of millions of people in the process of making more money. I think the indiscrimination of it, though, makes someone more

of like a fucking psychopath. Yeah. To be able to just look at it as like dollars and cents. Yeah, I guess at least one of them has a passion. Or hands. A horrible, horrible passion. Okay, so getting back to it. So yeah, he offers very benevolently that I will lead the group. I will get in there and I will stop the slave trade. I got a guy that actually has been through that area, so I'm already pretty familiar with it and everything. Gets elected head the first year, and then against kind of the bylaws that they created for this thing,

ends up getting elected as the head of the group the second year as well. You know how many meetings the IAA had? Was it two? Two. The first one when he's elected and then the second one when he's elected. Again, this is just something that they want to show people pictures of them, pat themselves on the back that say they were part of this. they really don't give a fuck and we're going to see it

because he has basically like carte blanche over this fucking country. Well, and that's what it is, is Leopold needed a shell company to cover up what was going on here. He gets everybody else involved. Everybody, like you say, is able to pat themselves on the back. They're working in the subcommittees. The IAA after its second meeting basically ceases to exist. It exists only in name. So to people's perception, the IAA was very visible.

This was something that they used, like you just said, to kind of get, themselves brandy points to make themselves feel better in these other countries that they're trying to help, you know, develop Africa and everything. So when people start hearing these names that Leopold is going to come up with for these new foundations or conferences or whatever he wants to call them, he just uses something very similar to the IAA. So the first time he does it is like when he tries to kind of almost blend them. So people's perception of what he's doing with this new foundation where he completely cuts out the other. It gets dissolved. The IA has dissolved like literally the second year after the second year. He himself then creates this pseudo-international African association

where he's in sole control of it. He is the association. So it goes from the IAA to the international association for the search of, or for the exploration of Northern Congo. And that's the first one that he is just in soul control of. Then he creates the IAC, the International Association of the Congo, who actually was raised by foreign investors that then Leopold went and bought out. So as the IAC comes online and like, is this just Leopold? No, no, no, there's other investors that are going to be fronting Stanley's exploration that he's about to go on for his contract. But then Leopold goes around everybody's backs and buys out all the investors. So the sole investor in the IAC.

If there wasn't already an agreement to just be like, hey, would you mind just actually buying this for a little bit and I'll kick you back something with interest? Yeah. I just got to make it look legitimate. I'll cut you in on some future deals. Just let me get a hold of it first. I got to make it look like it's not just me in control here. So the IAC ends up sponsoring Stanley's trip from 1879 to 1884. At one point in time before Stanley was actually chosen for this, kind of before he jumps in there, Leopold had reached out to a French explorer named P.N.

De Braza. De Braza ended up sticking around with the French because he went with Stanley. And at the same time that Stanley is going down to hit the mouth of the Congo River, Braza is also making his way to the land northwest of the Congo River. So he ends up planting his flag northwest of the mouth of the river for France. Pisses Stanley off. He knows that he has to be able to race up the Congo River to be able to beat him to the heart in Central Africa, to be able to place his flag up there. The big problem is to go through the rivers,

you get the lower Congo River that flows into the Atlantic, and then you have a shitload of falls that the river goes through that are impassable to go up river. This is basically like that scene. I can't remember the movie. It was always on T&T. It's the one where... Without a pedal?

No. Just because we're talking about rivers. Yeah, it's without a pedal. No. What's the one where in order to claim the land when they do like the land rush? It's like far and away or something. It's where Tom Cruise has to go out and plant the steak in the ground of like that's their plot of land. I don't know if I've seen that.

This just reminds me of that. So they hear the Belgium's going down there to claim the Congo. And France is like, fuck, who do we have down there? Get him there first. And they did. It becomes a race between Stanley and Braza to make it up to, I believe it was called the Leopold old lake. Of course. It wasn't that at the time.

I think it was because I think Stanley may have no, it was Stanley Lake, I believe because he had named it when he had come through before. They get up there. Braza comes over. He's holding this paper. He's like, Hey, he silly Belgians.

I did go sign a coach. Your wooden shoes, slow you down. I went ahead and signed a peace agreement to buy this land north of the lake. So this is French territory. And Morton's like, fuck you.

You're on the north side of the lake. I'm in the water. I'm going to the south side of the lake. He ends up getting himself a little land for Belgium. And this kind of pushes, Braza ends up having Brazzaville. I believe where Stanley goes and signs

down there is named Leopoldville, which is now Kinshasa, which I believe is the capital city of Congo. Okay. So of course, Leopoldville ends up getting turned into the capital of the Congo. Was it really Leopoldville? I'm pretty sure it was Leopoldville.

God damn. Seriously. He went with Brazzaville. I mean, the names aren't good. I get that, but okay, yeah, this guy's an asshole. It's also the first town that you're building down there. What are we going to call? You can't even do any.

Leopoldville. Leopoldalus doesn't sound right. Leopinapalus. San friend Leopoldeopold. oldo? The other ones don't really work. You're literally trying to base new names of a country off other places that were named after places in their original country.

Okay, all right. I see what you're doing there. As Stanley is down there working on these stations, he just ends up getting sick. And he goes back up to Belgium to be taken care of. He hopes that once he gets a hold of a doctor and the doctor figures out, I'm pretty sure it's probably like a malaria flare up or something because he had to have gotten malaria the first time.

he was down there or the second time he was down there. But he went back in hopes of being like, this is like halfway through his contract. He's talking about Stanley, right? Yeah. Okay. He had it. I want to say that's probably the first time he had it because when they said he came out when he just did the 700 mile one.

Yeah. That he came out like barely. Well, also this is shit that he's writing down. True. But they said that he was like half dead when he came out of that one. Which he might have been fine now that I think about it. Maybe he does. I hope he fucking got malaria.

Regardless at this point, he thinks if I can get up and get to a doctor I can get a diagnosis. Maybe Leopold won't send me back down there. Leopold hears all this word about... He wants to get out of work, note from the doctor. Leopold hears about what France is doing down there with Braza. And he kicks Stanley in the ass. He says, get your ass back down there.

We got to start making some moves. So as Stanley gets back down there and he starts exploring, going along these roads, breaking off from the stations, he starts securing these land deals with local African chiefs and he pulls some pretty stupid parlor magic tricks to scare these African chieftains. Somehow at the time, and this is, we'll come out after the Tesla episode. So they had batteries back then, of course, because Tesla was alive and they had batteries. Just call it what it is.

What? It's a goddamn fucking hand buzzer. Well, it was just a nine-volt, or it was a little battery that was there, a DC battery. And then I didn't understand if it gave an electrical pulse so the hand squeeze would be tighter or it shocked them. Yeah, that's right, because I remember listening to that. And they said it displayed strength. Yeah. Which, I mean, you're still only as strong as your actual, like the muscles in the hand.

Yeah, you can't squeeze harder. Then he did something with a tree that made them think that. Oh. Either or. He lit his cigars of the magnifying glass. Yeah. So he's just showing them all of the powers of the white man. There was another one where he walked up to the son of a chief.

Sorcerer, sorcerer. He handed him his rifle. He says, fire this rifle at me and it will not kill me. The chieftain son ends up firing the rifle at him. And of course, him being Stanley was smart enough to pull the bullet out of it or pull the shot out of it. You hear the click of the rifle. He doubles over in pain and then all of a sudden the bullet comes rolling out of his trousers and he picks it up from out of his trouser leg and he goes, you cannot kill a white man with a bullet. We do not die for anything. He's just trying to make them look at like these godly figures. Fuck, are you serious? Yeah. I didn't hear that part. No, no, no, no. Okay. I'm giving him a fucking look right now.

I understand he didn't get shot. I'm saying the psychological fuckery of that. Oh, yeah. To basically be like, I'm going to trick them to think that we're unkillable, so they won't even try. So when we get here, it's immediate subservitude. Well, yeah, one of the big selling points that Stanley gave to Leopold was he told them they don't have weapons. They don't have an army that can stand up to what we have. I believe they went through this with like two or three machine guns on wheels that they were carrying around with them to basically spook everybody.

I'm sure one demonstration of that. Yeah. You were like, well, fuck. So we get to the contract portion of this where Stanley would hand them over contracts written in French, I'm sure, because or Flemish, one of the two, but if it's, if French was the diplomatic language. It was basically just him where you see the contract where it just like comically unrolls and the fine print gets just finer. These people were-

It's a wonka situation. Yes. These people were used to deals. They were aware of what contracts were and shit like that because there were rulers of villages that had to make alliances, things like that. But these were based upon more of an honor system and everything, but, they did discuss what they were. These guys are writing them contracts that are basically just like, oh yeah, your land rights

will be sold away, but you'll get this and this, and making it sound like, but then in the fine print, it's like, oh, but we also have all of these stipulations and that if you do this, it's going to void the whole contract and we get every bit of your property. From my read on it, it wasn't even that. It was like, we will trade you one bolt of cloth per month. ownership of your land, but not only ownership of your land, when the land is improved, your work will also be required on this land once you sign this contract. You come with the land.

Contract could have said anything in the world because it's French and these are Africans that do not speak the language. They're also doing this under duress. I mean, this is a Native American solely and completely what we did to them. Yes. So because of that, just like we talked about back in like the King Philips War episode, the law in which these contracts were enforced wasn't going to be the law of where these things were signed in Africa. All they had to do was show a world court or the court back in Belgium and be like, oh yeah, they signed the contract. It's official under our laws.

And it's our land. Yes. That's what this means now. Because it just became our land with that. The law of our land is what applies to it. Yeah, so he's assuring all of these land contracts for the International Association of the Congo, not for Leopold under the association. Now, this association is still working under the guise of all like, oh yeah, we're totally building like hospitals and infrastructure. We're going to build railroads.

So, you know, and there's also going to be like, you know, schools. We're going to build schools down there so we can, hey, you guys love Christianity, right? Yeah, we're digging into Africa. Woo. And so this place, you know, this association or which, what is it at this point? It's the IAC, right? Yeah. I feel like I'm talking about Olympic committees. The IAC is still getting donations and he's using these donations to fund Stanley's building of infrastructure and industry that's not going to be used to better the country. It's going to use to have them basically strip mine the fucking country. Well, not to mention the labor that's going in this is not Belgian. It's all African. get away with it for so long because it's never a situation of his like, hey, where did your sister go? You're not kidnapping anyone. People don't know there's people down there. Well, they know there's

people down there. But they're not going to miss any of them. They don't know how many were down there. They know there's beings down there. They don't look at them as other humans. Yeah. But at the same time, there's people that are doing the work. So, right around this time, Portugal's like, wait a second. Where did you guys say you were? You guys were at the Congo River? No, no, that's ours. We claim that all the way back in the 1400s. We're grandfathered into that shit. So, just like Belgium did when they were scared about getting run over by the French,

they run to Great Britain. And Great Britain is looking at it like, well, shit. We know that Brazzos down there with the French. You guys do have a claim dating back to the 1400s, so we will back you. Leopold, on behalf of the IAC, because again, you're lucky because when we're not fighting the French, we're usually fighting the Spanish. You had to come to us with one of the two countries we're always fighting with. Leopold goes into action. It begins campaign to control these claims, saying, well, they have the mouth,

but at the same time, we have all of the interior. We need to be able to get through the interior. It's all asset denial. It's not even about like, oh, no, keep the people safe down there. Don't mess with the people. It's more like, we just don't want France to have it. Well, Britain gets swayed because the IAC and Leopold say, we will grant you most favored nation status. So when trade deals start going on, you will be the first one on the table to get this. Yes, again, it's all driven by money. So Great Britain switches are claimed from Portugal and moves in behind Belgium.

Leopold goes to Germany. Same pitch. Same idea. There will be equal trade going on. down there. This is the only sunny episode where it's the argument about the God and Mac is on their people keep switching their picture on each side of it. I'm sorry, I'm trying not to laugh about this. Again, Europe is fucking crazy. And not to mention, you'll understand why we've got to get the laughing out now because shit gets dark. So he's going around and running this PR campaign

to try to make sure that everything is covered up all while Stanley is down there still picking up more and more land. Do you have the amount of contracts that Stanley had signed with chieftains? No, it was insane. It was like 500, something like that, 300 or 500? Because you'd have like territory that you were just like, hey, where's your territory and be like, see the fucking mountain way over there? And they're like, yeah, it's like, I guess that. And then you'd just go to that mountain and meet the other tribe. And they'd be like, well, yeah, it's from that mountain all the way over to that one. There were just emissaries that would pick you up at the borders of the land. Yeah, and again, it was then their rules.

How many contracts do you guys have? Well, 500. Oh, that's all the tribes. Yeah, there were exactly 500 tribes. Exactly. Yeah, it's everywhere. We got everybody. So France, who has this claim with Brazzaville down there?

They go to France, and they promise France, if they go bankrupt, the lands would revert to France. It's a pretty bold move, I would say, because Leopold is still fronting most of this, with just donations to the IAC. Leopold is doing this. This is not Belgium. Uh-uh. Yeah. This isn't Belgium going to France to get these assurances. It's just the king and his boys. Which is so fucking nuts.

He rolls in, he's like, I'm the king of Belgium. I'd like to buy this country, please. Please. This would be great. Come on, man, we don't have anything. This is when things get rough for the United States. He fooled a president that I forgot existed. Honestly, I'm not quite sure.

He gets a pretty bum deal. Chester A. Arthur, because he comes after Lincoln and the Civil War and everything. And I believe he was not after Lincoln. He was after... Grant? Possibly. Because it went Lincoln Grant, I thought. I think so.

Okay, so at the same time that all this is going on, Stanley is still doing his fucking travel blogger, writer, writing down his tales in the dark continent. and he's sending this stuff back. And it's coming to the desk of Leopold and he's just putting his spin on it and making edits and all that kind of stuff. He's like, oh, we can't tell them we did this or anything like that. And then he's disseminating this information out to the people in Belgium. So they're being told, hey, this isn't costing, you know, this is a philanthropic thing that we're doing down there. We're heading it up.

This can only benefit the people of Belgium. And because it's this adventurous type thing of Stanley down there, they're just, eaten the shit up. He's keeping, he's basically just telling them to pacify them and be like, if you ever hear anything about Belgium later down the road, just remember this is what actually is going on. Yeah, part of his contract, part of Stanley's contract is to be able to write a book once he's done. That's the part of the allure for this, besides just being a general shitbag that he wanted to be. The only caveat with the book was Leopold was the one that got the final edit. So if anything got a little too hairy.

that maybe Stanley added in there, Leopold was able to pull back on those parts and make it look a little bit more bland and vanilla. Chester A. Arthur was pretty surprised with Stanley's work as far as the treaties were going because it was being sold to Arthur as similar to the U.S. efforts in Liberia to kind of try to create this free slavery, free land. Yeah, they said this was at a time because, again, we're just coming off of slavery. and everything like that, where America is trying to do fucking, what do they call it now if someone ruins their public image, damage control? We're in damage control mode.

And so it's not hard to convince, I think it's actually through this guy named, oh, what is his name? He was the former minister to Belgium from the United States. His name was General Sanford. Wasn't a general? Nope.

You could just apparently use the name general back then. He was able to claim the name General because he donated arms to the Northern Army during the Civil War. So basically it's like them giving him an honorary general title. It's like when they give kids the little police badges and like you're an honorary. Okay. Yeah, you can say your police officer today, buddy. Okay, so he's the former minister to Belgium.

He basically gets Leo in with Chester A. Arthur. Chester A. Arthur is like, we're still hurting on, you know, from a perception of the world because of the slavery thing. and yeah, you know what we'd love to go ahead and support you and your endeavors in the Congo. Yeah, you have our backing. Not backing as far as a financial thing, but it's basically just like signing off on it. Turns out that whole Civil War deal and stamping out slavery and reconstruction costs a lot of money. So we'll just sign on to... Again, part of this is also that...

Did we mention there's free trade as part of this? That's what's sold. No, no, that's what I'm saying. It wasn't just the United States being like, oh, yeah, we need to repair our image. It was like, oh, you said what, free trade? Yeah, we forgot to mention that. Every promise comes with free trade. Britain and England or Britain and Germany both somehow have most favored nation status somehow,

because two people can't be the most favored nation. But it's that thing. I tell him. Yeah. He's my favorite. But hey, what was it off of that 70 show? Who's my secret squirrel? and Eric just uses everybody.

This is so distorted and confused by the United States that as they are announcing the deal to recognize the Congo free state as a country. When is it done? It's a state of the union address. Oh, was it? Yes. It is such like a, you could talk about,

you need to be talking about like shit going on in the country during the state of the union. And Chester Arthur gets a, there and he's like, on another note, we are doing stuff to help in Africa. The United States is doing stuff to help in Africa. We are signing off on the endeavors of, you know, King Leopold of Belgium. They mentioned both the IAA and the IAC, just interchanging the names in the speech, because that's how confused everybody is. They're like, well, we heard about that one. That was with all. the experts and everything.

I, okay. Oh, just, they changed a letter. After nothing else changed. Nobody figured out that this was all Leopold's doing. Well, and I don't know if everybody's dumb or he's that smart. No. Well, he gets away with it for a little bit. Yeah.

But then the Brits, I think in the French, start to kind of notice something's up. And of course they did. They knew what they did when they called nice places. They're just sitting there. They're like, things are pretty, have you heard about what's going on in Belgium? They're like, no. Or down in the Congo, they're like, no, it's pretty quiet, almost too quiet.

Like, do you remember when we were doing like stuff? We were colonizing and taking places and, you know, subjugating the populace. They're like, yeah. We kept that quiet too, didn't we? Every time. This is the parents who partied in high school telling their kids not to drink and drive every time they leave the house. Yep. And the kid comes home drunk and the kid comes in when the parents are still awake,

piss-faced, but it's just like, hey, hey. Didn't drive home, right? What are you guys doing up? Don't look outside. Cardiff they won't be there. Yeah, it's a, they kind of sniff something out. But at the same time, 1885 rolls around Berlin, Otto von Bismock. invites 14 nations without African representation to have the Berlin Conference.

And this Berlin conference was essentially the European nations. They allowed America to be there just to kind of watch. Do you think it was a situation where, like, let's say there's delegates between like Britain and France and they're sitting there, and they're talking about what's going on the Congo. And just because they fight so fucking often, one of them accidentally bumps the other one of them, he's like, fuck you, fuck you too. and they just get into fight and forget about the Congo. They just distract each other so much that they both figure it out,

but they can't quit fucking with each other. You just see the French guys slap off, the British guy's cup of tea that's sitting on the table. Like, fuck you, get out of here. This is our area. What do you guys do? You guys have India. Calm down on Africa.

You already have India. And South Africa probably at this point. You're just trying to take the Congo for yourself. You want everything. Basically, this is a sit-down where Africa is the Turkey. at Thanksgiving and they're just going to try to carve up Africa. They're answering this Congo question about the IAC and who they've finally figured out is just pretty much Leopold the second wanting to be the sovereign ruler of this land.

He comes in and he's basically like, attention people, we're doing great work down in the Congo, but things could be going better. I'd like to propose that you all just recognize me as the ruler of the Congo, free state, I will serve as its steward slash king. And I will make sure that, you know, hey, we've been on the up and up to this point and everything. I, A, A, C now, whatever it is. Go ahead and just, yeah, I need more control over this if I'm going to really enact the best philanthropy possible. Like, like, like total control.

Yeah. Is Belgium going to be involved? Just me. No, I actually talked to the Senate. They don't want anything to do with this. Oh, okay, wait. So you're going to be the king, but it's not going to be like you're the king in your country where the Senate decides most things.

You're going to be like king, king. He's like, you know, you want to call it that? Honestly, I'm so used to how I'm king in my country. I wouldn't even know how to be a king king in another country. So I'll just do it the same way I've been doing it in my country. Hell, I'll make a Senate of the people down there. So you want to form a colony? No, I just want to be the king of two countries.

I can honestly stand here and say that the country of Belgium has never had a colony. How many of you, sirs, can stand with such a statement? See these hands? These hands are dirty. hands, clean as a whistle. It all works out. Belgian Congress ends up passing a resolution declaring Leopold the sole sovereign king of the Congo

free state. And did I mention free trade? Yeah, more free trade. The Congo free state was 76 times the size of Belgium and land area. Just so we know

where we're sitting at this point in our story, Leopold the second of Belgium is the king of Belgium, which kind of his power, I think they said, equated to what, like, Queen Victoria had. It's not a lot. It's just, again, the token figure head. He could try to bring in laws and he signed off on laws. But there were ways around him pretty much to subvert anything. He is now king king over a tract of land. in a people who he's probably rarely, very rarely, if ever interacted with.

And he has the authority to do whatever he wants to do. You would think, too, you want to try to start building out your departments so you can take care of this place. Congo Free State King Leopold, the first of Congo Free State. appoints heads of three departments. That's why, think of it this way. When you were looking at the, like, doing research, did you ever see him addressed as King Leopold I of the Congo Free State?

He just goes to King Leopold. Correct. But what would that lead you? Like, if you didn't know who Leopold the second was, and you're just saying he's Leopold the second of Belgium, you're like, oh, he's the ruler of Belgium. But he was also King Leopold. the first of the Congo.

You're just like, oh. Same guy. Yikes. The one and only, because they don't get another shot at this. But he appoints three heads of three departments.

The state, the interior, or of the state. They had the interior, they had foreign affairs, and they had finances. He was running a bare-bones crew here. And Leopold would never go to the Congo himself, but he used this cabinet that he appointed all Belgians, of course, basically

to do his bidding. They had 14 administrative districts. Each one of these districts was broken down into zones. Each zone was broken down into sectors. Sectors were broken down into posts. Every appointed head in the district's zones, all of this stuff were all European. This is probably a good time to explain what the value of the Congo was at this point in time to these people, what the value was. So the reason that Leopold wants this area is there has to be some way to make money off of it. He's not, again, he's not doing this from the get-go as any type of benevolent, you know, action or anything like that. So in, I want to say it was the mid-1800s, the process of vulcanization for rubber was

developed. And so this turned it from like the material that you get from the plants or the vine, the trees of the vines and was able to turn it into something like a usable that didn't crumble and stuff like that, right? Yeah. Crack and crumble. So at this point in time, you can get rubber one of two ways. You can get them from trees or you can get them from vines. Now, the Congo was full of vines. Had a shit ton of rubber vines along, you know, throughout the entire country. And then the interior is packed with rubber trees. Yes. You then have rubber trees, because again, this process was created. So they knew that rubber trees were going to be like a commodity. In South America, whoever had those colonies, started planting a shit ton of rubber trees,

but it takes a 20-year period, I think, for them to be viable. So for a 20-year period, Leopold II was looking at the Congo and saying, for the most part, I'm going to be able to, I'm kind of a monopoly on providing rubber, which is now, because it's new, highly sought after, and I've taken over a country with absolute authority and control of a populace that I can now use as forced labor. So no one knows what I'm doing back in my other country or in these other ones, because I don't have to have the optics of bringing people in or anything like that. I never have to do violence against another country in order to take slaves. I have an entire country of slaves to work on this essentially giant rubber plantation that I just got sole ownership over.

And that's really what it is. And Chris just hit it perfectly. This whole thing was to try to stop Arab slavery of the Africans down there and try to cut the head off that snake. when really all he did was just buy an area to enslave himself. But you can't call it slavery because those people sign contracts to say. He goes to end slavery and he's like, no, mine. Yeah. Yeah, these people, don't be fooled.

These people were still wearing iron chains around their neck as they were transporting things. Was his rationale? But I'm not taking them from their country. They're staying in their homeland. Oh, just as nasty prior to this. prior to the rubber boom, which I believe started in the mid-1890s, the first years that they're down there, the ivory trade is just going nuts. Because Asian elephants, very small tusks, can't get a lot of ivory out of it.

African elephants... And we've killed all those. Well, what they're using them for, and interestingly enough, I don't know if you had ever seen it, prior to him taking over in the Congo Free State, he actually took four Asian elephants in March 3rd. them down into the, into Central Congo, to try to crossbreed them with African elephants

because they knew that they were able to train and teach Asian elephants to do work. Oh, yeah. That he was trying to basically tame African elephants by interbreeding both of them. He's trying to make a mule. Pretty much. He's trying to take, I'm not saying they're donkeys and horses, but that's kind of what he's trying to do.

Well, and his justification for this is if he can have the elephants doing it. Animal husbandry. I didn't know that Leopold was into that. If he can make the animal husbandry happen. Make the two elephants fuck. If he can get them down there and he can start using elephants for work, that means that the Africans don't have to work and everybody can just live and enjoy this. No, this is his pitch. This is what he's saying. Okay. This is how Leopold's mind works. The part that was left out is. And if the African thing, the elephant thing doesn't work, I got a backup. Yeah. The thing that I'm actually going to do.

So this ivory trade is so big in Africa because I want to say at the point, at this point in time, there were like 25 million African elephants on the continent, which seems like a shitload elephants. But their tusks are massive. He said that the ivory that they had down there, they were using tusks for doorposts in houses. Yeah, like construction and shit. That's how much it was. And it's a massively profitable commodity to send back to Europe because they're,

making false teeth out of them. They're making chess boards. They're making everything kind of fancy out of ivory. You see ivory spoons with caviar because the metal affects the taste of the eggs. So they were just putting out ivory cutlery, everything that you could think of, they were making out of this tooth of an elephant. Oh yes. Did you notice that the caviar didn't have a weird taste to it? It's made with 100% genuine African elephant. So I'm just slaughtering these elephants. And then I believe it was Samuel Dunlap of Dunlap tires was the one that vulcanized the rubber. And this industry just absolutely explodes. Maybe he wasn't the one that vulcanized it.

He might have been the one that started putting them on cars. Bonus episode. Yeah, right there. It would be perfect for one. And as the rubber boom happens, you start to see situations where these falls start to become pretty big deal because everything in interior Central Africa, where most of the rubber trees and vines are,

in order to get it out, you have to be able to traverse those rapids. So from 1890 to 1898, they built the Matadi-Kinshasa railway that subverted the impassable Livingston Falls. These were near the Atlantic Ocean, and as they're building them, they're actually bringing in Chinese workers that are down there dying too

as they're building this railway. And the whole thing that they're saying when they're talking, like down there, in amongst the Europeans down there, or justifying the deaths, building the railroad, because once the railroad is finished,

no other African will have to die in trying to transport. Because again, if you're transporting on foot in Africa, Africa and you're going through the jungle, you might get picked off by a snake, you might get picked off by a big cat. He's using a bunch of people from trying to construct this and all the other countries are looking at it and being like, someone should say something. They're like, yeah, we've all done the same thing. Man, none of us can say shit. It's effective. That's what we can say.

Five down, opium boy. Yeah. It's just, it's crazy. 1890s see your eyes in demand for rubbers. We were just talking about all these rubber trees and vines come into play. You have to be able to police this force of Africans that are going out and harvesting this. He ends up establishing the force public in 1885. It's a force of the public. Controlled by the public, right? Made up of the public.

Okay, so this entire 20-year window, we're now going to start. digging into is just going to be a collection of fucked up atrocities and a guy that is doing, I'm trying to, we talked about this during the VOC episode where we were like a corporation that was provided the ability to basically claim land, create its own treaties with other countries and operate as almost a country unto itself. And now we have not a fucking company doing this. We have one guy who's doing this. And on the outside of this area, it's a combination of the atrocities that are getting out are not bad enough for anyone to care about doing something about. And for the most part, no information is getting out. Or if it is, it's being put a spin

like an adventure in Africa. It's written by Stanley or it's been edited by Leopold or someone like that. But the thing about that too is that all the money is coming to him. Yeah. Essentially it is. There was a time when he needed kind of in the beginning at the upstart. He needed to make some money back pretty quickly. So what he ended up doing was he talked to a bunch of private industry, a bunch of private corporations. They were all Belgian. He was a free trade was now something of the past. He forgot what free trade was. he says hey um i'm willing to lease you some of this land down here so you can start or getting this rubber production going as well everybody can make money off this it'll be just fine and they're like yeah no that sounds great we'll take it he's like okay i only meant a third of the country

though i'm keeping the other two thirds of the country for myself and they go all right we'll take it and he goes ah that's not actually completely the deal at the end of the year since it's a lease you guys have to kick me back 35% of your profits. So I'm still waiting my beak. It was more than that. Was it? Yeah, combined with the taxes, it ended up being about half. Really?

Yeah. So the way that I understood it was he, the force public is essentially the police force down there. The officers are all white, but it's made up of locals. And he's running in this. country, of course, because he's running it, he's going to start taxing. But he's doing this in a way that he knows that people can't pay taxes in the traditional sense that he's requiring them to. So he's like, you know what? I know you guys can't pay in the way that I feel that you should pay tax. Or the, um, monetarily. Monetarily or something. But I'll take labor. Yeah. So I'll go ahead and

consider your guys as labor toward the amount of taxes that you owe. And when it first started, they said it would take like 40 hours a month of work that would then work off what you were supposed to be owing on your taxes. That went from taxes for labor to holding people hostage for labor in order to meet quotas. And when they had these industries come down here, they, Leopold basically just told these places, hey, look, here's the deal. I'm going to let you put a place down here. I'm in charge of the workforce. I'll make sure that they've fulfilled the quotas. But this is actually your guys' company down here that's doing this. You guys are going to kick me back half of what you're making. And so if any of this shit comes out, this guy is, he's,

he's very smart. He's evil as fuck, but he's smart. He's looking at it and saying, well, I didn't, I wasn't fucking making rubber down there. It was these guys. I didn't know they were doing this. I didn't know they were doing this in my country. It's a big country. But, you. But, you know, you know, Yeah, it was very obviously this company that was committing these atrocities to these people. You guys don't know what's going on the other side of our country. This country is 76 times the size of that country. How am I supposed to keep track of this stuff? White people don't go into this country.

The force public is such a bleak topic because of just how it was filled, basically. So after they're established, they're in charge of management. the rubber collection within the zones, as Chris was talking about. They were scheduled out for this tax of 40 hours a week to be picking rubber, but they still had quotas that they had to hit within that 40 hours of work. And if you didn't hit your quotas, punishment was going to basically ratchet all the way up to death. The way that they're collecting members for this force public is they're going in and raiding villages. and is they're raiding villages and killing parents,

they're taking children back to raise them up. The force public is taken from basically outside the Congo or where production in the Congo isn't happening. And they're being brought in, I think we talked about this. The reason that Marco Polo was so effective is because he didn't care about who he was trying to subjugate for the con in China.

You had these Africans that don't have a connection to these villages that they're raiding. and that they're coming in and holding women and children hostage to try to get these quotas up. So they don't have the same feelings. While at the same time, they're still subordinate under a white man that's still not paying them, really. You're basically using it as a labor force to perform all labors in the country. The labor of actually processing and like getting the rubber and everything like that. and then using those same people to make sure that the people that are doing that are doing it.

And you just put a smattering of white people in charge of all those people. You are, like you said, you're disassociating these people from, let's just say like the industrialized area now of the Congo, from the people that are outside of that, they don't have anywhere to go. Someone's being taken from their family or something like that. And they're just like, okay, you're going to go in here and you're going to, I mean, we just kind of have to get into it. Fucking chopping off hands was this weird fucked up currency or form of payment during Leopold the second's fucking reign in the Congo.

Serve two purposes, but yeah. So the way that he ran this with the force public as well is they were only provided a very curated amount of ammunition to where they knew how many fucking bullets that, of these places have and they did and part of the officer's job was to go through and do an accounting for and if there was a missing bullet you better have a fucking missing hand that goes along with that to prove that you use that bullet to kill one of these people who wasn't meeting their quota or was stepping out a line or a litany of other reasons and this wasn't because ammo was short

this was because if they started siphoning off ammo, they could prevent eventually start a revolution. They did this disgusting fucking calculus of saying, hey, how much ammunition would they need in order to start an uprising? For the people that were making do this to finally turn and look and say like, I'm fucking sick at chopping the hands off my fucking own people,

everything. Give them and make sure that we're, we're accounting for every bit of it. Yeah. If they're not keeping it, if they even just bring back a spent shell, we need that hand because they could have just shod an animal that they're then eating because we're starving them out there. So they're trying to make sure that self-preservation and revolution aren't happening

through this bullet kind of check-in, check-out system. And meanwhile, in these... Like bullet surveillance. Pretty much. In these villages, they have to go out. Did you hear how they harvested a lot of the rubber from the vines? No. So they would go climb up into the trees.

They would have the rubber trees that would have the tap in them that would then lead down into some kind of a husk or a shell or something to collect it. They would climb up into the trees to get to the vines. And basically the vines are stretching themselves trying to get out of the canopy to get sunlight. So they're going to be really high up there. They would climb the trees. They would get the vines. They would cut the vines. As the sap is leaking out, they would rub it all over their bodies.

and as they rubbed it on their bodies, it would dry. And then they would climb down the trees. They would go back to their village and they would peel the rubber, basically like latex, I'm assuming. They weren't just cutting the vines down and taking them? Because you want them to continue to drip. Fuck me. So these dudes were basically like waxing themselves with rubber off of their bodies

to then throw it down into the pile to be taken and counted. That was how they were doing this. They were basically ripping their hair out. every single time they covered themselves in the sap. Fuck. And if you came up short on that quota, as Chris said, the Force Pub leak would come in and it was one bullet for one kill. So every time you had one bullet and one kill,

you needed one right hand. If they shot you once and didn't kill you, they were still taking your right hand. Just because you got shot and didn't die doesn't mean you get to keep both your hands. They're still chopping that bitch off. They had to use a second shot. Someone nearby or in your family was losing their right hand as well. Yeah.

And here's the thing, too. It had to be a right fucking hand. This wasn't a situation where either hand would do. So, like, fuck, that... Yeah. It's a real, really messes with your mind. It came down to a point where they actually had, um, villages, like reports from villages where they were actually raiding other villages

and killing people and cutting off their hands. So if their quota came up short that month and the force public showed up, instead of the force public killing and cutting off hands as punishment for missing the quota, they were just giving the hands of the people that they killed themselves. Yeah.

Like here, you don't have to kill anyone today, take this, show them that. Because again, like you said, when we were kind of talking before the episode, these are people that are just constantly being asked to kill or mutilate their own people. Yeah. And if it wasn't them,

if the white people, well, actually it was then that we're using these. The white settlers had them too. The white Europeans had them too. Their main tool of torture was called the Chiquete. Hold on real quick. I want to, I don't fix it on the hand thing. No, I get it. It's the keeper of the hands.

Yeah. To preserve these hands so they didn't rot and everything like that, they would smoke the hands. Like over a fucking beef truck. And then they would just be able to have them or be able to be able to, who was the fucking like, who was in charge of count in the hands, man? You know it wasn't a fucking white person, but it was someone that they were watching and being like, you better get this count right. If it's off by one, you know what's happening. Yeah, it's off by one.

You're not going to have a hand. You're going to be the fill in here. Yeah. And that was just the scary threat that was going on. and this chakote that they used it was a whip that was made from hippo hide so imagine how thick that is to begin with

they cut it at such an angle that they said when it was dried out at damn near had a razor's edge on it 20 whips you were most definitely going to lose consciousness 50 whips was basically certain death because you were just going to bleed out

from what was going on they used it on all insubordinate peoples and this wasn't just white settlers whipping black people. This was the force public that were whipping each other or whipping all of everybody that was below them. There was a Belgian magistrate that went down there. His name was Stenzius Lefranc. He witnessed firsthand. There was a force public leader that was whipping seven and eight year old boys. They were being whipped. They were sentenced to 25 whips each for laughing in the presence of an officer. That was their charge.

And LeFranco goes over, he sees one of the boys getting whipped and he goes over and he pushes the guy and he pulls a whip out of his hand and he goes, you're not going to do that. LeFranca called into the office of whatever company in the area was and they said, you don't ever do that again. You're not in charge over here. This isn't your area. Just absolutely sickening how far they would go at these things. And there's an episode idea that hit me. because the whip is super important to pretty much any of the forced labor that's happened all around the world and I would be interested to go in and do it.

I couldn't talk about it though. Not for that long. It just wouldn't be possible to talk about a use of such an important instrument. Yeah, you want to talk about a torture implement for... Yeah. But at the same time, there's a very interesting history of who used it, when they used it, what they used for them. It's just not a topic that I think I could go through.

I think the thing about it is if you really Whips were first designed for whipping animals. Yeah. And it's like this symbol of what you use to like treat a disobedient animal. It's like it's a psycho. Yeah, like thinking about that way it's, I mean, I know for a fact. I don't know for a fact. Fuck.

Well, I can actually say I know for a fact that it's got to be more painful to get hit with one than the psychological impact of getting hit by one. I think that's a fair, fair assessment. Yeah, I can agree there. Maybe one of the most feared parts of the forest public were members of a tribe called the Zappa Zaps. Zappazaps were rumored cannibals. And when they would go into villages, they would go in and collect the hands. Also, there were reports of them feasting on victims from the village that they had just killed.

just a crazy thing to think about that that was how they were doing things. We're almost in like 1900s. Yeah, 1900, the Forest Public League, numbered 19,000 men plus all of the rubber company militias that had gone down there. And they were bringing down white folks again. They were just going and they were, all of the other colonies that are in Africa

aren't in the slave trade, but they're also contracting. people from their areas to go work in other countries. They're going and putting a factory in a country where the country's like, you can put a factory here, but we're controlling the workforce. And you don't tell us how we control our workforce. You just worry about getting the factory built and then getting paid

and making sure that we get our abortion. I think was it three quarters of all men that were taken for the force public, died before they even got training. So not only were they. dying, you know, well, I guess not only were they, you know, dying and being forced to go against their own people, but they're then taking more of those people to put into the force public.

And within 15 years, they still ascended 19,000 men that hadn't died either before or in the service or screwed up and did something wrong and one of the other people else. Before that with the... Yeah, dude, there's, there were numerous uprisings. one of them actually was a man whose last name, he was a European that was down there. His last name was Rommel.

I didn't do the research to see if he was related to the Desert Fox, but it is interesting that there is a Rommel involved. If he was a Belgian, I doubt it was. Yeah. He was actually killed during one of these uprisings, and his station was taken. They squashed a lot of uprisings at this time. It's such a secret that this whole,

whole thing is going on, but there's actually a pretty early whistleblower on this. 1889, guy named George Washington Williams. This guy probably deserves a Patreon someday. He was born a Freeman. George Washington Williams. Isn't that what I said? Oh, he said, Colonel? Oh, he was.

That's right, he was. So not only was he a Colonel, he was born a Freeman in Pennsylvania. I actually don't know if this guy was really a Colonel, to be honest. I think it was one of those situations. General Colonel. Great guy. Yeah. born in Pennsylvania,

freeman, fought in the Civil War for the North, fought in the Mexican American Army. He was a minister. He was a lawyer. I've retracted my statement. I believe colonel, was that correct? Okay. Minister, lawyer, journalist, former member of the Ohio House of Representatives ends up traveling to Europe for a press interview

with Leopold and Brussels. Now, remember when we were talking about the Mexican Republic killing Maximilian, who is Leopold's brother-in-law. George Washington Williams went down to Mexico and fought for the Mexican Republic that was caused with killing Maximilian.

So I don't know if Leopold knew this and just didn't care because he really probably didn't like his brother-in-law that much. He didn't send anybody to help him. So he probably didn't care about that much. I don't think you get two shits. It's interesting, though, how the world is still so interconnected that this black man that was born in... You didn't kill him, did you?

Oh. All right, cool. Now my fucking sister just hangs around, thanks. Yeah, that lady that's pacing up and down the hallways out there? Yeah. Did you see her whispering to herself as you walked in? You killed her husband. George Washington Williams is absolutely enamored with what Leopold is saying.

Leopold's gassing up the Congo free state. He's exciting Williams with all this bullshit about how Christianity is being spread, about how people are being taught at these stations. about how life in the Congo free state is free for everybody. He is talking to someone as if this person does not have the ability to go check it out for themselves. This is the interview that he gives when somebody asks him at a dinner party, hey, how's it going in the Congo? Knowing full well that that person is never going to go down there to be able to expose what's actually happening.

Yeah. Williams was kind of in this state of, disbelief and he really, really wanted to see it in action. So back in the United States, President Benjamin Harrison sends William to the Congo free state to go and verify all of these wonderful stories that Leopold. He goes back to Harrison. He's like, this motherfucker's lying. It hasn't been in time.

I think he believed him. Really? Yeah, I do. Because he hasn't seen the proof yet. I guess that's true. I thought he was going to be like there hasn't been in time in human history where white people and darker skin people have just for the first time interacting been like, oh yeah, this is cool. But when was the last time on an international stage that somebody said they were going down to colonize?

Like everything was usually done in secret or behind a cloak and dagger, whereas he was doing it in secret, but he was also the guy that ran the IAA and everything to go do this. So these altruistic means. My vision is blurred by knowing what happened. Yeah. So I do believe that he really thought that this was all happening. And it's so interesting to be talking about this now because he's kind of the first guy that runs this PR scheme as far as a leader of a country. We talk about the colonization of India, everything that happened with Great Britain.

That's all attributed to Great Britain. We can attribute the Soviet Union and the mass murder to Stalin and more. Stalin mainly because he had the biggest one. We can attribute the Holocaust to Adolf Hitler. We can attribute the genocide for lack of a better term that we'll talk about later in the Congo directly to Leopold II. So he's the first guy that's ever had to face, like, print criticism of what he could be doing. Yeah. I'm trying to think of how to describe him.

He's like the CEO, but it's not a CEO would be have a board of directors. Yeah. I'm trying to think of a company. compare it to where it's the final I don't know he's fucking Jeff Bezos Yeah that's probably Amazon or something like that where what he says Go but he's like all my employees are so

Happy I mean yeah they love working in these warehouse with no breaks It's It's not that he has to face This and it's good that he Has to face this at the same time It takes so much longer after this But George Washington Williams

Does end up going down to the Congo free state He's just shocked at the state of the He's interviewing Africans. He's interviewing missionaries. He's interviewing members of the Force Public. He gains an understanding of just the true state of Congo. Also, he realizes that there's no way that they could be teaching the Africans in schools because none of the Europeans that are down there speak any of the African languages. When you were walking around and everyone's missing their right hand, that transcends language barriers. It does. And these missionaries are telling these stories about how they're trying to help the

public. But the force public is just going through and massacring these people. And they understand what the deal is. They understand why they're in the force public. The missionaries get that. The force public members are even very just blunt and upfront with them saying, if I don't do this, they'll kill me. I'm not doing this because I want to. I'm doing this because my life depends on continuing to do this. And they're not wrong. They're not. punching this up to try to shift blame, this is actually what's going on. July 18th, 1890, he writes an open letter to Leopold condemning the treatment of the Congolese people. Of course.

Did you say open letter? Yeah. So an open letter basically means it's not just like, hey, I sent addressed to King Leopold. He's basically like when somebody is releasing a letter to the public in which you write the person that letter. But everyone is seeing that you're writing the letter to that person. And it's a scathing letter. It's, it points to a lot of different stuff. He noticed just everything that was wrong and let it out to the world.

The King and his supporters immediately just rush to discredit Williams. What's that movie where they call and get the end of Smith? He's like, hey, what the fuck? I want to say it's a Sean William Scott movie. It kind of sounds like it, but that's what I see William like writing and being like, hey, remember when you told me about the Congo during that dinner party? ha, ha, ha, I made it down there. And as Leopold's ringing this, he's like, oh, this can happen.

This probably would have gone further. He probably could have gained some traction and did this had he not died August 2nd, 1891. So he writes the open letter July 18th, 1890, and a little over a year later, he's dead from tuberculosis. you lose the tip of the spear to try to go in and fix this. And once that spear is dull, it takes somebody special to sharpen it again to try to go after him. Edmund Dean Morel is the next tip of the spear. He was an official at a shipping company,

the Elder Dempster Company of the United Kingdom. He was sent to Antwerp on occasion because he spoke French to go check the shipments coming from the Congo. He actually worked for the company. that was one of like had the one of the biggest contracts and i you can't even say contracts with belgium he had one of the biggest contracts with fucking king leopold with the congo free state with the congo free state to basically you know run stuff from the congo up to up to belgium and as he's looking at these manifests he's like hmm humanitarian efforts things like that you probably need like food

medical supplies, blankets, probably stuff for like the schools and the hospitals that he says he's building down there. Money for the workers that are collecting this rubber? Man, we are sending a lot of guns down there, guys. A lot of bullets. Yeah. And they're all number.

Why are the bullets all numbered? But, and what he's seeing is just a lot of money coming in. And he's like, yeah, this isn't right. Like something's going on here. He also knows because he's looking at the books that there should be X number of tons of rubber on these ships. Well, there's X number of tons of rubber on the ships and then a whole hell of a lot more. So when he sees that extra rubber, he realizes that somebody's skimming off the top. And initially you would probably go to corruption within the shipping company, right?

That's how King Leopold is bringing his rubber in that's going off the top. books for them. Yeah. That's his cut of what their deal is. So they're not cutting him in on what they're estimated. Because these are company ships. Yeah. These are contracted by these rubber companies that are bringing their stuff there. So instead of paying Leopold out of their share of what's coming out of the money, they're paying Leopold the extra that he's sent. They bring in five ships. And as they're bringing them up to go ahead and, you know, um, not catalog, but take in their inventory and stuff like that, one just kind of veers off and goes another direction. Like, oh, whoa, we need to count that one. They're that's actually the Leopold ship.

That's going to his private. Turns out there was nothing in that ship. We just brought it back up empty. We didn't have enough to fill it. Don't worry about that ship. Ship's not that big of a deal because I'm sure. That little guy? Don't worry about that little guy.

There's certainly people that are in port that are looking at this and probably questioning it. So the less people that know that Leopold skimming off the top this way, the better. So this guy is also, I think, kind of a journalist. It becomes one. Yeah. And he insists. of starting a newspaper with the intention what happens

after he brings this to his manager's attention oh they tell him don't they tell him to shut the fuck up about it try to buy him off so he goes and he speaks to his superior who's immediately dismissive and then within the next week he's offered the first promotion overseas to work in somewhere else and he's like why Why am I being offered this promotion somewhere far away from this problem that I was just asking about?

I got no reason. It's more money. So he turns that down. Then they offer him a consulting position within the firm for like quadruple the amount of money that he was making before. And once he realizes this, he's like, well, they're just trying to buy me off. They want me to try to keep this secret now. So there's obviously something big here if they're trying to do this. Yeah.

And like you say, he begins campaigning immediately against the rule in the Congo free state. 1903, he starts the West African Mail Magazine. And basically, through this magazine, he's spreading all this information that he's learning about the Congo free state, about what King Leopold is doing down there, about the atrocities. He gets a hold of the open letter that was written years before this. almost what he wrote that in 1890 13 years before this he's seeing george Washington williams letter he's like i can corroborate this this story yeah and so this pressure that he's putting through the magazine campaign ends up reaching the british house of commons british house of commons passes a revolution protesting the human rights abuses in the

Congo. So we start to see the movement going on and you get another kick in the ass from this British consul named Robert Casement. Gentlemen, someone has fucked up their colony. We must strike now. Roger Casement, kind of interesting. We already talked about something that Roger Casement did. Roger Casement was one of the architects of the Easter Rising in Ireland. Really? Yeah. So he did this before he did that. He also went over to South. America and busted up some of the corporations that were running slave labor over in South America. He was just kind of everywhere. And with caseman on board sent down there to investigate, you have a bulldog whose report

reaches the press. He comes back and before he goes to address parliament, he has an off-the-record conversation with a journalist and just literally walks through his entire investigation. By morning, everybody has this unnamed source from within the casement investigation. with basically the whole thing that he's going to tell Parliament. So the public hears what everything. Who did you tell us information to? I thought you said it was off the record.

He's like, yeah, I don't know, man. I thought I said off the record too. Don't even recognize the journalist either. Wouldn't be able to pick him out of lineup. It's too bad about that information though, right? Through this movement that they have going on, they have some heavy hitters that are showing up. They create the Congo Reform Association.

Some of the members of the Congo Reform Association, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, pretty big name there. Booker T. Washington, huge name. And somebody that we talked about very recently last week, Mark Twain. Mark Twain wrote a very short kind of soliloquy story about King Leopold in the Congo. These things are read by everybody because you have guys like Mark Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle writing pieces. about what's going on in the Congo. And it's getting it to everybody beyond the news.

Now it's in print and just in entertainment. The same thing that was keeping the secret buried the whole Stanley thing if he was writing that. And he was editing, you know, Leopold was able to edit all the stories and things like that, is now being used against him by these guys. One of the things that he did as well, Leopold basically hires all these people to run like a counter PR up where he's taken all of these like well-known journalists or ones that he has control of and he's taken him down to the Congo on all of these PR-type little curated tours of showing him the best of the best, all the happy people that are just like, hey, look, we all have our

hands. See, everyone has their hands. And he's basically just walking him through the Disneyland of the Congo to show them that everything is hunky-dory so they can go back and they can write about it and all the people that believe what they write are going to know that, you know, nothing uncouth is going on down in the Congo. Yeah, this official investigation basically completely discredits the Roger Casement CRA findings. And not only do they do that, where do the investigators go for Leopold after they visit the Congo? They go to the other colonies of all the people that are actually going, are accusing Leopold to basically be like, hey, here's the deal.

Listen up. So we just got back from the Congo and everything is awesome. But then we took another little trip and we went over to the Dutchy Zindies or went over to Australia. India. Yeah, India. And things are horrible there. So just remember the people that are accusing King Leaphold of all this kind of stuff are doing it themselves. They were the first assholes in history that said, when you point a finger at somebody, there's three other fingers pointing back at you.

just it look Britain's just sitting they're like well I mean yeah but you guys already know about that stuff

focus I hate the line of reasoning there's no logic behind this line of reasoning it doesn't stand up to anything it's the neighborhood of glass houses but

it kind of is effective and I can kind of see a point the counter to it going yeah because people are just like oh yeah, I forgot they've been doing that for hundreds of years. Two wrongs don't make a right, but it is nice to know who's committing the wrong. Correct. It distracts just enough to put them on par to be like, well, then you guys are both wrong.

Yeah, he takes some interesting approaches to try and spread this positive propaganda. And some of them are more funny than others because it's just classic. them shooting themselves in the foot. And this is what's going on back in the Congo. He also has some interesting proclivities that tend to show him negatively in the light of the Belgian people.

He's not necessarily hated. He's actually known as the Builder King because he was taking so much money away from the Congo trade that he was just building cool shit in Belgium. This might be the most

infuriating part about this, not really, but the fact that this guy draws more public ire from his own people for the fact that he was banging Hoers and cheating on his wife, then killing all of these people in Africa. Is it just that there, I don't know what to do with that, I guess. Yeah, it's, but I just, I think that there has to. be a level that they have to separate him just because he was a king. And I think that there's more of a realization now of what was going on. But they didn't want to be embarrassed. And they hadn't been embarrassed yet because 1890 was actually the first time this really comes up.

He was named in a suit in France for frequenting a house of ill repute. He was... I thought that was Britain. Was it Britain that he was in? Oh. He was told that he kept an unkempt house or something like that. And that wasn't that your house was in an order. It's that you like to roll around at brothels. So the French will come in here a second. He had a place in every country. Come on. Yeah. So

in this suit, it was alleged that he was spending thousands of Franks monthly on girls' age 12 to 16. Oh, I had 10 to 15. Well, 10 to 15 sounds worse. Nothing's being counted out with this douchebag. Yeah. Just a

crazy gross thing because He's like 55 at that point. 1900 even. He ends up meeting a woman named Caroline Laquois, who was a French whore that was being pimped by her ex-soldier boyfriend. She's 16 years old. Leopold is 65. And we're a pro-sex work podcast.

Yes. So the reason we're using this is because it just sounds more timey of that. And plus, you don't get a lot of opportunities to, say French whore very often, especially on this podcast. We don't, and we don't get to pepper it in normal conversations. So we have to take the, you know, we have to take it as it comes. It's pretty hard to get to French whore in a regular conversation. 1902, Leopold's wife dies. So he started this relationship after his time in the, the horrohouses, uh, meets Carolyn Lecois in 1900. 1902, his wife dies. Doesn't matter in anything but just based.

forward facing to the public view because him and his wife's marriage died a long time ago. What it does, though, is after his wife dies, he starts to show off his new mistress in public. And this blows me away. He actually took her to Queen Victoria's funeral. So the countries that are now coming against Leopold and everything after this comes out, it does coincide with some selfish reasons as well because Leopold also introduces an import tax that he

says, I'm going to use it to fight slavery. Perfect. So all those countries that he was like, free trade, free trade, he's like, oh, you all had a taste. Now we start charging. So they were like, oh, okay, well, this has gone far enough. Now you're touching our money. Touch all the people down there in the

country, your country that you want. Don't mess with our money. There's numerous times that when Leopold's kind of on the edge or he's being talked to from another country kind of sideways about stuff. He always kind of does the same idea of the crusades. Like whenever you need popularity

boosts, you always push a new crusade. And his crusade was to go back down and to fight the Arab slave traders. What works? What got you down there in the first place? He keeps going back to that same refrain. He's like an old pitcher who's fast or who's curveball. Keeps him in the league.

Did you hear about how close Carolyn live to his castle? I didn't hear how close, but I heard that there was some very elaborate way that he would get there. In the beginning, yes. Yeah. So 1895 is when I think he starts dating the 16-year-old French horror Caroline. I thought it was 19.

It could have been 1895. So he eventually makes her this thing called the Betterness of Vaughn. I think that's Vaughn. Yeah. And there's this elaborate, like, when he needs to sneak out, it's like the most uns sneaky thing possible. He takes like a steamboat, like down the river and then get, It's like off at a bridge and then goes through a tunnel to get to her house.

And then at some point, there's a fucking big tricycle. Yeah. It comes in a play that he starts just riding a big tricycle around. He moved her so close. He didn't need secret passageways. He would just go from his castle on a tricycle, drive over to her house and bang her. So whenever you saw him on the tricycle heading one way in town, you knew what he was going to do. Off to bang my horse.

Ding, ding, ding. It had a basket that had waffles. in the front of it the whole time. I'm going to try to imagine my head that it's not like a traditional tricycle. I want to see him getting on a big wheel. Oh. And then just sitting there and peddling way out front. Yeah.

I like that idea. Just we're not even hiding it anymore at that point. It's wild how that goes. Destroyed his reputation. He ends up having two bastard kids with his second wife. This. When did he marryer? Like days before he died.

Okay. So he had the bastards. technically. Yeah, they were bastards then. This is where the one thing where I don't know I feel bad in a way, but I don't feel bad at all for Leopold. So the second child

that he has with the Baroness has a mangled hand. Stop looking at me. I'm looking at the boards. Does that feel ironic? Oh, you're talking about you're talking about holy justice?

Yeah. Like all the bad things you did? Well, all the hands that he took in Africa and now his child's born that way. I would say that, but you like, I don't like the concept of like punishing the child. I feel like he should have got his hand. I feel like he should have fucking got his hand ripped off by the tricycle. I think kind of in the early 1900s, they actually had reached out to him knowing that publicity was going wrong to see maybe if they could create an annexation. to the country of Belgium because Belgium wasn't stupid.

They knew that he was making money. They just knew that he was making their country look bad, even though they weren't a part of it, because he was the king of Belgium as well. Yeah. That ends up getting shot down. This might be one of the funnier parts of the story. So in 1904, he ends up hiring maybe one of the fattest men in America.

It was said that Frederick Starr made Taft look spelt. Taft is like our fattest president, I think, wasn't he? And this guy made... His name even sounds like taffy. That's how you remember it. Taff looks felt. So Frederick Starr was so fat that he was a narcoleptic. How fat was he?

When he was a young man, a skinnier man, didn't have narcolepsy. He got so fat he started falling asleep standing up. That was how fat this guy was. He ends up paying him basically to write this propaganda. rightsman papers under the pseudonym Colonel Henry Kowalski. Terribly fake name. He's just pushing all of this rhetoric out in the United States

talking about how the reports are wrong, that Belgium's not involved in this, that King Leopold's doing everything great, the rubber is a boon for the world, just doing everything that he can. I feel like this is a desperation hire. I think it was. I mean, I think he was a fairly decent,

writer, but they told him way too much. Because the second year, they signed him up for this first year's contract. The second year, the Belgians are like, this guy is not doing us any favors. He's costing us a ton of money. And he's in America. The cat's probably pretty much already out of the bag. Maybe we don't have to pay him. Second year rolls around. They do not pay Frederick Star. And Frederick Starr packs up his gigantic suitcase because he's probably got huge clothes. he heads off to California goes to San Francisco goes out California way

he meets our old nemesis William Randolph Hurst the newspaper magnate that hasn't ever made this podcast for anything good finally does something good because Frederick Starr tells him everything

he even fesses up that there is a mole in the Senate foreign relationship One thing that William Randolph Hearst hates more than hemp, it's fucking rubber. Any competition to paper, he was just like, I will destroy it. So they can't write on rubber. Doesn't matter.

They'll find a way. Yeah. Have you ever heard of stamps? You don't need to write. So Frederick Starr tells him this whole story about why they hired him for the propaganda. It admits that there's a paid staffer in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that's just scuttling resolutions against the Congo

as far as to send U.S. forces into the Congo to save the people from the bad rule. This is a fucking just guy that's running a country and just running it as a fucking sweatshop. And the guy that's saying it is just some fat lawyer

in the United States that got angry that he didn't get paid and tells Hearst. I'll show you. By the end of the week, this story is plastered through Hearst newspaper. Yeah, if you're going to disseminate something, that's probably the route you go. Bad, bad, bad deal. There were times that Leopold would actually see cartoons in, like, newspapers that he would read. And one of them was him just holding a hand above a pile of hands.

Where he had a knife in the other one where he just chopped off a hand or something. His remark to this is, that's absurd. Why would I cut off the hands? I would rather cut off the rest of their body. That's the one thing that I need. That's, yeah, exactly. I would cut off anything else. He also said, I think, to William the second, who was the ruler of Germany, and this is how obsessed he was with money over anything else.

Of Germany. Huh? That's Wilhelm, correct? It was spelled William. But isn't a W.O.V. Wilhelm, William. Okay. Second ruler.

Fuller Germany. William. He looked at him and he's like, you know, there's nothing left for us kings but money. Yeah Make stuff better for your people I don't know And here's the thing

He wasn't talking about being king of Belgium When he talked about that Yeah He was just bored He needed something else And he was letting people know about it That's the thing For as deep as he went to cover this up

He would just say the most flippant things Out of nowhere How can you try to claim innocence About what's going on in the Congo When you just openly admit Why would I cut hands off I would rather cut the rest of their body off I need their hands

The one person that should not be able to claim. Like, and where the buck stops is, motherfucker you wanted to be king. Yeah. You are the sole person responsible. Didn't even go to the trouble of building a larger government to try to hide yourself.

It was a multi-layer marketing system that didn't have a whole lot of rungs on the ladder before it got to you. There wasn't a whole lot of white before it got to what was going on. Your buffer zone was corporations. Yeah. And then as soon as you told those corporations, oh, by the way, we're going to start charging you more. I'm taking half of your earnings.

At some point, they're going to be like, hey, guess what? Especially when this news starts coming out, they're going to try to get ahead of it and be like, you'll never guess what we saw. Yeah, who's the first people that are going to go to the press and throw you under the bus? The guys that you're trying to screw even harder than you were before. after this happens it's Belgian pressures on Leopold just come full fold

they're so tired of being dragged through because again it doesn't matter that Belgium's not involved in any of this Belgium has loaned him money for different things that he hasn't paid back to them people don't know this guy as King Leopold the first of the Congo

when people talk about who's doing these atrocities in the Congo it's King Philip the second of Belgium. So Belgium's taken strays, which some deservedly so, because there has to be some type of awareness that something might be going on here.

Well, does these Belgian pressures start to mount on Leopold again for annexation? He tries to cut them a deal and he basically says, I'll annex the territory. You guys leave me the 100,000 acres of my own personal.

estate down there and I'll annex you the rest of this. What do you think could be happening in that 100,000 acres that he probably wants to keep a hold of? Robert trade still. He's fine passing off most of Congo. He doesn't want to deal with the corporations or anything anymore. Why is your 100,000 acres kind of spaced out? You wouldn't just take like a cohesive, no. Well, no, this area is where the death.

The deadliest animals are. I want to protect you guys. And I want to, yeah. Highest concentration of elephants. I don't want anybody to get gourd. He was just probably looking out for the people. And of course, Belgium was like, no, you're going to keep doing the same thing and we're going to get crazy. Now we're just neighbors with you.

Yeah. Now we actually have a hold to where we're going to have to go in as Belgium. Now we're responsible. We are 100% unable to decline that we knew what was going on. We're in the same fucking neighborhood. It doesn't work out. Finally, after one last international. committee goes down there and realizes that there's just,

they're going to have to perform military actions. Finally, once military action is brought up, Leopold goes to Belgium, take the annexation. Unfortunately, we got a lot of debt, boys.

The Congo's got a lot of debt on the books. I'm exorbitantly rich. I made a ton of money. But you guys want the Congo. You don't want me anymore. I'm just the king now. I can go back to being a peon. I'm going to build some shit.

It's going to be awesome. You're going to have to deal with that debt, though. Along with that debt, if I'm going to be king again, I don't have any money now because I'm not getting the money from the Congo. So you guys are going to have to break me off a chunk. So I can start making some more buildings around here to try to raise my... I've got plans. Yeah.

I need you to raise my station because I've been banging that 16-year-old French whore and everybody knows about it. I got to make myself look good in the public. Hey, man, in 1906, that French horror becomes his wife. Yeah, it's a sweet deal. Through this deal with parliament to cede the Congo to Belgium, the Belgian government ends up paying 215 million francs to wipe out Congo debt. Then there's the 45 million that they paid for building projects for Leopold.

He's going around to all these other banks and other countries using the Congo as collateral to take out these loans. You're taking out loans with collateral that's a country. Yeah, true. It's pretty big for one man to be doing. He's just the guy that, do you, here's the deed. Yeah. Yeah. So after you wipe out the debt, after you pay for the puff piece projects that Leopold wants to do in Belgium,

they also break him off 50 million francs just for his time and effort, I guess. I don't know what the 50 million francs from the country did benefit. the country got the public's works things that were, the country had a lot of stuff that was built off the backs of those people that were dying down there. 100%. So much so in fact that it conveniently is one of those things that they're just kind of like, but did he do it?

I mean, was it that bad down in the Congo? Because if it was that bad, there's a lot of cool buildings that we'd like that might need to come down. Yeah, he built a version of the hippodrome in one of like the, the beach towns. Didn't this motherfucker also build like a museum to Africa? A national central Africa museum in Belgium. He also tried to kind of regain in curry favor by basically offering these African artifacts

to all of these museums all over the world. He was trying to get in with J.P. Morgan over in the United States by trying to donate things to the Guggenheim and other. different organizations at Morgan own to try to get him on his side basically. I wonder if he ever got anything from him. I don't think he did. Because if you get shot down by J.P. Morgan because your slimy, that is fucking saying something. Yeah, definitely is.

Congo, you would think after being annexed to Belgium, everything would get better. Congo remained a colonial possession of Belgium until June 30th, 1960. So for the next, what, 52 years, Belgium. Belgium was basically running the same game to a lesser extent. I'm sure there were less hands that were lost. Yeah, they still had infrastructure down there. They were still responsible for it. They're still going to try to pull money out of it.

Here's the thing too. I don't see them putting a lot of resources into trying to reconstruct that country or try to fix any of the things that have been done down there. All they have to say is, well, we're not doing what he was doing down there. to the people. Well, you guys aren't doing anything to help. Yeah, but technically on the scale of helping, simply by us not doing the things that he was doing down there, that's helping. We don't have to go above that. He set the bar so fucking low that we just have to not be murderous shitbags and we can

claim that this country is better off. Yeah, we're going to, now we're into colonialism. That was just one guy that owned a country and was a king of another country. Now we've moved up to your guys. How did you guys let that happen, by the way? Yeah. We, Belgium, the Senate, we didn't want that. That's why we had no hand in it. That's why he was down there by himself. You think that we wouldn't have taken advantage of this whole colonial thing earlier?

You think we know what our fucking king is doing? He's useless. We don't even let him do anything up here. Why do you? Yeah. You see what happened down in the Congo? Why do you think that we didn't allow them to rule like that? We make him take a hands-off approach up here.

December 17th, 1909. Unfortunately, King Liu, every dog has his day. Unfortunately for Leopold. Yep. Unfortunately for Leopold, he dies. He married Caroline in a church ceremony that was never recognized by the government because the church ceremony has nothing to do with the government. And they didn't have a civil service because it wouldn't have been recognized.

And today, the king married his home. all the hell the king. So this is the most casino shit that I've ever heard. This is so incredible. We talked about his dislike for his daughters earlier. So each one of his daughters, he left $5 million. So 15 million francs out of his total earnings. After he dies, his brother's first son ends up becoming King Leopold III.

So since he didn't have an heir, it reverted to his brother's first. born when he was first trying to get kind of on his uh fuck i don't want to see on his feet but when he was stretched then when he was just trying to run the congo initially by himself before he started raking in money he had fought to deny his daughters the inheritance from their mother when she died because he wanted that money to be able to pour into the Congo I don't I don't understand it uh ironically enough the rest of his estate was left Caroline, bulk of it. And she turns around and gets back with her pimp boyfriend and they just go spend

Leopold's money like crazy. Anywhere they want, everywhere they want. Do you think that there's enough information that's been discovered about her and the pimp boyfriend to do a bonus episode? We're going to look into that, actually. Yeah, we'll try to get something out of it. Because the adventures of Carrie and whatever this dude's name is.

He had a upgrade with two D's. Yeah, this is. I want to know what happened here. This is Aeson Casino losing his wife to her boyfriend. Yeah. It's so wild how this story feels this way.

You have to imagine the people of Belgium probably didn't let this woman back in after he died because she has all the money that should have technically been their money, but their king was doing this on his own. It's gross here. I'm going somewhere warm.

Probably. Probably French Riviera. Just for inflation today, the total Congo earnings for Leopold equal about a billion dollars that he would have made. I mean, it's got to be more, but even at the same time, is there really a number that you could ever see? Okay. This is why I think that number is horseshit and why it's laughably low. What was when they ended up doing the... He turned over.

He annexed it. He allowed that to happen. What happened when they tried to go back through the books to find out what they had? That's right. So in September is when they signed the annexation. In August, he ordered that all of the records in the Congo Free State be burned. And he said, if they're not going to allow me to keep this, they're not going to know what I did here. That's the most evil fucking statement.

And it's the most guilty thing that anybody could say. Yeah. This is OJ saying if I had done it. It's just, it's right there. So, so bad. The estimations of deaths range anywhere from, again, Belgian revisionist history, 1.2 million deaths, upwards of 12 to 15 million people.

Responsible for the mutilation of murder, probably between 10 and 15 million people. in the course of 20 years. Potentially more than half. Well, no, that wasn't 20 years. How when, okay. 23, wasn't it? 1885.

When did he have to turn over the annexation? 1908. Okay, I'll do the math real quick. It should be 1885 to 1908. It should be 23 years. Oh, yeah. Look at you. Into the episode, Mass, strong.

Yes, that feels good at the end of an episode to be able to get that. potentially more than half of the population was wiped out in 23 years. That's a pretty fast clip to be wiping out potentially half of the people in a country. Not to mention the reason it wasn't just the killings. It wasn't just the hands. It was the fact that everybody starved because they had to meet these rubber quotas. They couldn't grow shit in the forest. It was too acidic.

There were too many leaves. It wasn't proper to grow food there. All of the fertile fields that they had been growing food in and subsisting, for hundreds of years go abandoned because who cares if you plant crops if you're not alive to eat those crops because you don't meet the rubber yields. It's just torture on every single sense of what's going on. The state of the country is as a direct result of Leopold II. Yeah.

And this is, it's something that we talked about, I believe it was during the Louisiana Purchase episode. Haiti is shit on by everybody. They think that it's an awful third world country. It's got a lot of problems. It has a hell of a lot of problems. It has a hell of a lot of problems because when they freed themselves from France, they had to pay France a debt that then was assumed by other people around the world,

other countries around the world, some in the United States. And they were paying that shit for hundreds of years. It's the same reason why China is isolationist as they are right now. they just had the luxury of being big enough and getting strong enough that they were like, okay, we're not just asking you not to fuck with us. You're not going to fuck with us anymore because you've been doing it throughout the course of written history. Quote unquote, third world countries aren't third world countries because they just didn't advance. Something happened to prevent them from doing that.

Yeah. Yeah. And this is just one of those things where now it's the Democratic Republic of Congo. I know that they still have problems. I know that it's probably one of the more underdeveloped African countries in or on the continent. But it's because they were left with nothing after the Belgians left. One fucking, see, that's how much it's in, it's not the Belgians that were leaving. It's after fucking.

I think it was both. I don't know. I'm not, I'm not absolving them from it. What I'm just saying is that saying that makes it sound like it was colonized. by the Belgians as far as like the Senate was like, oh yeah, that's ours. But at the same time, like you said, after they got that, I don't really see them doing anything that helped. 60 years of freedom, normal countries aren't going to look massive.

60 years of freedom for the Belgians didn't produce a whole time. After you figure out what's going on, and I realized that this is old school Europe rules where like a monarch was like above that all that shit, like you couldn't be tried or anything like that. at at what point after seeing what's going on like and again international courts world war one that kind of stuff that's developed it should have been also called back to shit like this when they're having a discussion to form those courts and everything they got to be using this as an example too

like we got to have something in here about being able to not have kings be immune to this kind of stuff this guy should have had every fucking thing he ever had seized taken and turned right back around to try to, at least try to repair or put a band-aid on what he did. Yeah, dude, it makes you think after he was annexed out of the Congo, he just... He got paid. Well, not only did he get paid, he still kept the title of King of Belgium. Yeah. They didn't force him to abdicate the throne.

So, hey, Belchup, you're not doing yourselves any favors in this whole situation by being like, oh, he did that down there? Well, he hasn't done anything up here. Yeah, okay. And is it a little bit that this is just your second king? And you don't want to have that look of advocating the throne. You can't chalk it up that you're already, that that's the ultimate L, I think, as a country, if you admit that, that it's like it only took us to the second ruler to allow us to not have fixed this situation before it happened. And it makes you look a little bit weak.

Yeah. Right before you go into World War II and you get the shift, or World War I. and you get the Schifflin plan to travel into France through Belgium by the Germans. So had you abdicated, you definitely would have looked weaker and probably more meaty come World War I. It's just you don't know that, but future you understands a little bit more why they did it. It's like a lasagna. It's got layers. Yeah.

And at the same time, I mean, they're still reckoning with this stuff today. 2020 was a major change for them as far as looking. at what Leopold did and looking at all of the statues of him around the country and saying we're not trying to erase history. We just don't really want to see this guy anymore. This guy's kind of a stain on our country's history. Yeah. All right. You got anything else? Merry whatever you're celebrating. Happy holidays. This has been such a fun thing. It was so cool to be able to finally, is Chris and I have been.

talking and crafting this idea for a Patreon. I know I'm back to it. But just to be able to kind of open a new layer of what this podcast could be and kind of do something along the same lines, but something that's shorter form and different. And we love doing this. Ideally, this is what we'd be doing full time and being able to cover anything and everything for you guys in much more just extensive

manners of everything like you know video getting to travel the sites to show you guys what we're talking about and this is kind of the first step so if you guys like what we've been doing for the last three three and a half years um yeah sign up for the Patreon for less than a

cup of coffee and uh yeah see see what we can do of a peacock you got to let us fly all right with that I'll also say fuck Leopold the second of Belgium. Belgium you got anything else? No, no,

I agreed. All right, everyone. Happy holidays. Be safe. We love you guys. See you next week. Peace. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us for another episode. If you like what you heard, hit that subscribe and like button.

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