What does /his/ think of Leopold II of Belgium?
Also why is his name never among Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc?
Because who the hell should give a fuck about the Congo?
>>50921
Cause the poor Congo folk dindu nuffin
Decent guy who got a little carried away with the memes of his time
>>51003
I mean he did it to a point where late 19th to early 20th people were like "take it down notch, Leo"
Well, because the narrative of a white ruler causing death and chaos in black people land wasn't a very good thing to publicize at a time when Europe was at the height of colonialism.
Still, the Congo Free State is pretty well known.
>>50921
Because he didn't actually directly do any of it. It was the incompetence of the officials in the Congo and their faulty policies that turned the place to shit.
>>51110
Hitler didn't directly do the holocaust either.
>>50921
>Also why is his name never among Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc?
Probably because it was more mutilation/maiming and less mass murder.
Also, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler where all enemies of the Anglosphere so there's a greater sociocultural consciousness of them.
>>50921
He is not on the same level as Hitler, first, because what Hitler did was an organized genocide not for political reasons, domination, economic gain or punishment (specifically, the reign of terror of Leopold II for 18 years in the Congo aimed punishment and obtaining wealth) but that murdered millions of people for what they were. Not for what they did, for what they thought or what they didn’t thought. A similar genocide, more than Leopold’s, would be the Armenian genocide in hands of the Turks during 1914-16. And even there, women and children were not murdered in bulk as men were, but they were subjected to atrocious marches in which there were survivors. They wanted them to die, but not directly kill them.
The Holocaust had two more features that make it particularly remarkable in human history. First, an entire industrial system was designed for the single purpose of exterminating other human beings: a rail network, death camps, gas chambers (or trucks filled with CO, which came into use because the Einsatzgruppen found it morally heavy killing men, women and children), crematoriums for the disposal of the bodies. There were hundreds of thousands of people dedicated solely to the task of killing others: Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and homosexuals, whether they were rich or poor, whether they were supporters of Nazism or not (some were), whether they were a danger to the state or not.
(cont)
>>51800
(cont)
Second, it clearly involved the German civilian population. A history of promoting hatred of "inferior races" fueled by the pan-Germanic mythologies as, theosophy and anthroposophy led to a shocking complicity and tolerance among neighbors of the victims. It is not that they looked the other way, it is that they were denouncing their friends. It is not that they denied that something horrible was happening (like many Turks continue to deny the Armenian genocide) but that they thought it was fantastic and beneficial. Army and civilians were both part of "the banality of evil" described by Hannah Arendt.
An additional issue is that the perpetrators showed no remorse (the only one that apparently did, nobody knows with what sincerity, was Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, who had been leading the use of slave labor in the war factories). And the last, is that 20 years after the events, accepted and recognized by the confessed murderers, neo-Nazis began a campaign to claim that the massacres hadn’t actually occurred. Obviously this demand constantly dissemination of historical facts to counter Nazi propaganda, which is very much alive.
