I've been interested in history for a while now, and in some ways I have a keen interest in filling in the gaps of my knowledge. I feel like certain books help assemble a puzzle, one that explains better the current state of affairs.
The book on Dowager Empress Cixi was like that, I knew peripherally about the Opium Wars. I'd heard about the Boxer Rebellion, though I little understood what it was all about. But the book that focused on her left helped set the stage for what I knew eventually would come to be. World War II. The Japanese invasion. The constituencies that fought against the Japanese. Even, at least a little bit, the rise of Mao. (I saw a movie, years ago in college, I don't even know it's name. It dealt mostly with an actor who was a eunich, and his unrequited love for a fellow actor...and it showed how the Cultural Revolution destroyed so much. In a way, the book on the dowager empress helped show what was being destroyed. And, to a certain extent, why. The ancient traditions had history and symbolism, but they also were stultifying and made it hard to implement change.)
But that's more the prelude for the book I just finished. King Leopold's Ghost. I picked it up partly to fill in those gaps, but I probably wouldn't have picked it up without a more personal reason. The company I work for has a number of employees from the Congo. I think there's an organization that helps with refugees somewhere around here, because about ten years ago we had a lot of Vietnamese mixed in with the usual white and African-American employees. Now we are seeing more and more from the Congo. It's kind of silly, but I didn't even know that most of them spoke French until I had them as employees.
So when I was browsing for a new history book to read, something about the Congo caught my eye.
It was a very good book, very detailed...
And the only word I can think of to describe King Leopold's rule is evil.
I don't use the word lightly. I don't like exaggeration. Yet the sheer greed, the willingness to paper over the human misery in pursuit of wealth...and even more than that, King Leopold's elaborate strategies to hide what he was doing...all leave me with no better word.
I do see some comparisons to my own experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, oddly enough. The men drawn to work in the Congo remind me of so many of the contractors I met overseas. So often they were men, divorced, looking to get paid a lot of money and willing to put up with dangerous conditions.
And yet there are differences, too. I don't want to sound like I'm dismissing American atrocities, and I know it must have been horrible for the Iraqis and Afghans who didn't want us over there. Yet I know so many American soldiers who deliberately tried to do a good job, and who were just as horrified as Americans back home about horrors like Abu Ghraib, or soldiers who killed civilians.
There wasn't the acceptance and tolerance of atrocity that King Leopold's men grew accustomed to.
I can also see why the Congo, of all the post-colonial nations, has struggled so hard to get to a stable point. People tend to rule (and accept rulers) who are like what they know. Just as Iraqis learned from and mimic Saddam Hussein, some of the Congo leaders mimicked King Leopold to a T.
Which kind of makes it even more depressing that we (as in, Western nations and America in particular) are so ignorant of history.
How can we make sound policy when we are so ignorant of what led to the current situation in the first place?
The book on Dowager Empress Cixi was like that, I knew peripherally about the Opium Wars. I'd heard about the Boxer Rebellion, though I little understood what it was all about. But the book that focused on her left helped set the stage for what I knew eventually would come to be. World War II. The Japanese invasion. The constituencies that fought against the Japanese. Even, at least a little bit, the rise of Mao. (I saw a movie, years ago in college, I don't even know it's name. It dealt mostly with an actor who was a eunich, and his unrequited love for a fellow actor...and it showed how the Cultural Revolution destroyed so much. In a way, the book on the dowager empress helped show what was being destroyed. And, to a certain extent, why. The ancient traditions had history and symbolism, but they also were stultifying and made it hard to implement change.)
But that's more the prelude for the book I just finished. King Leopold's Ghost. I picked it up partly to fill in those gaps, but I probably wouldn't have picked it up without a more personal reason. The company I work for has a number of employees from the Congo. I think there's an organization that helps with refugees somewhere around here, because about ten years ago we had a lot of Vietnamese mixed in with the usual white and African-American employees. Now we are seeing more and more from the Congo. It's kind of silly, but I didn't even know that most of them spoke French until I had them as employees.
So when I was browsing for a new history book to read, something about the Congo caught my eye.
It was a very good book, very detailed...
And the only word I can think of to describe King Leopold's rule is evil.
I don't use the word lightly. I don't like exaggeration. Yet the sheer greed, the willingness to paper over the human misery in pursuit of wealth...and even more than that, King Leopold's elaborate strategies to hide what he was doing...all leave me with no better word.
I do see some comparisons to my own experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, oddly enough. The men drawn to work in the Congo remind me of so many of the contractors I met overseas. So often they were men, divorced, looking to get paid a lot of money and willing to put up with dangerous conditions.
And yet there are differences, too. I don't want to sound like I'm dismissing American atrocities, and I know it must have been horrible for the Iraqis and Afghans who didn't want us over there. Yet I know so many American soldiers who deliberately tried to do a good job, and who were just as horrified as Americans back home about horrors like Abu Ghraib, or soldiers who killed civilians.
There wasn't the acceptance and tolerance of atrocity that King Leopold's men grew accustomed to.
I can also see why the Congo, of all the post-colonial nations, has struggled so hard to get to a stable point. People tend to rule (and accept rulers) who are like what they know. Just as Iraqis learned from and mimic Saddam Hussein, some of the Congo leaders mimicked King Leopold to a T.
Which kind of makes it even more depressing that we (as in, Western nations and America in particular) are so ignorant of history.
How can we make sound policy when we are so ignorant of what led to the current situation in the first place?
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