The past is often fascinating - but we must also never forget its brutality. No colonial power of the turn of the century was saintly - all were brutal, and often genocidal. But the Belgians in the Congo beat everyone for sheer, pointless cruelty.
Truth is a little different. They didn’t chop off your hands for failing to meat a quota. You can’t work without hands, see, so that wouldn’t really help. Naw, they just fucking killed ya. The hands were supposed to be what the soldiers brought back to count how many they killed, to prove they hadn’t wasted ammo. Seriously. The photos of people with just hands cut off were from soldiers cheating the system and just cutting off hands of random people so they could shoot more later. It was fucking barbaric.
Was reading about this on Wikipedia and the truth is even more insane. The caption on Wikipedia is
“A congolese man, Nsala, looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter who was killed, cooked, and cannibalized by members of the Force Publique”
All in the name of profits
Behind the bastards did a few episodes on the sheer scale of horror perpetrated on these people.
As an atheist, it’s stories like these than make me wish hell was real.
Perhaps Hell is as real as we make it.
I don’t understand how someone could do this to a defenseless child and sleep at night.
It’s because they convinced themselves that people who aren’t the same color as them aren’t actually people
