this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2025
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Explanation: While all of the European powers in Africa in the 19th and early 20th century were varying degrees of exploitative and genocidal under the excuse of 'civilizing' Africans, the Belgians take the cake for sheer pointless fucking cruelty. King Leopold II and the 'Congo Free State' engaged in... truly horrific practices that beggar belief. Amputations, reprisal murders for not meeting quotas, casually exterminating literal millions of human beings.
It's one of the ugliest parts of an already quite ugly part of history.
I heard a podcast from a journalist that was there a few years before and after the Belgians left. And he also told how he still vividly remembers sitting in a boat with two Belgian soldiers, they had to accompany him while traveling. And they started to compete and bet on their marksman skills. They ended up with using a random civilian they saw at the distant shore as a target. Just to see whether they could kill him from their current distance. One of them was successful.
But the journalist also mentioned that this was something of the less horrible stuff that was going on there. He was just so baffled they were so open and carefree about it on front of a foreign journalist.