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Title: Is it possible that entire populations are going INSANE?
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Published: Nov 15, 2006
Author: Mehitable Storm
Post Date: 2006-11-15 11:31:45 by mehitable
Keywords: None
Views: 2174
Comments: 61
I just posted this idea in a thread to Robin about what is happening in the Congo and wanted to throw the idea out to a broader group. People are behaving so bizarrely, frequently on a mass scale such as in the Congo, that I am wondering if many large groups of people - and I mean entire populations - are suffering from psychosis. The behaviors in the Congo seem to be well beyond the behavior of even wartime atrocities - they seem like the actions of insane people. What is making people so crazy? Is it a social phenomena of breakdown in traditional cultures and values, or is there some real organic effect of chemicals and/or drugs that are making people literally INSANE?
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 51.
#1. To: mehitable (#0)
Americans live in sanitized sanitariums. This is nothing new for mankind be it in the past or the present. Soldiers have been doing this to women since man organized for war. See examples in recent history like the Japanese 'Rape of Nanking' or the taking of Berlin by the Red Army.
The Belgians, of all people, I know, those guys with sweet beer and truffles and chocolate. The book below is hard to read. Imagine, killing 10 MILLION people in a non industrialized fashion. Read this book. See how the civilizing Europeans would chop off the hands of those who refused to slave for them to enrich the King - of Belgium, of course! In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million--all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated. King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust. Adam Hochschild brings this largely untold story alive with the wit and skill of a Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he knows that history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young British shipping agent who went on to lead the international crusade against Leopold. Another hero of this tale, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his life on a London gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into the middle of the story was a young Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming above them all, the duplicitous billionaire King Leopold II. With great power and compassion, King Leopold's Ghost will brand the tragedy of the Congo-- too long forgotten--onto the conscience of the West.
I've been trying to find some info on Congo history, and from what I've read the pygmies were there first, then others came and settled, by the time Leopold arrived in 1ate 1800s, the Arabs were already trading the natives as slaves, and the pygmies were already being eaten by the other natives. Indeed Leopold was very brutal and ruthless in his quest for rubber, and there are too many varying estimates of the dead. They died from diseases brought in by the white man, and from forced labor, starvation and outright murder. The estimates range from 10,000 dead all the way up to 10 million dead, that number claimed by Hochschild, who appears to be widely quoted. I don't think anyone will ever know the true number of dead from that era. The present day population is around 50 million, and the country is quite large, and very troubled.
Your prerogative. Hochschild's research is impeccable. As far as the blame agenda, well, he's an historian, you can believe him or not. That's why in the future, when the numbers of Iraqi dead are disputed, the same rationale can be used to discount the Lancet study. Only 30K civilians dead in Irak. That's what Dubya says. Varying estimates of the dead depend on who is pushing what agenda. The Belgians have every reason to minimise the numbers they killed. OK, so only 10K died at Belgian hands in the Congo in the 1890's.
If he's an historian on the order of Daniel Goldhagen, I would not be so sure of his numbers, but perhaps his research is impeccable, it's difficult to tell in these times when there are so many agendas. It does appear as if Leopold was a very brutal man without pity, as there seems no doubt that people of the Congo died in his quest for greed. I did not say I believe the correct number is 10,000 dead, again I said I tried to find out from different sources what happened and the estimates were from 10,000 dead, all the way up to ten million dead, the number Hochschild gives us. I'm sure we will never know the true number of dead in Iraq.
#56. To: Diana (#51)
What's wrong with the Lancet study of 655K? Upto a few months ago, add a couple of thousand at least a month since then. There's a study using methodology considered by the US, the Europeans and the UN conducted by some very competent experts. I know Dubya questions the methodology, but I doubt he could articulate his objections.
In the absence of a census (the first was made in 1924), it is even more difficult to quantify the population loss of the period. British diplomat Roger Casement's famous 1904 report set it at 3 million for just twelve of the twenty years Leopold's regime lasted; Forbath, at least 5 million; Adam Hochschild, 10 million; the Encyclopædia Britannica gives a total population decline of 8 million to 30 million. Wikipedia seems to think the total dead were between 3 and 10 million.
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#15. To: Destro, mehitable (#1)
Forgotten History of the Congo.
#25. To: swarthyguy, Destro, mehitable, robin (#15)
#28. To: Diana (#25)
#51. To: swarthyguy, mehitable, robin (#28)
OK, so only 10K died at Belgian hands in the Congo in the 1890's.
Replies to Comment # 51. I'm sure we will never know the true number of dead in Iraq.
#57. To: Diana (#51)
Estimates of the total death toll vary considerably. Nevertheless, it is impossible to speak of a genocide because a genuine will to exterminate a certain group must exist. The reduction of the population of the Congo was noted by all who have compared the country at the beginning of the colonial rule and the beginning of the 20th century. Estimates of observers of the time, as well as modern scholars (most authoritatively Jan Vansina, professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin), show that the population halved during this period. According to Roger Casement's report, this depopulation was caused mainly by four causes: indiscriminate "war", starvation, reduction of births and diseases. Sleeping sickness ravaged the country and was used by the regime to justify demographic decrease. Opponents of King Léopold's rule stated, however, that the administration itself was to be considered responsible for the spreading of this dreadful epidemic. One of the greatest specialists on sleeping sickness, P.G. Janssens, Professor at the Ghent University, wrote:
It seems reasonable to admit the existence on the territories of the Congo Free State, of French Congo and Angola of a certain number of permanent sources that have been put again in activity by the brutal changement of ancestral conditions and ways of life that has accompanied the accelered occupation of the territories.
End Trace Mode for Comment # 51.