King Leopold's Ghost Quotes

“the optimism, the boundless confidence of a society that had not yet seen or imagined the world wars, the belief that humankind had the capacity to briskly eradicate all barriers that lay in the path of progress. “Our”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“Morel made particularly effective use of photography. A central part of almost every Congo protest meeting was a slide show, comprising some sixty vivid photos of”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“He and his supporters never doubted that if only Britain were to act, it could force Leopold to mend his ways or could wrest the Congo entirely from his grasp.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“One traveler to the Congo came on a deserted town where a fifteen-foot boa constrictor was dining on smallpox victims’ flesh, and on another where the vultures were so gorged that they were too heavy to fly.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“This would mean, according to the estimates, that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“We run the risk of someday seeing our native population collapse and disappear,” fretfully declared the permanent committee of the National Colonial Congress of Belgium that year. “So that we will find ourselves confronted with a kind of desert.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“So many engineers were seized that factories came to a halt; so many railway men died that some trains did not run; so many colonels and generals were shot that the almost leaderless Red Army was nearly crushed by the German invasion of 1941.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“Power is tempting, and in a sense no power is greater than the ability to take someone’s life. Once under way, mass killing is hard to stop; it becomes a kind of sport, like hunting. Congo”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“He had all the bushes and trees cut down around his house at Bokatola so that from his porch he could use passersby for target practice. If”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“Two missionaries found one post where prisoners were killed by having resin poured over their heads, then set on fire. The list is much longer.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“Michael Herr, the most brilliant reporter of the Vietnam War, captures the same frenzy in the voice of one American soldier he met: “We’d rip out the hedges and burn the hooches and blow all the wells and kill every chicken, pig and cow in the whole fucking ville. I mean, if we can’t shoot these people, what the fuck are we doing here?” When”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“When another American, Francis Ford Coppola, tried to put the blood lust of that war on film, where did he turn for the plot of his Apocalypse Now? To Joseph Conrad, who had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“Filled with self-pity and calling himself “a man who had given up his life for his country and for Africa,” he”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“His health grew worse, probably exacerbated by the myriad of hovering doctors eager to give their famous patient all the latest treatments: strychnine injections, ammonia, ether, and electric pulses. On”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“He also knew that journalists dread having to digest a long official report when writing against a tight deadline—all the more so when the material is in a foreign language. On”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“the idea of independence and self-government in Africa was voiced by almost no one, except for a few beleaguered rebels deep in the Congo rain forest. In”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“Dr. Sheppard has not only stood before kings, but he has also stood against them. In pursuit of his mission of serving his race in its native land, this son of a slave . . . has dared to withstand all the power of Leopold.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“he wrote a trenchant warning of the “far-reaching consequences over the wider destiny, not only of South Africa, but of all Negro Africa” that would flow from the fact that Britain had set up the new, independent Union of South Africa with an all-white legislature.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“The years after the war saw the growth of copper, gold, and tin mining. As always, the profits flowed out of the territory. It”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“To the Africans throughout the Congo conscripted to work on these and other new enterprises, the Great Depression, paradoxically, brought lifesaving relief.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“An ancient English law made it a crime to witness a murder or discover a corpse and not raise a “hue and cry.” But”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“we live in a world of corpses, and only about some of them is there a hue and cry. True,”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“Thousands of refugees who had fled across the Congo River to escape Leopold’s regime eventually fled back to escape the French. The”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“as in Leopold’s colony, both the French territories and the German Cameroons were wracked by long, fierce rebellions against the rubber regime. The French scholar Catherine Coquéry-Vidrovitch has published a chilling graph showing how, at one French Congo post, Salanga, between 1904 and 1907, the month-by-month rise and fall in rubber production correlated almost exactly to the rise and fall in the number of bullets used up by company “sentries”—nearly four hundred in a busy month.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“two white men were put on trial for a particularly gruesome set of murders in the French Congo; to celebrate Bastille Day, one had exploded a stick of dynamite in a black prisoner’s rectum. Copying”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“today’s Namibia. The killing there was masked by no smokescreen of talk about philanthropy. It was genocide, pure and simple, starkly announced in advance.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“The rebel militias, the Congo’s African neighbors, and many of their corporate allies have little interest in ending the country’s Balkanization. They prefer a cash-in-suitcases economy to a taxed and regulated one that would give all citizens a real share of the profits from natural resources. For”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“International intervention in the country is like asking security guards to patrol a bank in mid-robbery. The guards may end up robbing or running the bank, whether”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“remembering how the United States and Europe have protected their investments by supporting rapacious African dictators like Mobutu, we must speak of neocolonialism as well. But”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“The lust for slave profits engulfed even some of the priests, who abandoned their preaching, took black women as concubines, kept slaves themselves, and sold their students and converts into slavery. The priests who strayed from the fold stuck to their faith in one way, however; after the Reformation they tried to ensure that none of their human goods ended up in Protestant hands. It was surely not right, said one, “for persons baptized in the Catholic church to be sold to peoples who are enemies of their faith.” A”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost