Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Ya-ta Boy]

Last week I stumbled across one of those gems that you sometimes find in Korean bookstores and wonder what it is doing here: Adam Hochschild�s �King Leopold�s Ghost�. I�d always known just the surface facts about his seizure of the Congo at the end of the 19th Century but had never read any detailed account of it. It was even more hair-raising than I�d imagined. I came across this:

�These were years when, to the distress of many a young male European, Europe was at peace. For a young man looking for battle, especially battle against a poorly armed enemy, the Congo was the place to go. For a white man, the Congo was also a place to get rich and to wield power. As a district commissioner, you might be running a district as big as all of Holland or Belgium. As a station chief, you might be a hundred miles away from the next white official; you could levy whatever taxes you chose in labor, ivory, or anything else, collect them however you wanted, and impose whatever punishments you liked. If you got carried away, the penalty, if any, was a slap on the wrist. A station chief at Manyanga, on the big rapids, who beat two of his personal servants to death in 1890 was only fined five hundred francs. What mattered was keeping the ivory flowing back to Belgium. The more you sent, the more you earned. �Vive le Congo, there is nothing like it!� one young officer wrote to his family in 1894. �We have liberty, independence, and life with wide horizons. Here you are free and not a mere slave of society�.Here one is everything! Warrior, diplomat, trader!! Why not!� �Someone fated for a life as a small-town bank clerk or plumber in Europe could instead become a warlord, ivory merchant, big game hunter, and possessor of a harem.� (p 136-137)

�In 1899 the reluctant [Presbyterian missionary William] Sheppard was ordered into the bush�There he found bloodstained ground, destroyed villages, and many bodies; the air was thick with the stench of rotting flesh�his eye was caught by a large number of objects being smoked. The chief �conducted us to a framework of sticks, under which was burning a slow fire, and there they were, the right hands, I counted them, 81 in all.� The chief told Sheppard, �See! Here is our evidence. I always have to cut off the right hands of those we kill in order to show the State how many we killed.� He proudly showed Sheppard some of the bodies the hands had come from. The smoking preserved the hands in the hot, moist climate, for it might be days or weeks before the chief could display them to the proper official and receive credit for his kills. [The �State� was the Congo Free State, the personal possession of King Leopold II.]
Sheppard had stumbled on one of the most grisly aspects of Leopold�s rubber system. Like the hostage-taking, the severing of hands was deliberate policy�If a village refused to submit to the rubber regime, state or company troops or their allies sometimes shot everyone in sight, so that nearby villages would get the message. But on such occasions some European officers were mistrustful. For each cartridge issued to their soldiers they demanded proof that he bullet had been used to kill someone, not �wasted� in hunting or, worse yet, saved for possible use in a mutiny. The standard proof was the right hand from a corpse. Or occasionally not from a corpse. �Sometimes,� said one officer to a missionary, soldiers �shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting; they then cut off a hand from a living man.� In some military units there was even a �keeper of the hands�; his job was the smoking.�

But what about the king�s favorite novel? �European and American readers, not comfortable acknowledging the genocidal scale of the killing in Africa at the turn of the century, have cast Heart of Darkness loose from its historical moorings. We read it as a parable for all times and places, not as a book about one time and place�But Conrad himself wrote, �Heart of Darkness� is experience�pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case.� Whatever the rich levels of meaning the book has as literature, for our purposes what is notable is how precise and detailed a description it is of �the actual facts of the case�: King Leopold�s Congo in 1890, just as the exploitation of the territory was getting under way in earnest.

�Heart of Darkness� has to remind you of Hobbes: �During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.�

�It is not wisdom, but authority that makes a law.�

[ontheway]

Sounds like an interesting "novel."

It once again shows the evils of government power. Government attacking the innocent in far away places or at home. This is the history of the various forms of totalitarian government, from monarchy through the various forms of socialism, they are all in the same evil corner on the Political Map.

The only new idea in government, libertarianism, is the only alternative and the only cure for the ancient, evil forms of government.

[Ya-ta Boy]

[ontheway]

Being "KING" means that he is the government.

Since the king has near absolute power, his "businesses" are part of the Kingdom and therefore are being exercised within the sphere of the government.

The Kings agents in the Congo were exercising the unlimited power of the King. That is why they were able to get away with murder, literally.

This is not an example of free enterprise. Under free enterprise, every individual has the same power, and the state has zero power. What you are describing is the exact opposite.

It is an example of what happens under socialism, statism, fascism, communism and other totalitarian forms of government.

[Tony_Balony]

Really Ya-ta, what sthe point of bringing this stuff up? Trying to get Whitey back on the farm? America back in the 1960's not having the troll value it once did? Ron Paul is so ...2007.

Wake up hippie, smell todays freshly brewed coffee.