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"Mature Content Warning!" |
King Leopold II of Belgium is the villainous protagonist of Mark Twain's satirical 1905 pamphlet King Leopold's Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule. As with the real-life King Leopold, he is the sole owner and absolute monarch of the Congo Free State, an African colonial state intended solely for Leopold to enrich himself via the rubber industry. The story takes place in the midst of the international scandal surrounding the widespread atrocities in the Congo committed under Leopold's reign and consists of Leopold's rambling attempts to account for and excuse his actions in the form of a soliloquy.
What Makes Him Pure Evil?[]
- As in real life, he takes advantage of the Scramble for Africa to personally assume absolute power over the Congo before enslaving the entire Congolese population to gather rubber for his own personal enrichment.
- Leopold's system of slavery involves levying taxes which are pure theft upon the Congolese demanding that they supply him with obscene amounts of rubber, quotas which can only be satisfied if every man, woman and child in every village works gathering rubber in harsh conditions for days on end without any food or rest, and with what little food they are allotted being constantly lowered to punish them for falling behind on their quota. Any who protest such conditions or attempt to gather food without permission are killed on the spot. This system results in thousands of Congolese dying from starvation and exposure until entire regions are depopulated.
- When villages fall short on their quotas due to these conditions, Leopold orders his Force Publique to carry out "rubber raids" in which offending villages are burned to the ground, the women raped and carried off into sex slavery and members of families who fail to pay their debts kidnapped and either ransomed or sold into slavery. He even allows his native troops to cannibalize the bodies of those they kill in the rubber raids.
- He orders his troops to chop off the hands of workers who fail to meet their quotas as a warning to others. He also requires the soldier police to bring back one Congolese hand for every bullet they fire in order to prove they are not wasting bullets, which in practice means that soldiers will shoot animals and then find random Congolese and chop their hands off to account for the missing bullets.
- Also in the name of saving bullets, he orders that children should be killed by beating them to death with gun butts or decapitating them rather than simply shooting them.
- Despite justifying his Congo rule with the argument that he is fighting the slave trade, he allows and even encourages Congolese families to sell their children as slaves to other tribes if it means he can get more money out of them.
- In addition to the cutting off of hands, he also orders his troops in some areas to specifically kill men and to castrate them and bring back their genitalia rather than hands to prove they are following his orders. This results in many Congolese men being shot and then castrated even if they are not dead.
- He allows women and children to be tortured and raped by his soldiers in order to give the Congolese men an incentive to work harder.
- When he hears that around ten million Congolese have died because of his rule, he refuses to take responsibility and argues that it is not his fault because most of them "only" died of hunger, ignoring the fact that they starved after being driven into the brush by his rubber raids.
- He states that his only regret about his Congo reign is that he had sixty women crucified when he could have had them skinned just as easily without attracting as much negative attention from the press.
- Faced with international outrage for his many atrocities, he justifies all of them as the price of doing business, alternating between accusing his critics of blaspheming against him, gloating over how he tricked the powers and the USA in particular into helping him, lamenting how the press have stopped taking his bribes to ignore atrocity reports, and complaining that Czar Nicholas II gets more attention from satirists despite not being as brutal as him.
- Not even his own family are safe from his depredations, as he gloats about abusing his wife and daughters and fondly reminisces how he ignored his daughter's tearful request to look upon her mother's corpse when she died before using the Belgian courts to rob her of her property. It's even implied he might have raped them, as he mentions that his house is “both chapel and brothel” before confessing how he “practised cruelties” on his wife and daughters.
- Although race segregation wasn't something unusual in his time period, Leopold still managed to go far beyond standards of his time to the point that even the other colonial powers were outraged.
External links[]
- Leopold II on the Villains Wiki