Thread by @TheSussexes

The reign of King Leopold II, the worst sadistically racist genocidal maniac in modern world history: Thread
‼️‼️Graphic images

Leopold II of Belgium was born in 1935, the 9th of April in Brussels as the second but eldest surviving son of Leopold I and Louise of Orléans

The British monarch, Queen Victoria, was Leopold II's first cousin (OBVIOUSLY), as Leopold's father and Victoria's mother were siblings

On 22 August 1853, at the age of 18, he married Marie Henriette of Austria in Brussels. But as any King he had mistresses, the youngest being Caroline Lacroix, a 16 years old French prostitute. Leopold was 66.

Leopold became king in 1865. His plans :"the country must be strong, prosperous, therefore have colonies of her own, beautiful and calm."

This became an obsession for Leopold II. He was convinced, that a nation’s greatness was directly proportional to the amount of goods it could suck out of equatorial colonies, and he wanted Belgium to have as much as possible before other countries came along and tried to take it

Leopold II had formed the International African Society to organize and finance exploration of the continent.

Officially, this was a prelude to a kind of international philanthropic enterprise, in which the “benevolent” king would shower natives with the blessings of Christianity, starched shirts, and steam engines.

Henry Stanley and Dr Livingstone were then explorers. Their expeditions composed a major part of opening up the rain forest to the king’s agents
The International Press will later praise them as :  « Physically brave, morally righteous, man of God and man of science »

King Leopold II was « working overtime to get Africans into heaven ». The ruse worked. The land discovered by his agents will be called « Congo free state »

The Belgian government therefore lent Leopold II the necessary seed capital for this “humanitarian” project

After he paid that debt off, literally 100 percent of the profits went straight to him. Which meant that Congo was not a Belgian colony; it belonged to one man, and he seemed determined to squeeze every drop out of his fiefdom while he still could.

Generally speaking, colonists always used violence to acquire and maintain control of the colonized. But during the 25 years that the Congo Free State existed, it set a new standard for cruelty that horrified even the other imperial powers of Europe.

Leopold II made deals with several Arab traders. Eventually he fought them of the territory and had total control on the slaves

With the field cleared of rivals, King Leopold II reorganized his mercenaries into a ruthless group of occupiers called the Force Publique and set them to enforcing his will across the colony.

He viciously forced the indigenous people to produce massive daily quotas of ivory and later much more massive daily quotas of rubber

If they failed to reach their nearly impossible quotas, he’d have their hands, arms, and/or legs chopped off, have them raped, and/or have them murdered.

He had “limb huts” constructed throughout the country to collect and publicly display severed body parts to systemically terrorize the Black populace.

He had “rape huts” constructed to systemically sexually brutalize the Black women and girls.

His people slaughtered ivory-bearing elephants in massive hunts. the Congo’s unique wildlife was fair game for sport killing by almost any hunter who could book passage and pay for a hunting license.

To save time and money, the king’s agents routinely depopulated villages – where most of the clearance work had already been done – to make room for the King’s cash crop.

John Harris, an English missionary, wrote, “I have just returned from a journey... (in the Congo). The abject misery and utter abandon is... indescribable....”

Leopold’s men were Leon Rom, known as “The Devil,” Rene de Permentier, known as “The Butcher of Congo,” and Leon Fievez, known as “The Head Collector” who often boasted of having “a hundred heads cut off.”

Nobody knows how many people lived in the Congo Free State in 1885, maybe around 20 million people before colonization. At the time of the 1924 census, that figure had fallen to 10 million.

There were outrage of course. But most of Europe were trying to compete with Leopold. « It was because Europe and America banded together to gang-rape and mass-murder their African colonies that the relatively small country of Belgium was able to dominate the Congo »

By 1908, Leopold II had no choice but to cede his land to the Belgian government. They created some new laws. For example, it became technically illegal to randomly kill Congolese civilians.

They renamed it « belgian Congo ». And that’s about it. Whippings and mutilations continued for years in the Congo, with every penny in profit siphoned out until independence in 1971.

On 17 December 1909, Leopold II died peacefully in Belgium. He is remembered for his large bequests to the nation and the graceful buildings he commissioned with his own money.

Before his death, he had his palace burn turning most of the Congo State records to ash and smoke: “I will give them ‘my’ Congo, but they have no right to know what I did there.”

Leopold II is the Great-great-uncle of the current King of Belgium Philippe. In their Royal website, Europeans’s crimes are described as ‘excesses’. And apparently in 1890, an anti-slavery campaign started in Africa, at the instigation of the King Leopold II

« You see, when you kill ten million Africans, you aren’t called ‘Hitler’. That is, your name doesn’t come to symbolize the living incarnation of evil. Your name and your picture don’t produce fear, hatred. Your victims aren’t talked about and your name isn’t remembered »

Slavery was abolished. But Congo still recovers from Leopold’s doing.
The corrupt commissions and bonus system Belgium put in place for colonial administrators stayed after the Europeans left, and Congo hasn’t had an honest government yet.

Foreign countries still own virtually all of Congo’s natural resources, and they guard their extraction rights with UN peacekeepers and hired paramilitaries. Everybody in the country lives in desperate poverty, despite living in what is the most resource-rich country on Earth.

Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes and « The Crime of Congo »:
"I am convinced that the reason why public opinion has not been more sensitive upon the question of the Congo Free State is that the terrible story has not been brought thoroughly home to the people"

End of thread. It broke my heart that outside the continent, people aren’t taught about these monsters. Hope this was informative.