King Leopold’s Soliloquy

In 1906, Mark Twain wrote an anti-imperialism treatise on Belgium’s King Leopold.

Twain wrote that King Leopold’s critics said he ruled “as a sovereign … absolute, irresponsible, above all law; trampling the Berlin-made Congo charter under foot … claiming and holding its millions of people as my private property, my serfs, my slaves; their labor mine, with or without wage; the food they raise not their property but mine; the rubber, the ivory and all the other riches of the land mine …

“They have told how I planned and prepared my establishment and selected my horde of officials — “pals” and “pimps” of mine, “unspeakable Belgians” every one — and hoisted my flag, and “took in” a President of the United States, and got him to be the first to recognize it and salute it.”

[PHOTO: Victims of King Leopold’s soldiers.]

Below: A new photo of the Make Poverty History march, and Londonbear and Chris Floyd speak eloquently about Africa:

PHOTO: Cyclists pass Gladhouse reservoir near Edinburgh as they make their way to the capital for today’s Make Poverty History march where they will join about 100,000 others. — From The Scotsman‘s article, “Suddenly, there is a real opportunity to change Africa.”

(Check Indymedia UK for the latest on demonstrations and protests.)

Today, Londonbear has diaried a powerful polemic, “We Should Give Africa Nothing.” calling for justice for Africa.

So too has Chris Floyd, the Moscow Times columnist, at his Empire Burlesque blog:

The Wild Wolves of Gleneagles: Live 8, G8 and Africa’s Anguish

As we’ve noted here before (here and here), and as others have noted (here), the “Live 8” concerts are, in the main, a goodhearted but wrong-headed diversion by unconsciously co-opted pop stars being used to obscure the brutal and rapacious exploitation of Africa by the world’s richest countries. But one good thing to come from this PR-apaloooza is that it has – temporarily, no doubt – focused attention on Africa’s plight and the West’s central role in creating it.

There’s nothing new about this knowledge, this blood guilt that stains the very fabric of Western civilization.

Floyd quotes a poem by Rabindranath Tagore at his blog:

Almost 60 years ago, Rabindranath Tagore captured its essence in a poem

“…Others came with iron manacles,
With clutches sharper than the claws of your own wild wolves:
Slavers came,
With an arrogance more benighted than your own dark jungles.
Civilization’s barbarous greed
Flaunted its naked humanity.
You wailed wordlessly, muddied the soil of your steamy jungles
With blood and tears….

…Meanwhile, across the sea in their native parishes
Temple-bells summoned your conquerors to prayer,
Morning and evening, in the name of a loving god.
Mothers dandled babies in their laps;
Poets raised hymns to beauty.

Today as the air of the West thickens,
Constricted by the imminent evening storm;
As animals emerge from secret lairs
And proclaim by their ominous howls the closing of the day;
Come, poet of the end of the age,
Stand in the dying light of the advancing nightfall
At the door of despoiled Africa
And say, ‘Forgive, forgive – ‘
In the midst of murderous insanity
May these be your civilization’s last, virtuous words.”

***
Tagore was not the only one to see the truth, of course. Indeed, more than a generation before, in 1905, a voice rose from the midst of the West itself to decry “Civilization’s barbarous greed.”

It was Mark Twain — too often remembered now (if remembered at all) as the genial author of those school-assignment chores, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Twain was much more than this, of course, much darker in spirit. He was also one of the fiercest opponents of anti-imperialism that America has ever seen. Here is his cry into the heart of darkness: King Leopold’s Soliloquy.