Thursday, April 04, 2024

Who was the cruelest human being ever?

Leopold II of Belgium.

King of Belgium from 1865 to 1909, Leopold II carried out the most brutal work of forced colonization ever carried out. The Belgian sovereign transformed a territory corresponding to that of the current Democratic Republic of Congo into his own personal colony, becoming a sort of private entrepreneur in the ivory and rubber extraction sector.

It is estimated, due to this campaign, 15 million deaths (out of a population of only 25 million Congolese at the time), added to an indecipherable number of mutilated, amputated or disfigured people (I'll spare you the impressive photos available) due to the atrocious punishments of the Belgian colonizing officers under the orders of Leopold II. Punishments which, moreover, were inflicted for absurd reasons, such as not having respected the minimum quantity of rubber to be extracted daily.

Leopold then did nothing to counter the spread of two terrifying epidemics: that of smallpox and that of sleeping sickness, thus contributing even more to absolutely decimating the poor Central African population.

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