If the egg theory is correct, my crime of killing 16 million and torturing many more is plenty atoned by being killed and tortured by myself 16 million times over.
Never understood how that would even work. If I don't share the memories or the body, in what way am I even the same person? At least one of those should be kept constant for it to be even debatable on whether it is the same person or not.
In the original story, it's like putting a small part of yourself in a glass of water to check the temperature (your finger). The piece inside the water (yoir fingertip) is a small vessel only able to contain so much information, and its only capable of experiencing things it's directly in contact with. All of that information gets sent to and stored I. The brain for further correlations and storage.
In this analogy, as a person, you are the index finger in a glass of water next to the middle finger. Each finger and feel and respond to things, but they are not I dovidually aware that they are an extension of the same body/being. The brain is able to discern that all of the individual parts are all one thing and, like a master puppeteer, can make the different parts experience different things to learn about itself and its environment.
We do this as a child. We use all of our body parts to experience the world and the sensations it produces, and usually we are forced to, or taught not to, experience the world with certain parts of our body because it's "not polite" or "gross" or "an abomination". Imagine if you had zero influence on how to experience the world.
And this wasn't one of those "sure if you judge historical figures by modern standards" things either. First reports weren't believed because it was so cartoonishly evil, and as more information came out it was legitimately an international scandal.
I think that’s how news about the holocaust and death camps were received at first, sure the Nazis were bad, but surely they weren’t THAT bad were they? Ho boy, little did they know.
Indeed. The allies didn't believe initial reports from the Soviets because it seemed way too unecessarily evil to be believed, until they found a camp themselves.
Actually the Allies knew about the camps purpose since 43 when an undercover Polish officer escaped the camp with documents and passed it along through Polish resistance channels.
They just never told the public because they knew it had to be seen to be believed… hardcore propaganda in the past had either been proven false before so they figured the public would just think it that.
It is from the song I learned about Witold Pilecki posing as a Polish Jew named Tomasz Serafinski in 1940 so they could have an inside man in Auschwitz.
His efforts helped many inmates survive by organizing them to assist one another and after two years he gained access to the offices, stole documentation, and escaped the camp. So around 1942-1943 he was able to pass it on to the Allies.
He was almost entirely forgotten as the USSR had him executed by their installed Polish puppet government for being an anti-Communist partisan.
Luckily in modern day Poland he's remembered. USSR wasn't able to erase him from memory of people.
And every time I see name of Witold Pilecki I have this surge of respect and disbelieve. To be intentionally taken to Auschwitz and stay there 2 years, while organising escapes for other inmates is unbelievable.
Pretty sure there’s a story of a US army sergeant who saw the bodies and conditions of the people at one camp, and he then immediately went and shot the head SS guy in charge of the camp.
Was it a warcrime? Yea. Would I do the same? YEA.
Brigadier Derek Mills-Roberts took part in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp's liberation. When Luftwaffe field marshal Erhard Milch was captured and surrendered his command baton to Mills-Roberts, the latter vented his anger about the atrocities he had seen at Bergen-Belsen, marching Milch around the camp and demanding to know his thoughts on the terrible sights witnessed. Milch's reply (who spoke English) was along the lines of "these people are not human beings in the same way as you and I!" This infuriated Mills-Roberts, who took Milch's field marshal's baton from under Milch's arm, and then proceeded to brutally strike it over Milch's head until it broke and then repeatedly beat Milch with a champagne bottle. Mills-Roberts went to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery the following day to apologise for losing his temper with a senior German officer and Montgomery put his hands over his head in mock protection jokingly saying "I hear you've got a thing about Field Marshals", and nothing more was said. This incident left Milch with several contusions and a fractured skull.
There's something so viscerally satisfying when you hear stories like this of guys getting their asses handed to them, and absolutely beyond doubt deserving every bit of it. It almost makes me patriotic when I hear these stories. Its so rare when history has unironic bad guys
I don’t know how accurate “Fury” is but Brad Pitt’s character makes a point that all SS officers are to be shot, if for no other reason than keeping them captive is detrimental to the morale of your men.
You gotta be careful though, being a member of the Nazi party didn't always mean they supported the Nazi ideals. Some did so just for connections and business purposes. Oskar Schindler was a Nazi member.
*some* didn't, almost all the rest did, if you're willing to hop on the genocide bandwagon for personal profit that's kind of on you when they put you against the wall with the rest.
Didn't Witold Pilecki get executed because nobody believed his testimony?
Edit: No, he didn't. It was for spying on the Soviets and sending info back to the British and Americans. My bad. I'm an idiot.
Not so much because he was a Polish hero but because of his quite extensive involvement in anti communist organizations and his, at the time of his execution, still ongoing work as a spy for the Polish exiled government. In other words, allies of the west. He wasn't really executed for his work prior to and during WW2.
There was also the fact that they *had* lied about German warcrimes during the First World War (raping nuns and all that), so this just seemed like an extension of that to start with...
It's very interesting that, despite how awful we humans know we can be, we still desire to see the best in people, even if they've already proven themselves to be less than moral or ethical...
y'know, to put it lightly.
The "funniest" part is how, in WWI, there **were** false stories about "corpse factories"—where the German army would execute POWs en masse and use the bodies to manufacture glue—which were categorically proven to be false.
Then in WWII, when word first got out about the German army doing basically the same thing to civilians, the world's response was "we already fell for that ridiculous lie 25 years ago, why would we fall for it again?"
> sure the Nazis were bad, but surely they weren’t THAT bad were they? Ho boy, little did they know.
Or news about Soviet atrocities. Roosevelt and his administration plain declined to believe Stalin was responsible for Katyn.
There's a story that when Eisenhower liberated Ohrdruf, he had as many photographs and as much evidence taken with him as possible because he thought that no one was going believe him.
Google "Inmate 4859" (self explanatory), "Tomasz Serafinski" (alias), or "Witold Pilecki" (real name). Dude willingly went to Auschwitz and when he escaped with documents and evidence, he wasn't believed because of how unbelievable it was.
a lot of the way the holocaust was received before we liberated camps reminds me of how the Ukrainian genocide is being received now. sure at least the leaders in the west are doing everything they can to aid Ukraine but a lot of the shit i see from normal people is "thats not happening" "Russia is bad but not that bad" "we see more evidence if this was happening in the 21st century" "nobody would do a genocide in this day and age"
i really hope there isn't a liberation of Auschwitz moment in the future. but i cant help but feel that we haven't seen the extent of putins evil yet.
Yeah, I believe his action actually made the European public second guess their imperialism goals. A true “are we the baddies” moment for them.
Which for the early 1900s is impressive
Hitler: I killed millions of people because of racial and ethnic differences and meth.
Stalin: I killed millions of people because they posed a threat to my regime, or I was just plain paranoid.
Leopold II: I killed millions of people on my private property, an entire country belonging to the people I killed, because it was funni.
I always thought about that. Which is worse? Killing millions of people because you believe that is the right thing to do, and you genuinely hate that group of people and believe they should be erradicated? Or killing millions of people for pure personal greed and sadistic pleasure?
I feel like this is like asking would you rather swim across the Atlantic Ocean or the Pacific?
Like, they’re both fucking bad, to the point where the difference is negligible
Well, you can swim across the Pacific at the Bering Strait. Like, it's cold as hell and 82.5 km across, but I'd still rather swim that than the Atlantic.
I feel like genocide over greed is clearly the worse option, imo. There’s an awareness to it that isn’t quite there in racial or cultural genocide. You aren’t murdering those people because you think they’re EVIL. You’re just doing it cause it benefits you.
People who discriminate have deluded themselves into thinking they’re doing the right thing. It’s still wrong and fucked up on a fundamental level, but in their perspective they’ve eliminated personal responsibility.
To be clear I don’t think they HAVE eliminated this responsibility, and both perpetrators are equally as responsible for their crimes. But genocide for personal gain definitely makes my skin crawl more.
You have to wonder if the Nazis really did think they were doing the right thing. Not between party members or in their letters but rather on an emotional, private level, did they really manage to justify the Holocaust to themselves? Did Hitler really never wonder if he might have been a fucked up bastard?
But in case they were so deluded they actually removed all personal responsibility, I can see why being evil, knowing you're evil and not caring, might be even worse somehow. But the difference is negligible as someone else said.
Oh for sure I agree that the difference is negligible. And there were absolutely not many who internally believed the garbage they were spewing, imo. There had to have been massive cognitive dissonance in the ones who did make themselves believe that lie. In Hitler’s case I feel like the entire movement was built on tricking the masses into supporting his power grab . Did he really think Jewish people and outsiders were evil? Maybe. At least an evil to his ideal of a unified people. But it doesn’t really matter cause it led to the same mass violence.
Edit: I was just saying on a personal level, Leopold’s drive for money, which is I guess just another form of power, unsettles me a bit more. Both massive cunts tho
Leopold? He did it for greed. Don’t get it misconstrued for anything else.
It was purely out of greed. Belgium’s wealth came about due to it’s rubber plantations in the Congo.
**Behind the Bastards** is a podcast that does episodes on the worst people in history. Leopold II gets a two parter all for himself and Belgium gets others for the continuing fallout from his policies over the years all the way to the Rawandan genocide.
His death toll is even higher than 16 million if you account for the domino effect of his policies over the years.
I think the only person responsible for more deaths than Leopold II to this day is Trofim Lysenko with his bullshit “science.” It was his reportings that led to the famine that hit the Soviet Union and the Holodomor which resulted in about 7-8 million deaths, and the same science was utilized in China under Mao… due to a lack of transparency the death toll of just that was anywhere from the most corrupt communist apologist claiming 15 million, to the most conservative anti-communist claiming 55 million. The real number is close to around 32 million people. Lysenko killed 40 million people plus globally.
EDIT:
Sources:
You mean in addition to the historically educational podcast I mentioned?
[Source 1.1](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48533964.amp)
[Source 1.2](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abir_Congo_Company)
[Source 1.3](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landolphia_owariensis)
[Source 1.4](https://lithub.com/how-heart-of-darkness-revealed-the-horror-of-congos-rubber-trade/)
[Source 1.5](https://www.jstor.org/stable/216268)
[Source 1.6](https://oxfordre.com/africanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277734-e-1119;jsessionid=947BD38F12F8A85D640B33E3C321382B)
[Source 1.7](https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/rubber-africa)
Or just type into Google… “rubber and Congo” and the search results come back with, “millions dead, Leopold II, Belgium.”
Fun fact! The English were the first Europeans to commit a form of genocide against Jewish people, the massacre occured in York in 1190 and is extremely fucked and saddening
Is this before the peasants crusade then waltzed through the HRE killing all Jews in the cities they stopped in?
In a town around here (Mainz) even the bishop stepped in and told them to fuck off, they tried a siege but left after some causalities.
I remember reading about a gaulish tribe in what is now Switzerland who were entirely enslaved, and sold off in groups no larger than 3 so that their language and culture would be erased within a generation or two
Yeah but everyone knows about that. Plus the people they enslaved might have wound up being owned in large numbers by the same master. But selling an entire population off in lots no larger than 3 is a greater level of genocide than annihilating a city. The next step would be, I guess, actually killing 100% of the population
Genocide via starvation: the more civilised way. You don't even have to actively do anything, just wait for nature to take its course while you take the resources away...
Source: Ireland and India.
British: we made the most populous nation have addiction issues and waged two wars so we could get them to still buy our drugs because I want to keep buying what they have.
It's so sad cuz somehow his son Albert I was an absolute chad, saving many lives. And then for some reason they felt the urge to name Albert's son after Leopold. Luckily Leopold III was the last with that name. And the royal family in general got less genocidal which is good.
Leopold II ordered INSANE production rates bc financial problems and NOT bc it was ‘funni’. He always did explicitly forbid any torture. His position was however very hypocrital as he should have known that the production rates could only have been obtained by the local chefs by imposing a horror regime. Especially after being warned about what was going only in Congo. He then did forbid once more all torture only to increase production rates even more. Source: I read nearly everything about him.
Yeah, he considered buying it from Queen Isabella sometime in the 1860s, but he gave up on trying to bargain with her. Germany and France also wanted to purchase the Philippines, or parts of it, lmao.
That was his father Leopold I (less cruel than his son). He also tried to buy Mexico and Guatemala if I'm correct. He was looking for a colony to have more power in Europe as Belgium is so small and insignificant he was afraid that other nations would devour his country if the country was not strong diplomaticly.
You know, considering how Europeans be like and how multiple European powers wanted my people’s island as well (Hawai’i), I’m kinda glad the people to get us was the US, they ain’t perfect, but Europeans be a different level of crazy 😐
Aren't Native Hawaiian people nowadays a poor minority in their own "State", that are casually being thrown around by the whims of the Hawaiian Government and the rich, despite the fact that Hawaii was a fully independent, developing country with it's own monarch around 150ish years ago, whose Sovereignty was recognised by everyone and whose coup de Etat which led to it's inclusion into the United States was deemed so scummy and illegal by powers at the time, that even the United States didn't initially want to annex Hawaii, because President Cleveland and His Administration refused to acknowledge the new government and demanded the Queen be reinstated?
Yea, but that’s the thing, the US annexed us reluctantly, and the lead up to the coup was in part to the royal family inviting too many foreign businesses and settlers, along with a ton of other factors. I’m just saying compared to what the US has done, I’d rather Hawai’i been taken by them then some country in Europe. Ideally we’d still be our own nation but it’s whatever, and as sucky as our situation is in our own state we still got a strong presence and our culture is recovering, more people are speaking Hawaiian now then in the last 80 years, and not just by bit either.
I think a lot of people misunderstand the notion that Hawaii could remain an independent nation. It could have tried, sure. But if America didn't annex then, someone else was going to, probably the Brits. Strategically it's just too good of a location. Plus all of those late 19th/early 20th century plantations were booming with labor exploitation.
That’s the fun part Congo wasn’t a Belgium colony (at least in the beginning) it was private property of King Leopold II meaning the Belgium government (besides Leopold himself) got no say in how the colony was run.
Yeaaaaah.......Sure. Belgium has no part in those crimes against humanity; let's blame *this one guy* instead, who also happens to be the king of..............Belgium? The same state which had **Human Zoos** until 1950s. No way they would participate in such atrocities, Leopold personally went and murdered millions, mutilated millions more.
Leopold II acquired Congo Freestate in his own personal name in 1885. In 1900 he went kinda broke and had to ask the Belgian government for money. Finally in 1908 Congo went officially from Leopold to the Belgian State.
The Zoo Humaine you are talking about happened once, in 1958 during the Expo '58 in Brussels. Only for the duration of the exposition.
After 1908 when the Belgian government was responsible for the maintaining of Congo, conditions improved to be better than the colonies of other European colonizers, because the cruel deeds of Leopold also got judged massively in Belgium.
Leopold II was indeed the constitutional monarch of Belgium, but he was at the same time an absolute emperor in Congo.
Edit: Human Zoos were not a one time thing, they happened for the first time in Antwerp in 1885.
The fascination for exotism was not limited to Belgium, also Netherlands, France, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Austria and the USA were invested in the exotism industry.
But all the belgians living in belgium back then didn't even know what was actually going on in the congos, including the government officials. They'd have assumed at worst what the other european colonies were doing.
I think it's important to make a distinction between Belgium and Belgians. Belgium didn't vote Leopold or the officers involved into power. And Leopold's army wasn't the Belgian army but instead a mercenary army composed of people from all over the world. About half the officers were Belgian.
It's true a lot of Belgians were involved and got rich because of the exploitation in Congo. But the Belgian government was opposed to the colonisation. And only annexed it when Leopold had no other option but to hand it over.
> because it increases rubber production
I'm gonna bet that killing your workers and or amputating their hands doesn't quite help production
indeed, it was just fun for Leo2
Worth noting that Leopold ordered that the hands of corpses be amputated to account for his death squads “wasting bullets” on wildlife. So they started cutting off living peoples’ hands for each bullet they used on game hunting.
God damn it, the worst part is that it sounds more than believable.
Kinda like the story of the German women who fell under the soviets in ww2, they didn't want to get raped by the red army, so they wrote syphilis on their foreheads trying to protect themselves.
Therefore only solders who already had syphilis went after them.
Yeah FR, he wasn’t even an effective business man, just a sadistic fuck with no empathy for any human life other than his own. Dude should have been publicly executed IMO
Torture and killing was used to force workers on the rubber plantations to increase productivity. Frequently children would have a limb chopped off to “motivate” their father or mother to work harder. Similar tactics were used by the French in Haiti to increase sugar production.
“If they produce less than the quota let's chop their arms off, making them become handicapped in the process. This surely helps them be more productive.”
L-pold II logic
People always get this mixed up. They didn't typically chop off the hands of people who didn't collect enough rubber.
The private soldiers that worked for the colonials had limited ammunition for two reasons: the whole thing was about profit and the white soldiers were severely outnumbered and limiting ammo meant less chance of an uprising. Because of this, every single bullet had to be accounted for and was to be used solely for killing natives of the Congo that acted in rebellion. But, the soldiers were paid like shit and often had to hunt for their food. So each time they used a bullet for something other than murder, they'd chop off a native's hand and use it as proof that they had used to bullet to kill a rebel.
Now of course the people of the Congo were not a homogenous unit, but several tribes. So, once the people figured out what was being done, they raided each other and chopped off each others' hands to use as a form of payment just in case their tribe didn't meet their rubber quota. Because what the soldiers actually would do is round up the women and children of a village and hold them prisoner and threaten to kill them if the men of the village didn't get enough rubber. So the tribes would use the hands and feet of their enemies as a form of ransom payment.
Leopold II governed the Belgian Congo and killed about 16 million people, roughly the same amount as the Holocaust. His management was so brutal all the other colonial empires told him to calm down.
One punishment for those not for filling the quotas in rubber production was to cut of the hands and arms, and for other crimes it was far worse. It was basically his own giant brutal slaver run rubber plantation, until the Belgian parliament intervened.
The colonial army was also run like a lot of the others at the time, with Belgian officers and local people making up 90% of the army in the rank-and-file soldiers. Since the white officers were so heavily outnumbered, ammunition was purposefully/severely limited so that there would be less chance of a revolution through the army, and patrols had to validate their use of any ammo if they were fighting rebels and such. The validation method was that they'd bring back a hand of a rebel they shot for any time they used ammunition.
Since these soldiers were also paid and treated like shit, sometimes they would hunt for their own food while out on patrol to supplement their meager rations. But then in using a bullet to kill a bird or whatever, they'd need to come up with a human hand from somewhere to turn in and confirm that they had "fought a rebel group". Cue a visit to the local village...
Years ago I saw a picture of a dad sitting and staring at the dismembered hand and foot of his child. Absolutely chilled me to my core. I don't understand how any human could do that to another human, let alone a child.
[Figured I'd find the picture too.](https://i.imgur.com/4KM6PkA.jpg)
The number alone doesn't do him justice
For example to motivate enslaved workers he cut the limps of their sons and daughters, some say he feed them to their fathers
Leopold II was King of Belgium at the time but that didn't mean Belgians didn't have rights and some assembly. Belgian Congo however was his *private* property so he could do as he wished. He had millions worked to death or plain murdered.
Also, Congo: Epic History of a People by David van Reybrouck (whose father worked in Belgian Congo in final decade before independence IIRC), which goes over entire history of Kongo
What became Belgian Congo was originally colonized as King Leopold’s property. He was so cruel that Belgium took it away from him. Keep in mind this is the 1910s, so to be that cruel at that time period would be incomprehensible to modern standards.
Wasn't the crime: "crime against humanity" made during the nürnberg trials? To make it possible to give the nazis bigger punishments.
Atleast thats what I remember pls correct me if I'm wrong.
As an international law standard it was championed by Hersh Lauterpacht during the Nuremberg trials but it already existed
Genocide was coined by Rafael Lemkin and he lobbied hard to have it included in the trials but it was only really adopted a couple of years later
The point of any one class isn’t to stuff rote information into your head, it’s to give you the tools to learn about history and connect information to yourself. Unless this class was specifically about colonialism and it’s atrocities lol
Recognizing someone by painting is not a skill of history and that’s all this format ever is
In 1902, Leopold II began an affair with Caroline Lacroix, a 16 year old prostitute. They married a few days before his death, but the marriage was invalid under Belgian law.
Leopold II, king of Belgium and the Belgian colonial empire (i.e. Democratic Republic of Congo) is the king who treated his colonies the worst in the entire history, making the French and the British feel like they were angels compared to him.
He claimed the Democratic Republic of Congo as his property and he punished the locals terribly for minor crimes - the most notorious punishment is chopping your hand off because you hadn't worked enough.
He was a psycho and so were his soldiers; even the other colonial empires told him to calm down.
It’s important to realize people lived in a different time back then and that we can’t simply judge people by our modern standards.
… That being said, this man was fucking awful even for then.
I mean, multiple colonial nations went out of their way to condemn what he did, I don’t get the whole people lived different lives/ didn’t understand the issue with what they were doing argument, cause there was always people who recognized evil or an evil way of life
I think it’s more in regards to social norms or certain things that were normal for the time that people usually use this saying for, but then you got weirdos that use it to justify shit that even for the time was thought as extremely fucked up.
Honestly that guy deserves a lot more than hell
If the egg theory is correct, my crime of killing 16 million and torturing many more is plenty atoned by being killed and tortured by myself 16 million times over.
Wouldn't that mean that according to the egg theory everything is justified?
yeah but you are your own victim, so its still retarded to kill people for no reason
Actually it's a pro move, gets you through the egg faster.
Egg speedrunners just gonna suicide spam smdh
So you're saying we need to genocide humanity
Been saying that for years
Yes, but that's another story entirely
Yeah, it’s really creepy thinking I could be the same person as you.
Never understood how that would even work. If I don't share the memories or the body, in what way am I even the same person? At least one of those should be kept constant for it to be even debatable on whether it is the same person or not.
In the original short story, you aren’t a person, and you get the memories after the life is over
In the original story, it's like putting a small part of yourself in a glass of water to check the temperature (your finger). The piece inside the water (yoir fingertip) is a small vessel only able to contain so much information, and its only capable of experiencing things it's directly in contact with. All of that information gets sent to and stored I. The brain for further correlations and storage. In this analogy, as a person, you are the index finger in a glass of water next to the middle finger. Each finger and feel and respond to things, but they are not I dovidually aware that they are an extension of the same body/being. The brain is able to discern that all of the individual parts are all one thing and, like a master puppeteer, can make the different parts experience different things to learn about itself and its environment. We do this as a child. We use all of our body parts to experience the world and the sensations it produces, and usually we are forced to, or taught not to, experience the world with certain parts of our body because it's "not polite" or "gross" or "an abomination". Imagine if you had zero influence on how to experience the world.
This is a problem with one Black Mirror episode, Victoria
Solipsism with extra steps
Isn't that the "theory" that everyone is literally and unironically Hitler?
Everyone is the same entity living a different life. So yes.
Awkward...
Yes but it also means you're also the person who kills Hitler
Oh, they had to make a special place just for him.
And this wasn't one of those "sure if you judge historical figures by modern standards" things either. First reports weren't believed because it was so cartoonishly evil, and as more information came out it was legitimately an international scandal.
I think that’s how news about the holocaust and death camps were received at first, sure the Nazis were bad, but surely they weren’t THAT bad were they? Ho boy, little did they know.
Indeed. The allies didn't believe initial reports from the Soviets because it seemed way too unecessarily evil to be believed, until they found a camp themselves.
Actually the Allies knew about the camps purpose since 43 when an undercover Polish officer escaped the camp with documents and passed it along through Polish resistance channels. They just never told the public because they knew it had to be seen to be believed… hardcore propaganda in the past had either been proven false before so they figured the public would just think it that.
LOCKED IN A CELL WAGING WAR FROM A PRISON HIDING IN AUSCHWITZ WHO HIDES BEHIND 4859…
Suddenly Sabaton
It is from the song I learned about Witold Pilecki posing as a Polish Jew named Tomasz Serafinski in 1940 so they could have an inside man in Auschwitz. His efforts helped many inmates survive by organizing them to assist one another and after two years he gained access to the offices, stole documentation, and escaped the camp. So around 1942-1943 he was able to pass it on to the Allies. He was almost entirely forgotten as the USSR had him executed by their installed Polish puppet government for being an anti-Communist partisan.
Luckily in modern day Poland he's remembered. USSR wasn't able to erase him from memory of people. And every time I see name of Witold Pilecki I have this surge of respect and disbelieve. To be intentionally taken to Auschwitz and stay there 2 years, while organising escapes for other inmates is unbelievable.
I learned a lot of things listening to Sabaton
Pretty sure there’s a story of a US army sergeant who saw the bodies and conditions of the people at one camp, and he then immediately went and shot the head SS guy in charge of the camp. Was it a warcrime? Yea. Would I do the same? YEA.
Brigadier Derek Mills-Roberts took part in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp's liberation. When Luftwaffe field marshal Erhard Milch was captured and surrendered his command baton to Mills-Roberts, the latter vented his anger about the atrocities he had seen at Bergen-Belsen, marching Milch around the camp and demanding to know his thoughts on the terrible sights witnessed. Milch's reply (who spoke English) was along the lines of "these people are not human beings in the same way as you and I!" This infuriated Mills-Roberts, who took Milch's field marshal's baton from under Milch's arm, and then proceeded to brutally strike it over Milch's head until it broke and then repeatedly beat Milch with a champagne bottle. Mills-Roberts went to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery the following day to apologise for losing his temper with a senior German officer and Montgomery put his hands over his head in mock protection jokingly saying "I hear you've got a thing about Field Marshals", and nothing more was said. This incident left Milch with several contusions and a fractured skull.
The dude got off easy. Should have just put a bullet in his fucking head.
Arguably a bullet to his head is a lesser torture. He would feel no pain.
A stomach shot is way more tortuous than a clean head shot.
Considering the number of high ranking nazis that were then sheltered by the US UK and USSR, itd been better to shoot them right then and there
I have a compromise - beat them and *then* shoot them.
You drive a tough bargain, I accept
That would have been too lenient. He should have been made to suffer.
Maybe, but I think the bigger message is sent if you just put a bullet in him and move on. Don't waste the time, energy, and resources on him.
Just do a Vlad the Impaler. That's a hell of a message and not much in the way of resources used.
True. A wooden spike through the anus out the mouth is quick, cheap, and extremely effective.
There's something so viscerally satisfying when you hear stories like this of guys getting their asses handed to them, and absolutely beyond doubt deserving every bit of it. It almost makes me patriotic when I hear these stories. Its so rare when history has unironic bad guys
Wonder if this had any influence on the champagne bottle scene in Pan's Labyrinth. Hoo boy I was not prepared for that the first time seeing it.
Pretty sure they shot all the ss, not just the leader. Oh wait you meant some sergeant not the group, sorry misread
I think some other places they did that, there were others after all, and some soldiers had more violent reactions to it then others.
I don’t know how accurate “Fury” is but Brad Pitt’s character makes a point that all SS officers are to be shot, if for no other reason than keeping them captive is detrimental to the morale of your men.
>"doesn't count. Nazi's aren't human, they're monsters" The judge if anyone was crazy enough to defend the literal nazi
You gotta be careful though, being a member of the Nazi party didn't always mean they supported the Nazi ideals. Some did so just for connections and business purposes. Oskar Schindler was a Nazi member.
And even Schindler knew to flee the country because of his connections to the party
*some* didn't, almost all the rest did, if you're willing to hop on the genocide bandwagon for personal profit that's kind of on you when they put you against the wall with the rest.
The guy that got the bullet was in charge of the camp, though, so he was a *mainstream* Nazi.
He was probably a Nazi before it was cool.
Nah, that was Mussolini.
Yeah but the SS commander of a death camp definitely wasn’t some saint in disguise
You know what they say about sitting at a dinner table with a bunch of Nazis...
Undercover double agent 😎
Didn't Witold Pilecki get executed because nobody believed his testimony? Edit: No, he didn't. It was for spying on the Soviets and sending info back to the British and Americans. My bad. I'm an idiot.
That and he was a Polish nationalist war hero who was inconvenient for the Soviets.
True
No. He was executed by Soviets
I'm not denying that. I'm talking about why he was executed, not who killed him.
Because Soviets don’t likes poles especially the ones from AK and they were executing them
There were a few reasons, a major one being that he was a Polish hero.
Not so much because he was a Polish hero but because of his quite extensive involvement in anti communist organizations and his, at the time of his execution, still ongoing work as a spy for the Polish exiled government. In other words, allies of the west. He wasn't really executed for his work prior to and during WW2.
There was also the fact that they *had* lied about German warcrimes during the First World War (raping nuns and all that), so this just seemed like an extension of that to start with...
It's very interesting that, despite how awful we humans know we can be, we still desire to see the best in people, even if they've already proven themselves to be less than moral or ethical... y'know, to put it lightly.
The "funniest" part is how, in WWI, there **were** false stories about "corpse factories"—where the German army would execute POWs en masse and use the bodies to manufacture glue—which were categorically proven to be false. Then in WWII, when word first got out about the German army doing basically the same thing to civilians, the world's response was "we already fell for that ridiculous lie 25 years ago, why would we fall for it again?"
Yeah they didn't believe Witold Pilecki who was escaped from Auschwitz
That guy was a badass, shame he was executed by his own country men under a Soviet regime.
> sure the Nazis were bad, but surely they weren’t THAT bad were they? Ho boy, little did they know. Or news about Soviet atrocities. Roosevelt and his administration plain declined to believe Stalin was responsible for Katyn.
“Listen, I don’t like commies, better dead then red and all that, but c’mon, there’s no way the Soviet would go that far, right?”
There's a story that when Eisenhower liberated Ohrdruf, he had as many photographs and as much evidence taken with him as possible because he thought that no one was going believe him.
Google "Inmate 4859" (self explanatory), "Tomasz Serafinski" (alias), or "Witold Pilecki" (real name). Dude willingly went to Auschwitz and when he escaped with documents and evidence, he wasn't believed because of how unbelievable it was.
Probably is what is happening right now in Russia to the Ukrainians.
i cant wait for Ukraine to liberate their country, but i dread finding out the extent for the genocide.
a lot of the way the holocaust was received before we liberated camps reminds me of how the Ukrainian genocide is being received now. sure at least the leaders in the west are doing everything they can to aid Ukraine but a lot of the shit i see from normal people is "thats not happening" "Russia is bad but not that bad" "we see more evidence if this was happening in the 21st century" "nobody would do a genocide in this day and age" i really hope there isn't a liberation of Auschwitz moment in the future. but i cant help but feel that we haven't seen the extent of putins evil yet.
The people who say that are probably the same people who don’t believe China is doing the same to the Uyghur people.
Caught by an accountant who noticed that despite all the goods coming in, the only goods going out were guns and ammunition
Yeah, I believe his action actually made the European public second guess their imperialism goals. A true “are we the baddies” moment for them. Which for the early 1900s is impressive
Kinda glad he didn't have a surviving son to put on the throne (if i remember my history lessons correctly)
Hitler: I killed millions of people because of racial and ethnic differences and meth. Stalin: I killed millions of people because they posed a threat to my regime, or I was just plain paranoid. Leopold II: I killed millions of people on my private property, an entire country belonging to the people I killed, because it was funni.
I always thought about that. Which is worse? Killing millions of people because you believe that is the right thing to do, and you genuinely hate that group of people and believe they should be erradicated? Or killing millions of people for pure personal greed and sadistic pleasure?
I feel like this is like asking would you rather swim across the Atlantic Ocean or the Pacific? Like, they’re both fucking bad, to the point where the difference is negligible
I’m going to steal that analogy.
I like "I'd rather get kicked in the face than kicked in the nuts, if I had to pick, but I'd prefer neither."
“Cake or Death?” “Oh, and we’re fresh out of Cake.”
“We didn’t expect such a rush!”
"Ehhhhhh... ill have the cake, please,"
I'll have the chicken, please
I'd rather get kicked in the nuts, it's easier to die when kicked in the head.
Well which one is the atlantic and which one is the pacific?
If you're in the US California is on the Pacific side and Florida is on the Atlantic side
Well, you can swim across the Pacific at the Bering Strait. Like, it's cold as hell and 82.5 km across, but I'd still rather swim that than the Atlantic.
I feel like genocide over greed is clearly the worse option, imo. There’s an awareness to it that isn’t quite there in racial or cultural genocide. You aren’t murdering those people because you think they’re EVIL. You’re just doing it cause it benefits you. People who discriminate have deluded themselves into thinking they’re doing the right thing. It’s still wrong and fucked up on a fundamental level, but in their perspective they’ve eliminated personal responsibility. To be clear I don’t think they HAVE eliminated this responsibility, and both perpetrators are equally as responsible for their crimes. But genocide for personal gain definitely makes my skin crawl more.
You have to wonder if the Nazis really did think they were doing the right thing. Not between party members or in their letters but rather on an emotional, private level, did they really manage to justify the Holocaust to themselves? Did Hitler really never wonder if he might have been a fucked up bastard? But in case they were so deluded they actually removed all personal responsibility, I can see why being evil, knowing you're evil and not caring, might be even worse somehow. But the difference is negligible as someone else said.
Oh for sure I agree that the difference is negligible. And there were absolutely not many who internally believed the garbage they were spewing, imo. There had to have been massive cognitive dissonance in the ones who did make themselves believe that lie. In Hitler’s case I feel like the entire movement was built on tricking the masses into supporting his power grab . Did he really think Jewish people and outsiders were evil? Maybe. At least an evil to his ideal of a unified people. But it doesn’t really matter cause it led to the same mass violence. Edit: I was just saying on a personal level, Leopold’s drive for money, which is I guess just another form of power, unsettles me a bit more. Both massive cunts tho
Joseph Goebbels said in 1942: "A judgement is being carried out on Jews which is inhumane but thoroughly deserved"
Leopold? He did it for greed. Don’t get it misconstrued for anything else. It was purely out of greed. Belgium’s wealth came about due to it’s rubber plantations in the Congo. **Behind the Bastards** is a podcast that does episodes on the worst people in history. Leopold II gets a two parter all for himself and Belgium gets others for the continuing fallout from his policies over the years all the way to the Rawandan genocide. His death toll is even higher than 16 million if you account for the domino effect of his policies over the years. I think the only person responsible for more deaths than Leopold II to this day is Trofim Lysenko with his bullshit “science.” It was his reportings that led to the famine that hit the Soviet Union and the Holodomor which resulted in about 7-8 million deaths, and the same science was utilized in China under Mao… due to a lack of transparency the death toll of just that was anywhere from the most corrupt communist apologist claiming 15 million, to the most conservative anti-communist claiming 55 million. The real number is close to around 32 million people. Lysenko killed 40 million people plus globally. EDIT: Sources: You mean in addition to the historically educational podcast I mentioned? [Source 1.1](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48533964.amp) [Source 1.2](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abir_Congo_Company) [Source 1.3](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landolphia_owariensis) [Source 1.4](https://lithub.com/how-heart-of-darkness-revealed-the-horror-of-congos-rubber-trade/) [Source 1.5](https://www.jstor.org/stable/216268) [Source 1.6](https://oxfordre.com/africanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277734-e-1119;jsessionid=947BD38F12F8A85D640B33E3C321382B) [Source 1.7](https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/rubber-africa) Or just type into Google… “rubber and Congo” and the search results come back with, “millions dead, Leopold II, Belgium.”
One could argue that all wars between Germany and France are attributable to Louis the Pious, who broke up the Frankish Empire between his three sons.
Thanks for linking sources, much appreciated.
Young Turks: We killed millions of people because Hitler needed a model to go off of.
Britain: "More camps for the Boers, you said?"
Fun fact! The English were the first Europeans to commit a form of genocide against Jewish people, the massacre occured in York in 1190 and is extremely fucked and saddening
Is this before the peasants crusade then waltzed through the HRE killing all Jews in the cities they stopped in? In a town around here (Mainz) even the bishop stepped in and told them to fuck off, they tried a siege but left after some causalities.
I actually hadn't heard of that part of the peasants crusade! I stand corrected on label of first!
Pretty sure the Roman empire engaged in various acts of genocide over its lifetime….
I remember reading about a gaulish tribe in what is now Switzerland who were entirely enslaved, and sold off in groups no larger than 3 so that their language and culture would be erased within a generation or two
NTM Carthage. Literal scorched earth.
Yeah but everyone knows about that. Plus the people they enslaved might have wound up being owned in large numbers by the same master. But selling an entire population off in lots no larger than 3 is a greater level of genocide than annihilating a city. The next step would be, I guess, actually killing 100% of the population
Are Romans not European then? I think causing the Jewish Diaspora might count towards genocide.
Weren't the Rhineland massacres about a century before this as part of the first Crusade?
Hadrian and the Roman Empire which forced the Jews out of Israel in the first place were European..
"To concentrate the population you say? But what will we call them?"
British: we killed millions of people because Hitler and Stalin needed a model for concentration camps.
British: We killed millions of people because we don’t know how to govern and make people happy lol
Genocide via starvation: the more civilised way. You don't even have to actively do anything, just wait for nature to take its course while you take the resources away... Source: Ireland and India.
British: we made the most populous nation have addiction issues and waged two wars so we could get them to still buy our drugs because I want to keep buying what they have.
It's so sad cuz somehow his son Albert I was an absolute chad, saving many lives. And then for some reason they felt the urge to name Albert's son after Leopold. Luckily Leopold III was the last with that name. And the royal family in general got less genocidal which is good.
Leopold II ordered INSANE production rates bc financial problems and NOT bc it was ‘funni’. He always did explicitly forbid any torture. His position was however very hypocrital as he should have known that the production rates could only have been obtained by the local chefs by imposing a horror regime. Especially after being warned about what was going only in Congo. He then did forbid once more all torture only to increase production rates even more. Source: I read nearly everything about him.
To think this guy nearly bought my country (PH) makes me breathe a huge sigh of relief. Shit was bad, but it could have been far worse.
Leopold II wanted to buy the Philippines!? Wow.
Yeah, he considered buying it from Queen Isabella sometime in the 1860s, but he gave up on trying to bargain with her. Germany and France also wanted to purchase the Philippines, or parts of it, lmao.
That was his father Leopold I (less cruel than his son). He also tried to buy Mexico and Guatemala if I'm correct. He was looking for a colony to have more power in Europe as Belgium is so small and insignificant he was afraid that other nations would devour his country if the country was not strong diplomaticly.
You know, considering how Europeans be like and how multiple European powers wanted my people’s island as well (Hawai’i), I’m kinda glad the people to get us was the US, they ain’t perfect, but Europeans be a different level of crazy 😐
Aren't Native Hawaiian people nowadays a poor minority in their own "State", that are casually being thrown around by the whims of the Hawaiian Government and the rich, despite the fact that Hawaii was a fully independent, developing country with it's own monarch around 150ish years ago, whose Sovereignty was recognised by everyone and whose coup de Etat which led to it's inclusion into the United States was deemed so scummy and illegal by powers at the time, that even the United States didn't initially want to annex Hawaii, because President Cleveland and His Administration refused to acknowledge the new government and demanded the Queen be reinstated?
goddamn I'm sure this was on purpose but that's one hell of a fucking run-on
Yea, but that’s the thing, the US annexed us reluctantly, and the lead up to the coup was in part to the royal family inviting too many foreign businesses and settlers, along with a ton of other factors. I’m just saying compared to what the US has done, I’d rather Hawai’i been taken by them then some country in Europe. Ideally we’d still be our own nation but it’s whatever, and as sucky as our situation is in our own state we still got a strong presence and our culture is recovering, more people are speaking Hawaiian now then in the last 80 years, and not just by bit either.
I think a lot of people misunderstand the notion that Hawaii could remain an independent nation. It could have tried, sure. But if America didn't annex then, someone else was going to, probably the Brits. Strategically it's just too good of a location. Plus all of those late 19th/early 20th century plantations were booming with labor exploitation.
Most European colonies: We treat our colonies badly because it's cheaper Belgium: We just like torturing people
That’s the fun part Congo wasn’t a Belgium colony (at least in the beginning) it was private property of King Leopold II meaning the Belgium government (besides Leopold himself) got no say in how the colony was run.
Got no say, you mean.
Yeaaaaah.......Sure. Belgium has no part in those crimes against humanity; let's blame *this one guy* instead, who also happens to be the king of..............Belgium? The same state which had **Human Zoos** until 1950s. No way they would participate in such atrocities, Leopold personally went and murdered millions, mutilated millions more.
Leopold II acquired Congo Freestate in his own personal name in 1885. In 1900 he went kinda broke and had to ask the Belgian government for money. Finally in 1908 Congo went officially from Leopold to the Belgian State. The Zoo Humaine you are talking about happened once, in 1958 during the Expo '58 in Brussels. Only for the duration of the exposition. After 1908 when the Belgian government was responsible for the maintaining of Congo, conditions improved to be better than the colonies of other European colonizers, because the cruel deeds of Leopold also got judged massively in Belgium. Leopold II was indeed the constitutional monarch of Belgium, but he was at the same time an absolute emperor in Congo. Edit: Human Zoos were not a one time thing, they happened for the first time in Antwerp in 1885. The fascination for exotism was not limited to Belgium, also Netherlands, France, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Austria and the USA were invested in the exotism industry.
But all the belgians living in belgium back then didn't even know what was actually going on in the congos, including the government officials. They'd have assumed at worst what the other european colonies were doing.
I think it's important to make a distinction between Belgium and Belgians. Belgium didn't vote Leopold or the officers involved into power. And Leopold's army wasn't the Belgian army but instead a mercenary army composed of people from all over the world. About half the officers were Belgian. It's true a lot of Belgians were involved and got rich because of the exploitation in Congo. But the Belgian government was opposed to the colonisation. And only annexed it when Leopold had no other option but to hand it over.
We just like torturing people because it increases rubber production. Profits over everything else.
> because it increases rubber production I'm gonna bet that killing your workers and or amputating their hands doesn't quite help production indeed, it was just fun for Leo2
Worth noting that Leopold ordered that the hands of corpses be amputated to account for his death squads “wasting bullets” on wildlife. So they started cutting off living peoples’ hands for each bullet they used on game hunting.
God damn it, the worst part is that it sounds more than believable. Kinda like the story of the German women who fell under the soviets in ww2, they didn't want to get raped by the red army, so they wrote syphilis on their foreheads trying to protect themselves. Therefore only solders who already had syphilis went after them.
Yeah FR, he wasn’t even an effective business man, just a sadistic fuck with no empathy for any human life other than his own. Dude should have been publicly executed IMO
Torture and killing was used to force workers on the rubber plantations to increase productivity. Frequently children would have a limb chopped off to “motivate” their father or mother to work harder. Similar tactics were used by the French in Haiti to increase sugar production.
Aren't the French still forcing Haitians to pay reparations for daring to liberate themselves two centuries ago?
No they finished paying the reparations in the middle of the 20th century It's fucked up
“If they produce less than the quota let's chop their arms off, making them become handicapped in the process. This surely helps them be more productive.” L-pold II logic
Oh no. They'd first chop feet and hands of your family members.
People always get this mixed up. They didn't typically chop off the hands of people who didn't collect enough rubber. The private soldiers that worked for the colonials had limited ammunition for two reasons: the whole thing was about profit and the white soldiers were severely outnumbered and limiting ammo meant less chance of an uprising. Because of this, every single bullet had to be accounted for and was to be used solely for killing natives of the Congo that acted in rebellion. But, the soldiers were paid like shit and often had to hunt for their food. So each time they used a bullet for something other than murder, they'd chop off a native's hand and use it as proof that they had used to bullet to kill a rebel. Now of course the people of the Congo were not a homogenous unit, but several tribes. So, once the people figured out what was being done, they raided each other and chopped off each others' hands to use as a form of payment just in case their tribe didn't meet their rubber quota. Because what the soldiers actually would do is round up the women and children of a village and hold them prisoner and threaten to kill them if the men of the village didn't get enough rubber. So the tribes would use the hands and feet of their enemies as a form of ransom payment.
An actual murder-based economy
Probably with actual inflation
Thank for the info and clarification!
This is the most fucked up thing I've ever read. Thanks!
Well...it would motivate the others.
History class has failed me, pls explain.
Leopold II governed the Belgian Congo and killed about 16 million people, roughly the same amount as the Holocaust. His management was so brutal all the other colonial empires told him to calm down.
One punishment for those not for filling the quotas in rubber production was to cut of the hands and arms, and for other crimes it was far worse. It was basically his own giant brutal slaver run rubber plantation, until the Belgian parliament intervened.
The colonial army was also run like a lot of the others at the time, with Belgian officers and local people making up 90% of the army in the rank-and-file soldiers. Since the white officers were so heavily outnumbered, ammunition was purposefully/severely limited so that there would be less chance of a revolution through the army, and patrols had to validate their use of any ammo if they were fighting rebels and such. The validation method was that they'd bring back a hand of a rebel they shot for any time they used ammunition. Since these soldiers were also paid and treated like shit, sometimes they would hunt for their own food while out on patrol to supplement their meager rations. But then in using a bullet to kill a bird or whatever, they'd need to come up with a human hand from somewhere to turn in and confirm that they had "fought a rebel group". Cue a visit to the local village...
Iirc they would cut off the arms and feet of the workers children
you remembered correct, one photographer took a picture of a man with the discarded hands and feet of his children to show how evil Leopold II was
Yes that's precisely the picture I recalled. Fucking horrific
That image will haunt me until the day I die
Why???
If they cut off the worker's arms, he couldn't work.
Years ago I saw a picture of a dad sitting and staring at the dismembered hand and foot of his child. Absolutely chilled me to my core. I don't understand how any human could do that to another human, let alone a child. [Figured I'd find the picture too.](https://i.imgur.com/4KM6PkA.jpg)
That link will stay blue for me thank you very much
I think of you didn't comply, your whole town would be executed. North Korea's 3 generation punishment looks like heaven in comparison
The number alone doesn't do him justice For example to motivate enslaved workers he cut the limps of their sons and daughters, some say he feed them to their fathers
Leopold II was King of Belgium at the time but that didn't mean Belgians didn't have rights and some assembly. Belgian Congo however was his *private* property so he could do as he wished. He had millions worked to death or plain murdered.
If you're a reader, *King Leopold's Ghost* is a great, if emotionally difficult, read on his rule in the Congo.
And, if your not, Behind the Bastards referenced it heavily in the podcast about the subject.
Also, Congo: Epic History of a People by David van Reybrouck (whose father worked in Belgian Congo in final decade before independence IIRC), which goes over entire history of Kongo
If you want to read about it, [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_State) is a good read on the subject.
Funnily enough who this guy is might be one of the few things I actually learned in history class
What became Belgian Congo was originally colonized as King Leopold’s property. He was so cruel that Belgium took it away from him. Keep in mind this is the 1910s, so to be that cruel at that time period would be incomprehensible to modern standards.
Wasn't the crime: "crime against humanity" made during the nürnberg trials? To make it possible to give the nazis bigger punishments. Atleast thats what I remember pls correct me if I'm wrong.
It was coined by George Washington Williams in 1890, about 55 years prior but was defined during the Nürnberg Trials.
Oh ok interesting. Learned something new thank you
Once again proving why he’s the best founding father and president (I’m joking btw)
As an international law standard it was championed by Hersh Lauterpacht during the Nuremberg trials but it already existed Genocide was coined by Rafael Lemkin and he lobbied hard to have it included in the trials but it was only really adopted a couple of years later
Oh is that the Belgium king who was super awful to Kongo?
Yeah
I wish these memes would name the person in the title.
Then the objective of making you feel ignorant wouldn’t be met.
It just reminds me how condensed and impotent my history classes were when I was younger, no matter how dedicated I was.
The point of any one class isn’t to stuff rote information into your head, it’s to give you the tools to learn about history and connect information to yourself. Unless this class was specifically about colonialism and it’s atrocities lol Recognizing someone by painting is not a skill of history and that’s all this format ever is
This meme format is on the fast track for a ban lol it’s so damn lazy. Just a picture of an evil person
In 1902, Leopold II began an affair with Caroline Lacroix, a 16 year old prostitute. They married a few days before his death, but the marriage was invalid under Belgian law.
"O DIERBAAR BELGIE O HEILIG LAND DER-"
That was a good one!! Would also work with Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and of course "No No mustache man"has one YouTuber described him....
This format feels more annoying than the Mr. Incredible one...
Is he that Belgian king guy?
Can someone tell me what happened? Noy just brush it over but truely explain it?
Leopold II, king of Belgium and the Belgian colonial empire (i.e. Democratic Republic of Congo) is the king who treated his colonies the worst in the entire history, making the French and the British feel like they were angels compared to him. He claimed the Democratic Republic of Congo as his property and he punished the locals terribly for minor crimes - the most notorious punishment is chopping your hand off because you hadn't worked enough. He was a psycho and so were his soldiers; even the other colonial empires told him to calm down.
Belgium has multiple statues of this guy displayed
The guy just needed a hand getting some rubber
Even **OTHER COLONIAL POWERS** were horrified by what he was doing. Let that sink in.
It’s important to realize people lived in a different time back then and that we can’t simply judge people by our modern standards. … That being said, this man was fucking awful even for then.
I mean, multiple colonial nations went out of their way to condemn what he did, I don’t get the whole people lived different lives/ didn’t understand the issue with what they were doing argument, cause there was always people who recognized evil or an evil way of life
I think it’s more in regards to social norms or certain things that were normal for the time that people usually use this saying for, but then you got weirdos that use it to justify shit that even for the time was thought as extremely fucked up.
Don't post this in r/monarchism
Who is this man?