Re: [Marxism] Muslim Vs Atlantic slave trade - comparative apocalyptics101

[Tom Cod <tcod@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Truly.  In "King Leopold's Ghost" author Adam Hochschild talks about the 
disingenuous and racist way Arab and Muslim domestic slavery, an ancient, but 
relatively marginal institution, was used by European colonialists not only to 
justify their imperialist land grabs, but to cover for their own system of 
widespread commercial slavery and genocide against African people.

This book focuses on the history of Belgian colonialism in the Congo which, 
under the cover of the most sanctimonious "Christian" humanitarian Victorian 
rhetoric, in reality set up a system not at all altruistic but one which was a 
system of human slavery and genocide which actually made the recently 
dismantled system of chattel slavery in the US seem tame by comparison.  
Ironically, part of the hyprocritical justification for this conquest was to 
free victims of Muslim slavery.  Observers were then shocked to see some of 
these persons, described in the most Orwellian terms as liberated freedmen, 
being marched around in iron chains to build railroads and other projects.   
Tied in with this was the horrific episode of the "rubber terror" in which 
thousands were enslaved to work on rubber plantations or who had their families 
held hostage and sometimes mutilitated and murdered while the working members 
were forced to collect wild rubber vines.  It is this environment that inspired 
Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" which formed the inspiration for "Apocalypse 
Now"-guys like Stanley, for example, that shot down Africans from their boats 
in the Congo River for sport the way Americans gunned down buffalo from trains 
in the same period.  The German governor in Namibia (SW Africa) who oversaw an 
only slightly less horrific rubber terror there was Ernst Goering, the father 
of the Luftwaffe commander.

Eventually an international movement against this set up got traction which 
eventually got Mark Twain involved, who as I recall wrote the essay "King 
Leopold's Soliloquy" denouncing it.  I thought of this when viewing the first 
segment of "Cuba: An African Odyssey" which dealt with Lumumba and the Congo in 
the early 60s, showing the incredibly blatant and brazen way the Belgians and 
the other imperialists operated there.  In particular at the independence 
ceremony the Belgian King, whose family made hundreds of millions from the 
rubber terror, talks about the great humanitarian legacy of the Belgians, 
assertions that are met with incredulity by the blacks present.  Lumumba's 
speech responding to that at the time being deemed the point at which his fate 
is sealed-at least as far as the Belgians were concerned.

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