Heart of Darkness

[editor's note: While I am on vacation I am reposting some of my earlier diaries that I consider particularly important, interesting or well read. This was originally posted on Columbus Day]

I experienced an odd sensation today as I was on the subway today. Today was Columbus Day but I had to go in to work for part of the day anyway. The book I am currently reading is King Leopold's Ghost, a pretty horrifying history of the Congo under colonialism.

Reading about colonial genocide in Africa on Columbus Day. Had a kind of irony to it.

I have been ambivalent, in the litteral meaning of the word, towards Columbus Day for years now. I celebrate America and Columbus' "discovery" of the "New World" because the result of his discovery and the ultimate founding of America is that my family, myself included, is alive and thriving today. Without America, my family would have been exterminated in the genocide of Nazi Germany if not before that in the genocide of the pogroms in Tsarist Russia and later Stalin's genocide in the Soviet Union.

But I am reminded every Columbus day of the genocides on which the founding of America was based. My family had a refuge from genocide because of a previous genocide committed against the natives of America. How's THAT for ambivalence?

King Leopold II set out to turn the entire Congo basin into his own personal colony. It wasn't a colony of Belgium until later. It was a colony held by a single man. According to some estimates, ten million people were killed so that one man could make the modern equivalent of $1 billion. Those people were killed to keep costs down in production first of ivory, then of rubber. Eventually, outrage from Britain, the US, France and Germany led to the transfer of the Congo from Leopold to Belgium...without much change in the genocidal practices.