The Holohoax!

King Leopold II of Belgium, 1835-1909

By N.S.

Meet the belgian holocaust hoax, and its perpetrator

During the 1990s, I read a book review about Belgian King Leopold who, according to the book under review, had slaughtered some ten million black Congolese in an African Holocaust.

The book, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998), was written by Adam Hochschild, a self-described “human rights activist.”

The self-description phrase “human rights activist” is an unwitting tell, the equivalent of saying, “I am a pathological liar.”

Am I being unfair? Is the reader aware of any honest “human rights activists”? If so, do tell!

I hadn’t read amconcon (wasn’t that a code phrase in a conspiracy picture?) in years. They used to publish movie reviews and political articles by my old VDARE colleague, Steve Sailer, but seem to have stopped doing so, several years ago, and I was never much of a fan of theirs otherwise. They had (have?) a “crunchy-con” writer, Rod Dreher (I had to look him up under “crunchy con,” since I’d forgotten his name), but I disagreed with him once, and so he had me permablocked from commenting. It occurs to me that two other things also turned me off from the magazine: 1. I subscribed to it when it launched, but it cheated me out of an issue, even after I’d contacted them; and 2. one of its founding editors, still running things, Scott McConnell, said some weirdly nasty things about Larry Auster; and 3. Among other weirdness, eight-to-ten years ago, McConnell published an obvious hoax by some mook who asserted that middle-aged and elderly black women had stopped the massive bloodshed in their neighborhood by simply demanding that the young men put down their guns.

The “thing” was so vague that I was unable to find it again. The hoaxer did not mention the name of the neighborhood. Or the city where it was located. Or the state. Was it even supposed to have taken place in America? But since it was a hoax, it could have taken place in any neighborhood, in any state, in any country, on any planet.

The following article, however, is juicy, apparently legitimate stuff.

“King Hochschild’s Hoax

“An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.”

By Bruce Gilley
April 17, 2023 12:00 A.M.
the American conservative

“For the past 25 years, the idea of the Congo has been closely linked in the Western imagination to the 1998 book King Leopold’s Ghost by the American journalist Adam Hochschild. The book is widely assigned in high schools and colleges, and it regularly tops best-seller lists in colonial, African, and Western history. Hochschild has become a sort of king of the Congo, or at least of its history. The book is reflexively cited by reputable scholars in their footnotes any time they wish to assert that it is “well known” and “beyond doubt” that sinister men in Europe wrought havoc in Africa over a century ago. Any discussion of the Congo, or of European colonialism more generally, invariably begins with the question: ‘Have you read King Leopold’s Ghost?’

“I have read it. And I can declare that it is a vast hoax, full of distortions and errors both numerous and grave, a few of which I will detail in this short essay. Some people might view ‘King Hochschild’s Hoax,’ as we might call it, as an empowering fable for modern Africans at the expense of the white man. But its debilitating effects on Africa, and on the Congo in particular, make the opposite more nearly the case. It is a callous and negligent chicotte (hippo whip) lash on the backs of all black Africans, narcissistic guilt porn for white liberals at the expense of the African. The Congolese lawyer Marcel Yabili calls it ‘the greatest falsification in modern history,’ a compliment of sorts, I suppose.

“Hochschild’s book is a history of the private domain of the Belgian King Léopold II in the Congo river basin that was founded in 1885 and then handed over to the Belgian government in 1908. The book alternates between diabolical accounts of Léopold and hagiographic accounts of three of his critics: the British campaigner E.D. Morel, the British diplomat Roger Casement, and the black American missionary William Henry Sheppard. The narrative style is dark and conspiratorial, from the initial plans for the domain to its final dissolution. All along, Hochschild’s aim is to elevate the story into one of the greatest evils ever perpetrated by the West upon the Rest.

“There have been two documentary films about Hochschild’s fable, both travesties of art as well as fact. But the worst is yet to come. A dramatized Hollywood version by the American directors Ben Affleck and Martin Scorsese, co-produced with the singer and activist Harry Belafonte, has been in development since 2019. The history of the Congo might have survived one gut punch from California (Hochschild did his research entirely at libraries in the state and teaches at Berkeley). But once Hollywood weighs in on the matter, history as such will be impossible. Before that happens, let’s set the record straight and end this most malicious form of imperial plunder....”

[Read the whole thing here.]