Mark Twain’s Defense of Human Rights in Congo – Lokoleyacongo
“We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem…. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.†So stated Mark Twain in an interview published in The New York Herald in 1900. As U.S. business and military figures settled in the Philippines, the most widely read American writer at the time increased the fury of his attacks on the U.S. occupation of the Islands. In 1901 Twain proposed a new flag that would be fitting for the U.S. “Philippine Provinceâ€: “We can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross bones.â€
Twain deplored his country’s imitating the European pattern of foreign imperial rule and joined in denouncing the European and American suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in China. “My sympathies are with the Chinese†Twain wrote. “They have been villainously dealt with by the sceptered thieves of Europe, and I hope they will drive all of the foreigners out and keep them out for goodâ€. But Twain’s fiercest denunciation of the exploitation of another people by a Western power was directed at Belgium’s King Leopold and his Congo Free State’s systems of extracting ivory and then rubber from the heart of Africa.
The celebrated writer’s 1905 treatise detailed the horrors perpetrated by the agents of a King “whose mate is not findable in human history anywhere, and whose personality will surely shame hell itself when he arrives there.†So wrote Twain in his journal a year after he published King Leopold’s Soliloquy as a small book benefitting the Congo Reform Association. The principal organizer and founder of the CRA, Edmund Morel, supplied Twain with photos of Congolese whose hands had been cut off for insufficient harvesting of rubber. In the writer’s view, the photos would counter the whitewashing by most of the American press of the Congo Free State’s depredations.
Read more at: https://lokoleyacongo.wordpress.com/tag/mark-twain-and-congo/
Astonishing for me, there are some learned people here, Mark Twain was against some of the stuff going on back then. I would not have known and Congo of all things.
Congo has a lot of precious minerals including
Coltan , commonly used in cell phones, they are finding this reportedly in Venezuela.
And of all things, this is kind of spontaneous, there is a lot on Obama and Congo. Now, beware, some of these websites seem to be leftist but the gist of the story, at least, with Mark Twain seems to be so, they are just quoting from his book.
Obama and the Congo . Some out there on the web is indeed, harsh on Obama or the USA or the CIA. But it stands, Mark Twain seemed to be upset truly at the course of events.
