[Marxism] Muslim Vs Atlantic slave trade - comparative apocalyptics101

[Tom Cod]

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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