“And yet the world we live in—its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence—is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history.”
― King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
― King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
“Monsters exist,” wrote Primo Levi of his experience at Auschwitz. “But they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are . . . the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
― King Leopold's Ghost
― King Leopold's Ghost
“Morel begins to notice things that unsettle him. At the docks of the big port of Antwerp he sees his company’s ships arriving filled to the hatch covers with valuable cargoes of rubber and ivory. But when they cast off their hawsers to steam back to the Congo, while military bands play on the pier and eager young men in uniform line the ships’ rails, what they carry is mostly army officers, firearms, and ammunition. There is no trade going on here. Little or nothing is being exchanged for the rubber and ivory. As Morel watches these riches streaming to Europe with almost no goods being sent to Africa to pay for them, he realizes that there can be only one explanation for their source: slave labor.”
― King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
― King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
“Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them.”
― Moby-Dick or, The Whale
― Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Jeremy’s 2025 Year in Books
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