Congo Film Quotes

I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history, without question. Yes, it was horrific. But I often wonder, with African atrocities like in the Congo, how horrific were they? The thing Africans don’t have that Jewish people do have is documentation. The Nazis kept meticulous records, took pictures, made films. And that’s really what it comes down to. Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them. Six million people killed. We can all look at that number and rightly be horrified. But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It’s harder to be horrified by a guess. When Portugal and Belgium were plundering Angola and the Congo, they weren’t counting the black people they slaughtered. How many black people died harvesting rubber in the Congo? In the gold and diamond mines of the Transvaal? So in Europe and America, yes, Hitler is the Greatest

As soon as camera crews are able to enter the Congo again, and have the guts to film bonobos the way they are, people will understand that everything being said about these apes is no exaggeration. They are not the product of some overactive sexual imagination, or of wishful thinking. That they delight feminists, the gay community, and pacifists should not be held against them. If one of our closest relatives fails to fit the prevailing views about aggressive males and passive females, one possibility to consider is that the prevailing views are mistaken. Either that, or there is something wrong with those males.

I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history, without question. Yes, it was horrific. But I often wonder, with African atrocities like in the Congo, how horrific were they? The thing Africans don’t have that Jewish people do have is documentation. The Nazis kept meticulous records, took pictures, made films. And that’s really what it comes down to. Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them. Six million people killed. We can all look at that number and rightly be horrified. But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It’s harder to be horrified by a guess. When Portugal and Belgium were plundering Angola and the Congo, they weren’t counting the black people they slaughtered. How many black people died harvesting rubber in the Congo? In the gold and diamond mines of the Transvaal?

De Amerikaan Adam Hochschild, zonder stevige Afrikakennis, puurde uit Stanley’s Engelstalige reisverslag het horrorboek King Leopold’s ghost, 1998, en Ben Affleck perst de leugen, op basis van Hochschilds verzinsels, verder uit in een film die weldra verschijnt.

L'Américain Adam Hochschild, sans aucune connaissance solide de l'Afrique, a propagé le livre d'horreur Le fantôme du roi Léopold, 1998, à partir du carnet de voyage en anglais de Stanley, et Ben Affleck pousse encore plus loin le mensonge, basé sur les affabulations de Hochschild, dans un film qui sortira bientôt.

White American, Adam Hochschild, with no solid Africa knowledge, purveyed the horror book King Leopold's ghost, 1998, from Stanley's English-language travelogue, and Ben Affleck further presses the lie, based on Hochschild's fabrications, in a film soon to be released.

Conrad spent six months working for a cargo company in the EIC in 1890, three weeks of it aboard a steamship traveling up river to today’s Kisangani. There is no mention of rubber in the novel because Conrad was there five years before rubber cultivation began. Kurtz is an ivory trader. So whatever sources Conrad was using when he began work on Heart of Darkness in 1898, his personal experiences would at most have added some color and context. Hochschild will have none of it, insisting that Conrad “saw the beginnings of the frenzy of plunder and death” which he then “recorded” in Heart of Darkness. The brutalities by whites in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now were inspired by the novel, Hochschild avers, because Conrad “had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.” In another example of creative chronology, Hochschild cites a quotation that he believes was the inspiration for Kurtz’s famous scrawl, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The quotation was made public for the first time during a Belgian legislative debate in 1906. Whatever its authenticity, it could not be a source for a book published in 1902.

When another American, Francis Ford Coppola, tried to put the blood lust of that war on film, where did he turn for the plot of his Apocalypse Now? To Joseph Conrad, who had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.