Now that the dust has settled, can it categorically be said that this man did nothing wrong?

>Also other countries were doing pretty much the same and pointed to him to get attention away from themselves.
>His beard and the use of the resources to improve his country make up for it.

Why does Veeky Forums defend genocide?

Oh. Like Stalin, CEO of the USSR. Or Kim, CEO of the DPRK.

He did run a succesful PR campaign for two decades, I'll give him that much.

Just out of interest, whom are you referring to?

Most of what we know of his "crimes" come from a single source that is not reliable.

Adam Hochschild

The Congo was his private property though

Stalin Kim and every other communist scum did it in his country, to his own people in the name of the proletarian. In the other hand Leopold did it in his own property, to a foreing people for raw materials

wat

The USSR was the private property of Stalin. Just because he got his position by networking instead of conquest doesn't mean he isn't the legitimate owner of the country.

Is the Congo Free State the perfect example of why ancap is even more stupid than communism?

It's an example of why they're identical.

Yeah and by you USA is now the private property of Donald Trump?

Leopold didn't conquer the Congo.
There's a pretty good pasta that explains how he got it, but basically, he invented lobbying and used it to further his interests in the US Senate. He played the European potencies against each other in order for them to approve and support his plans.
Then, with the support of all Great Powers, he became the sole owner of a private owned Free Congo State, not a colonial state, not owned by Belgium, it was owned in its entirety by Leopold.
It became the Belgian Congo after he relinquished it's ownership to the Belgian Government when the whole hand thing went public.

let me make a small correction
He wasn't sole owner, he was the majority share holder of the company that owned the Congo

wat

He belongs to being President, the office does not belong to him.

The locals were just like 'oh we belong to these guys now cool'? Or were they conquered?

Stalin had party members to deal with. He was still CEO of the USSR.

The USA is private property of big business.

Leopold hired the locals to kill and/or enslave the other locals, playing up old tribal conflicts
there were relatively few europeans in the freestate itself

It wasn't until belgium took over that congo became a proper colony and by that time the congolese were glad someone was stopping the whole hand trade business

"Lined up… are 40 emaciated sons of an African village, each carrying his little basket of rubber. The toll of rubber is weighed and accepted, but… four baskets are short of the demand. The order is brutally short and sharp – Quickly the first defaulter is seized by four lusty “executioners,” thrown on the bare ground, pinioned hands and feet, whilst a fifth steps forward carrying a long whip of twisted hippo hide. Swiftly and without cessation the whip falls, and the sharp corrugated edges cut deep into the flesh – on back, shoulders, and buttocks blood spurts from a dozen places. In vain the victim twists in the grip of the executioners, and then the whip cuts other parts of the quivering body – and in the case of one of the four, upon the most sensitive part of the human frame. The “hundred lashes each” left four inert bodies bloody and quivering on the shimmering sand of the rubber collecting post.

Following hard upon this decisive incident was another. Breakfast was just finished when an African father rushed up the veranda steps of our mud house and laid upon the ground the hand and foot of his little daughter, whose age could not have been more than 5 years."

Sometimes the hostages were women, sometimes children, sometimes elders and chiefs. Every state or company post in the rubber areas had a stockade for hostages. If you were a male villager, resisting the order to gather rubber could mean death for your wife. She might die anyway, for in the stockades food was scarce and conditions were harsh.

”The women taken during the last raid at Engwettra are causing me no end of trouble,” wrote Force Publique officer Georges Bricusse in his diary on November 22, 1895. “All the soldiers want one. The sentries who are supposed to watch them unchain the prettiest ones and rape them.”

”A file of poor devils, chained by the neck, carried my trunks and boxes toward the dock,” a Congo state official notes matter-of-factly in his memoirs. At the next stop on his journey more porters were needed for an overland trip: “There were about a hundred of them, trembling and fearful before the overseer, who strolled by whirling a whip. For each stocky and broad-backed fellow, how many were skeletons dried up like mummies, their skin worn out… seamed with deep scars, covered with suppurating wounds… No matter, they were all up to the job.”

When Raoul Van Calcken, an A.B.I.R. official, found two Africans, Lilongo and Ifomi, traveling to meet the commission, he ordered them seized. “He then told his sentries to tie us to two trees with our backs against the trees and our feet off the ground,” Lilongo told a British missionary. “Our arms were stretched over our heads… Look at the scars all over my body. We were hanging in this way several days and nights… All the time we had nothing to eat or drink, and sometimes it was raining and at other times the sun was out… We cried and cried until no more tears would come – it was the pain of death itself. Whilst we hung there three sentries and the white man beat us in the private parts, on the neck and other parts of the body with big hard sticks, till we fainted.”

Conquest. Leopold hired people to conquer the Congo. It was a conquest.

>Also he didn't actually fully know/want the abuse,

Nah he knew of it loud and clear. Why else would you burn all documents pertaining to your nearly the size of west europe property? Even if he didn't negligence is never an excuse.

nobody fucking cares about africans who flung shit at each other until 30 years ago

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>nobody fucking cares about africans who flung shit at each other until 30 years ago

Uh lots of people dud though back then.

like who?