Inconvenient commemoration (1984)

From the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not every liar, cheat and hypocrite is qualified to be a politician, for which a high standard of expertise is required. Even so equipped, however, politicians can frequently become victims of what has come to be known as the banana-skin syndrome. A pesky civil servant is sometimes the agent of this dreaded problem which can bring about political death, or even reveal the fact that a female generalissimo was lying through her teeth when she disclaimed responsibility for the slaughter of 350 of her fellow human beings.

Whether the suggestion by that well-known Christian. Enoch Powell, that the murder of 350 Argentinian sailors should have been an occasion for “justification and rejoicing" (as reported in the Belfast Telegraph, 3 October. 1984) is genuine hypocrisy, is open to doubt. It is true that according to the Christian ethic “thou shall not kill", but Christian practice has never been averse to a bout of murder, providing it is committed under the guise of war. At any rate, it is conceivable that the eminent Enoch is quite genuine in his well-publicised hatred of all but the best of white-anglo-saxon protestants.

Timing is critical in the use of hypocrisy. It is fine, for example, for the British Labour Party to show righteous indignation about the Tories presiding over rising unemployment; attacking the health service; breaking strikes and using the full rigour of the capitalist law to punish pickets and strikers and, indeed, all the other dirty things that Tories do. But the Labour Party can protest only when it is Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition — and its parliamentary representatives should leave the House before the Tories remind them that all Labour governments — all seven of them — have done all of these things in the past and will be obliged to do so again if they ever become the government again.

Yes, timing is always vital; but then, how fickle is the public memory? Who is likely to remind the pensioned media that butchering the people of Afghanistan was a practice taken up by British governments long before the Russian ruling class ever thought of it? Churchill, arguably one of the greatest exponents of political hypocrisy. just got his timing right in 1939 when he told the British working class to pledge their lives in the fight against Hitler — just two years after he had told readers of The Times that if Britain ever got into difficulties he hoped a man with the will and determination of Hitler would emerge. Mind you, this feat of monumental hypocrisy was almost eclipsed by the Russian Foreign Minister. Molotov, when he told his German counterpart that the Russian rulers had always held that a strong Germany was indispensable to world peace — about a year before their respective leaders sent their wage-slaves out to slaughter each other.

Then there was Kenyatta of Kenya, the leader of the Mau-Mau. If we believed the British press, this unsavoury bunch not only killed our brave boys who were upholding the flag in foreign parts, they actually ritualised the savaging of their corpses. Finally a deal was done with old Jomo that helped to keep trade and commerce intact and Kenyatta was canonised into the ranks of secular saints who help to keep the world safe for hypocrisy and capitalist exploitation.

Given half the space used by the press for bingo and trivia, we could lengthen indefinitely the list of current and past examples of hypocrisy. Where these examples proved successful, you can be sure that the timing was right. Bad timing and . . . there’s a banana skin!

It was such a banana skin that caused no less a person than the Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Ireland, the redoubtable hypocrite, Dick Spring, to fall on his political backside on 1 October last. In looking at the background to Spring’s misadventure. it is important to note that the Irish government is busily re-writing history in order to distance its more prominent personnel from the activities of the Provisional IRA and events in Northern Ireland. Again, the element of time comes into this mammoth exercise; according to the comfortable Garrett Fitzgerald and his cohorts, murder and mayhem was alright in 1916 and in 1919-21 but it is quite . . . well, barbaric, today.

Of course there were differences between 1916 and 1984. In 1916. when Pearse and Connolly led a bunch of politically ignorant workers onto the streets of Dublin to kill and be killed by their fellow members of the working class, Ireland was undergoing a period of British rule less rigorous and repressive than the country had ever experienced. In the present Northern Ireland troubles, on the other hand, those who mislead workers into an anti-working-class conflict against each other have very real military repression as well as social deprivation to play the role of recruiting sergeants. But this is not the difference that concerns southern Irish politicians; the difference is that they now have power and influence as the lickspittles of Irish capitalism; power, influence, Mercedes cars and all the trappings of rich living that their ex-imperial masters used to flaunt and all derived directly from the earlier bout of killing. Can it be wondered why they want to conceal the history of their bloody inheritance?

The old songs about yesterday’s heroes that once rocked the timbers where drunken patriotism found solace no longer have official favour — what respectable politician would want to share a ballad with the Provos? The sick commemoration services that previously allowed government ministers to unveil plaques to the immortal memory of some poor, unfortunate Paddy Murphy — whose dog might have barked at the Black-and-Tans — are, similarly, now frowned upon. But sometimes it can’t be helped; members of the commemoration committee might be the same people who marshall the voting fodder for the Party and. on the principle of votes before principles, what can a Minister, even a Deputy Prime Minister, do but attend?

Doubtless, for such good reason. Deputy Prime Minister Dick Spring was the chief hypocrite at a commemoration in honour of Sir Roger Casement, a would-be Republican gun-runner who was apprehended by the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1916. Actually, there are several layers of hypocrisy in the Casement affair. After his arrest, the British authorities — who had knighted him for his civil service in the Congo — found his diaries which, they claimed, revealed that he was a homosexual. The truth or otherwise of that claim should have been irrelevant but — mindful of the sick perversity of Catholic thinking on matters sexual — both sides tried to make propaganda out of the alleged revelations. the leaders of Catholic nationalism claiming that the “Black Diaries" were forgeries and, as such, demonstrated the depravity of the British.

The truth of the matter has never been cleared up nor have Irish politicians — the political heirs of yesterday’s gunmen — or the present IRA ever been brave enough to express their admiration for Casement irrespective of the nature of his sexual proclivities. The hypocrites can only revere the memory of a heterosexual Casement. But that is the lower layer of hypocrisy; the more immediately glaring aspect of the matter — the commemoration of a gunrunner by an Irish Minister — was the part that came unstuck — through bad timing for all concerned.

Poor Dick was not to know that the latter-day gunmen were attempting an almost carbon-copy re-run of the Casement adventure — at least, not when he agreed to give the oration. As it was a seven-ton trawler, loaded with weapons and surrounded by the entire Irish navy, was sailing into port within a short distance of the spot where Dick was commemorating an equally-failed venture. Whether it disturbed the Deputy Prime Minister to the point where he left the festivities without partaking in the sumptuous repast usually allotted to a hypocrite of such high standing. is not reported. Certainly, the affair did not appear to rock his boss, Garrett Fitzgerald, who with contemptible effrontery took credit for saving the lives of “fellow-irishmen” who might have died if the weapons had got into the hands of the Provos. Presumably, had Casement's mission been accomplished, the resultant deaths might have provided another opportunity for some other hypocrite to commemorate a "successful" engagement in the “Glorious Struggle" where the "other side" were “British" members of the working class.

Paisley, one of the chief political architects of the present troubles in Northern Ireland, and the Unionist Party leader. Molyneaux, while complimenting the southern politicians on the capture of the arms, were quick to point to the hypocrisy of the Irish government. Molyneaux equated the Casement adventure with the more recent attempt to bring weapons into Ireland and he upbraided the southerners for not condemning all gun-running. A fair point, you might think, until you remember that he and his Party of Superbrits owe their existence in no small way to the fact that they conspired successfully with Germany, in 1912 — in the shadow of the First World War — to bring in guns to use against British troops if the British government intended to impose a solution of the Irish Problem that was not compatible with the political and economic requirements of the capitalist class in Northern Ireland.

Harrington might well have been referring particularly to Irish politicians when he penned the couplet:

Treason doth never prosper; what’s the

reason?

If it prosper, none dare call it treason!

We are not implying that capitalism is bad because its politicians are demonstrably cheats, liars and hypocrites. Capitalism should be abolished because it kills people by starvation, war and lack of medical attention; because it imposes poverty of varying intensity on the overwhelming majority of the world's people; because it divides. alienates and embitters the human family and denies us all the material means of a full and happy life — and finally because. even if the politicians who legalise its thieving processes were anxious to promote political honesty, they could not do so.

Richard Montague

Belfast Branch, WSP

Blogger's Note:

Embedded within this article in the original copy of the December 1984 Socialist Standard was an ad for the recently published pamphlet, Ireland — Past, Present and Future. This pamphlet was produced jointly by the SPGB and the World Socialist Party of Ireland. It can be accessed at the following link.

Peru and England. A Comparison. (1912)

From the August 1912 issue of the Socialist Standard

The world has lately been startled by the publication of sensational reports of the methods by which a British rubber company, operating in Peru, obtains its rubber.

The nauseating details which have found their way into the papers do not by any means exhaust the catalogue of atrocities inflicted upon the company’s Indian victims, or sap the infinite variety of the tortures used to terrorise these poor people into superhuman exertion in the collection of rubber ; nor do those widely publicised details touch the limits of ferocity laid bare in the Government Blue-Book.

This, however, is not meant in the sense of the degree of physical suffering involved, for it is inconceivable that the agonies of roasting the feet over a slow fire (as quoted by the newspapers) can be transcended, even where the torturers go the length of smashing up a man’s organs with a stick, or inserting burning brands in a woman’s body in a part which even a Blue Book only dares hint at. But these details which the British Press even cannot lift the veil on, add to all the other horrors some inkling of the filthy-mindedness that goes hand-in-hand with British capital, to win dividends for British Christians and the like.

It is not the purpose here, however, to treat the public to a recital of the sickening story of mutilation and murder reported by Consul-General Casement, but to direct attention to horrors no whit lees sickening which are mere everyday affairs much nearer home than the forest glades of Peru. Those who are so startled and shocked to find that the inhumanities which make the names of the old-time Spanish “conquerors” stink in the nostrils, still survive in British capitalism; those who are horrified to discover that the tale of the Congo has been re-written with but varied detail in the solitude of Western forests, those who have observed with pained surprise, the agonised convulsions of a harmless and innocent people being done to death in Southern America, transforming themselves into the sensational throbbing of rubber shares in Throgmorton Street at the time of the great “rubber boom,” do not need to throw their imagination half way round the world in order to find something to move their “bowels of compassion” or stir their righteous—very righteous—indignation.

As a matter of fact murder and brutality—like charity, according to the account of those who know all about it—begin at home. Not only, mark you, the murder of the Peruvian Indians, whose doom is pronounced in the London board rooms by silk-hatted directors and cosmopolitan financiers. We do not have to turn to the diocese of the Bishop of the Falkland Islands (who is now in England trying to raise funds to further the interests of British capital in Peru and the vicinity, instead of being in his diocese supervising the decent burial of the corpses British capital is providing there), one does not, I say, have to go to that Bishop’s diocese to find matter for “thrills” and “shocks.”

No, there is not one of the atrocities related in Blue Book Cd. 6266 that cannot be paralleled in the diocese of the Bishop of London, or in the diocese of any other English Bishop. There is not one page of this voluminous report, reeking with bloody tragedy, that might not have been made to carry as tragic and as bloody an inscription by any faithful hand that should have set itself the task of chronicling the history of any single day in any of the great manufacturing towns of highly civilised, free and Christian England.

Capitalism is very much the same thing in all its operations and in its every sphere of influence. What is good or evil under it is determined only but its result upon profits—by its effect upon ruling interests. Capital, as Marx says, comes into the world dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. And one Dunning many years ago wrote :—

“With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere ; 20 per cent. certain will produce eagerness ; 50 per cent., positive audacity ; 100 per cent. will make it ready to trample on all human laws ; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged, if turbulence and strife will bring profit, it will freely encourage both.”

So outrage is inherent in the system—nay, that is but half stating the case : outrage is the foundation and corner-stone of the system. The great primal outrage is the seizure by those who rule under the system, of every means by which men might support themselves in any form of independence. Upon that great, tragic outrage—the closing of every avenue of life against the worker, the whole system of robbery, violence and violation rests. And that robbery, that violence, that violation, is as complete, cruel, and shameful here in England as anything Consul-General Casement travelled so far to put on record.

Violation of Indian girls ! It is common enough in any factory district in England for girls to have to submit to the bestial attentions of their foremen and male overlookers. They have to choose between that and starvation. It is a fact well known to the employers, who do not interfere (as has been admitted) because it smooths the way to prostitution, which is the necessary adjunct to the low wages paid by the factory masters. It is a fact also well known and confessed by our legislators, as is proven by the provision made for its interdiction in a projected Bill.

In offices things are much the same, and in large drapery establishments every “encouragement” (such as locking the girls out in the street all night if they are not in by a specific time) is held out for their girl assistants to resort to certain means of augmenting their scant wages.

Notwithstanding that the method is differed the violation at home is as brutal and shameful as that in Peru. In the latter case the weapon made use of is physical force: in the former starvation In the one case the tormentor has possession of the woman’s body, in the other case of her means of livelihood. The compulsion is pretty complete in both cases.

We must not allow ourselves to be led astray by the old capitalist defence that “this is a free country.” The freedom of these girls to leave their employment is merely the freedom to starve. That is the freedom which belongs to every wage-slave. It is the freedom which followed naturally upon the enclosure of all land and the seizure of all the means of living. The capitalist has no need to hunt the forests of this country for workers : he has shut them out of the fields and forests, and left them only the freedom to starve. This freedom the capitalist would not interfere with if he could. It is the greatest asset he has. The slave has not got it, hence the slave must be fed, cannot be trusted with delicate machinery, cannot be speeded up to the requirements of the modern factory system. The lash never has been able to compel anything but the quality of labour most nearly approaching that abstract conception, the “purely physical”—it cannot induce the exercise of “gumption.” Only when the workers are free to starve, and liable to be thrown out on the street to do it, do they become fit and proper instruments for the economical manipulation of the modern machinery for producing commodities.

Hence the masters cherish the workers’ freedom to starve even more than do the workers themselves. It is the basis of all their exploitation, their standby in every difficult situation.

And similarly it is the basis of the whole awful position of the workers. Because this freedom is their only alternative, they present themselves for sale in the labour market. Because they have only the freedom to starve they face death in the mine and torment before the battle-ship’s furnaces. They give up their whole lives to unrewarded drudgery in sordid and bestial conditions, submitting to the vilest prostitution of their labour in the performance of slave tasks, all because they may starve if they don’t.

And at every turn they are offered the same alternative by which it is pretended the women may save themselves from violation, but which, nevertheless, cannot save any workingman from handing over his body, nay, his life, to exploitation, cannot afford one of them escape from a prostitution as vile (if we could only see it thro’ the unaccustomed eyes of the savage) as any that women are subjected to through their sex.

The other atrocities reported from the rubber districts all have their parallels in any capitalist country. The police brutality at Liverpool and Manchester and year ago, when scores of people of both sexes and all ages were maimed for life; the murders at Tonypandy, Belfast, and other places, the kicking of pregnant women quite recently at Canning Town, show very plainly that when it comes to dealing with resistance to their plundering, the master class know not the slightest difference between the Indians of Peru and the working class of England. Rubber is not more bloodstained than coals. Dying Indians are not more contemptuously thrown into the bush to expire than are our miners bricked up in the blazing pits to burn. The Waste of Indian life is no more extravagant than that of shunters on British railways, and callous brutality cannot anywhere outdo that displayed in certain capitalist hospitals, where healthy working-class children are innoculated with filthy diseases and reduced to noisome masses of corruption—because they are cheaper than calves. And where, in the whole of the Consul-General’s report, can a more stupendous crime, a more ghastly butchery, be found recorded than has been recently witnessed in the streets of London, where the shipping masters have deliberately set themselves to crush a hundred thousand men into submission by starving their wives and children ?

Let us be clear in our comparison. Let us get the true perspective. The Indians, the evidence in the report tells us, are so used to being flogged that they do not so much mind it. Let us make sure that our familiarity with the brutality of our daily existence does not blind us to its real horror. The Indians, while they have their forests, have to be hunted and captured. This, as we understand it, is illegal. But generations ago the workers of this country were captured by depriving them of their means of living. Hence if they won’t submit to the masters’ terms they are legally free to starve. It is this illusive difference in the aspect of the cases which blinds us to their essential similarity. Under the cloak of legality the workers of the whole civilised world are enslaved and starved and bludgeoned and raped to satiate the lusts of a parasite class, and when we see our own condition reflected in a savage race, and only revealed because the savage, having his means of livelihood in his native wild wood, has to be exploited by “illegal” means, we are astonished and shocked.

The only remedy, both for ourselves and for the Indian, is to take away from the capitalists the means of life and make them the property of the community, first capturing the political power by which they hold their sway.

A. E. Jacomb

Other “Huns” and Other Louvains. (1914)

From the December 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

I.—The Belgians on the Congo.

The two faces of the capitalist have been exposed in these pages times out of number, and in various forms. Once again this dual personage has become clearly visible to the merest observer under another set of circumstances.

We have of late heard the squalling of the Belgian capitalists and the officials of the Belgian State. So shocked and horrified were these tender people at the way in which the “brutal Germans” trod upon their sacred soil and destroyed some of their towns, that a deputation was sent to proclaim this sacrilege to the world, with a view to persuading the neutral powers to come to their assistance.

But the Socialist remembers that these capitalists wailing over their wrecked property and pretending to be so concerned about the poor Belgian workers who are being driven from their homes, are the same capitalists who, through their agents, ransacked scores of villages and towns, shot and killed thousands of men, women, and children who had never raised even a finger against them.

Before describing these barbarities it would perhaps be as well to briefly sketch the events that led up to them. If the reader wishes them elaborated he should read “Red Rubber,” by E. D. Morel, to which book, together with White Paper, Africa, No. 1, 1904 (Cd 1933, 8½d.), the writer is indebted for the following information.

In the sixties and seventies of last century the great commercial countries saw enormous possibilities in the creation of new markets, arising out of notable discoveries by explorers in Central Africa, and each wished to acquire as large an outlet as possible for their own manufactures. The scramble commenced.

The discovery of the Congo Basin by Stanley was the most significant of all, and in this direction the late King Leopold II turned his attention. Having previously juggled successfully with Suez Canal and other shares, he had amassed a considerable fortune. He sent several investigating expeditions, consisting mostly of Englishmen and Germans (how strange !) assuring the world that his intentions were purely scientific and severely disinterested. To carry on this work Leopold formed a company styled “The International African Association.”

This bloody and astute king capitalist played his cards like an expert. He became a member of the Aborigines Protection Society, and promised to support lavishly the missionary societies of England and America. He captured the British Chambers of Commerce by declaring that if the commercial communities supported his proposals the Congo trade would be open to them and would be exempt from all fiscal restrictions.

After a time the various powers became uneasy and jealous as to who should control this vast and rich land. Certain suggestions were considered with a view to placing it under international control. Then on the suggestion of the Portuguese it was decided to recognise the sovereignty of Portugal on both banks of the river up to a certain limit inland, to declare the river open to the world, and to place it under an Anglo Portuguese Navigation Commission to which the accession of the other Great Powers would be welcome. After introducing clauses protecting traders against exaggerated tariffs, and for the protection of the natives (!), etc., the treaty was signed.

But Leopold had not been playing to the gallery for nothing, and immediately the treaty was denounced by the British Chambers of Commerce and the philanthropic societies. The British Government was accused of betraying national interests, and the Portuguese Government was accused by its bosses of a similar crime. France, encouraged by the clamour, became resolutely hostile, and Bismarck, on behalf of Germany, kicked. Belgium was now in an unique position, and received the reluctant support of the British Government, with a proviso to secure freedom of trade, etc. Bismarck’s proposal of an International Conference was assented to, and was opened “in the name of God,” on Nov. 25, 1884.

Fourteen powers were represented, and their first consideration was for the welfare of the natives ! Such was the slimy cant and hypocrisy that we are told “the delegates, figuratively speaking, fell upon each other’s necks and wept with emotion.” They placed the Congo Basin in the hands of Leopold’s company. Articles were signed to ensure the utmost freedom to all capitalists, and for the preservation of the natives, the suppression of slavery and the slave trade, and “the protection of all . . . institutions which aim at instructing the natives and bringing home to them the blessings of civilisation.” We shall see, presently, what these “blessings of civilisation” were.

On August 1st, 1885, Leopold notified the signatory Powers that the International African Association would henceforth be known as the Congo Free State, with himself as sovereign of that “State.” Almost immediately followed a decree claiming all vacant lands as the property of the State. Another decree limited the rights of the native to the area upon which his hut was built, whilst another prohibited the hunting of the elephant “throughout the whole of the State’s territory” (three-fourths of which had never been trodden by a white man). Then they commenced recruiting an army of the most savage tribes. These natives could either volunteer or were taken in raids. For every recruit of the latter order the State officer obtained a bonus according to the physical fitness of his captive. Male children were also taken and drafted to military instruction camps to be made soldiers in due course. Having secured and trained sufficient recruits they set out with a mandate from Christendom to exterminate the Arabs, who had up to then been trading with the natives. Their object was to obtain the vast stores of ivory and rubber in the Arabs’ possession and to capture their markets. This accomplished, everything was clear for Leopold and his thieves’ gang to commence business.

On Sept. 21st 1891 a secret decree was issued to the State officials in Africa, stating that it was the paramount duty of the Congo Free State to raise revenue, and “to take urgent and necessary measures to secure for the State the dominal fruits, notably ivory and rubber.” Other regulations followed, which forbade the natives selling rubber or ivory to European merchants, and threatened the latter with prosecution if they bought these articles from the natives.

The merchants protested, and Leopold defined the position. Everything, he told them, belonged to the State—the land and the produce thereof. The natives were tenants upon State property. If they interfered with that property they were poachers ; and whoever abetted them were poachers, receivers of stolen goods, and violators of the law. How simple and concise !

Other secret documents were dispatched to the Governor-General baiting him to do his utmost to obtain the produce from the natives, “sparing no means.” A sliding scale was fixed by which officials were paid. The less it cost to obtain the goods the greater the bonus ; the more it cost to get the goods the less for the official. In other words, the less the native got for his ivory and rubber the larger the official’s commission and the more for the thieves on top !

One can pretty well guess the nature of the orders of tha Governor to his subordinates, and of the subordinates to their subordinates. Here is a typical one from Commandant Verstracten to the officials in charge of stations in the Rubi Welle district :

“I have the honour to inform you that from Jan. 1st 1899, you must succeed in furnishing 4,000 Kilos of rubber every month. To this effect I give you carte blanche. You have, therefore, two months in which to work your people. Employ gentleness at first, and if they persist in not accepting the imposition of the State, employ force of arms.”

Here is an extract from another :

“Decidedly these people of Inoryo are a bad lot. They have just cut some rubber vines at Huli. We must fight them until their absolute submission is obtained, or their complete extermination.”

Under this system £13,715,664 worth of raw produce was forced out of the Congo natives during the seven years preceding 1906 by the hirelings of this royal member of the Aborigines Protection Society and his confederates.

Let us now see how the rubber was acquired under the stimulus of bonuses and force. The information is furnished by Belgian and French, traders (who, no doubt, felt sore at being outdone by the State monopoly), and travellers and missionaries. The most brutal act of the “German Huns” sinks into insignificance compared with some of them.

The procedure was by levying a tax on the villages and towns payable in kind, and State soldiers would be sent to demand payment—so much ivory or rubber as well as food stuffs—every week or month as the case might be. But let the eye witness describe. The following is au extract from a letter written as early as 1892 by a resident of Likini.

“The frequent wars upon the natives undertaken without any cause by the State soldiers sent, out to get rubber and ivory, are depopulating the country. The soldiers find that the quickest and cheapest method is to raid villages, seize prisoners, and have them redeemed against ivory, etc. . . . Each agent of the State receives 1,000 fr. commission per] ton of ivory, and 175 fr. per ton of rubber.”

This, the reader will notice, was about a year after the decree urging the officials to secure the “dominal fruits.” The bloody events that followed have never been surpassed. The following is from the diary of E. J. Glave, an “independent English traveller” who crossed the Congo in 1894-5. It appeared in the “Century Magazine” in 1896.

“Up the Ikelemba away to Lake Mantumba the State is perpetrating its fiendish policy in order to obtain profit. War has been waged all through the district of the Equator, and thousands of people have been killed. Many women and children were taken, and twenty-one heads were brought to Stanley Falls, and have been used by Captain Rom as a decoration round a flower bed in front of his house.”

The following piece of information was given to the British Consul, Roger Casement, and is quoted in his report (p. 43.)

“Each time the corporal goes out to get rubber, cartridges are given to him. He must bring back all not used ; and for every one used he must bring back a right hand. . . . Sometimes they shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting ; they then cut off a hand from a living man. … In six months, on the Momboyo River they had used 6,000 cartridges, which means that 6,000 people are killed or mutilated. It means more than 6,000, for the soldiers kill children with the butt of their guns.”

If a soldier returned to his station without a sufficient number of hands to make up for the rubber he had not brought, he was shot by his superiors. A native corporal described how in one day he had brought 160 hands home to his officer and they were thrown into the river. Another individual testifies to a village (Katoro) being attacked. Many were killed, including women and children. The heads were cut off and taken to the officer in charge, who sent men back for the hands also, and these were pierced and strung and dried over the camp fire. On another occasion a large town was attacked ; hands and heads cut off and taken to the officer. The witness said : “I shall never forget the sickening sight of deep baskets of human heads.”

According to Roger Casement many had their ears cut off ; also the native soldier, after being told “You kill only women ; you cannot kill men,” would mutilate the bodies and carry the sexual organs to the officer. In fact, in the Mongalla massacre of 1899 the agents confessed to ordering sexual mutilation. Consul Casement says that “this was not a native practice, but the deliberate act of soldiers of an European administration . . . and that in committing these acts they were but obeying the positive orders of their superiors.”

In some cases when protests were made to the Congo Courts a mock trial ensued. Lacroix, one of the agents in the Mongalla region was thus held up, and he confessed to having been instructed by his superiors to attack a certain village for shortage of rubber, and to having killed in his raid many women and children. He said:

“I am going to appear before the judge for having killed 160 men, cut off 60 hands ; for having crucified women and children, for having mutilated many men and hung their sexual remains on the village fence.”

Terms of imprisonment were inflicted, but were never served. Why ? Because “they had acted on instruction.”

The Congo Free State is split up into several “Companies” or “Trusts,” each occupying a specific area. One named “The King” was worked in the interest of Leopold’s private purse. Other portions were handed over for stewardship to financiers, “personal friends and officials of his European Court,” etc. In the “Companies” the King or the State usually held half the shares. One is named the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company. In six years this company, with the aid of the State soldiers, made a nett profit of £720,000 out of the rubber slave trade on a paid-up capital of £9,280 ! Thus each share of a paid up value of £4 6s. 6d. has received £335 in the same time. King Leopold held 1,000 of these shares.

However, it seems quite clear that, although the Belgian capitalists, backed by the arms of the State, had a big hand in this dirty business, there was along with them the international gang of plunderers. If this were not so, why was it that, although the evidence of these devilish horrors was before the Governments of America, Italy, France, Portugal, Germany, and the rest of them for years, they did not move to stop them ? Why was it that for six years the British Government was continually having reports of atrocious maladministration on the Congo and yet refused to move ? Why, indeed, did it absolutely suppress these reports—which it has never yet made public? Sir Henry Johnston, who has travelled a good deal in that direction, is evidently in the know. He says : “If there have been bad Belgians on the Congo, there have been bad Englishmen, ruthless Frenchmen, pitiless Swedes, cruel Danes, unscrupulous Italians.” (See preface to Morel’s “Red Rubber,”)

At any rate, how do these brutalities practised by Belgian bullies upon a defenceless people whose country they had invaded compare with the German atrocities of to-day ?

I am not attempting to defend German autocrats, but merely to make it plain that it is nothing but sheer hypocrisy for the Allies to point an accusing finger at Germany, for there is not one of them but has been guilty of deeds of brutality every whit as appalling as has been charged, not to say proved, against the German butchers. With the Belgian workers the sympathy of all Socialists must lie, but suffering is no new thing to them, any more than it is to the workers of other countries. And if their pains and travail contribute to their political enlightenment, then they will not have suffered in vain.

J. W. Pyle

Cant and culture. (1914)

From the November 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rheins, Louvain, Statuary and Architecture! Art, Science, and Culture! How extremely interested our masters are in the defence of art! And what interest, too, the workers have evinced in these remarkable relies of medieval craft!

Lives are being lost—workers’ lives. Blood and tears are being shed—the blood of working men and the tears of working women. Children cry for bread; deep despair numbs the brain of wife and sweetheart; hospitals are filled with the maimed and the crippled, but we must steal oar hearts to such things as these, for such is the toll of war.

But “our” churches and “oar” cathedrals are being destroyed and desecrated by the unholy hand of the hated Hun. The German has dared to eat his filthy sausage from the sacred altar, and to use the statue of the Holy Virgin as a peg upon which to hang the washing.

This is indeed s matter to call for the immediate attention of the working class. We can stand the lose of life—there are plenty more workers. The bereavement of the husband can be borne (there are others). The loss of a limb—well, there are crutches, and, as in the past, our generous masters will come forward to our aid with a licence to sell matches. With calm and philosophic mind we can tighten our belts when we are hungry, but rob us of our art treasures, and like enraged tigers we, the working men of Britain, will slay the despoilers, or, as at Deptford recently, break the windows sod smash the furniture of peaceful civilians whom the authorities have taken the precaution previously to disarm. The workers are, above all, lovers of art.

There are works of art in London, and it is surprising how few of these lovers of art visit them. Some, it is true, attract attention if well advertised —the crown jewels for instance, the greatest pleasure from which is derived by estimates as to how much they are worth. Certain palatial buildings, too, are visited mainly because they belong to the King, or possibly did belong to some other royal gentleman; and such artistic delights in architecture as the bank of England will hold in awe the twenty-four-bob a-week toiler because of the gold in its vaults. But of the real art treasures and rare buildings in London, how many are known to the average worker? Of the proletarian visitors to the Abbey, St. Pauls, the Galleries and Museums, how many can appreciate their beauties ?

Why should we, and if honest, how can we, generate a feeling of indignation at the destruction of those things that, however beautiful they may have been, we would never have seen, and possibly would not have appreciated if we had seen ? Why join in the howl of holy horror at their destruction, while dumb to the greater crime ever being perpetrated upon the toilers by the destruction of their powers of appreciation? Have the toilers time to develop culture?

The German, we are told, lacks culture. Perhaps this is true, but have we “anything to write home about" in that matter? Is the smashing of windows and the looting of shops a sign of culture?

Rolls of toilet paper are bring sold in the streets of London, upon each slip of which is a photo of the Kaiser, and the hawker’s cry of: “ What to do with the Kaiser,” raises a grin on the faces of passers-by. Is this culture ? or is the cry of “German Kultur” just cant?

The Socialist deplores the uncultivated mind of the worker, and is conscious of the intellectual satisfaction lost thereby; but who are we to blame for the loss?

The monuments of art and skilled craftmanship in this country stand untouched by the hands of the destroyer, but they might as well be a heap of ruins as for as the average worker is concerned. Our board-school education stopped at the “three r’s,” with the possible extension to some technical training that would be of use to our masters. So soon as the child of the toiler is old enough to learn and understand he is hauled off to the field and factory to sweat for an employer. He is “educated" enough to pull a lever so many times a minute, to label jam jars or work s machine to stamp oat blacking tins, until he becomes exhausted; or maybe he views London architecture fourteen hours a day while hanging on to a strap behind a carrier's cart. And the magnificent wage of seven shillings per week does not allow him to cultivate his mind by trips to the Continent of Europe in search of “old masters."

In short, the horrible grind from morn till night, with occasional intervals of “rest," seeking for a master; the constant petty worries as to how to make ends meet on twenty-four bob a week, banishes for the working man all desire for intellectual advancement, and the few standing out from the rest find little encouragement in the surroundings and conditions of a toiler's life.

To talk to the worker of saving art treasures is as intelligent as to expatiate to the deaf on the beauties of music. The labourer who at a meeting held to debate the question of whether the earth is spherical or flat, sized up the situation when he said: “Let us get hold of the world first, and then it might be interesting to know whether it is round or not” That labourer was wise. The world is not the workers' world, neither are art treasures for the workers. Their domain is the factory and the slum. Their art is the poster hoarding and the prints in the ½d. illustrated or “Pears Annual”. How can we get excited about art treasures ?

And as to culture, how is the following as a specimen; this too, in times of peace? It is from the report of Roger Casement, British Consul in the Congo, and relates to the “Domains de la Couronne,” Belgian Congo, published 1904.

“I asked them (the natives) why they had left their homes . . . All, when the question was put, women as well as men, shouted: ’On account of the rubber tax levied by the [Belgian] Government posts.’ . . . ‘ How much pay did you get?’ ‘We got no pay. We got nothing. It used to take ten days to get twenty baskets of rubber (twenty baskets of rubber had to be delivered four times a month). We were always in the forest, and when we were late we were killed. We had to go further and further into the forest to find the rubber vines, to go without food, and our women had to give up cultivating the fields and gardens. Then we starved . . . When we failed and our rubber was short, the soldiers came up to our towns and shot us. Many were shot; some had their ears cut off . . . Our chiefs were hanged . . . The white men [Brave Belgians] told their soldiers ‘You kill only women: you cannot kill men.’ So when the soldiers killed us’ (here he stopped and hesitated and then, pointing to the private parts of my bulldog—it was lying asleep at my feet) he said, ‘then they cut off those things and took them to the white men, who said’: ‘It is true you have killed men.’ ‘You mean to tell me that any white man ordered your bodies to be mutilated like that, and those parts of yon carried to them?' (All shouting) ‘Yes. many whits men.’ ‘You say this is true? Were many of you so treated after being shot?’ (All shouting) ‘Ukoto! Ukoto!’ (Very many; very many.)”

German, British, and Belgian “culture” are much the same pattern when profits are at stake. Atrocities are denounced when committed by the enemy, but the foul and fiendish slaughter of the worker in the Congo, and the equally bloody murder by British capital in Peru; the Russian butchery on the Lena Goldfields in 1912; the outrages of Paris in 1871; the many and various deeds of shame and brutality perpetrated by the Capitalists of all countries when profit is to be made or territory to be annexed, when property is to be defended or stolen: all these things are to be forgotten, and we, the workers, upon whom fall all the evils and horrors of modem mass murder—we are to cheer and wave our sweaty caps, and shake the bloodstained fiat of the erstwhile allies of our slave-drivers.

The Socialist cannot do it if he would. He remembers that these deeds have been done in the interest of the Governments of the various countries. Governments representing the interests of the master-class, our enemy. He- keeps in mind the Class Struggle, and is determined to fight it to the bitter end.

Twel.

If This Be Treason (2005)

From the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

As soon as he could after the bombs went off in London on 7 July Tony Blair came on the TV to address the nation, as is expected of all great national leaders at times of crisis and danger. His message, in the sense that it had already been largely worked out for him by the media, was unexceptional. “This is” he said, “a very sad day for the British people but we will hold true to our way of life”. Whether that “way of life” was represented by waging war on a country on the basis of lies about it being an immediate threat to world safety with its massively powerful weapons he did not say. But in case there were any lingering misapprehensions about it he plunged on: “When they [the bombers] try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated”.

Protection

This use of the words “us” and “we” was designed to create the impression that Blair was facing the same dangers, of being blown to pieces on the London Tube or buses, as the rest of us. In fact he made his defiant speech on a brief break from the G8 at Gleneagles, where the participants were protected by a high, impenetrable metal screen backed up by a few thousand police officers. When, back in London, he travels the quarter mile or so between his home in Downing Street and his workplace in the Houses of Parliament he does not face the same risks as working Londoners because he is whisked on his journey in a bullet-proof car, among a swarm of police on motor bikes, through streets which have been swept clear of other people. By most reasonable standards anyone who behaves in that way can be described as “intimidated”. Not that Blair lives by the same standards as the rest us, who are merely expendable members of the working class.

But after his intimidated bravado Blair had to give some attention to tracking down the bombers’ organisation and being seen to be actively working against another such incident. During this it leaked out that in future our “way of life” may be subject to the decisions of secret “anti-terror” courts, ruled over by “security cleared” judges with the accused being represented by “special advocates” who had also been vetted for “security”. Other news revealed that some of the defendants before such courts, if British subjects, may find themselves charged with the offence of treason. It seemed fairly obvious that these proposed changes, in the panic after 7 July, were designed to induce a retributive thrill among those whose enjoyment of our way of life made them grateful for the protection of such a stoutly unintimidated government.

Treason

Treason is defined as a violation or betrayal of allegiance which is owed to a sovereign or a country, usually through joining, or giving support to, enemy in a war or attempting to overthrow the government. This definition is more comprehensive and more complex than it may at first seem to be. There have been cases when the person accused of treason has argued that they were not of the alleged nationality and so did not owe allegiance to that country or its sovereign. Anyone who regards the world’s population as a mass of human beings may marvel at capitalism’s need to disastrously complicate what are essentially simple matters – for which many a lawyer is grateful. It may be taken as an example of this that of the four categories of treason remaining from the Treason Act of 1351 there is still the offence of “violating” the wife of the king’s eldest son, which may have caused some lost sleep among the men who consorted with Princess Diana while she was still married to the Prince of Wales.

For a long time treason was a capital offence and to satisfy the thirst of the population to witness that traitors had got their just deserts the sentence was often to be hung, drawn and quartered in public. (In fact this sentence was not formally abolished until 1947 – one of the reforms for which the Atttlee government did not, for some reason, claim any credit.) After capital punishment was abolished in 1965 treason remained as one of the few offences which could still “attract” (as lawyers are fond of putting it) the death penalty. Wandsworth prison in London, just in case anyone was in need of being hanged, kept a scaffold in good working order.

Casement

One of the more famous examples of treason trials, which came to its appointed grisly end on the scaffold in 1916, was that of Roger Casement. He was an Irish man who at the turn of the century had been employed as a consul of the British government in what was then the Belgian Congo. There he was appalled by the slave conditions and the butchery imposed on the Congolese people by the Belgian rubber companies, under the authority of King Leopold II. Casement’s character was summed up by his manager, who complained that “He is very good to the natives, too good, too generous, too ready to give away. He would never make money as a trader”. He retired in 1911, with a knighthood and a British government pension and two years later he returned to live in Ireland where, not entirely justifiably, he drew parallels between what he had seen in the Congo and Irish problems. In the cause of Irish nationalism he helped to form the Irish Volunteers, an armed militia.

When the First World War began he advised Irish men against joining the British Army, on the grounds that the war with Germany was no concern of theirs. On a false passport he went to Germany with the intention of persuading Irish prisoners of war to fight against Britain. This was not as welcome as he might have hoped; the Germans found him an embarrassment and hastily shipped him, in a submarine, back to Ireland where he was quickly captured. At his trial he tried to argue that he was an Irishman, a case which was fatally weakened in law by his accepting employment as a British consul, a knighthood and a pension. He was quickly convicted and executed at Pentonville on 3 August 1916. After his death his diaries came to light, providing evidence that he was not only a traitor but also a homosexual, which was enough to provoke popular satisfaction that it was entirely appropriate to do away with him. It was not a time notable for rational assessment of such issues.

Joyce

There were similarities between that case and of William Joyce, whose broadcasts from Germany during the Second World War eventually earned him the name of Lord Haw Haw and a death sentence at the Old Bailey. Joyce was accustomed to dazzling people with his somewhat undisciplined knowledge and his oratory. Organisations found it difficult to cope with him and he had to leave the Army, the Conservative Party and then the British Union of Fascists. All of this was expressed in his virulent anti-semitism; typical of his descriptions of Jews was as “submen with prehensile toes”. But for this he might have done well in the Tory Party (he was once close to being their parliamentary candidate in Chelsea) and in the BUF he held a position only a little below that of Oswald Mosley. Joyce was ejected from the BUF in what Mosley described as an economy drive; he went on to form the National Socialist League, which was closer to the Nazis (their meetings ended with shouts of “Sieg Heil”) but the NSL never made any headway and was about to be wound up when Joyce went to Germany just before the start of the war.

Although there is little evidence that Joyce’s broadcasts had any significant effect on the war morale in Britain, he did provoke a kind of bemused fascination and became the stuff of myths and rumours. At all events his pro-German activities were enough to ensure that when the war ended he would be arrested and brought to England to be tried for treason. Anticipating by some 60 years the Blair government’s manipulation of the legal system, Parliament rushed through the Treason Act of 1945, which replaced the elaborate and prolonged trial procedure which had been in force in cases of treason with a simpler and brisker style, similar to that of a murder trial.

It soon emerged that Joyce had a serious defence against the charge. He had been born in the USA of Irish parents who had become naturalised Americans in 1894. But as a young man he had come to England and had applied for a British passport by lying about his place of birth. His defence argued that, however he had described himself, he was in fact not British but the prosecutor – handsome, brilliant Hartley Shawcross, Attorney General in the 1945 Labour government – persuaded the jury, with a little help from the judge, that “common sense” should override procedure. The long queues which had formed overnight to witness Joyce’s trial were hungry for a guilty verdict and it took the jury only 23 minutes to agree. A little over three months later Joyce, having exhausted all the avenues of appeal, was executed at Wandsworth prison. Popular revenge had been satisfied.

Class and Patriotism

Among his admirers Joyce had a reputation as a relentlessly logical thinker. It was a strange kind of logic which accommodated his support of Germany’s war effort against Britain with his rabid British nationalism. (“The white cliffs of Dover! God bless old England on the lea” he exclaimed to his guard when he was being flown across the Channel to his trial). At the end he tried to escape the hangman by claiming to be an “alien”, which was the kind of accusation he was accustomed to make, in suitably contemptuous invective, about Jewish people. There was – and still is – nothing exceptional about such inconsistencies, which expose the fallacy of patriotism, with its essential creed of “my country right or wrong”. Workers, who make up the majority of capitalism’s people, have no country; however the system arbitrarily divides them according to ruling class rivalries, the workers are united in their poverty. For example it was not a coincidence that the number of victims of recent disasters such as the Asian tsunami and the Katrina hurricane was clearly related to the degree of their poverty. If you could afford it you got out in time; if you could not afford it.

That its workers should be patriotic is vital to each national ruling class and this, fertilised by official lies, is exploited by all governments. Following the 7 July bombs in London one politician after another rushed to denounce the bombers for killing innocent people, as if the British and American forces in Iraq were not also doing that, on a much larger scale. The response of the Blair government was very much as we have come to expect – distortions of facts, the creation of new offences and the revival of the treason charge, designed to stimulate a panic under cover of which the politicians could feel free to do what they would. The strategy in all this was to cement the workers’ patriotism, their loyalty to British capitalism. But as the smoke of the bombs cleared and the dead were counted the central fact remained that for workers to accept such a weary, discredited case is treason against their class.

Ivan

Classic Reprint: Atrocities in the Congo (1960)

A Classic Reprint from the September 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Congo has dominated the headlines in the past few weeks. Readers will find the following—from the Socialist Standard of December 1914—of great interest. The information in the article was largely based on British Government White Paper, Africa No. 1, 1904 (CD 1933) and "Red Rubber," by E. D. Morel.

In the sixties and seventies of last century the great commercial countries saw enormous possibilities in the creation of new markets, arising out of notable discoveries by explorers in Central Africa, and each wished to acquire as large an outlet as possible for their own manufactures. The scramble commenced.

The discovery of the Congo Basin by Stanley was the most significant of all, and in this direction the late King Leopold II turned his attention. Having previously juggled successfully with Suez Canal and other shares, he had amassed a considerable fortune. He sent several investigating expeditions, consisting mostly of Englishmen and Germans (how strange !) assuring the world that his intentions were purely scientific and severely disinterested. To carry on this work Leopold formed a company styled “The International African Association.”

This bloody and astute king capitalist played his cards like an expert. He became a member of the Aborigines Protection Society, and promised to support lavishly the missionary societies of England and America. He captured the British Chambers of Commerce by declaring that if the commercial communities supported his proposals the Congo trade would be open to them and would be exempt from all fiscal restrictions.

After a time the various powers became uneasy and jealous as to who should control this vast and rich land. Certain suggestions were considered with a view to placing it under international control. Then on the suggestion of the Portuguese it was decided to recognise the sovereignty of Portugal on both banks of the river up to a certain limit inland, to declare the river open to the world, and to place it under an Anglo Portuguese Navigation Commission to which the accession of the other Great Powers would be welcome. After introducing clauses protecting traders against exaggerated tariffs, and for the protection of the natives (!), etc., the treaty was signed.

But Leopold had not been playing to the gallery for nothing, and immediately the treaty was denounced by the British Chambers of Commerce and the philanthropic societies. The British Government was accused of betraying national interests, and the Portuguese Government was accused by its bosses of a similar crime. France, encouraged by the clamour, became resolutely hostile, and Bismarck, on behalf of Germany, kicked. Belgium was now in an unique position, and received the reluctant support of the British Government, with a proviso to secure freedom of trade, etc. Bismarck’s proposal of an International Conference was assented to, and was opened “in the name of God,” on Nov. 25, 1884.

Fourteen powers were represented, and their first consideration was for the welfare of the natives ! Such was the slimy cant and hypocrisy that we are told “the delegates, figuratively speaking, fell upon each other’s necks and wept with emotion.” They placed the Congo Basin in the hands of Leopold’s company. Articles were signed to ensure the utmost freedom to all capitalists, and for the preservation of the natives, the suppression of slavery and the slave trade, and “the protection of all . . . institutions which aim at instructing the natives and bringing home to them the blessings of civilisation.” We shall see, presently, what these “blessings o£ civilisation” were.

On August 1st, 1885, Leopold notified the signatory Powers that the International African Association would henceforth be known as the Congo Free State, with himself as sovereign of that “State.” Almost immediately followed a decree claiming all vacant lands as the property of the State. Another decree limited the rights of the native to the area upon which his hut was built, whilst another prohibited the hunting of the elephant “throughout the whole of the State’s territory” (three-fourths of which had never been trodden by a white man). Then they commenced recruiting an army of the most savage tribes. These natives could either volunteer or were taken in raids. For every recruit of the latter order the State officer obtained a bonus according to the physical fitness of his captive. Male children were also taken and drafted to military instruction camps to be made soldiers in due course. Having secured and trained sufficient recruits they set out with a mandate from Christendom to exterminate the Arabs, who had up to then been trading with the natives. Their object was to obtain the vast stores of ivory and rubber in the Arabs’ possession and to capture their markets. This accomplished, everything was clear for Leopold and his thieves’ gang to commence business.

On Sept. 21st 1891 a secret decree was issued to the State officials in Africa, stating that it was the paramount duty of the Congo Free State to raise revenue, and “to take urgent and necessary measures to secure for the State the dominal fruits, notably ivory and rubber.” Other regulations followed, which forbade the natives selling rubber or ivory to European merchants, and threatened the latter with prosecution if they bought these articles from the natives.

The merchants protested, and Leopold defined the position. Everything, he told them, belonged to the State—the land and the produce thereof. The natives were tenants upon State property. If they interfered with that property they were poachers ; and whoever abetted them were poachers, receivers of stolen goods, and violators of the law. How simple and concise !

Other secret documents were dispatched to the Governor-General baiting him to do his utmost to obtain the produce from the natives, “sparing no means.” A sliding scale was fixed by which officials were paid. The less it cost to obtain the goods the greater the bonus ; the more it cost to get the goods the less for the official. In other words, the less the native got for his ivory and rubber the larger the official’s commission and the more for the thieves on top !

One can pretty well guess the nature of the orders of tha Governor to his subordinates, and of the subordinates to their subordinates. Here is a typical one from Commandant Verstracten to the officials in charge of stations in the Rubi Welle district :

“I have the honour to inform you that from Jan. 1st 1899, you must succeed in furnishing 4,000 Kilos of rubber every month. To this effect I give you carte blanche. You have, therefore, two months in which to work your people. Employ gentleness at first, and if they persist in not accepting the imposition of the State, employ force of arms.”

Here is an extract from another :

“Decidedly these people of Inoryo are a bad lot. They have just cut some rubber vines at Huli. We must fight them until their absolute submission is obtained, or their complete extermination.”

Under this system £13,715,664 worth of raw produce was forced out of the Congo natives during the seven years preceding 1906 by the hirelings of this royal member of the Aborigines Protection Society and his confederates.

Let us now see how the rubber was acquired under the stimulus of bonuses and force. The information is furnished by Belgian and French, traders (who, no doubt, felt sore at being outdone by the State monopoly), and travellers and missionaries. The most brutal act of the “German Huns” sinks into insignificance compared with some of them.

The procedure was by levying a tax on the villages and towns payable in kind, and State soldiers would be sent to demand payment—so much ivory or rubber as well as food stuffs—every week or month as the case might be. But let the eye witness describe. The following is au extract from a letter written as early as 1892 by a resident of Likini.

“The frequent wars upon the natives undertaken without any cause by the State soldiers sent, out to get rubber and ivory, are depopulating the country. The soldiers find that the quickest and cheapest method is to raid villages, seize prisoners, and have them redeemed against ivory, etc. . . . Each agent of the State receives 1,000 fr. commission per] ton of ivory, and 175 fr. per ton of rubber.”

This, the reader will notice, was about a year after the decree urging the officials to secure the “dominal fruits.” The bloody events that followed have never been surpassed. The following is from the diary of E. J. Glave, an “independent English traveller” who crossed the Congo in 1891-5. It appeared in the “Century Magazine” in 1896.

“Up the Ikelemba away to Lake Mantumba the State is perpetrating its fiendish policy in order to obtain profit. War has been waged all through the district of the Equator, and thousands of people have been killed. Many women and children were taken, and twenty-one heads were brought to Stanley Falls, and have been used by Captain Rom as a decoration round a flower bed in front of his house.”

The following piece of information was given to the British Consul, Roger Casement, and is quoted in his report (p. 43.)

“Each time the corporal goes out to get rubber, cartridges are given to him. He must bring back all not used ; and for every one used he must bring back a right hand. . . . Sometimes they shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting ; they then cut off a hand from a living man. … In six months, on the Momboyo River they had used 6,000 cartridges, which means that 6,000 people are killed or mutilated. It means more than 6,000, for the soldiers kill children with the butt of their guns.”

If a soldier returned to his station without a sufficient number of hands to make up for the rubber he had not brought, he was shot by his superiors. A native corporal described how in one day he had brought 160 hands home to his officer and they were thrown into the river. Another individual testifies to a village (Katoro) being attacked. Many were killed, including women and children. The heads were cut off and taken to the officer in charge, who sent men back for the hands also, and these were pierced and strung and dried over the camp fire. On another occasion a large town was attacked ; hands and heads cut off and taken to the officer. The witness said : “I shall never forget the sickening sight of deep baskets of human heads.”

According to Roger Casement many had their ears cut off ; also the native soldier, after being told “You kill only women ; you cannot kill men,” would mutilate the bodies and carry the sexual organs to the officer. In fact, in the Mongalla massacre of 1899 the agents confessed to ordering sexual mutilation. Consul Casement says that “this was not a native practice, but the deliberate act of soldiers of an European administration . . . and that in committing these acts they were but obeying the positive orders of their superiors.”

In some cases when protests were made to the Congo Courts a mock trial ensued. Lacroix, one of the agents in the Mongalla region was thus held up, and he confessed to having been instructed by his superiors to attack a certain village for shortage of rubber, and to having killed in his raid many women and children. He said:

“I am going to appear before the judge for having killed 160 men, cut off 60 hands ; for having crucified women and children, for having mutilated many men and hung their sexual remains on the village fence.”

Terms of imprisonment were inflicted, but were never served. Why ? Because “they had acted on instruction.”

The Congo Free State is split up into several “Companies” or “Trusts,” each occupying a specific area. One named “The King” was worked in the interest of Leopold’s private purse. Other portions were handed over for stewardship to financiers, “personal friends and officials of his European Court,” etc. In the “Companies” the King or the State usually held half the shares. One is named the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company. In six years this company, with the aid of the State soldiers, made a nett profit of £720,000 out of the rubber slave trade on a paid-up capital of £9,280 ! Thus each share of a paid up value of £4 6s. 6d. has received £335 in the same time. King Leopold held 1,000 of these shares.

However, it seems quite clear that, although the Belgian capitalists, backed by the arms of the State, had a big hand in this dirty business, there was along with them the international gang of plunderers. If this were not so, why was it that, although the evidence of these devilish horrors was before the Governments of America, Italy, France, Portugal, Germany, and the rest of them for years, they did not move to stop them ? Why was it that for six years the British Government was continually having reports of atrocious maladministration on the Congo and yet refused to move ? Why, indeed, did it absolutely suppress these reports—which it has never yet made public? Sir Henry Johnston, who has travelled a good deal in that direction, is evidently in the know. He says : “If there have been bad Belgians on the Congo, there have been bad Englishmen, ruthless Frenchmen, pitiless Swedes, cruel Danes, unscrupulous Italians.” (See preface to Morel’s “Red Rubber,”)

1960 Postscript

These were the atrocities which were responsible for the formation, at the beginning of this century, of the Congo Reform Association. One supporter of the Association was the late Arthur Conan Doyle, who in 1909 wrote a lengthy pamphlet called The Crime of the Congo. This pamphlet was an account of the barbarities which the agents of the Belgian rubber companies committed against the Congo natives. Some of the examples given by Doyle also appeared in the Socialist Standard of December, 1914.

Even in a world which is accustomed to organised savagery, Doyle's pamphlet is shocking to read. But one piece of it induces a grim smile on the reader's face:

"Sir Edward Grey has told us in his speech of July 22nd, 1909, that a danger to European peace lies in the matter. . . . Whence does it come? Is it from Germany, with her traditions of kindly home life—is this the power which would raise a hand to help the butchers of the Mongalla and of the Domaine de la Couronne? . . . Both in the name of trade rights and in that of humanity Germany has a long score to settle on the Congo.  . . . Or, lastly, is France the danger?  . . . For my own part, I cannot believe it. I know too well the generous, chivalrous instincts of the French people. . . ."

Consider the work of the kindly, home-loving Nazis. The most brutal of Leopold II's commissaries would have been aghast at their concentration camps. The French have shown us in Algeria that they have instincts other than the generous and chivalrous. Obviously, Doyle was wide of the mark when he thought that only the Belgians were capable of perpetrating such outrages.

Are we, then, being wise after the event? No. Socialists know that, when they expand their influence by conquest and colonisation, the capitalist powers often resort to violent coercion. And because we know that as capitalists they all have the same interests, we have never supported one ruling group against another. Atrocities which are committed in the process of expanding an empire are not the work of only one or a few countries. Every colonial power has done its share. Violence and terror are part of the atrocious capitalist system of society.

Editorial Committee.

Racism and hostility (2022)

Book Review from the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Of Fear and Strangers: a History of Xenophobia. By George Makari. Yale University Press £20.

The word xenophobia may sound as if it is from Classical Greek, but in fact it is much more recent. It dates from the 1880s, as a psychiatric condition (pathological fear of strangers) and a term for irrational enmity towards other nations, with terms such as Francophobia found. But its real use for dislike of ‘foreigners’ dates from the 1900 Boxer Uprising in China, after invasions by various European colonial powers led to a resistance movement which included the slogan ‘destroy the foreigners’. It was thus employed to explain why people living in Asia or Africa might hate Western armies and colonialists.

A so-called racial science was developed, which inter alia claimed that ‘primitive races’ saw all outsiders and strangers as enemies. This licensed violence against those who evinced such hatred. But, as George Makari shows here, this position was gradually undermined. Reports such as Roger Casement’s on Belgian atrocities in the Congo, together with many other examples of colonial murders and forced labour, made it clear that Western behaviour and attitudes were to blame: ‘Their wild and primitive xenophobic rejection of us was actually our violent dehumanization of them.’ Immigrants to the West, such as Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia, encountered xenophobia from organisations like the British Brothers’ League, which at the start of the last century wanted to halt immigration by ‘destitute foreigners’.

In the 1930s there was a ‘general panic’ in Europe against migrants, and Nazi policies had been foreshadowed in many ways by earlier colonial conquest and domination. Their killings of Jews and others seemed to go beyond ‘just’ xenophobia, and the term genocide was coined in 1944 to describe the intent to destroy a human identity.

Makari provides a full and detailed account of how xenophobia and other racist views have been used to justify mass killings, slavery and so on. The second half of the book, which examines the ideas of psychologists and writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, is less interesting, but the final section has a useful discussion of the return of xenophobia, especially since 2016, as witness Brexit and Trump. It cannot be explained simply as due to economic problems or ‘cultural preservation’. Perhaps more extensive discussion of populist politics would have been helpful here.

It is sometimes argued that it is just part of human nature to distrust strangers or outsiders, who are not part of some in-group and so threaten ‘us’ and need to be driven off. But Makari cites the research of various writers who have argued that restraining aggression had advantages for survival and so led to bands of humans becoming larger, safer and not living in constant fear.

Paul Bennett

How "Ability" Directs. (1922)

From the April 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

How often are we working men told that we have not the intelligence to "direct" industry ; and that society would crumble to pieces were it not for the individuals who possess a wonderful faculty called by our masters Directive Ability? We are also assured that those possessing this marvellous—and very mysterious !—gift are only found within the ranks of the capitalist class.

Now and again ugly and awkward (for the capitalist) facts come out in connection with the running of particular concerns. At such times the capitalist directors (the alleged possessors of "directive ability") hasten to disown responsibility for any of the irregularities charged against the company, and plead ignorance of its internal mechanism. On such occasions officials of the company (wage-slaves) are saddled with the whole of the responsibility.

A case in point was provided during the inquiry into the celebrated Putymayo Rubber atrocities, some years ago, in which Sir Roger Casement gave evidence. On the board of directors of the company, whose treatment of the natives formed the subject of the investigation, there were four English directors. When interrogated as to the company's doings these brainy gentlemen denied all knowledge of its operations and asserted that they did not even know the language in which the business at the meeting of directors was carried on !

However, even this direct information is not necessary to anyone who will give a few moments' thought to one side of the question—and a glance now and again at the company reports and prospectuses regularly printed in the papers. From the latter it will be noticed that the same individual's name appears on the boards of numerous companies. It will further be discovered that some of the companies are gigantic concerns with tentacles stretching out all over the world, and producing varieties of articles a knowledge of which requires training and specialisation to a very high degree. This being so, it should be obvious that an individual who was connected with such concerns could take a very minute part (assuming for the sake of argument that he does take a part) in the work of these companies.

The writer of this article has before him a cutting from the "Daily News" (14/2/22) relating to the case of the City Equitable group of companies whose affairs are creating a financial stir at the present moment. From this cutting we learn that Mr. Gerard Lee Bevan, who was the chairman of the City Equitable Fire and the City Equitable Associated Companies, was also on the boards of the following companies :

Agricultural Industries, Ltd. ; Burton Son and Sanders, Ltd. ; Chilian Stores (Gath .and Chaves), Ltd. ; Clarke, Chapman & Co., Ltd. ; H. and C. Grayson, Ltd. ; Harrods (Buenos Aires), Ltd. ; Leyland Motors, Ltd. ; South American Stores (Gath and Chaves), Ltd.; Southern Brazil Electric Co., Ltd

The capital of two of the above companies (Agricultural Industries, Ltd., and South American Stores) total round about ￡5,000,000. It will be observed that one of the above companies is connected with Agriculture, another with Petrol Motors, another with Electricity, and so forth. A man would need to be indeed a many-sided genius to handle such vast concerns ! No wonder the poor fellow has made a mess of things and cleared out !

The truth of the matter, however, is that all the direction of  industry performed  by these self-styled directors concerns the direction of  the profits into the appropriators pockets.

The whole of industry, in all its ramifications, occupies in the actual production and distribution of wealth only those whose title gives the key to their social position―the working class. How are they rewarded ? Perhaps the following; quotation will form a fitting conclusion to these few remarks (taken from the "Daily News," 10/2/22) :

  "A case which has been resumed at intervals for the last 30 years has been brought once more before the First Paris Court of Appeal.
  M. Eugene Turpin, the inventor of melinite, and of many other contrivances, is endeavouring to recover damages from all persons who have used his invention. M. Turpin is still a relatively poor man, although since 1881 he has brought out at least 40 inventions."

The above inventor can take his place with the galaxy of inventors (including General Shrapnel, who died in poverty in the early stages of the war) who have made possible the rapid expansion of wealth which has brought with it intrigue and wire-pulling (misnamed "directive ability") of the wealthy financiers.

Gilmac.

Editorial: Fryatt and Others. (1916)

Editorial from the August 1916 issue of the Socialist Standard

The fate of Captain Fryatt has caused another violent outbreak of cant to sweep over the larger part of the civilised globe. Such a bowl of indignation from those who are urging men on to wholesale murder might lead one to the conclusion that murder itself is a harmless and unimportant matter compared with the method and circumstances of the murder. Men are torn from their homes and sent willy-nilly into death-trap trenches to slaughter and be slaughtered in a quarrel that is not theirs, and that is doing glorious work and dying glorious deaths. The Cain-mark upon their foreheads takes the form Victoria Crosses or Iron Crosses and the like, while they who send them to their crime and their doom have their names inscribed on the “pegs of history" that is not placed in tbs category of the Newgate Calendar. There is no hint from our masters' paid mouth pieces, whether of Fleet Street or of Canterbury and York, that there is anything foul in all this. Crime under authority savours of heaven.

Authorities have a habit of making laws to support their authority, and it is characteristic of them that they never make the mistake of asking the concurrence of those they make subject to those laws If "Thou shalt" or "Thou shall not" are insufficient, then the requirements of the case are fully met with the noose or the bullet. Whatever wordy warfare may centre around the fact of the offence, it is always recognised that the question of tbs justice of the law will not stand argument, and there never is any. Thus in the Casement business not one word has been argued by the prosecution as to whether the prisoner's motives were grounded on patriotism or some baser sentiment. To let the evidence prove the former—it very well might—would by all the rules of logic place Casement on the same plane as Nurse Cavell—and that would never do. It would also have opened grave doubts as to the standing of those misguided Dublin rebels who shared the adventure with Casement, but not being of aristocratic blood, were shot out of hand. Were they not patriots also, and did they approve of the laws under which they were butchered in cold blood ?

The fact is all rule is coercion, and all rulers are bullies. The bullies make laws to suit their own needs without reference to the point of view of those whom they put under the laws, and to talk of justice in the case is laughable. For those who shot the Dublin prisoners in cold blood to complain of the judgment of the German court-martial is incongruous.

Of course the execution of Captain Fryatt was murder—foul, brutal, and stinking. But our masters want us to view it as something standing in a class by itself, something typically and peculiarly German ; but in truth it is nothing of the kind. It is simply another capitalist outrage upon a member of the working class, committed to suit capitalist ends, and accepted and exploited by other capitalists to fan the flame of hatred and feed the declining war-fever. That is our judgment of all these "atrocities."