From: Cub Driver look@

(I'm
not sure about the Dutch record in Africa--not nearly as bad,
evidently.)

The Dutch were most active in the East Indies. "Java or How to Manage a
Colony," by English lawyer JWB Money, showed how a small country like Holland
had perfected the technique of exploiting vast colonies. Money concluded that
the huge profits made from Java depended on forced labor and brutal
suppression; in effect the Dutch East Indies were a vast slave plantation.
Belgium's King Leopold II read Money's book and "improved" on the methods it
described to rape the Congo, where, under Belgium rule, between 5 and 8 million
inhabitants perished between 1885 and 1908. France, Germany and Portugal
adopted Belgium methods in their own African colonies A novel was written
about the Belgians in the Congo by some guy named Joseph Conrad, who visited
the Belgian Congo in 1890. He gave his book the appropriate title, "Heart of
Darkness." It's most famous line is, of course, "The horror...the horror."
Conrad, commenting on the fact that his novel was an effort to convey the
enormity of the reality, wrote of Belgium's action in the Congo that it was
"the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human
conscience." Not bad for a pipsqueak country enjoying its 15 minutes as a
world power.


Chris Mark