Talk:King Leopold's Ghost

message: The bolded portion of the selection below (which I wrote) was removed by an anonymous, but prolific contributor with a strong interest in history.  
* Sir Roger Casement, British diplomat (and later Irish martyr), who put the force of the British government, itself a somewhat less bloody oppressor, behind the international protest against the Belgians.
Granted, the words may be a bit POV, but this is an article about a book and one of the points raised in the book is that the English attack on Belgian oppression in the Congo had the side effect of taking some of the heat off England for her own colonial activities.  I would like to discuss this point further, but I do believe some such phrase belongs in the article, as accurately representing the author's views.  Ortolan88 15:47, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: POV Issue, Contrast England and Belgium in late 19th century Africa

message: I've fixed a few of the links to point them directly to the articles in question as opposed to going through a redirect or to a disambiguation page. Mhacdebhandia 08:32, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Minor Edits 

message: I have removed the mention of genocide from the lead. Adam Hochschild states in In the Heart of Darkness, New York Review of Books, 26 October 2005 that "The exhibit deals with this question in a wall panel misleadingly headed 'Genocide in the Congo?' This is a red herring, for no reputable historian of the Congo has made charges of genocide; a forced labor system, although it may be equally deadly, is different." It is clear that he is not claiming that his book King_Leopold's_Ghost is about a genocide. --PBS (talk) 15:48, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  That's indeed a problem with such figures. No scientific surveys, not stats, but some people think they can spit out figures. These high killing figures are also counterlogical. If exploitation was the motive, then the exploiters don't have a motive to kill those that they exploit; at least not at a large scale. The extraction of rubber was of course a coercive measure, but so is any taxation. Another problem is, that some people may have had an axe to grind with Leopold, who was a rather unpopular monarch. --41.151.82.78 (talk) 08:43, 23 January 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: You are correct that the precise number will never be known, since Leopold consigned the relevant records to the furnace at Laeken.  But not all estimates are wild guesses.  As Hochschild discusses in detail (and as reported in the article), several approaches toward estimating the mortality (starting with the early Belgian government investigation and continuing through recent anthropological studies) have probed the number through various angles, and the careful ones agree:  roughly half the population died during Leopold's regime.  Given the census taken when the government took control (well before the 1960s), this implies an imprecise but fairly solid round number of 10 million.  That's based on solid evidence, and those who would like to ignore it have yet to produce solid evidence to the contrary. Comparing the rubber collection to taxation is disingenuous:  tax collectors are not typically given blanket license to kill.  While it would indeed seem counter-productive to kill off your workers, it is well documented that the Congo authorities had instructions to do just that if they met resistance -- or even short-fall. -- Elphion (talk) 15:26, 23 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Genocide

message: Removed the request for a citation in the intro, as there already was a good one inline.--Quisqualis (talk) 05:44, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed "citation needed" 

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thread_title:  External links modified