It might have killed over 8 million people.
I think among the most striking examples here aside from the obvious one (Holocaust), is Belgium, because it just seems to slip under a lot of people's radar. Belgium has an evil, brutal and vile history, especially in relation to its colonialism and the included human rights violations which in my opinion are massive compared to the country's size and geopolitical abilities.
Belgian citizens are oblivious, but at least slowly "waking up" as the BBC calls it [1]. To be clear, it's the system and leadership that I struggle with. Not the citizens.
To this day, Belgian schools do not in any way teach that Belgium is solely responsible for the Rwandan genocide in the early 90s. It was the sick Belgians who separated fake ethnic groups in Rwanda in the first place, depending on how ethnically white the shape of your skull appeared. And later they used these synthetic groups for political purposes and control.
The Belgian government/leadership has a long history of inhuman behavior, violence and murder that goes nearly completely ignored within Europe and it sort of rubs me the wrong way. Guy Verhofstadt said 'I beg your pardon' once in Rwanda, and that was basically it. 800,000+ are dead and Belgium says 'sorry' once. What?
Belgium isn't about chocolate, it's a country which is completely fine with not teaching its citizens about the common practice of chopping off children's arms for not meeting labor goals for the day. When Belgians travel to places like Rwanda they are dumbfounded by the realities of their own history.
And those people want to tell China something about human rights, yelling from some tower in Brussels. It's breathtaking.
But I disagree with you on the other spectrum. Mostly how the argument is presented. "If only those nasty Europeans never existed, the world would be at peace". Yea, no. Every civilization, whether Asian, Persian, African, Pacific Islands, pre-European native Americans and everyone else I missed were perfectly cool with destroying some other tribe/clan/city. Hell, Hawaiians were a very warrior centric culture before Cook arrived.
We suck as humans. Doesn't matter where you were born, you suck because you're a human. No one's hands are clean. Pointing at one culture as the cause of the world's problems doesn't solve much and just spins the wheels of hate and war some more. And hey, dont get me wrong, when Merkel has negative things to say about how Poland and the US conducts themselves, the first thing I always think of, "Really chancellor kraut?". It is laughable when Brussels or Berlin or London or DC wants to take the moral high road. However, at some point we have to cut our losses and just quit being douches to each other or we are forever doomed to repeat the bad parts to history.
My hands are clean. I washed them.
On a more serious note tho, I particularly don't like the mixing of people and time. For example: There is no point in accusing German people for the war crimes of WWII when they were born decades later.
It does make a bit more sense when you look at current (war) crimes of your country (or collective in general) tho, but the extent to which you are to blame is probably still very very low (but not zero) and gets lower the bigger the collective is, if you have (close to) no political power.
We are not taught about the atrocities of our ancestors and how the Greece the 'mother of all cultures' was infact filled with traitors and slavery, especially Athens.
Our 'great' past is ,beat, almost literally into our heads. We named one of the worst warlords in history 'Great' and instead of talking about the slavery and death he brought, we call it 'liberation of the barbarians', with 'barbarians' meaning all who are not greeks (::winky face::).
When it came to the Romans, we were still the winners because conquered them with our culture.
The worst of all is that this becomes so ingrown, even in young people, that for many it becomes a corner-store of their identity; any critical discussion is met with attacks because it literally shakes the foundation of their world.
There were two distinct tribes in Rwanda, the Tutsi and the Hutus. It's quite common for some Africans to identify by tribe.
There is a great/depressing book by a UN general who was in Rwanda at the time. [0]
> human rights violations
To be pedantic, there were no human rights violations as there was really no legal concept of human rights at all. The what-is-now Chinese were slaughtering each other long before any White Man set foot in the place.
[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shake-Hands-Devil-Failure-Humanity/...
Edit: It is mentioned a bit in the article about the Hamite theory (a racist theory that formed the academic legitimization for many colonial decisions in Africa): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_Hutu,_Tutsi_and_Twa
and it's also mentioned in the articles on the two tribes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutu#Origins
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutsi#Origins_and_classificati...
I've had heated debates with friends just trying to explain that people are people, and they do mean things to each other. Sometimes. Often, actually.
(Similar to other types of condescension-masquerading-as-respect, such as "women are too pure to debate politics".)
The funny thing is that the person who expressed this usually strongly believes it is genuine respect, and will get outraged if you suggest otherwise. Like, is there a higher compliment than to be treated like a child? But at the same time, we do not consider children competent, and we feel comfortable making the important decisions for them.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Lords-Rim-Sterling-Seagrave/dp/039914...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott#The_Art_of_Not_...
Making the cackhanded pre-1970s Belgian administration "solely" responsible for the 1993 genocide is an exceptionally unorthodox (i.e. stupid) hot take, so it's no wonder that no school is teaching it.
That's comparable to claiming the the US, British and French are "solely" responsible for the Holocaust because they forced Germany to sign the Versailles treaty. Yes it might have played a role, but it's clearly ridiculous.
Not only is this factually untrue - perhaps Belgians highlighted ethnic divisions between the two Bantu peoples, but they did not create them - how about you leave the peoples of Rwanda some agency? Nobody made them commit genocide. They are their own people, with their own culture, attitudes, beliefs, and minds. Sometimes they do good things and sometimes they do bad things. In the 1990s they committed a genocide, as many if not most other peoples in history have.
They did this for their own reasons, not because genius Belgians manipulated them into it. They did it because they're people just like you or me. Pretending that Belgians are uniquely awful and responsible for the actions of other people is just a different kind of paternal superiority.
Inequality and discrimination have long term consequences.
Basically, Belgians decided that one group was superior and cooperated with them. The other group was deemed inferior and treated rather badly. A lot of resentment followed. The groups were pre-existent, the level of resentment was not.
The genocide did not happened out of nowhere, the two groups hated each other ever since and committed small scale atrocities against each other after. Which created situation that was easy to be exploited in Rwandan internal power struggles.
So, it is combination of factors. The culture, attitudes and beliefs that caused genocide were the one growing from colonial system. The minds and decisions were Rwandans.
I don’t want to minimize the atrocities of the Belgian Congo. But the Belgians are not and can never be held “solely responsible” for the Rwandan genocide. The agency, and the moral responsibility, for that genocide rests primarily in the hands that gripped those machetes and used them to gruesomely murder and dismember their neighbors, and those hands were not Belgian.
Everyone who has ever committed an atrocity had some historic excuse for it. The lesson of the 20th century is that no historical excuse or context provides a justification for mass murder. Belgians have committed horrible atrocities in the past, but that doesn’t justify or somehow transfer the blame for the atrocities committed by the descendants of their victims against each other.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/11/irish-presiden...
What they did to the Congo is sickening.
It's true that the Belgian colonial history slips under many people's radar, and I agree that it should be discussed more. Too few people know that more people died under Belgian colonialism than e.g. in the holocaust. (I guess that people historically were less bothered by the deaths of so called "primitive bush people" than "educated white europeans")
> Belgian schools do not in any way teach that Belgium is solely responsible for the Rwandan genocide
I disagree with this claim. Colonial history was taught in my school and iirc it's part of the obligatory high school curriculum. That being said, this was not the case some decades back, and awareness is definitely not on par with e.g. Germany. For example, there exists a "Leopold II street" not too far from me. Imagine having "Adolf Hitler street" as the main street trough a German town. Especially among the older generation there are still people of the "we also did a lot of good in the congo" opinion.
I feel that a lot of belgians kind of feel disconnected from the colonial atrocities. The colonies were a long way from belgium, and few people were involved or even knew about what happened there, far from actually going there. What further complicates the matter is that the during the initial (and most cruel) colonial period, the colony was not actually property of Belgium, but of the belgian king. Hence the government and some people feel like they had little to do with it. These reasons do not justify the ignorance, but do in some part explain it.
On a similar note, you claim that Belgium is "solely responsible for the Rwandan genocide", but said genocide occurred over 30 years after the Belgians had left. I'm certainly no expert on the matter, it's possible that this is an indirect result of the colonial administration, but I find the "solely" a bit reductionist. Neighbouring tribes were killing opposing tribes before the europeans arrived. (Although I'm sure the colonizers exacerbated this to play divida et concera). I'm not saying the belgians are not to blame, just saying that this is a nuanced discussion.
> To be clear, it's the system and leadership that I struggle with. Not the citizens.
This is indeed an important distinction to make. I feel that making sweeping claims like "Belgium has an evil, brutal and vile history" will cause people to feel attacked. It's counterproductive and will make people deny your real points. "I am Belgian and did not commit crimes so I guess his broader statements are false too"
> Belgium isn't about chocolate, it's a country which is completely fine with not teaching its citizens about the common practice of chopping off children's
I disagree. Belgium _is_ about chocolate. But it's also about a lot of different things. The history _is_ taught. But a country is not defined by the bloody pages in it's history book. Just like germany is not defined by the nazi's or americans are not defined by their genocide of the natives. I feel the past is too complicated to allow general statements about "country X" is good and "country Y" is bad.
> And those people want to tell China something about human rights, yelling from some tower in Brussels. It's breathtaking.
In contrary, the crimes of our forefathers just only fuel us to fight harder for our fellow humans.
It would be wise to point at the real perpetrators such as Leopold II and other financiers and executors involved rather than 'Belgians'.
Well, depends on the Europeans. Some of us Europeans have been victims, rather than perpetators of colonialism for example...
https://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-tel...
is a good post about that, and the Dark Ages myth. There's a lot of propaganda from this time period that people still believe today because it was used to justify a lot of the European nationalism of the 19th and 20th centuries.