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Update: President Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has announced that General Bosco Ntaganda should be arrested and face a military tribunal in the DRCongo instead being made to stand trial at the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands. (Washington Post, 4/11/2012) .

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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he term, “colonialism” means “domination of a superior power over a weaker one” and suitably describes the exploitation and indoctrination that occurred in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1885 until World War II. Most of the civil wars that continue to plague East Africa as well the systemized rape of women, torture, and dismemberment regularly practiced by rebel militia groups and even the standing armies in the DR Congo today were initially introduced as effective domination strategies by the most powerful countries in Europe beginning in the late 1900’s as a way to “introduce and maintain order”.

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It all began with the birth of “African Colonialism” at the Berlin Conference of 1885. At this formal gathering, representatives from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, as well the small country of Belgium sat down together to divide up and section off all of the land south of Sub-Saharan Africa except for the lands previously awarded to the countries of Ethiopia and Liberia.

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Belgium was a relatively new monarchy at the time having only just established its independence from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1830. Great Britain and France clearly were in need of raw materials and trade alliances with which to support their countries’ growing domestic industries while Italy had joined together with Germany in 1871 forming an imposing alliance. The “Congo Conference” was hosted by Germany and the resulting General Act of the Berlin Conference was established to regulate trade and settlement practices within the colonies. In order to do this a committee of European leaders agreed to impose new borders onto existing tribal kingdoms – many times separating centuries- old ethnic groups in the process and distorting territorial boundaries that had previously served to divide feuding clans.

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[dropcap]E[/dropcap]ach country pledged to launch immediate settlement plans, man and staff their colonial governments, and headed out to take control of their new possessions; completing this task in 10 short years between 1880 and 1890. And as for the claims and the rights of the peoples and ethnic groups already living on these lands, you ask? Well their rights and claims were never considered at all. The residents of these lands were deemed to be incapable of ruling themselves and so as part of the colonization agreement each nation pledged to “end the slave trade, bring God to the local residents, and establish order throughout the colonies” but it was clear as one Ugandan colleague so eloquently stated that their purpose in coming was “not to elevate but to dominate”.

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[dropcap]N[/dropcap]o one person managed to do so with as much cruelty or avarice as King Leopold II of Belgium. It is important that the reader understand that by the conclusion of the Berlin Conference Leopold had been granted exclusive rights to the region of the world now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo- not his country, his government, nor his people. The Congo Free State as he called it belonged to him and him alone. He set to work organizing his colony for one purpose only – to increase his personal wealth. He hired the services of none other than Henry Morton Stanley of, “Dr. Livingston, I presume” fame, to sign treaties with the kings of the most important tribes in the Congo in order to present undeniable evidence that they had accepted his sovereign authority over them and their people. He then concentrated on building a private army that would enforce his rules throughout the Congo Free State which he named the Force Publique.

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He presented commissions to a wide range veteran officers and mercenaries from around the world. His officers had to be white Europeans while his enlisted men, dressed in blue uniforms and red fezzes were selected from among other African tribal groups in North Congo, Zanzibar, and other countries around West Africa like Ghana and Cameroon. Leopold only hired seasoned military officers, who had actually fought in battle and he assembled a force of war- hardened troops accustomed to killing and punishing to accomplish their goals.

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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Force Publique resurrected a well- known set of military strategies based on the art of intimidation and subjugation. These procedures had been commonly used in European warfare when a smaller force sought to intimidate civilians living in the area into submission in order to eliminate the possibility of a whole -scale rebellion against them. The smaller force deliberately employed terrifying procedures and specific forms of psychological torture known to be so repugnant to their enemies that they would immediately “cease and desist” preventing any further threat of retaliation. These soldiers were deliberately trained to carry out the most atrocious acts imaginable towards the Congolese people in order to remove any semblance of self-efficacy or control and to destroy any confidence the villagers’ once had in their ability to strike back.

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[dropcap]L[/dropcap]astly, the Force Publique used what was most valuable to their victims such as the threat of harm to wives and children to further control Leopold’s workers. These strategies had first been designed for use in European conflicts where troops had found themselves outnumbered in enemy territory but now they would be customized and reworked by the Force Public in order to allow them to effectively manage large groups of enslaved laborers. “Colonial regulations” were applied with impunity against a people whom the soldiers had already determined were inferior and replaceable. Despite all of their advanced weaponry and superior military strength the Force Publique did not have the tactical advantage and they knew it. They were a small number of men residing in a foreign country surrounded by a superior force of combatants capable of waging war on them at any time. They had heard reports that some of the villages in the outer bush practiced Cannibalism and that information further intimidated them. So they took the offensive and systematically broke the “spirit of the people” around them in order to protect themselves from the threat of rebellion and to ensure that Leopold’s obsessive demands would be carried out to the letter. Do these tactics sound familiar then? They should. These are the same techniques used by any number of rebel militia forces in the Ugandan Civil War, the First and Second Congo Wars, Darfur, and in the War for Independence in Rwanda. Kony and his Lord’s Liberation Army did not create these methods but they certainly have applied them successfully.

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All of East Africa has mastered subjugation procedures especially well and use them whenever they need to render a group of civilians submissive and compliant. Congolese warlords use them as effectively today as the Force Publique did over a century ago. Leopold’s first economic endeavor was the accumulation of ivory. His marksmen, in their quest for wealth, slaughtered thousands of male and female elephants just to hack off their tusks. The ivory itself would be eventually fashioned into jewelry and other decorative objects such as pipes, billiard balls, and piano keys. There are reports that his hunters trapped and slaughtered upwards of two hundred elephants at a time leaving their carcasses to swell and rot in the intense, tropical sun. The train that Stanley had built had not been completed so Leopold needed a way to transport his ivory tusks to the coast. He began using local tribesmen as porters to hand-carry these tusks along dangerous pathways that had been cut through the thick rain forests in order to deliver them to his seaport where they would be loaded on ships and taken back to Belgium. If a man became sick or overcome with exhaustion on the trip he would be left to die on the path while his friends were forced to move on without him. Leopold demanded that his ivory shipments be transported in the dry and wet seasons causing his porters to die from a host of life-threatening maladies such as mud slides, snake bites, malaria, blood infections, and wild animal attacks. At the dawn of the 20th century the vulcanization of rubber helped establish the bicycle and automobile industry. There was an immense need for raw rubber from which to make things such as tires, hot water bottles, and raincoats. Leopold intended to capitalize on his second opportunity to increase his wealth. The enormous region of the Congo Free State was covered by a vast tropical rainforest that contained rubber trees. These trees could be harvested by laborers for the sap they contained. Leopold found himself doubly blessed with an unlimited supply of raw rubber to export and an enormous work force of tribesmen that could be used to collect the sap. He ordered his native populations into the rain forests and if they objected he killed them and/or maimed their wives and children sometimes putting entire villages to the torch.

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[dropcap]W[/dropcap]ithin a decade Leopold’s rubber extraction operation became a especially lucrative business so much so that the French in their colonies in the northwest Congo, the Portuguese in Angola, and the Germans in Cameroon developed similar rubber extraction enterprises based on Leopold’s use of enslaved labor. Leopold was such a severe taskmaster that even his own troops were subject to stringent quota systems. Each soldier was made to account for the use of every bullet fired by submitting one hand from the villager he had killed as proof. Many soldiers were unable to account for all of their spent bullets and so feared that their salaries would be docked for these omissions. They solved this problem by cutting off the hands of live villagers instead, then turning those in to balance their accounts. Over time mutilations became the accepted mode of punishment for even minor infractions. Hands and feet were cut off in retribution for real as well as imagined offenses or because the workers had not met their rubber quotas for the month. One of the most painful photographs I have ever seen from that period was of a Congolese worker who sits looking down at five hands that have been laid out in front of him, one hand had been amputated from each one of his five daughters as punishment for not meeting his rubber quota. One of the reasons the Force Publique became so outrageous in the number of people it killed was the fact that it never lacked for more laborers; if one man died, another could replace him. It has been reported that when Leopold was finally made to sell the Congo Free State to the Belgian government, a mere 10 years later between 10 and 13 million people were dead from murder, mutilation, starvation, exhaustion, or disease. The deliberate use of mutilation to subdue a larger group should also sound familiar. The use of torture, mutilation and rape is currently being used by rebel armies, [western-controlled] guerrillas, and terrorists throughout East Africa. “There is nothing that crushes the human spirit so irrevocably as having to endure a piece of your body being hacked off,” stated one of my dear Ugandan friends. “I would like to see just how well Mandela (referring to Nelson Mandela) would have carried on after they hacked his nose and lips off! These are primal fears that overwhelm the simple people who have have been subjected to such atrocities. Things like that change you forever and you would do anything at all to stop it. Those soldiers know this and still they do it to innocent men, women, and children. Damn them! May they never be forgiven!” And as one of my other sources confided, “What better way to crush a woman for good than to impregnate her with the enemy’s child?”

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What should scare us even more is the reason these atrocities were committed in the first place. If I could get Kony to speak truthfully about why he harms the people of his Acholi villages, I am sure that he would not mention emotions such as hatred or revenge- he only ever acted out of fear. He struck first just as the Force Publique did a century ago. He knows that he does not have a sufficient number of men to fend off an attack by all of the people living in an area at once so he prevents that from happening by systematically crushing them before the group realizes that it had the power to retaliate all along. But the subjugation techniques so well developed and applied by the Force Publique never really went away. They were preserved in detailed accounts passed down from grandfather to son to grandson around the village campfires in the evening. The horrendous tortures and brutal massacres of the Congolese people were never really forgotten and eventually were remembered best by the young men; the ones who most recently resurrected the violence and intimidation in order to wage their own unique brand of civil war. I truly wish I could reassure you that once King Leopold II had been removed from power and the Belgian government took control conditions improved for the people of the Belgian Congo but that did not happen. Although the name of the colony changed—the lives of the people did not. But that explanation will have to wait until my next post —Kat Nickerson Kingston RI USA

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For those of you who would like to know more about this topic read King Leopold’s Ghost: a story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa By Adam Hochschild, ©1998, Pan MacMillan ISBN – 0-330-49233-0 [/learn_more]

S I D E B A R  ENDS HERE / ARTICLE BY A. VLTCHEK RESUMES

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Their gangrenous sisters, capitalism and nihilism, are brainwashing people all over the world, while driving them into dark valleys of despair.

It is because their weapons of mass destruction are the deadliest, their propaganda the most advanced, their opposition the most indoctrinated and their opposition almost non-existent!

War after war, genocide after genocide, the Westerners are still playing dumb! They refuse to acknowledge whet they are doing to the world.

When over 100 French people died during a bizarre recent string of attacks in Paris (who was behind them? West’s allies – jihadists, or maybe their own establishment?), Europeans began mourning their own victims – and pointing fingers at “the others”. People all over the world, either too scared to say “no” or too brainwashed as well, began expressing solidarity with the French nation.

Part of “The Jungle”, a terrible refugee camp near the French city of Calais, went ablaze. Refugees got attacked all over Europe, as “retaliation”. But retaliation for what? After all, refugees were only escaping their countries that were ruined and plundered by both Europe and the United States!

Aguirre, the Wrath of God  (German: Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes), is a 1972 West German epic film written and directed by Werner Herzog focusing on true events pertaining to the Spanish conquest of the Americas, in this case the Peruvian/Amazonian region. Few artists have recreated the conditions of the 16th century and psychology of the ambitious, nearly insane European conquerors as accurately and meditatively as Herzog. Aguirre remains a warning about mad, obsessive colonialism. 

But this is not how a common European was instructed to see the world.

The common European and North American is much more submissive to the regime, than a common inhabitant of any other part of the world. He or she learns what is required to be learned, listens attentively what the media/propaganda people digest and serve. Debates are almost always within the permitted framework.

A common citizen of a Western country devours hours of bizarre entertainment daily (including “news entertainment”). They watch dozens of propaganda films and clips, every year. He or she can hardly make any distinction between reality and fiction, anymore. Such a citizen is willing to sacrifice billions of men, women and children all over the world just for their own material benefits and wellbeing.

All s/he knows, all s/he feels is (somehow abstractly) is that they are somehow “superior” to the rest of humanity; that their culture is exceptional and predestined to rule the world. All s/he senses is that s/he has the right to consume and to use all the natural resources of the world, and that their government can decide which country outside the Western realm should be allow to stand and which would be forced to fall.

Millions of human lives lost in the Middle East, tens of millions of men, women and children murdered by imperialism in Africa? Who cares? Who bloody cares? Westerner eats, copulates, sometimes works and then he either tries to enjoy his life, or he fights for much better benefits… for himself, or for herself. Rest of the world is there to provide or to subsidize such benefits; that is all.

The dumber they, the Westerners, are, the more self-assured and arrogant their worldview. You see people like this in a pub, but you also see them controlling all international organizations, even the UN agencies. Those big, beefy, tall Germans, Scandinavians, North Americans, Brits – speaking with air of a stone superiority to those “agile Asians, clumsy Africans and insecure Arabs”! Telling them what to do, how to run their societies. Absolutely no shame! You would never hear them lamenting: “We fucked up the world. We raped the planet. We are still doing it…” Never.

No apologies, no remorse, no grand plan for how to reverse the flow, how to return at least some part of what had been stolen and how to stop murdering.

Of course, everywhere you go, you read stuff like “May Peace Prevail on Earth!”

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[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]es, over 100 people died in Paris. Right before that, almost 50 died in Beirut, Lebanon. While thousands are dying in Yemen, every month… While 17,000 already vanished in Iran – victims of West-sponsored terrorism… While hundreds of thousands have been dying in Libya and Syria… While millions have been dying in Somalia and Iraq… While some 10 millions already died in a looted and raped DRC (the Democratic Republic of Congo) … All of them victims of Western assaults and banditry or of Western-sponsored terrorism directly!

All those Mujahedeen, al-Qaida, al-Nusra, ISIS… That entire Wahhabi fundamentalism created first by the British and later North American imperialism. All that vile, toxic stuff that had been armed, and financed and serviced by the Europeans, as well as Saudis, Turks and other great allies of the West.

And why was that stinky stuff so diligently armed and financed? So it could ruin and destroy progressive, socialist Islam, from Egypt to Iran to Indonesia! So it could destroy the Soviet Union and any Marxist roots in Afghanistan! So it could murder millions of progressive people in those proud and independent nations. So the West could rule, unopposed, grabbing all it wants, deciding who will be governing where!

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Now Russia stands against the terror with its fighter jets. Its bombers are flying sorties for survival of this humanity. Just recently, Russia already paid a tremendous price, and we all know what it was. But it is used to paying unimaginable prices, for the survival of our planet. 25 million human lives in just one war, in order to defeat Nazism. Or great chunk of economic output of the USSR, “just” in order to defeat Western imperialism and colonialism.

China sent military advisers, and is standing by, rock solid, shoulder-to-shoulder with Russia.

Syria managed to shock the world by refusing to surrender, by fighting with unimaginable heroism against all odds. Half of its people are on the move, millions of refugees are flooding all shores, but the country is standing tall, injured and bleeding but standing, nevertheless.

And so is Latin America, despite all those vicious attacks from the West. Standing, damn it, standing towering and proud!

And those ignorant, selfish, brutal hordes in the West see nothing. They repeat propaganda injected into their heads, providing slight variations to it, calling it freedom of expression!

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After the “Paris attacks”, Western propaganda is in high gear once again. Its apparatchiks were clearly “prepared and ready”. Future direct attacks against Syria are already “justified” well in advance. Not against ISIS (although that would be the official pretext), but against President al-Assad and his government which is, despite everything, supported by the majority of Syrian people. Attacks against Syria will not be called “Western terrorism”, but something like a “heroic revenge”.

Can this planet be entrusted to those who watch crap on their television screens, day after day – both Hollywood propaganda production, and news propaganda briefings?

Can anything that comes from the West be taken seriously, after centuries of lies and murder?

Who is killing whom, lately? Who is behind what?

I will stick to what I know. And what I know is who is actually killing millions in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

I will not speculate about some “insider job” of the Empire, although I have some strong suspicions; of course I do! For now I will only stick to facts that I can prove.

And the facts are simple and horrendous: the Empire has been murdering tens of millions of people on our planet. The Empire, and that self-perpetuated ignorance, fundamentalism and blindness of its indoctrinated citizens!

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address:
“http://www.telesurtv.net/english/bloggers/Ignorance-and-Indoctrination-of-Westerners-Kills-Millions-20151116-0001.html”. If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

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