Adam Hochschild

This is an amazing and well-researched deep dive into the genocidal assault, mass slavery, and extractive economy that was the Belgian Congo. In three acts, King Leopold of Belgium, finally gets the foreign land he seeks to wring out and obtains the Belgian Congo, later known as Zaire and now simply as Congo. For the second act and the closing decade of the 19th Century, Leopold enacts a rule of terror resulting in the deaths of 4 to 8 million indigenous people, "a death toll," Hochschild show more writes, "of Holocaust dimensions." The final act finds, largely in the US and UK, an activist front that exposes the rapacious tactics over the 20th Century's first decade.

Along the way we meet Joseph Conrad as a steamboat captain, a possible basis for Kurtz in Léon Rom, the oddball characters drawn to lawless frontiers like the sketchy Morton Stanley and more.

It is unfortunate that this audio book has many repeated lines. It is boundaries between sessions we done so the last line of the previous session became the first line of the following session. Then, sloppy editing brought these together like rail cars, not deleting one of the lines in the connection. show less

Having only a passing familiarity with the history of the European colonization of sub-Saharan Africa, I must admit to being somewhat shocked at the raw body count associated with Leopold's rape of the Congo. As many have asked, "How could the death of up to 10 million people become nothing more than a footnote to this historical era?"

The subjugation and plundering of large areas of the region was certainly not an activity that began and ended with Leopold, however, the scope of his show more atrocities coupled with the other aspects of his pathetic life identify him as an utterly miserable excuse for a human being.

That being said, however, it should be noted (as the author does at the end of his work), that in many ways, Leopold was a man of his times. If his body count was higher than that of French, German and English colonies, this was largely due to the fact that the rubber resource was more densely located in his area of control. What matter the body count if the value of the bodies were negligible? Even many of the "heroes" identified in the book, looked with disgust and abhorence at the subjects of Leopold's crimes against humanity.

However, it is these very individuals, who took on at great risk the powers involved in the carnage that make up the story of this period. A willingness to protect the defenseless, at great personal sacrifice and with virtually no hope of either success or reward is what identifies the finest among us. show less

A book that brilliantly succeeds in finding a new way to talk about the First World War, by looking at the protesters and conscientious objectors who opposed it along the way. I must admit, in my head antiwar protests started sometime around the 60s with Vietnam; but it turns out that the British peace movement during 1914–18 is one of the most impressive in history.

So riveting are many of the details here that you end up feeling amazed and annoyed that they aren't included in more general show more histories of the conflict. I've read countless thousands of words on John French over the last year, yet I somehow had no idea that the field marshal's own sister was Charlotte Despard, one of the most intransigent, outspoken activists of the period. Despard denounced ‘the wicked war of this Capitalistic government’ while her brother was busy orchestrating it – and yet the two of them were as close as ever, regularly visiting each other and writing off their siblings' political views as charming quirks.

Despard also championed many other progressive causes of the time, notably women's suffrage. The so-called suffragettes are a key part of the story, and a good illustration of how divided liberal activists were when the war broke out. Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel went from planting bombs in Lloyd George's house to working hand-in-hand with him from speaking-platforms and in editorials: ‘If you go to this war and give your life,’ Emmeline told a cheering crowd in Plymouth, ‘you could not end your life in a better way – for to give one's life for one's country, for a great cause, is a splendid thing.’ An argument that became impossible after Owen.

Perhaps it helped cement the votes-for-women movement as being within the establishment – sure enough, women were enfranchised in 1918 before the war ended. Nevertheless as a modern reader all your sympathies are with the younger Pankhurst daughter, Sylvia, who remained absolutely committed to the antiwar movement and was more or less thrown out of her own family as a result. Sylvia's secret lover – the pacifist independent MP Keir Hardie – is another key character in here, and one I'd previously known nothing about. Both of them were shunned, isolated, mocked.

Bertrand Russell also flits in and out of these pages, a towering moral presence. Every time I read about him I admire him more and more. Russell was jailed for six months for his antiwar activism (when the warder took down his details on arrival, he asked Russell's religion, and he replied, ‘agnostic’. Asking how to spell it, the warder sighed, ‘Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God’). He still managed to keep in touch with two of his lovers while in prison, too – he wrote to a French actress in French, a language his jailers couldn't understand, and sent letters to another woman smuggled out in copies of the Proceedings of the London Mathematics Society, which he told her was ‘more interesting than it appeared’.

Hochschild does a brilliant job not just in uncovering the activities of these characters, some of whom have been comprehensively neglected, but also in tying their stories together: the narrative often reads like a novel with a large but interconnected cast. The whole thing is animated by a steady but unintrusive sense of injustice, and the writing is clear, notwithstanding a few foibles (he deploys, for instance, that odd American hypercorrection ‘felt badly’).

What's particularly sad, after following these people for so long, and hoping for some kind of victory on their behalf, is seeing how desperately almost all of them latched on to the Russian Revolution in 1917. It's a harsh but enlightening test of moral character to see how quickly people could bring themselves to bail on the Soviet dream when things started going wrong – not a test many leftists passed with flying colours (but that's a story better told elsewhere). And overall, this is a story of failure and disappointment, though the tone is moving and hopeful rather than depressing. The title points up the overarching irony. President Wilson had called the slaughter the ‘war to end all wars’ – but Sir Alfred Milner was more prescient in 1918 when, peering into the future as the bodies were cleared away, he described the Treaty of Versailles as ‘a Peace to end Peace’. show less

This is an excellent but horrifying history about an extremely violent and repressive, but mostly (as per the title) forgotten 4-year period in American history, from 1917, when the U.S. entered WW I, to 1920. Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913 as a liberal reformer, and many like-minded politicians and other figures joined his administration to help with the project of making life better for laborers and helping to reduce the large wealth gap that had formed between the working class show more and the owners of industry. (Sound familiar?) In many important ways, however, Wilson was no bargain. Although he'd served as governor of New Jersey, Wilson was a Georgia native and a firm proponent of Jim Crow. For example, he went about resegregating the areas of the federal government that had made progress in that area. At first he was opposed to U.S. involvement in WW I, running for reelection under the slogan, "He kept us out of war." But as the war progressed, and the allies became hard pressed, they turned to the U.S. for armaments and other supplies, going into huge debt to the U.S government and munitions companies, among others, to the extent that an Allied defeat in the war would have occasioned massive defaults and extensive losses to U.S. creditors. Well, that couldn't be allowed. That's not the only cause that Hochschild provides for the U.S. entry into the war, but it is an extremely significant one, and something I'd never realized.

Once the U.S. was involved, Wilson's Attorney General and other high-ranking figures went to town, using the war effort as an excuse for furious and violent repression. The so-called Espionage Act of 1917 made it a crime punishable by long prison terms to criticize the war effort or the government, or to complain about war profiteering. A nationwide civilian vigilante organization called the American Protective League was organized and given carte blanche for violent and even often deadly activities. People got lynched for refusing to buy War Bonds. Massive, coordinated, roundups of draft-aged men took place, and woe betide anyone who couldn't show a draft card. This was all a cover for nativist, rightwing politicians who wanted to hound immigrants, the labor movement, conscientious objectors, socialists, Jews, Catholics and, it goes without saying, Blacks. Good old J. Edgar Hoover got his start during these days. And Wilson, still supposedly a reformer, either condoned or turned a blind eye to all of it. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Espionage Act (very little espionage was ever uncovered), and did so in a unanimous ruling despite the presence of Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes on the court (Holmes, in particular, later did an about face on this subject). The whole period was a horror show from beginning to end. It wasn't until the end of the war and, in particular, the advent of the Warren Harding administration, that some of the main perpetrators of the offenses began to be discredited (in events reminiscent of Joseph McCarthy's toppling) and the American body politic finally lost their appetite for the repression. And although Harding is generally remember with derision nowadays, Hoschshild makes the point that he immediately began commuting the sentences of and releasing from jail the many political prisoners still being held under the Espionage Act long after the war, and the dangers of espionage, had ended. Or, has Harding put it to a journalist off the record even before assuming the presidency, "Why should we kid each other? Debs* was right, we never should have been in that war."

* Leading, and extremely popular, Socialist politician Eugene Debs, who had previously garnered massive amounts of votes while running for president, and running again for president in 1920 from his prison cell (jailed under the Espionage Act), still garnered 900,000 votes nationwide. Harding let him out. Debs, Emma Goldman, and other socialist and anti-war leaders get excellent pocket biographies in this book.

This is a very well-written history, though towards the end it becomes progressively (you should pardon the expression) harder to read, as it is largely a recitation of objectionable people and events. Hochschild does spend a bit of time at the very end drawing parallels between that time and this one in American history. How could he not? Unpleasantness aside, the book is fascinating and provides, I believe, essential information for all Americans (at the very least) wanting to understand the antecedents of today's massive strains of nativist, repressive movements that currently flourish here. show less