It's
Bad To Be The King
 As
you might guess I barely scratched the surface
of King Leo's monstrous reign over North Congo,
but the most disgusting part of this story was
this nasty business of the cutting off of hands
and
feet.
In the beginning
I'm sure it was highly motivating to the workforce,
one that didn't meet its rubber quota, when
a
comrade fell to the machete. When
that threat lost its effectiveness
the police
force
moved down
the chain
to wives and children. To keep bookkeeping
happy the amputated hands had to be sent in along
with the rubber as an explanation of the shortage.
This meant that, in short time, spare hands and feet
became sort of a currency as smarter workers found
they
could
augment a shortage
of product with spare hands, and so inter-village
warfare over hands and feet broke out. What fun that
must
have been on a Friday night.
Could it get worse? Certainly. The King was evidently
some sort of cheapskate who didn't want his soldiers
wasting bullets shooting animals,
only
lazy workers. So if they shot at a worker and missed,
or took pot-shots at the stray gazelle, the soldiers
had to explain the loss of the bullet with, you
guessed it,
some luckless worker's hand. The practical upshot
of this was if the local gendarmes were taking
unauthorized
shooting practice in your area it was wise, as
a native, to make yourself
really scarce for awhile.
The
big difference between King Leopold and Adolph
Hitler is that Adolph killed six million Europeans
for personal and political reasons. Leo, on the
other hand, was in it purely for the money. To
him, enslaving an entire country was capitalism
at its finest. That makes him, in my eyes, a somewhat
greater
monster than
Hitler
You may be asking yourself what's the
relevance of this story to your everyday life and
I say "Plenty!". This is what happens to a country
when plutocrats call all the shots. So when you
look at the poisoned Gulf of Mexico, the poisoning
of the groundwater throughout our country, the
way the Bill of Rights has been completely shredded
over the past 30 years, the way the voting process
has been compromised by big money, and the way
the Republican Party does everything in its power
to serve their rich masters then you're seeing
an ugly picture of the future America to
come.
And that America, and you, will be owned by the
Koch
brothers.
---------
If you'd like to read more about King Leopold's
time as ruler of North Congo here's a concise
description.
---------
BTW, speaking of water and oil, Raging Pencils
has been discovered by the Damascus
Citizens for Sustainability.
It's
sort of a one-stop-shop for fracking news. Check
it out.
=Lefty=
|
