"What happened is, a long time ago, the country Belgium took over this country Congo and killed a lot of people and made everyone slaves."
No, that's actually not what happened. First of all, they did not take over Congo because Congo never existed before Leopold drew it up on a map on a rainy Saturday afternoon together with Stanley. Also, the country of Belgium did not take over Congo, it was a private enterprise by king Leopold II, although the government later took it over from him after reports of atrocities started to trickle through to western Europe. Third, they didn't make people slaves. The slave traders operating in Congo were mostly African-Arabic. The Belgians levied taxes on the population. This was first collected in rubber, and the colonist but also the Congolese army committed atrocities such as the cutting off of hands, murder of village elders, and so on to maximize production. Many more lives were claimed by the sleeping disease. Later on they switched to taxing in money which meant that many young men had to work in the mines to earn money for their village, often under really bad conditions. The wars, dictatorships, and genocides started after the independence.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not making excuses here or anything, but it irks me when people reduce the complex history of a beautiful country to an overly simplified and plainly false representation of the facts.
Great points, this misrepresentation of fact reminds me of a history class in which we discussed the British tactics against the Zulus and a girl actually claimed that "Africa had no war before white people came". I laughed really hard and eventually she was corrected that Africans knew how to and did conduct wars long before white people arrived.
Here's the thing: it's fiction, and short of Ayn Rand's speechifying characters, fictional characters aren't necessarily mouthpieces for the author, let alone reliable narrators.
Are you irked by the fictional father's mis-read of history, or by the fictional lawyers who distorted the truth to put together a micro-lawsuit for reparations? Or is your assumption that Paul Ford doesn't know what he's talking about?
(FWIW, I'm inclined to believe that the Congo reference is an unintentional sleight and a throw-away example used to make a few points about the reach of these micro-lawsuits rather than a troll, but I don't find that it detracts from the illusion because it sounds pretty representative of the understanding of the issue some upper middle class dad might actually have.)
I don't really care whether Ayn Rand's an ignorant boob or his fictional character is. I'm an irritable man and I irk easily.
For example, I am irked every time I hear someone use the phrase '5 times more', because then I'm always left wondering if they whether they really mean '5 times as much', or '6 times as much'.
Yes, but I think you'd agree that replacing the sentence in the story - a bit of dialog spoken to a 10 year old - with your paragraph would not be an improvement.
I was never arguing that. But if you wish, the sentence in the story is not just oversimplified, it's just ignorant and wrong. I would never tell my child such things.
Comments
"What happened is, a long time ago, the country Belgium took over this country Congo and killed a lot of people and made everyone slaves."
No, that's actually not what happened. First of all, they did not take over Congo because Congo never existed before Leopold drew it up on a map on a rainy Saturday afternoon together with Stanley. Also, the country of Belgium did not take over Congo, it was a private enterprise by king Leopold II, although the government later took it over from him after reports of atrocities started to trickle through to western Europe. Third, they didn't make people slaves. The slave traders operating in Congo were mostly African-Arabic. The Belgians levied taxes on the population. This was first collected in rubber, and the colonist but also the Congolese army committed atrocities such as the cutting off of hands, murder of village elders, and so on to maximize production. Many more lives were claimed by the sleeping disease. Later on they switched to taxing in money which meant that many young men had to work in the mines to earn money for their village, often under really bad conditions. The wars, dictatorships, and genocides started after the independence.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not making excuses here or anything, but it irks me when people reduce the complex history of a beautiful country to an overly simplified and plainly false representation of the facts.
Great points, this misrepresentation of fact reminds me of a history class in which we discussed the British tactics against the Zulus and a girl actually claimed that "Africa had no war before white people came". I laughed really hard and eventually she was corrected that Africans knew how to and did conduct wars long before white people arrived.
Here's the thing: it's fiction, and short of Ayn Rand's speechifying characters, fictional characters aren't necessarily mouthpieces for the author, let alone reliable narrators.
Are you irked by the fictional father's mis-read of history, or by the fictional lawyers who distorted the truth to put together a micro-lawsuit for reparations? Or is your assumption that Paul Ford doesn't know what he's talking about?
(FWIW, I'm inclined to believe that the Congo reference is an unintentional sleight and a throw-away example used to make a few points about the reach of these micro-lawsuits rather than a troll, but I don't find that it detracts from the illusion because it sounds pretty representative of the understanding of the issue some upper middle class dad might actually have.)
I don't really care whether Ayn Rand's an ignorant boob or his fictional character is. I'm an irritable man and I irk easily.
For example, I am irked every time I hear someone use the phrase '5 times more', because then I'm always left wondering if they whether they really mean '5 times as much', or '6 times as much'.
Yes, but I think you'd agree that replacing the sentence in the story - a bit of dialog spoken to a 10 year old - with your paragraph would not be an improvement.
I was never arguing that. But if you wish, the sentence in the story is not just oversimplified, it's just ignorant and wrong. I would never tell my child such things.
Unless you were ignorant and wrong, and it's what you believed.