Looking at the BBC documentary we can see how often in human
history economic greed and colonial exploitation have been
justified by racist theories. The documentary describes almost
unbelievable cruelties committed against the peoples of the
Americas and Africa by Europeans. For example, in the Congo, a
vast region which which King Leopold II of Belgium claimed as
his private property, the women of villages were held as
hostages while the men were forced to gather rubber in the
forests. Since neither the men nor the women could produce food
under these circumstances, starvation was the result.
Leopold's private army of 90,000 men were issued ammunition, and
to make sure that the used it in the proper way, the army was
ordered to cut off the hands of their victims and send them back
as proof that the bullets had not been wasted. Human hands
became a kind of currency, and hands were cut off from men,
women and children when rubber quotas were not fulfilled.
Sometimes more than a thousand human hands were gathered in a
single day. During the rule of Leopold, roughly 10,000,000
Congolese were killed, which was approximately half the
population of the region.
According to the racist theories that supported these
atrocities, it was the duty of philanthropic Europeans like
Leopold to bring civilization and the Christian religion to
Africa. Similar theories were used to justify the genocides
committed by Europeans against the native inhabitants of the
Americas. Racist theories were also used to justify enormous
cruelties committed by the British colonial government in India.
For example, during the great famine of 1876-1878, during which
ten million people died, the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the
export to England of a record 6.4 million hundredweight of
wheat.
