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To: Revolting cat!
Credible source?

Be specific. What is incorrect in his story? Were all the contemporary reports of atrocities coming out of the Belgian Congo from missionaries and others the work of dedicated Communist, self-hating, West hating rich Jews, too? Were all those photographs of people holding up their amputated stumps just some primitive Photoshop work?

Is Congo better off today? Is he interested in comparisons? Would he ever compare Congo to the gulags?

You haven't read the book, have you? He brings the story up to the present, talking about the corruption of the country under Mobutu, which basically continued the kleptocracy of the colonial system, with merely a differently colored guy with a penchant for naming everything after himself at the top. He also very specifically compares the colonial forced labor system to the gulag system in a couple of places.

From page 162:

Hostage-taking set the Congo apart from most other forced-labor regimes. But in other ways it resembled them. As would be true decades later of the Soviet gulag, another slave labor system for harvesting raw materials, the Congo operated by quotas.

From page 233:

Why then, did the killings go on for so long? The same irrationality lies at the heart of many other mass murders. In the Soviet Union, for example, shooting or jailing political opponents at first helped the Communist Party and then Josef Stalin gain absolute power. But after there were no visible opponents left, seven million more people were executed, and many millions more died in the far-flung camps of the gulag.... In the Congo, as in Russia, mass murder had a momentum of its own.
There are a couple of others, as well.
54 posted on 09/03/2009 10:58:31 AM PDT by Bubba Ho-Tep ("More weight!"--Giles Corey)
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To: Bubba Ho-Tep
We might as well re-read Jessica Mitford and William Mandel, too, both of them Communist propagandists. No, I won't read a book by another one of them. Mary McCarthy said this about Jessica Mitford: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'" This quote applies to every Communist propagandist, regardless of some factoids about lost limbs they bring up (cue the violins), which happen to be true. Let's concern ourselves with the savagery in today's Zimbabwe (for instance), or Congo, about which Mr Hochschild will not write, you can bet your bottom dollar, or if he will, he'll blame the white race. It's as easy to write about King Leopold as it is about Hitler, a little harder about Patrice Lumumba.
55 posted on 09/03/2009 11:07:19 AM PDT by Revolting cat! (Let us prey!)
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