The greatest mass murderer hardly anyone knows about.

King Leopold II of Belgium - Tyrant of Congo

One of history's greatest mass-murderers is a man that most Westerners have never heard about, who had over ten million* people tortured, mutilated, and worked to death on the world's largest ever privately-owned plot of land.

This is how private property is established where it had not existed before. This is how capitalism gets started in a new land. This is how “capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

*The real number is not really known, as Leopold's didn't care enough to keep track of how many they killed. 10 million is a conservative estimate.

When we learn about Africa, we learn about a caricatured Egypt, about the HIV epidemic (but never its causes), about the surface level effects of the slave trade, and maybe about South African Apartheid (the effects of which, we are taught, are now long, long over). We also see lots of pictures of starving children on Christian Ministry commercials, we see safaris on animal shows, and we see pictures of deserts in films and movies. But we don’t learn about the Great African War or Leopold’s Reign of Terror during the Congolese Genocide. Nor do we learn about what the United States has done in Iraq and Afghanistan, killing millions of people through bombs, sanctions, disease, and starvation. Body counts are important. And the United States Government doesn’t count Afghan, Iraqi, or Congolese people.

It is important that we don't ignore or censor history to suit our narrative. Mass genocide on this scale cannot be relegated to myth.