Germany pre-WW2, and us

[BowlLikeAChicken]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/19/nambia-germanys-african-holocaust/

I've known about this for a while, . . . . but, just DAMN!!

[HeiressofBickworth]

1. DAMN! I consider myself fairly well-read

and I particularly like reading about WWII which ended just months before I was born. I have read about Nazis in South America, but I had never before heard about them in Namibia. I guess the world has a long way to go before erasing the smug superiority that racism brings. Thanks for posting this -- it's very interesting and informative.

[JustAnotherGen]

2. Saw this in GD yesterday

The first concentration camps on earth were built in this part of Africa… They were built by the British Empire in South Africa and by Germans here, in Namibia. Shark Island on the coast was the first concentration camp in Namibia, used to murder the Nama people, but now it is just a tourist destination – you would never guess that there were people exterminated there. Here in the center of Windhoek, there was another extermination camp; right on the spot where “The Horse” originally stood.”

“The Horse” was recently removed from its original location, and placed in the courtyard of the old wing of The National Museum, together with some of the most outrageous commemorative plaques, glorifying German actions in this part of the world. Nothing was destroyed, instead just taken away from prime locations.

Where “The Horse” stood, there now stands a proud anti-colonialist statue, that of a man and a woman with broken shackles, which declares, “Their Blood Waters Our Freedom”.


A visit to those German genocidal relics is ‘an absolute must’ for countless Central European tourists that descend every day on Namibia. I followed several of these groups, listening to their conversations. Among these people, there appears to be no remorse, and almost no soul-searching: just snapshots, posing in front of the monuments and racist insignias, pub-style/beer jokes at places where entire cultures and nations were exterminated!

Central European, German-speaking tourists in Windhoek, appear to be lobotomized, and totally emotionless. And so are many of the descendants of those German ‘genocidal pioneers’. Encountering them is like déjà vu; it brings back memories of the years when I was fighting against the German Nazi colony, ‘Colonia Dignidad’ in Chile; or when I was investigating the atrocities and links, of the German Nazi community in Paraguay to several South American fascist regimes that had been implanted and maintained by the West.

So what's the solution? And are we as Americans any better? I'm not sure we are. I look at three blatant murders of young black men in the past two and a half years and I think - Welcome to America.

[kwassa]

3. Read "King Leopold's Ghost" to encounter even more horror.

What the Belgians did in the Congo. This is an incredible book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Leopold's_Ghost

The book aims to increase public awareness of crimes committed by European colonial rulers in Africa. It was refused by nine of the ten U.S. publishing houses to which an outline was submitted, but became an unexpected bestseller and won the prestigious Mark Lynton History Prize for literary style. It also won the 1999 Duff Cooper Prize. By 2013, more than 600,000 copies were in print in a dozen languages.

The book is the basis of a 2006 documentary film of the same name, directed by Pippa Scott and narrated by Don Cheadle.[2]
........................................................

The book places King Leopold among the great tyrants of history. The death toll in the Congo under his regime is hard to pin down, both because accurate records were not kept and because many of the existing records were deliberately destroyed by Leopold shortly before the government of Belgium took the Congo out of his hands. Although Wm. Roger Louis and Jean Stengers[3] characterize the earliest population and mortality estimates as "wild guesses", Hochschild cites many subsequent lines of inquiry that conclude that the early official estimates were essentially correct: roughly half the population of the Congo perished during the Free State period. Since the census taken by the Belgian government (after acquiring the Congo from Leopold) found some 10 million inhabitants, Hochschild concludes that roughly 10 million perished, though the precise number can never be known.

Hochschild profiles several people who helped make the world aware of the reality of the Congo Free State, including:

George Washington Williams, an African American politician and historian, the first to report the atrocities in the Congo to the outside world.

William Henry Sheppard, another African American, a Presbyterian missionary who furnished direct testimony of the atrocities.

E. D. Morel, a British journalist and shipping agent checking the commercial documents of the Congo Free State, who realized that the vast quantities of rubber and ivory coming out of the Congo were matched only by rifles and chains going in. From this he inferred that the Congo was a slave state, and he devoted the rest of his life to correcting that.

Sir Roger Casement, a British diplomat and Irish patriot, put the force of the British government behind the international protest against Leopold. Casement's involvement had the ironic effect of drawing attention away from British colonialism, Hochschild suggests. The Congo Reform Association was formed by Morel at Casement's instigation.