I recently read another brilliant myth-busting article by the indefatigable Dr Bruce Gilley – a man clearly on a mission to shatter the self-loathing nonsense which most people choose to believe about the Colonial period in these painfully woke times. His latest target is the best-selling ‘King Leopold’s Ghost’, a book which was gleefully and unthinkingly adopted as the unofficial Bible for those desperate to condemn ‘rapacious colonialism’. As Dr Gilley shows, however, the author – Adam Hochschild – was far more interested in writing a sensational, anti-Western, anti-Colonial tome, than producing an accurate and balanced piece of work.
Just like the rogue’s gallery of pseudo-historians who frantically perpetuated the Apartheid-era version of the Boer War – Pakenham, Pretorius, Scholtz et al – the method Hochschild used to promote his fiction is to carefully doctor quotes, ignore context, and shamelessly leave out absolutely everything that refutes his preferred version of events. Luckily, for those of us with an interest in historical reality, Dr Gilley has skewered these blatantly dishonest and disingenuous methods, just as I have pointed out similar tricks pulled by various anti-British types, who were desperate to paint the Boers as the poor, innocent victims of the war they started.
For those who are genuinely interested in seeing through the propaganda and rubbish we have been force-fed by so-called ‘academics’ over the last few decades, Dr Gilley’s article really is well worth reading, so I share the link below:
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Wow, I’ve just had complete change of view as to the Congo. That was indeed worth the read.
Yes – me too. I have always bought the line that Leopold was an evil mass-murderer, and the Belgians were terrible colonists. Dr Gilley’s article exposes just how easy it is for these so-called historians to manipulate evidence and push their agenda. Now one can understand how the likes of Pakenham managed to put such a fact-free / outrageously biased version of the Boer War into the public consciousness.
I do so hate when people link to articles that are inaccessible behind a paywall !
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