81 Quotes by Adam Hochschild

The city of Detroit slaughtered the animals in its zoo to provide meat for the hungry.

Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island. Aldrich, a multimillionaire, a card-playing partner of J. Pierpont Morgan, the father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was the ultimate Washington power broker. “I’m just a president,” Roosevelt once told the journalist Lincoln Steffens, “and he has seen lots of presidents.

Forgetting one’s participation in mass murder is not something passive; it is an active deed. In.

So eager were its officials that the German government had telegraphed its ambassador in St. Petersburg two declarations of war to be delivered to Russia’s foreign minister: one if Russia did not reply to its ultimatum, the other rejecting the Russian reply as unsatisfactory. In his haste and confusion, the ambassador handed over both messages.

At first, Africans apparently saw the white sailors not as men but as vumbi – ancestral ghosts – since the Kongo people believed that a person’s skin changed to the color of chalk when he passed into the land of the dead.

During and after the war, though, no one in the Allied countries wanted to be reminded that, only a decade or two earlier, it was the King of the Belgians whose men in Africa had cut off hands. And.

Its monarch, the ManiKongo, was chosen by an assembly of clan leaders. Like his European counterparts, he.

During and after the war, though, no one in the Allied countries wanted to be reminded that, only a decade or two earlier, it was the King of the Belgians whose men in Africa had cut off hands. And so the full history of Leopold’s rule in the Congo and of the movement that opposed it dropped out of Europe’s memory, perhaps even more swiftly and completely than did the other mass killings that took place in the colonization of Africa.

For what was slavery in the American South, after all, but a system for transforming the labor of black bodies, via cotton plantations, into cloth?