The Thomas Carlyle Club for Young Reactionaries aspires to nothing less than maximum controversiality, and I for one believe we’re succeeding admirably. Huzzah! Jolly good. We’ve done slavery (Issue 3), we’ve done lynching (Issue 11) — well, we haven’t done them, but you know what I mean. Anyway, it seems only natural that we should stay the course and bring our gun turrets to bear on colonialism, completing a sort of reactionary racialist trifecta.

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Ah, the Congo Free State. No one knows anything, but everyone has an opinion. Thus necessitating this appendix.

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The lies and stupidity are endless, reader, and I have neither the time nor the patience to go through them one by one and refute them; instead, I simply present a selection from The Latest Phase of the Congo Question (1906). After that, you’ll be in a suitably skeptical mindset to do your own research and make up your own mind.

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You may be wondering how modern-day critics of the Congo Free State have responded to primary sources such as these. The answer, of course, is that they have simply ignored them, and screamed a lot about racism. This is a classic Progressive debating strategy with an extraordinarily high success rate.

Anyway, the commission ultimately reaches this conclusion (my emphasis):

From the mass of statements, testimony and information gathered by the Commission it appears that the mutilation of dead bodies is an ancient custom which does not have in the eyes of the native the horrible character which it does in ours. The cutting off of certain parts of a dead body fulfils the natives desire to procure a trophy or simply a piece of evidence. The mutilation of fallen enemies frequently occurred in the wars between natives in certain regions. [—]

One point is beyond doubt: a white man has never inflicted such mutilations, nor caused such mutilations to be inflicted, upon living natives as a punishment for failure to bring in taxes nor for any other cause. Deeds of such a kind have never been stated to us by a single witness, and in spite of all our investigations, we have never been able to discover such a case.

But do read the whole thing (and whatever other primary sources you like) and decide for yourself — for this has gone on long enough, I think! Adieu!