Atrocities & Erasure

King Leopold II ran the Congo as his personal property for twenty-three years. The territory existed to extract wild rubber. Villages were given quotas. Failure to meet the quota meant the Force Publique would burn the village and cut off the hands of survivors as proof to their officers that bullets had been used on humans, not animals.

By 1908, when international pressure finally forced Leopold to transfer the territory to the Belgian state, the population had fallen by an estimated half. The wealth Leopold extracted built the Arcades du Cinquantenaire in Brussels, the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, and the seaside resort of Ostend.

In the middle of the Second World War, Britain diverted food from Bengal to feed British troops and stockpile reserves in Europe. When officials in India warned Churchill that people were dying, his response, recorded by Leopold Amery, was to ask why Gandhi had not yet died.

The Bengal famine was not caused by crop failure. Rice harvests in 1943 were only slightly lower than normal. It was caused by deliberate policy: requisitioning, scorched-earth tactics against possible Japanese supply lines, and a refusal to release reserves. Two to four million people starved in a province under the direct administration of the British Crown.

While Persia was a declared neutral in the First World War, British and Russian armies occupied the country and turned it into a logistical theatre against the Ottomans. The historian Mohammad Gholi Majd, working from U.S. State Department archives, documents what followed: occupation forces requisitioned or purchased almost the entire harvest, blocked grain shipments at the southern ports, and in some districts burned food storages to deny them to rivals or to clear land for military use. Wheat that Iranian peasants had grown was loaded onto British transports for Mesopotamia and India.

The result was the largest demographic catastrophe of the First World War. Famine and the typhus and cholera epidemics that travelled with it killed, by Majd's accounting, somewhere between eight and ten million Iranians — close to forty percent of the population — in barely two years. The episode is virtually absent from British and Russian textbooks. It is absent from the standard Western chronologies of the Great War. Even in Iran, the cynical use of the famine by later regimes has not produced a public reckoning commensurate with its scale.

The Iranian case shows the colonial logic at its most undisguised: a neutral country, a foreign army, a confiscated harvest, a population left to die, and a century of silence afterwards. The phrase 'collateral damage' had not yet been invented; the practice was already mature.

When the Herero rose against German settler land seizures in 1904, General Lothar von Trotha issued an Extermination Order: 'every Herero, with or without rifles, with or without cattle, will be shot.' The Herero were driven into the waterless Omaheke desert. Wells were poisoned. Survivors were sent to concentration camps on Shark Island, where forced labor and starvation killed roughly half of them.

German anthropologists collected the skulls of victims for racial-science research. Some of those skulls were only returned to Namibia in the 2010s. Germany formally recognized this as a genocide in 2021, more than a century later.

France did not consider Algeria a colony. It considered it part of metropolitan France. When Algerians rose for independence in 1954, the French Republic responded with the Battle of Algiers, in which paratroopers under General Massu used systematic torture — la gégène (electric shock to the genitals), waterboarding, rape — to extract information from suspected FLN members.

The war killed several hundred thousand Algerians. Entire villages were 'regrouped' — forcibly relocated to camps. In Paris in October 1961, French police under Maurice Papon murdered between 100 and 300 Algerian demonstrators and threw their bodies into the Seine. The French state acknowledged this in 2012.

The British colonization of Tasmania is one of the few cases in modern history that historians describe, with little controversy, as genocide. Settlers, with state backing, conducted the 'Black War' — a campaign of hunts and massacres that, combined with introduced disease and forced displacement, reduced an Aboriginal population of perhaps 5,000–10,000 to a handful within a generation.

Truganini, often (and inaccurately) called the last full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal woman, died in 1876. Her skeleton was put on display in a museum until 1947.

The Seventh Cavalry surrounded a band of Lakota under Spotted Elk who had been ordered to disarm. When the shooting started — over a deaf elder named Black Coyote who did not understand he was being told to give up his rifle — soldiers used Hotchkiss guns to cut down men, women, children and infants. The bodies were left in the snow.

Twenty soldiers received the Medal of Honor for this. The medals have never been rescinded.

The Mayan codices — folding books containing centuries of astronomy, mathematics, history and prophecy — were systematically burned by Spanish missionaries in the sixteenth century. Bishop Diego de Landa burned dozens of them at Maní in 1562. Four codices survive. Four.

The library of the University of Sankoré in Timbuktu, the libraries of the Songhai Empire, the architectural records of the Benin Bronzes (16,000 of which were looted by the British Army in 1897 and still sit, mostly, in European museums), the Buddhist sculptures of Gandhara, the ceremonial objects of the Pacific Northwest — colonialism was not only a project of killing people. It was a project of erasing the proof that they had a civilization in the first place.