"What do you mean, you can't repeat the past? Of course you can. "

Reading King Leopold's Ghost, I was struck by how little the great European powers seemed to have progressed between Columbus's initial expeditions to the New World. starting in 1492, and Stanley's trips for Belgium in the 1880's. They still viewed unfamiliar societies as "primitive" and "savage," much like they had during the colonization craze in North and South America. As Hochschild points out:

The very word treaty is a euphemism, for many chiefs had no idea what they were signing. Few had seen the written word before, and they were being asked to mark their X's to documents in a foreign language and in legalese.

Sounds familiar. In the Americas, European explorers and colonizers neglected the dazzling variety of cultures, customs, and beliefs of indigenous peoples in favor of lumping them all together into one big bowl of heathen stew. And what else do you do with a bowl of stew, but trick it out of its land and try to kill it? On a side note, the original caption for this photograph reads, "A typical Native American." Somehow I doubt that serenading woodland creatures with flute music was or is on the list of daily activities for most of them.

It's just sad to see that it took humans so long to even start recognizing that we are more similar than we are different. And sadder still to see how far from our ideals we still are today. Unfortunately, the story of what happened in the Congo seems to be a sad one, told many times. Rather than battling (both figuratively and literally) over religion, ideology, and culture, humans should probably spend some time focusing on being better than we have been, and better than we are.

Yep, that's more like it.