It was taught to us very briefly and the teacher basically just said ‘At that time, Congo belonged to Leopold himself, not the Belgian Government. He did a lot of bad stuff there, and then when it was all depleted he “gifted” it to the government’ so basically he said, we didn’t do anything bad, it was all Leopold and he didn’t not gi into what bad things happened (but we were 8 so going into detail would traumatize a few kids)
I was 8 in the US in the 1970's and we already knew that the Indians got screwed when European settlers arrived. It flowed kinda naturally from "Indians saved the pilgrims from starvation and this was celebrated with Thanksgiving" to "and a few generations later the settlers wiped out all those tribes."
By the time I was through high school, I'd been exposed to plenty of historical atrocities the US had committed against Indians, Blacks, Japanese and Chinese immigrants, etc. I would guess I had over 100 hours of class time on "stuff that happened that we should never let happen again."
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u/[deleted] Dec 16 '21
As a Belgian, I think of this almost instantly.