In the 19th century Spiritualism arose in 1848 and the following years, almost exclusively in places where slavery had been abolished. Almost all of the reported spiritual manifestations in the United States between 1848 and 1861 (the start of the American Civil War) were in the US states where slavery had been abolished, such as New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Spiritualism spread from the US to England after slavery had been abolished in the British Empire (which happened in 1834). It should therefore come as no surprise that when examining the early Spiritualist literature, we find some strong denunciations of slavery.
For example, on pages 236 to 239 of his 1851 book on spiritualism, Joel Tiffany gives a ringing denunciation of slavery. Referring to three million slaves in the US, he states this:
"Here are among us, three millions of men, women and children made chattle by the laws and public sentiment of this christian nation. Three millions of immortal beings, whose business here it is, to individualize and develop immortal spirits ; whose birth-right it is, to investigate, study, improve, and develop those minds preparatory to the eternal future, upon which they are about to enter ; shut out by the laws of the land, from the rights and immunities of manhood ; denied the privilege of learning to read the volumes of nature or revelation ; shut out from the reach of human sympathy; proscribed and hunted like boasts through the land ; denied the rights of being husbands to their wives, or wives to their husbands ; parents to their children, or children to their parents... Three millions of human beings doomed to perpetual servitude and bondage, and made the victims of avarice and lust. And it is made a penal offence to give them food, raiment or shelter, even when they are ready to perish. By the laws of these christian states, the husband can be torn from the wife and be doomed to perpetual bondage, and she to ceaseless concubinage ; the baby may be plundered from the cradle, or torn from the breast of its mother, and sold in the public shambles. The family circle may be invaded, and all the ties of natural affection broken, crouched and trampled upon; and all that avarice can exact, caprice and villany can inflict, or lust can crave, these three millions are subject to, and there is no arm to protect them ; there is no city of refuge within this christian nation to which they can flee, and no christian altar to whose horns they can cling, und demand protection....It cannot be denied that the Christianity of the United States holds the institution of slavery in its power, and can put an end to it at pleasure, if it were disposed to do so. And the only reason why that most accursed of all institutions, still continues among us, is because the religion of the country wills it."
To give another example, in an 1855 book a leading figure of American spiritualism (Adin Ballou) states this:
"Slavery, and all kinds of tyranny and oppression are utterly sinful. So all war, violence, revenge, and vindictive punishment."
I was shocked recently to see a diagram depicting the worst murderers in history. On the right of the diagram (listed as history's worst murderers) were Hitler, Stalin and Mao, which did not surprise me. But I was quite surprised to see the man listed as the fourth worst murderer in history: King Leopold II of Belgium. I knew nothing about such a person. Researching the topic, I learned about one of history's most horrible tales of human oppression.
In the late nineteenth century, European nations were rushing to exploit the riches of Africa. The worst offender, it seems, was Belgium. King Leopold II set up a nation he called the Congo Free State, which he regarded as his own personal property, to be ruthlessly exploited for raw materials such as rubber. Because of his ruthless exploitation of this state, a huge number of Africans died, a number estimated between 1 million and 15 million. It is impossible to accurately estimate the number, because no one was keeping track of all those who died from the oppression.
The ruthless subjugation and exploitation of the Congo is documented in the 1909 work The Crime of the Congo by the noted author Arthur Conan Doyle. While almost all of America and Europe stood mute during decades of the most horrible abuses in the Congo, Doyle stuck his neck out and wrote a full book denouncing the oppression. In his first paragraph Doyle writes this:
"There are many of us in England who consider the crime which has been wrought in the Congo lands by King Leopold of Belgium and his followers to be the greatest which has ever been known in human annals. Personally I am strongly of that opinion. There have been great expropriations like that of the Normans in England or of the English in Ireland. There have been massacres of populations like that of the South Americans by the Spaniards or of subject nations by the Turks. But never before has there been such a mixture of wholesale expropriation and wholesale massacre all done under an odious guise of philanthropy and with the lowest commercial motives as a reason. It is this sordid cause and the unctious hypocrisy which makes this crime unparalleled in its horror."
After noting that the United States was the first nation to recognize this Congo Free State set up King Leopold II of Belgium, Doyle describes on pages 11-12 how ruthless exploitation began:
"Having obtained possession of the land and its products, the next step was to obtain labour by which these products could be safely garnered. The first definite move in this direction was taken in the year 1888, when, with that odious hypocrisy which has been the last touch in so many of these transactions, an Act was produced which was described in the Bulletin Officiel as being for the 'Special protection of the black.' ....This Act had a very different end. It allowed blacks to be bound over in terms of seven years' service to their masters in a manner which was in truth indistinguishable from slavery. As the negotiations were usually carried on with the capita, or headman, the unfortunate servant was transferred with small profit to himself, and little knowledge of the conditions of his servitude...In that case the negotiations run their course easily enough; each chief promises to supply a certain number of slaves, and receives presents in return. It may happen, however, that one or another pays no heed to the friendly invitation, in which case war is declared, his villages are burned down, perhaps some of his people are shot, and his stores or gardens are plundered. In this way the wild king is soon tamed, and he sues for peace, which, of course, is granted on condition of his supplying double the number of slaves."
On page 22 Doyle describes some of the economic enslavement involved:
"Having claimed, as I have shown, the whole of the land, and therefore the whole of its products, the State — that is, the King — proceeded to construct a system by which these products could be gathered most rapidly and at least cost. The essence of this system was that the people who had been dispossessed (ironically called 'citizens') were to be forced to gather, for the profit of the State, those very products which had been taken from them. This was to be effected by two means; the one, taxation, by which an arbitrary amount, ever growing larger until it consumed almost their whole lives in the gathering, should be claimed for nothing. The other, so-called barter by which the natives were paid for the stuff exactly what the State chose to give, and in the form the State chose to give it, there being no competition allowed from any other purchaser. This remuneration, ridiculous in value, took the most absurd shape, the natives being compelled to take it, whatever the amount, and however little they might desire it. Consul Thesiger, in 1908, describing their so-called barter, says: 'The goods he proceeds to distribute, giving a hat to one man, or an iron hoe-head to another, and so on. Each recipient is then at the end of a month responsible for so many balls of rubber. No choice of the objects is given, no refusal is allowed.' "
Later we read of more details of the exploitation:
"By this system some two thousand white agents were scattered over the Free State to collect the produce...Each agent was given control over a certain number of savages, drawn from the wild tribes, but armed with firearms. One or more of these was placed in each village to ensure that the villagers should do their task. These are the men who are called 'capitas,' or head-men in the accounts, and who are the actual, though not the moral, perpetrators of so many horrible deeds. Imagine the nightmare which lay upon each village while this barbarian squatted in the midst of it. Day or night they could never get away from him. He called for palm wine. He called for women. He beat them, mutilated them, and shot them down at his pleasure. He enforced public incest in order to amuse himself by the sight....Then came the punitive expedition, and the destruction of the whole community. The more terror the capita inspired, the more useful he was, the more eagerly the villagers obeyed him, and the more rubber yielded its commission to the agent. When the amount fell off, then the capita was himself made to feel some of those physical pains which he had inflicted upon others. Often the white agent far exceeded in cruelty the barbarian who carried out his commissions. Often, too, the white man pushed the black aside, and acted himself as torturer and executioner. As a rule, however, the relationship was as I have stated, the outrages being actually committed by the capitas, but with the approval of, and often in the presence of, their white employers."
On page 33 we read one of very many similar accounts in the book:
"It was not merely for rubber that these horrors were done. Much of the country is unsuited to rubber, and in those parts there were other imposts which were collected with equal brutality. One village had to send food and was remiss one day in supplying it: 'The people were quietly sleeping in their beds when they heard a shot fired, and ran out to see what was the matter. Finding the soldiers had surrounded the town, their only thought was escape. As they raced out of their homes, men, women and children, they were ruthlessly shot down. Their town was utterly destroyed, and is a ruin to this day. The only reason for this fight was that the people had failed to bring Kwanga (food) to the State upon that one day.' "
The same page quotes a Mr. Murphy:
"The rubber question is accountable for most of the horrors perpetrated in the Congo. It has reduced the people to a state of utter despair. Each town in the district is forced to bring a certain quantity to the headquarters of the Commissary every Sunday. It is collected by force; the soldiers drive the people into the bush; if they will not go they are shot down, their left hands being cut off and taken as trophies to the Commissary. The soldiers do not care whom they shoot down, and they most often shoot poor, helpless women and harmless children."
On another page Doyle quotes a witness of the atrocities inflicted on those resisting slave-like work as rubber gatherers:
"They refuse to bring the rubber. Then war is declared. The soldiers are sent in different directions. The people in the towns are attacked, and when they are running away into the forest, and try to hide themselves, and save their lives, they are found out by the soldiers. Then their gardens of rice are destroyed, and their supplies taken. Their plantains are cut down while they are young and not in fruit, and often their huts are burned, and, of course, everything of value is taken. Within my own knowledge forty-five villages were altogether burned down."
There was no moral difference here between the slavery of the American south (in which blacks were forced to work all day gathering cotton under penalty of death) and the slavery-in-all-but-name of the so-called Congo Free State in which blacks were forced to work all day gathering rubber under penalty of death. The abuses listed in Doyle's book were as bad as any occurring in the American south. On page 52 we read the report of one witness:
"I heard from the white men and some of the soldiers some most gruesome stories. The former white man (I feel ashamed of my colour every time I think of him) would stand at the door of the store to receive the rubber from the poor trembling wretches, who after, in some cases, weeks of privation in the forest, had ventured in with what they had been able to collect. A man bringing rather under the proper amount, the white man flies into a rage, and seizing a rifle from one of the guards, shoots him dead on the spot. Very rarely did rubber come in but one or more were shot in that way at the door of the store — 'to make the survivors bring more next time.'... The white man himself told me that you could walk on for five days in one direction, and not see a single village or a single human being. And this where formerly there was a big tribe! "
On and on the book goes documenting the atrocities, with Doyle stating on page 86 that "The greatest, deepest, most wide-reaching crime of which there is any record, has been reserved for these latter years." But where were our biologists at the time this holocaust was occurring? Some of them (including leading names of Darwinism) were busy creating the type of intellectual environment in which such atrocities would be tolerated.
There were, for example, the people who caused the kidnapped Congo native Ota Benga to be displayed around 1906 caged with monkeys in the Bronx Zoo, displayed as a claimed example of a "missing link" between apes and men. The wikipedia.org article on Benga incorrectly states that the exhibit was presented "as a lampoon on Darwinism." In fact, the exhibit was designed to promote Darwinism by trying to display evidence that some missing link had been found between apes and men. A Guardian article tells us that "New York’s newspapers, scientists, public officials, and ordinary citizens revelled in the spectacle," which seemed to attract more than 100,000 visitors. A BBC.com article discusses some of the subsequent attempts to cover up this embarrassing episode. The Guardian article tells us that the caged display of Ota Benga was supported by two major Darwinists:
"Unrepentant, [William T.] Hornaday declared that the show would go on just as the sign said, 'each afternoon during September' or until he was ordered to stop it by the Zoological Society. But Hornaday was not some rogue operator. As the nation’s foremost zoologist – and a close acquaintance of President Theodore Roosevelt – Hornaday had the full backing of two of the most influential members of the Zoological Society, both prominent figures in the city’s establishment. The first, Henry Fairfield Osborn, had played a lead role in the founding of the zoo and was one of the era’s most noted paleontologists. (He would later achieve fame for naming Tyrannosaurus rex.)"
Henry Fairfield Osborn was a fervent Darwin devotee (as you can tell from reading these two pages) and eugenics advocate who co-founded the American Eugenics Society in 1922. The Wikipedia.org article on him states this:
"Osborn therefore supported eugenics to preserve 'good' racial stock. Due to this, he endorsed Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, writing both the second and fourth prefaces of the book, which argued for such views. The book was also largely influential on Adolf Hitler. Hitler called the book 'his bible' for it advocated a rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who, according to the writer's opinion are to be seen as 'weak' or 'unfit.' "
A scholar puts it this way:
"The teaching of Darwin in a sense sanctified the exploitation of the less fit by the better fit -- that is, exploitation of those less able to adapt to the circumstances and opportunities of the times. The industrial revolution that was shaping itself in the Victorian age saw the enterprising, but also the unscrupulous, take advantage of the underprivileged, the resourceless, the ignorant, the unprotected -- in a word, the unfit. The exploitation manifested itself in work hours from before dawn until the night, in child labor paid pittances, in unhygienic factories and perilous mines."
The scholar was referring to the exploitation of workers in England during the Victorian age, but the words apply all the more forcefully to the situation in the so-called Congo Free State established in 1885, soon after Darwinism started to gain traction. There seemed to be scarcely a word of protest from Darwinists against the genocide occurring in that state between 1885 and 1909, while Leopold II of Belgium was its effective dictator.
In a book William T. Hornaday (referred to above) taught both the untrue racist idea that there was a "vast" difference between the intellect of human races, and also the very absurd claim that "the gap between the gibbons and the monkeys is much greater than that between the gorilla and man." It was the old deceptive Darwinist strategy of trying to make the oceanic gulf between apes and humans look like a small crack.
The information overlords controlling today's mainstream information try to depict Arthur Conan Doyle as a fool, because he was a proponent of spiritualism. They love to cite how Doyle was fooled by two clever sisters who cut out some magazine artwork and made some fake photos that Doyle was fooled by. But we never hear in discussions of Doyle how he was the one writing a book denouncing one of history's worst holocausts, while the mainstream authorities of the US and England turned a blind eye to such atrocities that persisted for decades, with some of them helping to create an intellectual environment in which such atrocities would be more likely to be tolerated under Darwinist grounds of "survival of the fittest."
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