Quotes from Adam Hochschild

International intervention in the country is like asking security guards to patrol a bank in mid-robbery. The guards may end up robbing or running the bank, whether

more than 35 percent of all German men who were between the ages of 19 and 22 when the fighting broke out, for example, were killed in the next four and a half years, and many of the remainder grievously wounded. For France, the toll was proportionately even higher: one half of all Frenchmen aged 20 to 32 at the war's outbreak were dead when it was over.

he wrote a trenchant warning of the "far-reaching consequences over the wider destiny, not only of South Africa, but of all Negro Africa" that would flow from the fact that Britain had set up the new, independent Union of South Africa with an all-white legislature.

remembering how the United States and Europe have protected their investments by supporting rapacious African dictators like Mobutu, we must speak of neocolonialism as well. But

British stonemasons in Belgium were still at work carving the names of their nation's missing onto memorials when the Germans invaded for the next war, more than 20 years later.

Underlying much of Europe's excitement was the hope that Africa would be a source of raw materials to feed the Industrial Revolution, just as the search for raw materials—slaves—for the colonial plantation economy had driven most of Europe's earlier dealings with Africa. Expectations quickened dramatically after prospectors discovered diamonds in South Africa in 1867 and gold some two decades later.

By the conflict's end, more than 20,000 British men of military age had refused the draft.

Prof. Gilley declares that my "central lie," my "first and biggest deceit," is to equate the État independant du Congo, the regime King Leopold II of Belgium controlled for 23 years, with colonialism.

others helped Austria-Hungary carry out a ruthless occupation of Serbia. When the war ended, that tiny country would have proportionately the highest death toll, military and civilian, of any combatant, nearly one out of five of its people.

This would mean, according to the estimates, that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people.

when the barrage reached its crescendo, 224,221 shells in the last 65 minutes, the rumble could be heard as far away as Hampstead Heath in London. More shells were fired by the British this week than they had used in the first 12 months of the war; some gunners bled from the ears after five days of nonstop firing.

Looming over this entire story is one of the most enigmatic of American presidents. A visionary internationalist, he staked his political fortune on his hopes for the League of Nations, where countries would settle their disputes by negotiation instead of warfare. Yet he presided over the greatest assault on American civil liberties in the last century and a half. And, despite his skill as an orator and writer, he showed few regrets over that contradiction

We run the risk of someday seeing our native population collapse and disappear," fretfully declared the permanent committee of the National Colonial Congress of Belgium that year. "So that we will find ourselves confronted with a kind of desert.

Of the 120,000 British troops who went into battle on July 1, 1916, more than 57,000 were dead or wounded before the day was over—nearly two casualties for every yard of the front. Nineteen thousand were killed, most of them within the attack's first disastrous hour, and some 2,000 more who were badly wounded would die in hospitals later.

British territory did cover nearly a quarter of the earth.

As with many episodes from this war, it is hard for us to see the attack on September 26, 1915, as anything other than a blatant, needless massacre initiated by generals with a near-criminal disregard for the conditions their men faced.

What made it so easy for Haig to demand high casualties was that he chose not to see them. He "felt that it was his duty to refrain from visiting the casualty clearing stations," wrote his son, "because these visits made him physically ill.

So many engineers were seized that factories came to a halt; so many railway men died that some trains did not run; so many colonels and generals were shot that the almost leaderless Red Army was nearly crushed by the German invasion of 1941.

In addition to deliberately shooting more than 5,000 Belgian civilians and setting fire to thousands of buildings, they had poured gasoline into the famous university library at Louvain and burned it to the ground, along with its priceless collection of 230,000 books and 750 medieval manuscripts.

Power is tempting, and in a sense no power is greater than the ability to take someone's life. Once under way, mass killing is hard to stop; it becomes a kind of sport, like hunting. Congo

the idea of independence and self-government in Africa was voiced by almost no one, except for a few beleaguered rebels deep in the Congo rain forest. In

The tank suffered, too, from the era's strange mismatch between firepower and communications: it carried no radio, only homing pigeons, which could be pushed out a small opening in hopes they would fly back to headquarters.

He had all the bushes and trees cut down around his house at Bokatola so that from his porch he could use passersby for target practice. If

The years after the war saw the growth of copper, gold, and tin mining. As always, the profits flowed out of the territory. It