Red herrings, red rubber and a fucking Wallonian idiot

In between other things recently I re-read Heart of Darkness. I made myself read it more slowly than usual, really sinking my teeth into each sentence. As the F-word says, it's an epic book, an epic in less than a hundred pages. I'm not confident that I'd given it that sort of treatment sufficiently in the past. Of all the books where not a single word is wasted!

To me now of course it's a book about Belgium: I honestly believe that Conrad had in mind to write a book about how much Belgium sucks. But naturally after I've spent three years here that's how I read it, and I'm sure in another year or two I'll read it in a completely different way. And if I could travel back in time to me when I was 15, and read that book for the first time, and say, "Little Miss La Spliffe, this is a book about how Joseph Conrad thought Belgians blew, and you will understand that after you've spent three years with the fuckers," I think I would have given myself a very funny look indeed.

But the thing was, what Belgians did in the Congo was a hecatomb. As an achievement of debasement, the Congo Free State is right up there with the Holocaust - so many millions dead in such a short period of time. I'd even argue that in a sense it was a much greater acheivement of debasement than the Holocaust: first because it was all managed without gas chambers, railroads or massive race paranoia, and secondly because the world's collective response to its repurcussions has been an almighty shrug of the shoulders about how those Congolese can't manage to stop murdering each other, instead of the sort of enduring efforts at popular reparation that let the Israeli army shoot Americans in international waters with a minimum of popular fuss.

The way Antwerp has gone on being an international diamond trading centre for no good reason and the fact that small arms manufacture is the only productive industry left in Wallonia - those things just slip under the radar. It would be like if Germany managed to just slip under the radar as the world's leading producer of striped pyjamas and blue tattoo ink. It would be like they had lost the second world war, had to apologize, but were allowed - no - encouraged, ordered by the rest of the world to keep the Jews, Gypsies and gay people working at the labour camps for another half-century . . .

But yeah - one mustn't make that comparison, must one? Part of the reason I'm feeling Heart of Darkness is a work of classic literature about how Belgians suck is because Belgians are still sucking. Hard. A la Louis Michel, sadly not just some fucking crank on the street, but an ex-EU commissioner whose work focused on the Congo, and who remains significant in post-colonial affairs. I understand that the Nazis had a genocidal philosophy and that the Belgians didn't, as Michel insisted, but that is the red herring of all time. It's a common Belgian defence when the Congo comes up, and a feature of the African museum's only updated exhibit here - minimizing the slaughter by arguing successfully what no serious historians disputes - that the Congo Free State was not an effort at genocide.

However, the fact the Germans murdered millions of people with a plan and the Belgians did it because they didn't give any sort of fuck about whether black people lived or died whilst they were being brutally exploited doesn't incline me one way or the other in terms of who out-evils who. Really just encourages me once more to think of the Belgian history in the Congo as a truly supreme example of debasement: they committed or facilitated all those murders in a psychopathic, unthinking fashion, when you'd think that sort of damage would need to be carried out by calculating sociopaths.

All of which is a long way to say I hope this goes somewhere. There have been apologies; there was the almighty stink a century ago occasioned by Casement and Conrad and Mark Twain and a bunch of other people who worked out the horror of what was going on, maybe one of the first such stinks. But has there been any accountability? I saw Leopold II's sarcophagus the other week, he sleeps soundly with all the other dead kings in an empty white room, where a sarcophagus lies waiting for the present king, with no splash of colour except a security guard making sure visitors don't take a shit on anything. And the post-period - the entire Belgian Congo - the population here has no more idea on that one then what they get out of Tin-Fucking-Tin (though it's nice to know that eventually Herge felt bad about all the hunting scenes in that book).

I'd been wondering how I'm going to accept living in a country like Australia, where it's much easier to argue that genocide did take place with no repurcussions to the population that did the cleansing, and insufficient compensation to them as have been cleansed. Trust a nice spot of upper-class Wallonian idiotic surreality to persuade me it'll probably be an improvement on here. Thanks Louis Michel, you fucking twat.

Are you sure that's what you meant to say?

So you know I love Joseph Conrad. And these couple of sentences are a reason I love him, as well as a sort of symptom of what makes me love him:

"You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies, - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do."

I've read and nodded my head 10, 20 times at that before, but today it rings true in my head more clearly than it ever has. Not just as a quick, effective literary device to make Marlow into a living, breathing thing in Heart of Darkness - dear Marlow, I've got such a crush on him - but almost as a manifesto.

It's because of my job, of course. As a business journalist I'm lied to an a daily, hourly basis, and when I'm not being lied to I'm being obfuscated to, and not being a political animal to me it's the same damn thing. And what hurts the most is that these are grown men lying to me, lying in a bald-faced manner that they can't possibly expect me to believe, but they do expect me to believe.

Because I'm very vain, the most painful thing about that used to be that I couldn't bear so many hundreds of people thinking I was stupid. But I got over that, as it's nothing personal; I could be fucking Einstein and they'd still be trying to bullshit me. Now the most painful thing about it is that I feel these grown men (and I mean men -female contacts aren't more forthcoming, but when I ask a question whose answer they don't want to give me they usually stand on the fifth) are lying with the gracelessness of children, but that they're grown men, so it's tragic.

It's tragic because they're stuck in the worst of childhood (guile and bullying) while spinning their way to the worst of age and mortality (greying, balding, fattening, coarsening, suppurating, drooping, and losing their health and energy), utterly wasting the incredible luck (if you're an atheist), the incredible beneficence of our creator (if you're garden-variety religious), or the incredible opportunity for discovering the higher nature of existence (if you're Buddhist - I think, I'm just guessing about that religion based on all the Monkey! we've been watching) that is the fact that I'm alive, you're alive, that we're all alive and who we are. Utterly wasting all that like it means nothing, and they might as well already be dead.

And all that's standard - that's how industry, how business works. I can't bear it sometimes. Frankly, it stresses me. My job isn't horribly demanding in terms of the quantitative workload but sometimes it does get hard to bear all these damn, stinking lies. But at the same time, I love it. I love exposing a lie. I love being lied to and then slapping that lie with the truth. I love collecting two dozen lies and extracting the truth from them. It feels really good. It feels like an abusive but, shall we say, very satisfying relationship, and I don't write that lightly.

Still, I need to find a way to deal with all of this without getting stressed. If I move from business journalism into political journalism or standard garden variety journalism it's not as though I can expect the lies to get any less frequent, blatant, or brutal. I need to find a way to not be so stressed by them.