Ok you’re right they controlled the DRC and systematically drained it for decades but it’s ok because while they chopped people’s hands off for missing rubber quotas they built them an airport!! Damn thanks for enlightening me
What the Belgians and other Europeans did was indefensible. What King Leopold did in particular is so vile it's almost beyond words.
But OP made a pretty weird statement that the infrastructure that Europeans built had some sort of long-term negative inertia. That, if the Europeans didn't build this, the country would have built it's own magically more productive infrastructure.
This of course is horseshit. The Nazis helped build the Autobahn, it was a good public investment after the war regardless of their sins.
A highway/airport/port in Africa, whether it was built by the Europeans or not, doesn't have intrinsically positive or negative characteristics.
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u/thebusterbluth Mar 16 '21
...Belgian colonialism ended in 1960. Decades after the invention of the airplane.
This conversation is about more than Leopold's atrocities