History of Racism III of III
- 10 years ago
EPISODE 3
Now we bring the story of race and racism right up-to-date. Some of the 20th Century’s early genocides, particularly those in Armenia and the Belgian Congo, represented a new, mechanized phase of state-sponsored racial slaughter.
During the genocide in the Congo, 10 million African people – almost half the entire population – were butchered by King Leopold’s men. For the first time, details of the massacres were made known to people in Europe. These accounts were so lurid and horrifying, that some Europeans, perhaps for the first time, started to wonder who were the ‘civilised’ - and who were the ‘savages’.
Shortly after the demented carnival of self-destruction that was the First World War, there was a widespread and palpable awareness of the dangers that might arise from racist ideologies. The League of Nations had been created as a forum where peaceful solutions to conflicts between nations – and races - might be found.
At the Paris Peace Conference, the Japanese delegation had tried to persuade all nations to sign up to a Race Equality Proposal, which would have established for states and individuals a right in international law guaranteeing “just treatment in every respect making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.” But for leaders of the former colonies, there was too much at stake to concede the principle of racial equality:
The Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes thwarted the proposal, knowing that it would have jeopardised his “White Australia Policy”. The Americans, whose southern states still operated the racial separatist policy known as Jim Crow, were similarly unimpressed.
Now we bring the story of race and racism right up-to-date. Some of the 20th Century’s early genocides, particularly those in Armenia and the Belgian Congo, represented a new, mechanized phase of state-sponsored racial slaughter.
During the genocide in the Congo, 10 million African people – almost half the entire population – were butchered by King Leopold’s men. For the first time, details of the massacres were made known to people in Europe. These accounts were so lurid and horrifying, that some Europeans, perhaps for the first time, started to wonder who were the ‘civilised’ - and who were the ‘savages’.
Shortly after the demented carnival of self-destruction that was the First World War, there was a widespread and palpable awareness of the dangers that might arise from racist ideologies. The League of Nations had been created as a forum where peaceful solutions to conflicts between nations – and races - might be found.
At the Paris Peace Conference, the Japanese delegation had tried to persuade all nations to sign up to a Race Equality Proposal, which would have established for states and individuals a right in international law guaranteeing “just treatment in every respect making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.” But for leaders of the former colonies, there was too much at stake to concede the principle of racial equality:
The Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes thwarted the proposal, knowing that it would have jeopardised his “White Australia Policy”. The Americans, whose southern states still operated the racial separatist policy known as Jim Crow, were similarly unimpressed.