AtDTDA 19: Other axes of space-time [527]

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

"By this point" Barry Nebulay points out, no one's keeping tabs on who's
registered, who's not. Thus assured of at least a temporary roof, Kit curls 
up in a corner with:

           . . . .piles of Quaternionist debris, along with a shifting 
           population of refugees whose names, if he heard them 
           at all, he quickly forgot.

. . . . and somehow I recall:

           There are six different types of quark, usually known as flavors: up, 
           down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. (Their names were chosen 
           arbitrarily based on the need to name them something that could be 
           easily remembered and used.) The strange, charm, bottom and top 
           varieties are highly unstable and died out within a fraction of a 
           second after the Big Bang; they can be recreated and studied by 
           particle physicists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark

Is it safe to say that all the twisting the stu-millian/maxapendica contorted
itself through resulted in Kit having landed on/in a different space-time axis?

Waking up, Kit finds himself among a group of "Young Congo", anarchists 
banded together against the ravages of King Leopold II:

           Of the Europeans who scrambled for control of Africa at the end of 
           the19th century, Belgium's King Leopold II left arguably the largest 
           and most horrid legacy of all.

           King Leopold II left arguably the largest and most horrid legacy
           While the Great Powers competed for territory elsewhere, the king 
           of one of Europe's smallest countries carved his own private colony 
           out of 100km2 of Central African rainforest.

           He claimed he was doing it to protect the "natives" from Arab 
           slavers, and to open the heart of Africa to Christian missionaries, 
           and Western capitalists.

           Instead, as the makers of BBC Four documentary White King, Red 
           Rubber, Black Death powerfully argue, the king unleashed new 
           horrors on the African continent.

           Torment and rape

           He turned his "Congo Free State" into a massive labour camp, made a 
           fortune for himself from the harvest of its wild rubber, and 
           contributed in a large way to the death of perhaps 10 million 
           innocent people.

           What is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo has clearly never 
           recovered.

           "Legalized robbery enforced by violence", as Leopold's reign was 
           described at the time, has remained, more or less, the template 
           by which Congo's rulers have governed ever since.

           Meanwhile Congo's soldiers have never moved away from the role 
           allocated to them by Leopold - as a force to coerce, torment and 
           rape an unarmed civilian population.

           Chopping hands

           As the BBC's reporter in DR Congo, I covered stories that were loud 
           echoes of what was happening 100 years earlier.

           Men who failed to bring enough rubber for agents were killed
           The film opens with the shocking images of some of Leopold's victims 
- 
           children and adults whose right hands had been hacked off by his 
           agents.

           They needed these to prove to their superiors that they had not been 
           "wasting" their bullets on animals.

            This rule was seldom observed as soldiers kept shooting monkeys 
           and then later chopping off human hands to provide their alibis

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3516965.stm

For more horrid details, check out:

           King Leopold's Ghost (1999) is a best-selling popular history book by 
           Adam Hochschild that explores the exploitation of the Congo Free 
           State by King Léopold II of Belgium between 1885 and 1909.

           Hochschild describes Léopold as a man of greed who, obsessed 
           by the desire for a colony, hides his real intentions under 
           "philanthropic" purposes. With a complex scheme of political 
           intrigue, corruption and propaganda, he wins the assistance of 
           one of the greatest explorers of the time, Henry Morton Stanley, 
           as well as that of public opinion and of powerful states. Through 
           the Berlin Conference and other diplomatic efforts, he finally 
           obtains international recognition for his  colony. He then 
           establishes a system of forced labour that keeps the 
           people of the Congo basin in a condition of virtual slavery.

           In Hochschild's impassioned book, King Léopold takes his place with 
           the great tyrants, having reduced the population of the Congo Free 
           State—which Hochschild describes as being his private fiefdom—
           from 20 million people to 10 million in 40 years.

http://tinyurl.com/2mt8x4