My Take | Bismarck was no rabid Western imperialist
Contrary to far-left revisionism in Germany, the West would have had much cleaner, instead of bloodied, hands in its colonial history if it had followed the Iron Chancellor’s restraint
Germany’s first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, has a much cleaner record when it comes to the West’s murderous imperialism during the heyday of colonial conquest in the half-century before the first world war. Compared with the other great European powers and perhaps even the United States, the Iron Chancellor showed remarkable restraint.
The atrocities and mass murders associated with Germany’s colonisation were committed after he was kicked out of office in 1890 by the new young emperor who wanted “a place in the sun” for his country, and to join the other great European powers in their insatiable hunger for foreign possessions.
So it’s ironic that last week, far-left protesters toppled a 125-year-old bronze statue of Bismarck in Frankfurt to mark the 140th anniversary of the Berlin Conference, which has been seen as emblematic of imperialist Europe’s “scramble for Africa”.
It was part of an ongoing far-left revisionism of Bismarck as a colonialist. “Coloniser” and “anti-colonial action” were painted over the toppled statue. Sadly, ignorant people often associate Bismarck as some kind of proto-Hitler. But while Bismarck presided over the Berlin Conference, it was the conference’s instigator, Leopold II of Belgium, who showed he was positively Hitlerian by taking over the Congo as his private domain, rather than under Belgium, and torturing and murdering millions of the population there over the next two decades. That was the background to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The reason Leopold isn’t as infamous as Hitler today is surely because the skin colour of his countless victims was black, whereas that of Hitler’s victims was much paler.
Although Europe accounts for only 8 per cent of the world’s total land mass, between 1492 to 1914, its inhabitants conquered or colonised more than 80 per cent of it. And from 1876 to 1915, a handful of Western imperialist powers plus Japan distributed or redistributed about 25 per cent of the land mass directly as colonies.
However, Germany’s overseas possessions were actually subpar compared with the true global colonisers. During this late 19th- to early 20th-century period, Great Britain acquired an astonishing 4 million square miles (10.4 million sq km), followed by France at 3.5 million sq miles.
