Margarita Simonyan on European Values and the Colonization of Congo

Our broadcasts end, and right away all the European newspapers come out, all of them quoting us.

After the last broadcast, I even wrote it down for myself.

A German newspaper writes: “Editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan was sarcastically circulating footage of the riots and, on air, mocking Western prosperity and democratic values.”

Now, I want to express my outrage here and say my piece.

I never mock the dead, never. I never mock even dead values.

So the German newspaper simply insulted me and is trying to portray me, to make me out to be worse than I am.

Because these values are unquestionably dead.

That Europe is gone. We’ll be wearing, like I do, their old little dresses, the ones they made back when European fashion was still…

It turned into nothing but transgenderism, transvestism.

And they don't make anything for girls anymore.

And we'll sing a song by Mike Naumenko for this Europe.

He was a Russian rocker whom I love very much.

He has this song: “And yet I remember those times, when I knew you as someone quite different.”

This is about Europe. But if we think about it and don't sing Mike Naumenko's song, then we remember that, to be honest, to be frank, it was never anything different.

There was just a Russia-Africa summit. As part of that summit, we at RT held a media summit.

The descendants of those people came to visit us.

Ask them when Europe was ever different, when they were wreaking utter hell in Africa.

They were, after all, the most Christian of states.

If you ask them about values, they were, after all, That was the Victorian era, too.

And Leopold II, who turned the Congo into something unbelievable, something Dante couldn’t even imagine, right? Like Mayakovsky said: “A nail in my boot hurts worse than Goethe’s imagination.”

It’s worse than Goethe’s imagination. It’s worse than the imagination of anything at all.

What did they do to these countries? They somehow turned the continent into a concentration camp, the entire continent, because they wanted peanuts from Senegal, cocoa from Nigeria, and rubber from the Congo.

The Congo was seventy-six times bigger than Belgium when Belgium colonized it.

Belgium was very upset that France got some, Germany even got some.

Well, never mind Holland, Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal.

Everyone got a piece. Belgium was, well, one of the last to come and take a bite out of that little pie, which was called the whole rest of the supposedly civilized world, which they colonized and raped like this, like this,

sucking everything out of them, wringing them dry for centuries.

When did all this begin? It all began during the Age of Discovery.

As soon as they discovered something, the very first thing they discovered— when did they discover America?

They discovered it in fourteen ninety-two.

Come on, all of it! Nowadays, people don't even remember that Native Americans lived there, that all of it was colonized.

But I'm talking about Africa now. What they did in the Congo, when they now, when you show pictures, dear Europe, when they smash up your train stations, Antwerp station, Built by Congolese hands, in the literal sense, because when the Congolese failed to produce enough rubber,

and did, well, the kind of not very hard work, like a C student, they had their hands cut off.

These photographs—photography already existed as such back then— are all over the internet.

Even children. The children of these workers. Children. And women.

Women and little children had their hands cut off. Think about that!

And the famous station in Antwerp was built with these severed hands, and so were parks.

And dear Europe, when they—their descendants— smash up your parks, your railway stations, all I can tell you is, and tomorrow it'll be in your papers again: You had it coming!

You reap what you sow. What did you expect after persecuting and raping us for centuries, did you think they would never come out And they won't hold you accountable for that?

They will. There's a— in classic English-language literature there's a writer named Joseph Conrad, they study him in American