The Command Above All

As 2025 unfurls itself into the light of day, the time has long since passed for us to examine, piercingly and unflinchingly, our relationship to the members of the elite, ruling classes, clearly displaying their unity and power on Trump’s inaugural stage. The billionaire class ceases to exist without the labor of the millions who toil day-in-day out for the simple means of surviving until tomorrow. Just as we are the makers of the world we live in today, we will be the makers of tomorrow and the next. Do we wish to live half-lives while others experience their heaven on earth, or will we rise in thundering, harmonious tides towards a liveable, egalitarian future?

“The commands were above all for labor,” this was recorded into a historical account of a Belgian king, Leopold II, as he became principal dictator and colonizer, seeking out the raw materials over a vast stretch of the African Congo. In establishing the “Free Congo” state, Leopold II, alongside an army of investors, fellow europeans and even some americans looking for their fortune in the seemingly “untouched” African continent (the lives spanning generations and forming complex societies below the Sahara not meritorious to the europeans of course). Over a million square miles of land came into the ownership and tyranny of nearly a single man. For over 52 years the invasive, barbarous Europeans ruled over not only the land but the millions of native inhabitants of the land.

In 1833, the United Kingdom passed a bill banning slavery domestically and in its colonies. In 1865, the United States passed the 13th amendment banning slavery (the bill’s efficacy must undoubtedly be examined and refuted), but in this 20th century colony Leopold II used whatever means necessary to him to reap the colossal fruits of the African continent. The sheer loss of human life is astonishing, especially in retrospect of how little it is taught in western spheres of education. Eight to Ten million lives were taken in the Congo, a silenced holocaust that stripped the African continent of any means of life and subsistence and carried wealth in abundance back to europe for the sole gain of, “the men with forked tongues.”

On June 30th, 1960, the Congolese people won an independence movement against the Belgians and named Patrice Lumumba their Prime Minister. In a speech given at the independence day ceremony, Lumumba lamented the atrocities committed by Europeans upon his people, and to the horror of King Baudouin of the Belgians (in attendance at the ceremony) and western leaders the world over, “The Congo’s independence is a decisive step towards the liberation of the whole African continent.” Lumumba was assassinated 7 months later on January 17th, 1961. It was later revealed that the assassination plot was carried out as a directive of the CIA. To this day the Congo is stripped of its natural resources, such as Cobalt and other minerals mined for the expansion of Big Tech companies, and its people left without autonomy and in a violent state of disunion.

“We have experienced forced labour in exchange for pay that did not allow us to satisfy our hunger, to clothe ourselves, to have decent lodgings or to bring up our children as dearly loved ones.” Just as the overseers and functionaries of the Congo genocide cared little for the people and land they brutalized, the overseers and functionaries of our present systems of domination care little for how we spend our lives, only that we serve their will to meet their gain. We must meet the rising tides of fascism within this country with the strength of a socializing movement towards the will of the people. We must resist the entrenchment of alienation seeking to turn the whole of society into a conglomerate of individuals alone, and the division of our political selves along only two supposed paths of governance, neither meeting our demands and both proliferating our misery.

I call on all Congolese citizens, men, women and children, to set themselves resolutely to the task of creating a national economy and ensuring our economic independence.

Eternal glory to the fighters for national liberation!

Long live independence and African unity!

Long live the independent and sovereign Congo!