King Leopold’s Ghost is, at its center, about morality. Its opening lines focus on the young Edmund Morel’s “flash of moral recognition” (1), and throughout the rest of the book we see other characters have similar insights, like lights flickering on in the darkness. It is a book about what one can and should do in the aftermath of such moral awakenings. Certainly many chose to look away, but this history highlights those who didn’t, and paid painful, sometimes fatal prices for it.

Hochschild’s repeated references to other mass murders in the twentieth century also contribute to the exploration of this theme, by offering examples of immorality on a large scale and comparing them to what happened in the Congo.

Exploring the theme of human rights in the Congo necessitates an analysis of how the concept of race supports—and is, in fact, central to—European imperialism. Racial prejudice allows white Europeans to view non-white people as less than human, which in turn allows for the systematic violation of their human rights. If, for example, the people of the Congo had been considered fully human, what was done to them—the violent appropriation of their land, labor, and lives—could not have gone on for as long as it did.