Rimu recently started a new rant thread. I copied the response of the person they had targeted and in less than a minute Rimu had deleted the comment.
This is the comment Rimu did not want people being able to see: https://feddit.uk/post/53824748/26875911
This is the thread I shared it on: https://feddit.uk/post/53824747
I dunno that the original dessalines counts as genocidal, despite his attempts to rid haiti of whites. It was more or less a mass murder, and outright unnecessary since he had other options, but I don’t know that genocide would be the right term for it? Maybe, I’m not fully convinced either way, just starting a tangent
That tangent is that the real dessalines was… complicated. He essentially became a central figure in Haitian liberation. One can argue that the revolution might not have succeeded without him. He was certainly effective.
He was also effective as “emperor” (in quotes because it’s hard to be an emperor of a single nation) for the most part. Made Haiti pitchy officially an independent nation, declared slavery abolished, stripped colonialists of property, and generally kept things running.
Of course, part of keeping things running was treating Haitians like slaves, just without the label.
Which shows both why the dev dessalines might have chosen the name, and why it doesn’t really fit. Plus, you know, the whole emperor thing being contrary to socialism being weird.
Fwiw to anyone here for the tangent, there’s been a goodly number of books about the real Dessalines. Likely available at your local library, or on the high seas. He was a fascinating figure.
Most genocide is Mass murder. You are basically making an argument of ability and scope. Genocide is a genocide. And it doesn’t even require murder all the time. Though generally it does include it.
The fact remains that not only did he target what had become a minority group on the islands and wipe it out. Basically genocide. Worse they had been allies fighting alongside him.
And the United States certainly weren’t the good guys in the whole situation either. They did their normal thing showing up just long enough to kill a foreign leader. Even if the large portion of Haitian population desired is removal. It still doesn’t excuse what France did afterwards and how America followed along buddy buddy enabling France.
I would definitely argue that there’s a bit of wiggle room on freed slaves offing their oppressors though. It wasn’t just him.
My hindsight take is that it was a justifiable action considering the history of humanity and how slave revolt tends to be handled. Wiping out the overlords instead of exiling them is a form of preemptive strike.
The overlords, and their wives, and their children, and anyone else who looked like them regardless of socioeconomic class. Months after the fighting had stopped. Following assurances they’d be left alone… but weren’t allowed to leave.
You’re allowed to endorse the original cause for a conflict and still say that where it ended was kinda fucked up.
Fucked up, yeah. But we’re still talking about people that were enslaved, raped, beaten; had their children raped, beaten, and stolen from them, and had ancestors in the same situation.
I would call the massacre assisted suicide on a historic scale.
You’re the second person here to blame the victims of an atrocity for their own genocide.
This was a formalized extermination program by an ethnostate. I was assured y’all consistently opposed to that sort of thing. Now I wonder, if things suddenly flipped around in Palestine, how many would be downright gleeful about Israeli medics and journalists being hunted by snipers. Like it’s only unforgivable if the wrong side does it.
What the actual Nazis did was plenty fucked up, but we did not turn around and eliminate Germany, or Germans, or German. Genocide cannot both be the worst possible crime against humanity, and also ‘oh well you get what you deserve.’
Well, we’ve hit a snag.
Who is “y’all” in this case?
See, by that sentence that started “I was assured y’all”, you’re in/out grouping and making an assumption that not only is there an out group for you to categorize people into it, but that I’m a part of that group.
Secondary to that, I’ve never seen a discussion where someone starts thinking in terms of “me vs them” that ended in anything but ugliness. I’m willing to accept that this might not go that way, but I’m dubious as fuck. So, if that’s where you are, do us both a favor, don’t respond to this, and just block me. I don’t have time or patience for that bullshit.
Besides, it’s why I so rarely engage in discussions about the subject matter of a post in this community. It isn’t the place for even gentler debates, much less those that run hot.
That being said, if you’re drawing parallels between a slave revolution in haiti and the Israeli pogrom going on currently, be aware that Israel is the slave masters in this case, not Palestinians. The direct equivalence would be if Palestinians got armed and took back their lives. Then, any remaining Israelis were put to death instead of shipping them back home.
See, you expect a degree of over reaction by oppressed and tortured people. It doesn’t make it good, but it is totally understandable, and can even make good sense strategically.
To redraw the comparison, let’s say that Palestinians, now running their own independent nation, had allowed their previous oppressors to remain for similar reasons. What are they supposed to do with them? integrate them into Palestinian culture? When their oppressive neighbors are still planning death and mayhem, and the Israelis inside their borders are just as likely to side with their oppressors?
What then? Send those people back to Israel, where their resentment and sense of entitlement will continue to be a problem? Or wipe them out and be done with it? Sending a message at the same time of “stay the fuck out”.
Now, is that morally “good”? Fuck no, we’re all supposed to take the gentler path when we can. But put yourself in the place of either peoples. Are you so certain of your moral superiority that you wouldn’t make the strategic decision to eliminate a threat? A proven threat in both cases. Remember, the Haitians were coming off of centuries of slavery, rape, torture, and not just “regular” slavery, chattel slavery. The Palestinians? Holy fuck, for it being a relatively recent reoccurrance of violence against them, they’ve had a violent boot on their neck for generations too.
Me? I’m not that confident in my ability to pretend moral superiority in the same situation. Hell, I’m pretty damn confident I’d be willing to do the killing. I’m a nice person, but I am not a good person when it comes to protecting me and mine. Oh, I could be talked into holding off if leadership had a good plan in place, after all, the cycle of killing is hard to stop just because you were justified; that’s how we get generational warfare.
It’s also interesting to look at the ww2 comparison. Me? I have said publicly that the worst mistake humanity ever made was in letting nazis live. Some shit needs to be crushed as hard as possible. Not because it prevents the insanity from coming back, but to draw a line in the sand and say “nope, if you pick up that banner, you will share the same fate.”
I think that’s what the Haitians did back then. They said nope, fuck slave masters, and anyone thinking they can try it again.
Is it a moral good? Nope. But I am absolutely okay with an oppressed people making bad choices while they get their feet back under them.
Maybe you’re a better person than me. Since I don’t believe in a real deity, I suppose only the collective consciousness of humanity can be the judge of that. But I just can’t find it in me to care that a bunch of ex slaves went hard. I don’t blame them. Maybe if they hadn’t been treated worse than animals, they would have had a chance to be the kind of people that don’t make the choice. But they were, and I suspect that any group of people so treated would as well. Which seems to me a matter of ideals vs reality, not a pure morality
Wall of text in response to ‘is genocide bad y/n.’
That would be what I wrote, yes. And you’d endorse it? You, personally? Invidually? Would that not fit with-- okay what the fuck would “back home” even mean for-- beside the point. What is the difference between ‘Palestine genociding Israel would be okay’ and ‘Haiti genociding French descendents was okay?’ Why the fuck is genocide ever okay?
Calling it “understandable” or “strategic” is NOT what you said, when you called that explicit progrom “suicide.” You are unambiguously blaming the victims of the genocide, for their own genocide.
This is the rhetoric of every fascist action. ‘We must be unforgivable before they get us!’ because being better than the fucking genocidal maniacs is somehow unthinkable. Nobody bayonetting a child while shouting ‘take that, complicit oppressor!’ is engaged in serious philosophy. They’re just doing ingroup / outgroup violence.
You can say the cycle of killing is fucked up. You don’t have to excuse it, as you do here, repeatedly. It can be difficult to break, and still be evil.
Oh, you’re pro-cycle-of-killing. Okay. Glad to have that laid naked.
Children.
That’s calling it a moral good.
You, personally, are endorsing this genocide. ‘It’s whatever’ is not meaningfully better than ‘I love that for them.’ You are excusing a pogrom while patting yourself on the back for considering it just super terrible in an abstract sense where you still get to say it’s fine.
Fun fact - Haitian soldiers mostly ignored the initial order. They were totally fine with letting these people live. Dessalines personally showed up in town after town to force these forces to commit this atrocity.
Which you endorse.
The American Civil War was actually the oppression of a South American minority group (white European slave owners)
Did Sherman hunt down their families, after the slaves were freed?
When you start bayonetting all children of the wrong ethnicity, because shooting them might be too noisy and let others escape, it doesn’t really matter what justifications started the conflict. There was a line and it is behind you.
The line was subjugating and enslaving people - the colonists got their children killed. Also, how the fuck do you look at America today and conclude Sherman went far enough?
Systematic killing of children cannot be justified by a war that’s already over, no matter how justified that war was. Dessalines rode from city to city making good and goddamn sure those children got murdered for being born wrong.
Nobody with criticisms about reconstruction thinks the right answer was genocide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haitian_massacre first sentence.
I don’t know why he chose that name but it seems like a deliberate provocation. That violence begets violence, and still without violence we cannot resist the oppressors. And that you can only liberate yourself and others by getting your hands dirty.
So I think it’s hypocrisy to reduce the historical figure Dessalines to a genocidal dictator. To use a thought terminating cliche about simplistic “good vs evil” ethics and derail a discussion that was about something else.
Every time you start a war you accept that war crimes will happen. It is inevitable in wars. There are no clean wars. War is slaughter, and when soldiers or the oppressed are put into extremis some will act like animals.
So how much of the guilt for the massacre lies with the slavers?
Yet liberals pretend that they do not put people into extremis. That their reasons were justified and intentions noble, that their wars and their hands are clean. But violence begets violence.
That is what the name of the user tells me, and what that comment tells me.
Yup, that’s the main event under discussion.