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It wasn't "audacity" it was an ethnic genocide of the island -- they killed thousands of their masters, their masters' innocent children, and even white aboliti
by mobilefriendly 9y ago
It wasn't "audacity" it was an ethnic genocide of the island -- they killed thousands of their masters, their masters' innocent children, and even white abolitionists. Haiti is poor for other reasons, though. In 1960 Haiti and neighboring Dominican Republic had roughly the same per capita GDP. Since then DR has tripled and Haiti has declined by 50%
- edbaskerville 9y agoLet me get this straight: African slaves rise up against their masters, and you're blaming the slaves for not carefully differentiating between the "innocent" and the "guilty" free people, all of whose existence on the island is built on the prior genocide of the native Taino people and subsequent enslavement of Africans?
- literallycancer 9y agoIt's not very constructive to kill people that share your goals, is it?
- edbaskerville 9y agoCertainly not. I'm not questioning the wisdom of avoiding unnecessary killing. And certainly any children and white abolitionists killed did not deserve their fate. I'm not even really questioning the facts—I haven't read a proper history of Haiti yet. I'm questioning the implied moral judgment I read from mobilefriendly's comment: that this revolt by people in chains, people with no choice to be illiterate and uneducated, can't be called an audacious freedom fight because the killing spread beyond those who directly enslaved them to other free white people. Rather, it must be called genocide, a term generally used to describe free people exterminating those deemed a pest to their society. (The fact that Haiti's elite is made up largely of mixed-race people also calls into question the "genocide" categorization on factual, not just moral, grounds.)