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"But debt is not just victor's justice; it can also be a way of punishing winners who weren't supposed to win. The most spectacular example of this is the hist
by cryptohacks 5y ago
"But debt is not just victor's justice; it can also be a way of punishing winners who weren't supposed to win. The most spectacular example of this is the history of the Republic of Haiti - the first poor country to be placed in permanent debt peonage. Haiti was a nation founded by former plantation slaves who had the temerity not only to rise up in rebellion, amidst grand declarations of universal rights and freedoms, but to defeat Napoleon's armies sent to return them to bondage. France immediately insisted that the new republic owed it 150 million francs in damages for the expropriated plantations, as well as the expenses of outfitting the failed military expeditions, and all other nations, including the United States, agreed to impose an embargo on the country until it was paid. The sum was intentionally impossible (equivalent to about 18 billion dollars), and the resultant embargo en sured that the name "Haiti" has been a synonym for debt, poverty, and human misery ever since."
- Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber
- haskellandchill 5y agoBitcoin fixes this.
- underdeserver 5y agoNo, it doesn't.
- haskellandchill 5y agoTongue meet cheek.
- thrthrthrow 5y agoCould you please explain why you think it doesn't?
- jethro_tell 5y agoHow does it fix it?
- cryptohacks 5y agoHappy to chat about it but this does not seem like a welcoming space for the discussion.
- jethro_tell 5y agoJust curious? What's the use case for breaking an international embargo with crypto?
- edgyquant 5y agoWhen someone makes an extraordinary claim, “Bitcoin fixes this,” the burden is on them to explain how that is the case.
- cryptohacks 5y agoWas it a bitcoin comment? It could help.
- tekromancr 5y agoI don't think you understand just how powerful states with big fucking guns are
- thrthrthrow 5y agoCould you please explain how?
- haskellandchill 5y agoI'm being sarcastic, I know it's a risky move here but I couldn't help myself. Bitcoin is a scam.
- leto_ii 5y ago> Bitcoin is a scam. You're really tempting fate twice here :))
- sha256kira 5y agoWhats bitcoin again?
- tekromancr 5y agoI would say so. You attempted to use sarcasm in a community of people who dis-proportionally don't pick up on sarcasm, using a medium that notoriously doesn't transmit sarcasm well.
- haskellandchill 5y agoYes but I laughed and maybe a couple others. The OP comment was by a crypto throwaway account, the subtle message was there anyway, I just blew it up. Graeber is completely correct about Haiti getting screwed over by debt but I wanted the Bitcoin message underlying it to be exposed and have more substantial conversation about financial policies that could help. Did it work? Maybe.
- edgyquant 5y agoIt isn’t that people here don’t pick up sarcasm it’s that sarcasm as an entire comment isn’t really welcome here. This isn’t Reddit and comments are supposed to have substance.
- 5y ago
- dang 5y agoPlease don't take HN threads into classic flamewar hell. A comment like this is vandalism. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- zenmaster10665 5y agowow - that is shocking - thank you for enlightening me with this information :(
- cousin_it 5y agodeleted
- leereeves 5y agoAmazingly, that's a real quote from the book[1] (according to that source David Graeber blames bad editing), and it does raise questions about the credibility of anything else in that book. But that story about Haiti's debt can be found in better sources. 1: https://braddelong.substack.com/p/on-april-fools-day-we-remember-david https://braddelong.substack.com/p/on-april-fools-day-we-reme...
- cryptohacks 5y agoI admit, I've only read the first 30 pages of the book, and the editing is pretty bad.
- rozab 5y agoThis debt was still being collected by Citibank up to 1947. For the 'theft of property'... That is, the citizens of Haiti themselves.
- weimerica 5y agoLet us not white-wash the Haitian revolution which did not simply free the enslaved but also genocided every European and mixed-heritage Haitian. If Germany is to pay back for its crimes of the 20th Century, why not Haiti?
- thoughty 5y agoTreaty of Versailles which asked Germany to pay for world war 1 is what restored in world war 2. I don’t think Germany was stick with an invoice after world war 2
- weimerica 5y ago> I don’t think Germany was stick with an invoice after world war 2 It was.
- praptak 5y agoYes it was, technically. GPs point about not repeating the post-WWI mistake still stands though. Germany also received huge help as part of the Marshall plan.
- nextlevelwizard 5y ago>I don’t think Germany was stick with an invoice after world war 2 If only there was some way of searching for this information so you don't have to rely on shitty gut feelings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_reparations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_reparations
- carschno 5y agoTo quote the most relevant parts: > According to the Yalta Conference, no reparations to Allied countries would be paid in money. Instead much of the value transferred consisted of German industrial assets as well as forced labour to the Allies. > Later the Western Allies softened their stance in favour of the Marshall Plan, while Eastern Germany continued to deliver industrial goods and raw materials to the Soviet Union until 1953
- cabalamat 5y agoDavid Graeber also wrote (in the same book): >Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages. That's an impressive amount of wrong to pack into one sentence! So much wrong, that I would not trust anything based on Graeber's word.
- eplanit 5y agoSurely there are photos of the early Apple engineers in the 1970s, with their _laptops_ in each other's garages. /s
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- magnio 5y agoHow about Wikipedia?[0] > After the Haitians gained independence from French colonial rule in the Haitian Revolution of 1804, the French returned in 1825 and demanded that the newly independent country pay the French government and French slaveholders the modern equivalent of US$21 billion for the theft of the slaveowner's property and the land that they had turned into profitable sugar and coffee-producing plantations. > Haiti’s legacy of debt began shortly after a widespread slave revolt against the French, with Haitians gaining their independence from France in 1804. President of the United States Thomas Jefferson – fearing that slaves gaining their independence would spread to the United States – stopped sending aid that began under his predecessor John Adams and pursued international isolation of Haiti during his tenure. France had also pursued a policy that prevented Haiti from participating in trade in the Atlantic. This isolation on the international stage made Haiti desperate for economic relief. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_debt_of_Haiti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_debt_of_Haiti
- Spooky23 5y agoAre you trying to say that Apple Engineers in 1978 weren’t using their MacBooks? I wonder why the democratic drum circles were in garages instead of Starbucks? LOL. That’s beyond impressive, that in extraordinarily and spectacularly ignorant prose.
- wyager 5y agoIt’s described in that quote and in the article as if the Haitians defeated the French on their own. The Haitian revolution was essentially part of a fight between the French and the British, and internecine conflict between various French factions. 45,000 British soldiers died vs 75,000 french soldiers, so presumably the British involvement was also as significant as the French one. Also, of the first leader of “liberated” Haiti, Dessalines: “Dessalines marched into Port-au-Prince, where he was welcomed as a hero by the 100 whites who had chosen to stay behind. Dessalines thanked them all for their kindness and belief in racial equality, but then he said that the French had treated him as less than human when he was a slave, and so to avenge his mistreatment, he promptly had the 100 whites all hanged.” Off to a great start…
- mytailorisrich 5y agoAll the white population was massacred, actually [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre Edit: Thank you for being so mature and for going through my comment history to downvote all the comments you can. Way to go, really. Probably why the previous thread was flagged...
- runako 5y agoThat's not what the article you linked says, actually: "A contingent of Polish defectors were given amnesty and granted Haitian citizenship for their renouncement of French allegiance and support of Haitian independence." Update: I generally agree with your revised point, but for the sake of history I believe it's important not to needlessly exaggerate historical events. Let the events themselves stand on their own. My country has an ongoing problem with propagating accurate history, so I am aware of the need to get things correct.
- mytailorisrich 5y agoI'm not here to nitpick or defend genocide. A few white people might not have been killed, and some foreign troops, like those defectors, spared. Read the whole page where you found this quote to single out. Considering how the slaves had been treated it is perhaps understandable that the backlash was brutal, but that was a genocide nonetheless, with the white population massacred, not just a few people in an unique event. I certainly don't think that I have exaggerated anything.
- nickik 5y agoI would not really recommend Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber as a good source. While there are sometimes good historical nuggets, it mostly concerns itself with interpreting ever possible situation in the last 5000 years according to Graebers ideology and confirming that it is correct while constantly claiming anybody else that worked on these same topics and didn't share his interpretations are idiots (while often not actually seeming to know what they actually wrote). This is just state policy if they don't like other states. Its just legal justification for states to do what they want to do. States have found a billion way to justify hostile action against other states. Claiming reparations of one kind or another is very common for a very long time. Even had they been able to pay that money, its very questionable if that would have changed the disposition of the other stats towards it. Cartage managed to pay Rome back in full, and Rome then decide to destroy it anyway. They might just have a different excuse for the same policy.
- dogman144 5y agoFirmly agree and I keep the book on my shelf as a lesson that with funding, credentials, and details anything can get published.
- ekianjo 5y agoTHis book is better known as "ignorant writes about History by cherry-picking data points"
- dogman144 5y agoInteresting book until 1/2 of the way through it finally drops the point of it: debt is slavery and exclusively exists to perpetuate this form of slavery. Perhaps, but credit markets also provide critical benefit. 500 pages of such a singleminded dismissal of nuance was too much for me.
- gordian-mind 5y agoAh yes, the popular field of finding convoluted ways to blame Europeans for all the failures and atrocious dystopias created by non-whites.
- akudha 5y agoThe sum was intentionally impossible (equivalent to about 18 billion dollars), Assuming this figure in today's money - we have a country of more than 10 million people who can't afford to pay 18 Billion, and we have at least two individuals who are worth at least 10 times that amount (at least on paper)!! Yes, I am aware it is a weird and useless comparison. Still, it is kinda astonishing.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dang 5y agoCopy-pasting a piece of high ideological rhetoric into this thread created one of the worst tire fires I've seen in a long time, including flamewars about competing genocides, the origins of Apple, Bitcoin, the bombing of Japan, and the devil knows what else. Perhaps if it were one flamewar amid a bunch of on-topic, thoughtful replies, that could be called a coincidence, but in this case it's painfully clear that your comment set off the whole thing. Please don't ever do anything like this on HN again. Edit: I think I could have modulated this comment a bit better. Sorry! More downthread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27776445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27776445. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22expected%20value%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Igelau 5y ago(Can someone please clarify) how was that ideological rhetoric? Are these not historical facts? And if they are, aren't they relevant to a story about political instability in Haiti? Is Haitian politics itself off-topic? It seems like it's such emotionally charged territory due to its agonizing history that containing all the flame wars would constitute a de facto ban on the topic. Edit: really? There's a whole other thread making these exact same points that didn't get flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27761847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27761847
- throwaway122 5y ago> But debt is not just victor's justice; it can also be a way of punishing winners who weren't supposed to win. > permanent debt peonage > the temerity not only to rise up in rebellion, amidst grand declarations of universal rights and freedoms ...all seem like ideological rhetoric, and barely "facts".
- Igelau 5y ago> the temerity not only to rise up in rebellion, amidst grand declarations of universal rights and freedoms See, I read that in a sarcastic "how dare they" tone. Maybe that's why I don't think it's controversial. > But debt is not just victor's justice; it can also be a way of punishing winners who weren't supposed to win. Are you saying the debt/embargoes weren't meant to be punitive? "Weren't supposed to win" being the prevailing attitude of global economic powers of the time.