> "Let us not white-wash the Haitian revolution..."

let's also make sure not to miss the misdirectional, identity-based non sequitur, focusing exclusively on a few colonizing europeans and a singular incident over the shackled lives of millions of slaves and their prolonged casualties over literal centuries. with one being the consequence of the other, no less.

That's what you get from revolutions by slaves, bro.

To calrify (reagrding comments) I'm not saying this is noble deed but I would not judge them with ordinary moral standards.

So when one has their citizens slaughtered whole-sale, they are then under obligation to offer good trading terms?

If we are to reinterpret France's wrongs in light of modern norms, why not too interpret the wrong of the Haitian's? Why is this "rules for thee?"

“Fighting oppression is more just than committing oppression” is a norm that has an incredibly long history. What also has an incredibly long history is trying to elevate the importance of the marginal consequences of those fights, over what was being fought against.

Because enslsavers created the situation in the first place. They wronged themselves by taking people who could have been educated and empowered and instead taught them violence and ignorance.

The same reason we don't get too hung up on American soldiers slaughtering SS officers after liberating concentration camps. Two parties can both be in the wrong while at the same time one is way more in the wrong.

war crimes are war crimes, abuse is abuse. Being a past victim doesn't make ur actions any less evil.

Because violence begets violence. If you violently abuse, maul, and kill a group of people, then they are loosed, you don't need to think in terms of anything more than "what else did you expect"? I don't know if you've ever watched someone you love beaten to death, or been maliciously mauled yourself, but I bet the person that came out on the other side would not be someone you would recognize. Violence has consequences beyond the immediate victims and it takes time and effort to undo. Everlasting economic sanctions certainly won't help.

I'm not saying it's not evil, I'm just saying that if A enslaved B and B's family, it's perfectly normal for B to kill A and A's family. Is it legal? Is it good? I mean do you really think slaves care about laws or moral? It's brutal reality that we better avoid in one way or another in the future.

Murdering infants is barbaric. It's impossible to corroborate now, but many reports at the time suggested they used impaled French infants for a battle standard. I don't have a word strong enough to condemn that depravity. "That's what you get from revolutions by slaves, bro." comes across as extremely flippant. Slavery is wrong. Murdering innocent people is also wrong, bro.

Singling out acts of violence to try to say that both sides are equally evil or that one side is more moral because of that one act of evil is stupid.

The greater picture is this: Haitians were slaves and had every right to fight against their oppression. The "white Europeans" belonged back home in France. They brought it on themselves.

I always like to use this thought experiment: which of the two sides had power to change the situation?

The Haitians couldn't help being slaves until they rebelled. The French could from the very start choose not to be slavers.

Who brought the black Haitians to Haiti? Did they stay there voluntarily during white European rule?

Details matter.

I don't see how being brought to Haiti matters. Imagine some white settlers brought as children who have just become young adults. Do they need to go back to France?

> I don't see how being brought to Haiti matters

It does matter if they were brought as slaves and against their will, and made by force to call Haiti their home. I hope you see the difference between this and the children the settlers brought with them. Comparing children to slavery is nonsense.

The point is not that they were in Haiti. The point is that they were engaging in slavery, and they had the freedom not to.

I was not making any statements on settler colonialism which is a separate issue entirely. I was just saying, the French cannot claim be victims when they were the ones engaging in slavery.

Let's say when you do wrong X to someone, it's quite possible that they return the "favor" someday. I don't know what we are arguing here. Are they evil? For sure, but do you really expect them to be gentlemen revolutionaries who only kill those "should be killed"?

Actually Europeans did the same in not so long ago, not as slaves, but as slavers (or some more fancy words), so people can go down much further IMHO.

> many reports at the time suggested they used impaled French infants for a battle standard

Sure, and the Soviets claimed the Katyn massacre was perpetrated by the Nazis.

Consider sprinkling a few grains of salt on contemporary accounts by interested parties.

Well in this case, B killed everyone that looks like and shares an ethnicity with A. And if C enslaved B and B's family, but C had 1/4 of the same racial ancestry as B, he was spared. So not really a 1:1 comparison.

"Chaotic good" doesn't mean "Chaotic nice"

One of the tragedies of slavery - like other severe forms of oppression - is that it doesn't ennoble the oppressed. In fact, it makes the enslaved person accustomed to cruelty, violence, iniquity, tyranny; and is likely to result in individuals who tend to be possessive, anxiety-prone, vengeful, violent etc. A bit like the adage about abused children growing up to become abusive parents.

(Of course, this too is a crass generalization.)

Exactly Germany has to pay for its crimes…not the liberated Jewish people.

Could you imagine Germany sending a bill for the total cost of WW2 to the newly created Country of Israel?

Genocide was committed on both sides, and from a purely numerical standpoint the Haitian slaves had it worse. Why shouldn't France have been forced to pay back Haiti for the enslavement and genocide that it committed? Or should we just forget about the Vicomte de Rochambeau and his attack dogs?

"Convinced that the crisis in Hispaniola could only be resolved by mass murder, Rochambeau undertook to massacre much of the non-white civilian and military population. Under his direction, the French imported hundreds of attack dogs from Cuba, which were used both in counterinsurgency operations and in grotesque public spectacles in which unfortunate prisoners and servants were eaten alive. Rochambeau also displayed exceptional cruelty in a number of other ways, such as massacring enemy troops after they had surrendered to his forces, burning men and women alive, and executing many soldiers and civilians by torture and drowning." [0]

[0] http://islandluminous.fiu.edu/part02-slide13.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27761407.

Wrong - the Poles who fought with Dessalines were allowed to stay and settle.

Sure, some men were allowed to live as well as every woman who agreed to marry black men, but thousands were still killed.

So they made a carve-out on their genocidal rampage? That does not make the slaughter of women and children better.

Treaty 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

>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

To 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

> I don’t think Germany was stick with an invoice after world war 2

It was.

Yes 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.

The US has extraterritorial rights to German military bases to this day.

So they may not have a crippling financial debt, but the loss wasn’t “free”.

This is nonsense. Germany was not 'asked to pay for WW1'. To cost imposed on Germany would only just cover repairing Northern France and Belgium. Even just including pentions for French war widows was not fully paid for.

And they of course never paid for the utter deforestation they forced on much of Eastern Europe.

And this debt payment was not the reason for WW2. By the time Hitler came to power Versailles was a dead document. The financial terms had been revised multiple times and in those negotiations Germany got a pretty good deal and a number of additional benefits and access to a gigantic amount of US loans and trade deals.

And after WW2 Germany still had to pay some debt but because of financial restructuring after WW2 those were not as large. Part of why this was possible however was because the US actually promised a great deal to nations who accepted debt restructuring. Including economic and military aid, and trade deals.