It's odd how Haiti had the same GDP per capita as now up-and-coming Vietnam just 10 years ago and yet most of the explanations for why Haiti's a hopeless basket case are citing events in the 1800s.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=haiti%2C+china%2C+sout...
1800s is a long time ago, but it's consequences continued long after. Debts were still being paid until almost 1950. It's easy to underestimate debt impact. US Debt to GD ratio, is about 100% and there is a lot of concern on long term US economic health. Venezuela is essentially a failing economy and is at 350%. France came and instituted a debt of 300% debt to GDP as reparations for slaveowners. That's essentially Venezuela territory.
What happened to Haiti between 1950s to 2010 was the Duvalier family who came to power on a movement that grew out of the US occupation of Haiti in the first half of the 1900s. Not the same, but similar to Castro coming to Cuba post US actions there, and Iran post US propping up the Shah of Iran, US occupation created a groundswell against. It took a bit more time, but it eventually enabled the Duvalier family dynasty. And they were horribly corrupt, but they rode the wave.
Haiti finally got rid of them and things started to look better. So why has it diverged from Vietnam since 2010? An enormous earthquake hit in 2010 and devastated the country. 3% of the population was killed. 15% of the population had their homes destroyed.
8% of Germany died during WW2, and they suffered under enormous foreign debt afterwards. Two million Vietnamese died during the Vietnam war. 4% of Japan died during WW2, and they also happened to have nuclear weapons used against them. The Korean war was enormously destructive, and after the cease fire, most of South Korea's industrial base ended up on the wrong side of the border. South Korea operated under a military dictatorship for decades. Vietnam is still a single-party Communist state, with attendant corruption and looting.
All four countries are dramatically richer today than Haiti. Disasters and foreign debt don't explain the difference.
You can find the source of a text just by picking a random sentence from it, put it in quotes and google for it.
Like the article says it sounds unreal and almost to suspend disbelief, however if you independently look up the major events outlined they pencil out.
It is interwoven with describing an interactive fiction game, so not every word on there represents reality, but there are sources. I found it riveting when I first read it.
How long will you keep blaming colonial rule and start accepting that the local people have to fix the problems.
This skips over the context of why people absolutely feared the idea of slaves gaining freedom after the Haitian Revolution.
The reason for that was the genocide carried out against non-black Haitians. [1] Even those people who actively opposed slavery, including children, were murdered. Americans feared that if slaves were freed, they'd all be raped and murdered as well
I'm not here to justify slavery or anything. But people 200 years ago didn't consider all races equal, and they were especially put off by the events that transpired in Haiti and wanted to actively prevent anything similar from happening in their own hometown.
And let's not forget for those 2 decades we also payed Haiti's dept to France, something we had nothing to do with.
Haitians love to bring up slavery and their treatment by France and USA as the only and main cause of why they're so poor, but the elephant in the room is how corrupted Haitian politicians and business people are, in the 1950s DR and Haiti had about the same GDP, and now DR is about 10 times richer. Corruption is the main cause of why Haiti is so poor nowadays, I should know, my own country is full of it. For some reason they never bring up Papa Duc and Baby Duc and all the other dictators and corrupt presidents they've had in recent decades.
I really hope some day Haiti can get their shit together and start to develop their country, that'll be the best for everybody on the Hispaniola island.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/dominican-...
That seems over the top to call a slave revolt genocide against the opressing group.
It was very literally genocide. There's no other word for it.
Killing 2000 whites at once is horrible. It came the end of a fight for independence / freedom from slavery that had been killing on average 10,000 blacks per year for 100 years. Over 1 million blacks died in Haiti during slavery.
Killing does not justify killing, but at the same time 2,000 in the context of 1 million is something different. And yes those 1 million included women and children as well.
This was not peaceful treatment:
> Torture of slaves was routine; they were whipped, burned, buried alive, restrained and allowed to be bitten by swarms of insects, mutilated, raped, and had limbs amputated.
The life expectancy of an enslaved person was 3 years. Yes that level of absurd. It's almost unfathomable.
And during that same war Napoleon's armies were also committing massacres - and the thing that stopped them from elevating to genocide was that they kept losing battles/territory. Ie one army succeeded at what the other failed at.
What happened in Haiti and the major powers treatment of the colony was disgusting and severely understudied/unknown by most people.
I think the rest of your lengthy post refutes that. Or maybe it means "but we understand why they did it."
But I don't want this to devolve into an internet argument, especially not on this topic, and I feel it tip toeing towards that line - so I'll gracefully end my replies here. Cheers.
To blame it purely on France enforcing the debt is missing a fair amount of Haitian politics. It's not it wasn't a factor but it's way more complicated than just France bleeding Haiti dry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Haiti#Political_str...
>France, with warships at the ready, sailed to Haiti in 1825 and demanded Haiti to compensate France for its loss of slaves and its slave colony.[5][6] In exchange for French recognition of Haiti as a sovereign republic, France demanded payment of 150 million francs.[5] In addition to the payment, France required that Haiti provide a fifty percent discount on its exported goods to them, making repayment more difficult.[4] In 1838, France agreed to reduce the debt to 90 million francs to be paid over a period of 30 years to compensate former plantation owners who had lost their property; the 2004 equivalent of US$21 billion.[5][4][7] Historians have traced loan documents from the time of the 1825 Ordinance, through the various refinancing efforts, to the final remittance to National City Bank (now Citibank) in 1947.[2]
Founding fathers btw.