Yep, a few years later Haiti invaded my country and did the same thing, some towns still tell the stories of the massacres hatians committed in DR, they closed down schools and universities, killed blacks, whites and mulattos, by the time we got rid of them our economy was in shambles and the population was about a third of the population when they invated DR, I think this is the single event that has caused the most damage to my country ever.

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.

Was this one of the reasons the DR has removed Haitians citizenship a few years ago?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/dominican-...

That certainly doesn’t justify slavery, and also doesn’t really provide any useful context in my opinion. There isn’t a big difference between “they didn’t want their slaves to gain freedom” and “they didn’t want their slaves to gain freedom and be angry at their former masters.”

Children and abolitionists weren’t masters and were still killed. There’s a big difference between being angry at slave owners and carrying out genocide. The latter is what happened in Haiti and people in the US actively feared that for decades.

>> The reason for that was the genocide carried out against non-black Haitians.

That seems over the top to call a slave revolt genocide against the opressing group.

The Poles who switched sides and fought with the Haitians seem to get ignored for some reason.

They systematically murdered every last white person in Haiti - whether they were involved with the French or not. Women and children included.

It was very literally genocide. There's no other word for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre#Massacre

To be clear, this was a horrible event - but frequently like here it leaves out any other events during the period.

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.

>> Killing does not justify killing,

I think the rest of your lengthy post refutes that. Or maybe it means "but we understand why they did it."

Nope, not that. It means history does not happen in a vacuum.

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.