It’s not fun interacting with them when they often want to engage in ad hominems. This is why I have no interest in the tankie triad.

  • @michaelmrose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4•1 day ago

    No he didn’t. They killed the guilty and the innocent making no effort to distinguish between them. The soldiers mostly escaped whereas civilians were murdered. In fact most people in Haiti had little stomach for the sort of purge of French women and children he desired to the point where it doesn’t happen until he tours a particular settlement.

    One can argue all day long he was revenging very legit harms but it doesn’t make him less of a monster and his people ultimately agreed and murdered him.

    • @amino@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      6•1 day ago

      there was no distinction between “civilians” and soldiers because the people he targeted fought in the colonial National Guard. you would’ve known this if you had read the sources I linked though. from WP:

      In a 2005 article titled “Caribbean genocide,” historian Philippe Girard argued that during the first four months of 1804, “on Dessalines’s orders, soldiers rounded up white planters, their families, French soldiers and the urban poor known as petits blancs, and killed them. Neither women nor children were spared.” Drawing heavily on Girard’s claims, podcaster Mike Duncan, in Season 4 of “Revolutions,” offers a sensationalized account of what he calls the “genocidal massacres” of 1804. He alleges that Haitian soldiers raped all the White women and concludes that Dessalines committed a “heinous crime.”

      Did Dessalines execute French soldiers and colonists? Yes. But this fact has been exaggerated and taken out of historical context.

      When the French evacuated in late 1803, they did not concede defeat. Instead, a small contingent of troops relocated to the city of Santo Domingo and began threatening to reinvade and “annihilate” the Black population. Dessalines soon learned of these plans. He also learned about support among White colonists for the recent French expedition. In this context, he ordered the execution of people who had “taken an active part in the different massacres and assassinations” by the French army. But, rather than targeted executions for the defense of the country, terrified colonists claimed to have witnessed the “massacre” of all the White people.

      Historical documents reveal, however, that many White people remained in Haiti after this alleged genocide. For example, a partial census from October 1804 lists more than 600 White people in the district of Gros Morne alone. That same month — after all the White people were allegedly killed — a British captain claimed that 200 White women were in imminent danger of being “massacred” in Cap Haitien.

      Claiming that Dessalines targeted civilians is also misleading. Many of those he executed fought in the colonial National Guard — militia units of male planters and merchants — which supported the French military expedition. Such claims also downplay the violence of colonialism. Settlers were enslavers, and as historian Vincent Brown has shown, slavery was war. Anti-colonialism is not genocide.

      this rhetoric sounds like the Israeli hasbara painting settlers as innocent civilians when most of them either served in the IDF or are currently reservists.

      • @michaelmrose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7•1 day ago

        When you massacre non-combatants, women, and children as factually did happen its genocide. The fact that not all jews were killed doesn’t negate for instance that the holocaust happened. For every genocide there are apologists. The fact that the french as a people may logically be deemed to be more deserving of reciprocal violence doesn’t justify it because violence is done to individuals by individuals. They could have forcibly relocated the people or allowed them to be re-located especially the old, women, and children. They broadly committed mass murder. The fact that the french did much worse doesn’t make those immoral acts moral.

        Anti-colonialism is not genocide

        Genocide is genocide.

        • @amino@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          0•24 hours ago

          When you massacre non-combatants, women, and children as factually did happen its genocide

          this is word for word what the French did to Haitians. that was the only genocide that ever happened during the Haitian Revolution. implying that racism against white colonizers is possible or if you’re a white supremacist claiming that resisting a Holocaust is akin to committing genocide is a genocide denier’s talking point.

          • @michaelmrose@lemmy.worldEnglish
            5•22 hours ago

            Of course racism is possible vs anyone it’s simply a word for pre judgement based on race. If Animus is based on what is actually happening right now it’s arguably not racism it’s simply a correct judgment call. The French as a group were at war with the Haitians but you still can’t morally slaughter non combatants.

            I hate the attempt to remove a definition of the word racism from the dictionary and replace its definition with something closer to systemic racism or oppression.

            What word then means prejudgements based on race?

            Of course the oppressed can’t oppress the oppressor but anyone can prejudge based on race which has been a valid definition of racism for a very long time.

          • @michaelmrose@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4•23 hours ago

            The Frenchs behavior was abhorrent but this doesn’t absolve anyone from the requirement to be moral themselves.

            Murdering women and children isn’t resisting genocide it’s just plain old genocide same as if we had put German civilians into their own ovens after ww2.

            Were those civilians complicit. Largely I feel that the answer is yes. But we are required to be moral ourselves even when faced with immorality.