cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3460175

Damn, that sucks. The French should have taken up Louverture on his offer instead of backstabbing him, then.

As it turns out, the Wikipedia page is shockingly wrong/misleading. The new Haitian government specifically carried out a vengeful campaign against the French whites including the poor “Petit-Blancs” who didn’t own slaves but largely supported slavery and white supremacy throughout the colony’s history, at some points even more fanatically than their rich counterparts (there was genuine threat of a mass revolt from them when the colonial government wanted to grant more rights to free mixed-race Haitians). Polish soldiers who assisted the revolution and German farmers on the island were spared, as well as non-French nationals (a common if unverified story is a white Frenchman who survived by pretending to be American).

This isn’t to say genocide under any circumstance is “okay” but I’m don’t think anyone is under any position to lecture people who were put under the sheer inhumanity of Caribbean sugar cane plantation system in particular or Transatlantic slavery in general. To say nothing of the depraved lengths the French, slave-owning or not, went to to preserve slavery in the revolutionary war (such as, as some in the comments point out, reprisal massacres, mass rapes, feeding prisoners to dogs, etc). It’s also inaccurate to say this was done only out of revenge when the fear of white French petitionining to have France reinvade was very real (as had happened). Even then, Dessalines’ mandate was far from uncontroversial or even universally-enforced. As with other things, this falls solely on France which has not even pretended to pay back the damage it has done to Haiti before, during and after the revolution.

Also, though rightoids and fashies like this guy are expected, it’s funny to see more liberal whites pearl-clutch over the 1804 massacres but somehow handwave the rest of the period as “simply another time”. You’re sure to find them under any post about the Haitian revolution bringing it up but if you bring up the fact that the American Founding Fathers were slave-owning, genocidal hypocrites on any post commemorating the 4th of July, you’re suddenly a party-pooper who doesn’t understand history.

Link if you hate yourself

These are questions that keep me up at night.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19534199

Before I begin, I have a confession: until recently (until today, in fact), I was a tankie. But this morning I just woke up and realized everything I believed and everything I'd been saying was wrong, and my critics were right about everything. And so, I have decided to completely and totally adopt their way of thinking.

The above image is an example to illustrate how my thinking has changed. You may be familiar with "Russell's Teapot," a thought experiment from Bertrand Russell where he imagines that someone says that there is a tiny, invisible teapot, floating out in space. He argues that while such a claim cannot strictly be disproved, it can be dismissed without evidence because there is no evidence to support it. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. He goes on to explain that while he could not disprove the existence of God, he still considered himself an atheist, because he did not see sufficient evidence for the claim of God's existence to be credible.

In my previous (tankie) way of thinking, I would have agreed with this idea, that claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. But I now understand that this made me a Bad Person. Suppose that, as in the beautiful diagram I drew in MS Paint, the claim is not only that the teapot exists, but that inside of the teapot, there are a bunch of tiny invisible people who are geopolitical enemies of the United States and they are committing genocide against innocent people. Again, before, I would have said that that only makes the claim more implausible and would require extraordinary proof. Now, I realize how wrong I was, and I can only say that I deeply regret and apologize for my statements. The existence of the teapot can be proven incontrovertibly, by the following logic:

1. If you claim that the teapot does not exist, you are denying that the genocide inside it is happening.

2. If you deny the genocide is happening, you are a genocide denier and therefore a fascist.

3. Fascism is wrong.

4. Therefore, it is impossible to correctly deny the teapot's existence.

As a brief aside, I should mention that in addition to my political conversion, I have also experienced a drastic change in my religious beliefs, as it is now trivially easy to prove that God exists. According to the Torah, God flooded the world, wiping out virtually all of humanity, including countless ethnic groups. To deny the existence of God makes you a genocide denier and a fascist. However, it should be added that to worship God is genocide apologia, which is also fascist. The only non-fascist belief, which is necessarily correct, is that God exists and is evil. Moving on.

Before, I believed that it was ridiculous for the US to spend as much on the military as the next 9 countries combined. I wanted to slash the military budget to fund domestic spending, schools, hospitals, making sure bridges don't collapse, helping the poor, etc. I see now how wrong I was. The Genocide Teapot exists, somewhere out there in space, in fact, there could be countless numbers of them out there. Therefore, the real progressive thing to do is to further cut domestic spending and have everyone tighten our belts so that we can produce as many missiles as possible, to be fired out into space indiscriminately, in hopes of hitting a Genocide Teapot.

However, we must also consider the possibility that these teapots could be located here on Earth too. Teapots are a form of china, which is a very suspicious connection. Clearly, the US must be permitted to inspect every square inch of China in search of these invisible teapots, and refusal to comply should be considered an admission of guilt. But we should not, of course, limit ourselves to China. Perhaps there are Genocide Teapots in Russia, or Brazil, or Germany, or Canada, who knows? I do, because to deny that Genocide Teapots exist in all of those places is genocide denial, which is fascist and wrong.

In conclusion, we should bomb every country in the world simultaneously, including ourselves, and anyone who disagrees with me is a war-loving fascist.

Thank you.