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#Post#: 13649--------------------------------------------------
Coups & Colonialism in Haiti: France & U.S. Urged to Pay
Reparations for Destroying Nation
By: guest55 Date: May 25, 2022, 6:15 pm
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Debt, Coups & Colonialism in Haiti: France & U.S. Urged to Pay
Reparations for Destroying Nation
[quote]We look in depth at “The Ransom,” a new series in The New
York Times that details how France devastated Haiti’s economy by
forcing Haiti to pay massive reparations for the loss of slave
labor after enslaved Haitians rebelled, founding the world’s
first Black republic in 1804. We speak with historians Westenley
Alcenat and Gerald Horne on the story of Haiti’s finances and
how Haitian demands for reparations have been repeatedly shut
down. Alcenat says the series “exposes the rest of the world to
a knowledge that actually has existed for over a hundred years,”
and while he welcomes the series, he demands The New York Times
apologize for publishing racist Haitian stereotypes in 2010 by
columnist David Brooks. Horne also requests The New York Times
make the revelatory documents that the series cites accessible
to other historians. He says the series will “hopefully cause us
to reexamine the history of this country and move away from the
propaganda point that somehow the United States was an
abolitionist republic when actually it was the foremost
slaveholder’s republic.”[/quote]
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2q98odZz2U
#Post#: 13655--------------------------------------------------
Re: Coups & Colonialism in Haiti: France & U.S. Urged to
Pay Reparations for Destroying Nation
By: 90sRetroFan Date: May 25, 2022, 9:37 pm
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HTML https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/world/americas/haiti-history-colonized-france.html
[quote]Coffee has been the fulcrum of life here for almost three
centuries, since enslaved people cut the first French coffee
plantations into the mountainsides. Back then, this was not
Haiti, but Saint-Domingue — the biggest supplier of coffee and
sugar consumed in Parisian kitchens and Hamburg coffee houses.
The colony made many French families fabulously rich. It was
also, many historians say, the world’s most brutal.
Ms. Present’s ancestors put an end to that, taking part in the
modern world’s first successful slave revolution in 1791 and
establishing an independent nation in 1804 — decades before
Britain outlawed slavery or the Civil War broke out in America.
But for generations after independence, Haitians were forced to
pay the descendants of their former slave masters, including the
Empress of Brazil; the son-in-law of the Russian Emperor
Nicholas I; Germany’s last imperial chancellor; and Gaston de
Galliffet, the French general known as the “butcher of the
Commune” for crushing an insurrection in Paris in 1871.
The burdens continued well into the 20th century. The wealth Ms.
Present’s ancestors coaxed from the ground brought wild profits
for a French bank that helped finance the Eiffel Tower, Crédit
Industriel et Commercial, and its investors. They controlled
Haiti’s treasury from Paris for decades, and the bank eventually
became part of one of Europe’s largest financial conglomerates.
The first people in the modern world to free themselves from
slavery and create their own nation were forced to pay for their
freedom yet again — in cash.
Twenty-one years after Haiti’s revolutionary heroes declared
their country’s independence, swearing to die before being put
back in chains or living under French domination again, a
squadron of French warships — equipped with some 500 cannons —
loomed off Haiti’s coastline.
The king’s envoy, the Baron of Mackau, issued a daunting
ultimatum:
Hand over a staggering sum in reparations to Haiti’s former
slave masters, or face another war.
The Haitians had ample reason for alarm. Two decades earlier,
Napoleon had tried to destroy them, sending one of the largest
expeditions of warships ever dispatched by France, with his
brother-in-law at the helm. The Haitians won and declared
independence. Napoleon lost more troops than he did at Waterloo
and withdrew.
But rich French colonists continued to press to reconquer the
territory, and they found another sympathetic ear when the
Bourbon monarchy returned to power. One minister of the navy, a
former colonist and prominent defender of slavery, even drafted
a new plan to put Haitians back in bondage or “crush them” with
a still larger army.
No country could be expected to come to Haiti’s defense. The
world powers had frozen it out, refusing to officially
acknowledge its independence. American lawmakers in particular
did not want enslaved people in their own country to be inspired
by Haiti’s self-liberation and rise up.
So, Haiti’s president, eager for the trade and security of
international recognition, bowed to France’s demands. With that,
Haiti set another precedent: It became the world’s first and
only country where the descendants of enslaved people paid
reparations to the descendants of their masters — for
generations.
It is often called the “independence debt.” But that is a
misnomer. It was a ransom.
The amount was far beyond Haiti’s meager means. Even the first
installment was about six times the government’s income that
year, based on official receipts documented by the 19th-century
Haitian historian Beaubrun Ardouin.
But that was the point, and part of the plan. The French king
had given the baron a second mission: to ensure the former
colony took out a loan from young French banks to make the
payments.
This became known as Haiti’s “double debt” — the ransom and the
loan to pay it — a stunning load that boosted the fledgling
Parisian international banking system and helped cement Haiti’s
path into poverty and underdevelopment. According to Ardouin’s
records, the bankers’ commissions alone exceeded the Haitian
government’s total revenues that year.
...
“The slaves fought for our independence,” he said. “To make them
pay for that independence again, it was setting up another form
of slavery.”
Since then, the double debt has largely faded into history.
France has repeatedly downplayed, distorted or buried it. Only a
few scholars have examined it deeply. No detailed accounting of
how much the Haitians actually paid has ever been done,
historians say.
...
They called the burden imposed on Haiti “perhaps the single most
odious sovereign debt in history.”
...
Little of this history is recognized by France. The reparations
Haitians were forced to pay their former masters for generations
are not covered in French schools, researchers say. And when a
Haitian president began loudly raising the subject, the French
government scoffed and tried to squelch it.
...
Some of the families that received payments over decades remain
European royalty and French aristocracy. Their descendants
include Maximilian Margrave of Baden, a first cousin of Prince
Charles; the French businessman Ernest-Antoine Seillière de
Laborde, who once ran the country’s powerful association of big
businesses; and Michel de Ligne, the Belgian prince whose
ancestors were close to Catherine the Great and built a castle
known as the “Belgian Versailles,” where hundreds of Jewish
children were hidden during the Holocaust.
During slavery, Haiti brimmed with such wealth that its largest
and most important city, Cap-Français, was known as the “Paris
of the Antilles,” bursting with bookstores, cafes, gardens,
elegant public squares and bubbling fountains. The Comédie du
Cap sat 1,500 people and put on 200 performances a year — many
direct from Paris — as well as regular dances and balls. The
town’s slate-roofed houses, with their whitewashed walls and
courtyards, rented for four times the price of a ground-floor
apartment in central Paris, according to the historian John
Garrigus. The harbor, choked with garbage today, was perennially
full of ocean-worthy sailing ships.
All this happened quickly. The mountainous colony, tucked into
the western part of the island of Hispaniola, was colonized by
France later than most of the Caribbean, yet in less than a
century its plantations were the leading suppliers of sugar to
Europe. Only in the late 1730s were the colony’s first coffee
plantations cut into the mountainsides in Dondon, where Ms.
Present still farms today.
By the late 1780s, the colony of Saint-Domingue alone had
absorbed 40 percent of the entire trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Many kidnapped Africans died within a few years of being pulled
from the putrid, crowded bowels of slave ships and branded with
their new masters’ names or initials.
The survivors made up an astounding 90 percent of the colony’s
total population, kept in line by hunger, exhaustion and public
acts of extreme violence. Crowds of colonists gathered in one of
the island’s fancy squares to watch them be burned alive or
broken, bone by bone, on a wheel.
Sadistic punishments were so common they were given names like
the “four post” or the “ladder,” historians note. There was even
a technique of stuffing enslaved people with gunpowder to blow
them up like cannonballs, described as burning “a little powder
in the arse,” according to French historian Pierre de Vaissière,
who cited a 1736 letter from a colonist.
“O land of mine, is there any other on this planet whose soil
has been more soaked in human blood?” asked the Baron de Vastey,
a government officer in the northern part of Haiti in his 1814
work “The Colonial System Unveiled.”
“To France’s shame, not a single one of the monsters,” he wrote,
singling out plantation owners and their managers by name, has
experienced “even the slightest punishment for his crimes.”
France strengthened its laws forbidding the mutilation or
killing of enslaved people in the 1780s, a sign of how openly
cruel some plantation owners had become. A few years later, 14
enslaved people from a remote coffee plantation made the long
trip to the Cap-Français courthouse to test the new laws. Their
master, a rich planter named Nicolas Lejeune, had tortured two
women whom investigators found in chains, their legs charred
from burns. They died soon after, yet Lejeune was acquitted.
The only thing that will prevent “the slave from stabbing the
master” is “the absolute power he has over him,” Lejeune wrote
to the prosecutor, according to historian Malick Ghachem.
“Remove this brake and the slave will dare anything.”
The enslaved people of Saint-Domingue rose up late one August
evening in 1791, starting what some historians call the largest
slave uprising in history.
Little documentation about the early days of the revolution
exists. One enslaved person confessed, most likely under
torture, that a clandestine meeting took place in the woods,
attended by 200 others from across the north. The rebels later
held a ceremony, vowing to destroy their oppressors and the
tools of their subjugation.
They did it with whatever weapons they could grab or fashion and
— most effectively — with fire, burning sugar cane fields and
plantation buildings. The cloud of black smoke that engulfed
Cap-Français made the sky glow after sunset like the northern
aurora, one French surgeon recounted.
Within two weeks, every plantation within 50 miles of
Cap-Français was reduced to ash and the rebels, many dressed in
rags, organized into three armies, with hundreds on horseback.
One leader became infamous for wielding the same cruel
punishments slaveholders had used, whipping colonists hundreds
of times and hacking off their hands.[/quote]
We need to revive this!
#Post#: 13656--------------------------------------------------
Re: Coups & Colonialism in Haiti: France & U.S. Urged to
Pay Reparations for Destroying Nation
By: 90sRetroFan Date: May 25, 2022, 9:38 pm
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[quote]The declaration of independence for Haiti — the
Indigenous name that revolutionaries reclaimed for their country
— offered enslaved people hope from Brazil to South Carolina,
noted the historian Julius S. Scott.
But for their masters, it set a chilling precedent.
“The peace of 11 states in this union will not permit the fruits
of a successful Negro insurrection,” Senator Thomas Benton of
Missouri told his fellow lawmakers in Congress, explaining why
the United States should not recognize Haiti’s independence. “It
will not permit Black consuls and ambassadors to establish
themselves in our cities, and to parade through our country.”
Or, as Senator John Berrien of Georgia said, official relations
with Haiti would “introduce a moral contagion” that would make
even the most horrifying pestilence seem “light and
insignificant.”
Haiti knew the French would return, a premonition that still
towers in stone over the country from a green peak above
Dondon’s coffee farms. It is called the Citadelle, the largest
military fortress in the Caribbean and arguably Haiti’s most
important building. Its gray walls, now patched with orange
lichen, are as thick as 16 feet and as high as 147 feet. From
one angle, they sweep like the prow of a monstrous ocean tanker
bearing down on any flimsy vessels below. More than 160 cannons
point threateningly from its openings and ledges.
Some 20,000 peasants — conscripted by the new Haitian government
— built it in just 14 years, beginning shortly after
independence. It was just one of 30 forts ordered up by
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s first ruler, in preparation for
what he called “an eventual offensive return of the French.”
That day finally came, 21 years after independence.
On July 3, 1825, a French warship, accompanied by two other
ships, sailed into the port of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital.
They were sent by Charles X, the newly installed king of France,
to enforce an ordinance: In exchange for 150 million francs, and
an enormous reduction in custom taxes on French goods, France
would recognize its former colony’s independence.
If the Haitian government did not accept the ordinance, exactly
as written, the Baron of Mackau, Ange René Armand, had orders to
declare Haiti an “enemy of France” and blockade its ports. In
his own handwritten account, the baron said he had been
instructed to launch military operations that “can no longer be
stopped.”
“I am not a negotiator,” he told Haiti’s president, Jean-Pierre
Boyer, according to the baron’s account, which was published in
France this year. “I am only a soldier.”
Just up the coast, 11 more French warships waited. One of the
Haitian president’s top generals rushed a letter to him in the
middle of the talks, saying his men in the coastal mountains
northwest of Port-au-Prince had spotted the French fleet.
The idea of payment had been raised before, first by the Haitian
president in 1814 as a way of fending off what many saw as an
imminent French invasion. Frozen out of trade with France and at
times the United States, Boyer himself had discussed the idea,
in exchange for international recognition of Haiti’s
independence.
But those were diplomatic negotiations. Now, a crippling amount
was being demanded under threat of war. The French demand was
“excessive” and beyond “all our calculations,” Boyer said,
according to the baron’s account.
But after three days of meetings, he relented.
Some historians dispute the notion that Boyer accepted the
demands merely to protect his people from war. Alex Dupuy, a
Haitian American scholar, argues that the president wanted to
enshrine the property rights of the Haitian elite who had taken
over land, and knew the costs would be offloaded onto the poor
masses. “One has to understand the pressure France put on Haiti,
but also the interests of the Haitian ruling class,” he said.
The ordinance broke new ground. Typically, historians say, war
reparations are imposed on the losers. Victorious European
nations forced France to pay them after the Napoleonic Wars in
1815, a decade before the Baron of Mackau set foot in Haiti.
After World War I, Allied nations imposed huge penalties on
Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, fueling bitter resentment
that carried into World War II.
But in this case, the victors — who had first thrown off their
shackles, and then defended themselves by beating back
Napoleon’s forces — were the ones to pay. Instead of remedying,
or even acknowledging, the abuses of slavery, the ordinance
focused on the financial losses of the former masters.
In the coming decades, some nations, like Britain, abolished
slavery and paid slaveholders for their losses, while also
requiring newly freed people to continue working for their
former masters for a number of years without pay. As the Swiss
historian Frédérique Beauvois points out, the United States was
an outlier: It freed people after the Civil War, and granted no
compensation to their enslavers.
But Haiti’s case was unique. The Haitians had already freed
themselves.
In the other cases, governments paid slaveholders to ease their
opposition to abolition laws and to ensure that the economy
would not crash, she said. But with Haiti, France demanded
payment from those who had been in chains.
“It was to punish them,” Ms. Beauvois said. “It was vengeance.”
The price tag was huge. In 1803, France sold Louisiana to the
United States for 80 million francs — just over half what it
demanded from Haiti. And back then, Louisiana encompassed a
large sweep of the continent, stretching across all or parts of
15 modern states. Haiti was 1/77 the size.
The Haitian government didn’t have enough money to pay even the
first of five installments.
So the baron brought three Haitian diplomats with him back to
France. There, they sealed a 30 million franc loan. But after
the group of bankers, which included the Rothschilds, took its
commissions, Haiti got only 24 million francs.
Instead of 150 million, Haiti suddenly owed 156 million, plus
interest.
It was one of the first of many loans by French bankers to
foreign governments that transformed Paris into a hub of
international finance. And it became a prototype for controlling
colonies after their independence, fulfilling the vision of the
baron, who later became France’s minister of the navy and
colonies.
“Under such a regime,” he wrote, “Haiti would undoubtedly become
a highly profitable and costless province of France.”
In Paris, the king named a commission to sort through more than
27,000 demands for compensation that flooded in decades after
the Haitian revolution.
The biggest single payout went to the family of one of the
biggest slaveholders in Haiti’s history, Jean-Joseph de Laborde,
a banker for Louis XV, according to Oliver Gliech, a German
historian who has created a database of former colonists.
In the late 18th century, Laborde shipped nearly 10,000 Africans
to Haiti in his slave boats and had more than 2,000 enslaved
people on his plantations there, many of whom died. French
revolutionaries beheaded him in 1794, but two of his children,
Alexandre and Nathalie, received about 350,000 francs, or about
$1.7 million today, for his claimed losses in Haiti.
Officially, former colonists got just one-tenth of what they
lost. But Laborde’s son, Alexandre, a fervent abolitionist, said
in an 1833 parliamentary debate that the compensation payments
were so large they actually exceeded the plantation owners’
losses.
“With half of the compensation I would receive, I could buy the
three houses I owned,” he told lawmakers.
By law, the commission could compensate Frenchmen only for lost
real estate. But it was clear that “slaves were almost the only
value of Saint-Domingue” and should be part of the calculus,
Jean-Marie Pardessus, an official who helped set the rules on
compensation, told his fellow lawmakers.
What little is known about the commission’s decisions comes from
a 990-page volume of its original handwritten notes discovered
in the French archives in Roubaix in 2006.
Some former colonists submitted letters from slave ship captains
and slave merchants as proof of the kidnapped Africans they had
purchased on the eve of the revolution. Conversely,
commissioners subtracted the value of enslaved people colonists
took with them when fleeing.
In 1828, the commission heard from Philippine Louise Geneviève
de Cocherel. Her father, the recently deceased Marquis of
Cocherel, had owned six properties, including a sugar plantation
and a coffee plantation.
Cocherel had been singled out by the Baron de Vastey in his
treatise on the horrors of slavery, but in flowing handwriting,
the commissioner’s note taker recorded the marquis’s losses with
bureaucratic dispassion:
His sugar and cotton plantations had been “reduced by death” to
220 enslaved people, valued at 3,425 francs per head.
The coffee plantation’s slaves had been “reduced to 40 by
death,” their worth put at 3,250 francs each. On the ranch, the
seven enslaved people had been “reduced to” six, worth 2,500 per
head.
In 1789, before the slave rebellion, the marquis bought 21
recently kidnapped Africans before leaving for France. But he
didn’t indicate where they were put to work, so the commission
valued them at an average rate, down to the cent: 3,366.66
francs.
In the end, it awarded Cocherel’s daughter, a newly married
marquise, average annual payments of 1,450 francs, or about $280
in the 1860s, for dozens of years, according to government
publications of the commission’s decisions.
By contrast, coffee farmers in Haiti were earning about $76 a
year in 1863, Edmond Paul, a Haitian economist and politician,
wrote at the time — barely enough to cover one meal a day of
“the least substantive foods.”
It was reminiscent, he said, of slavery.
The Haitian government ran out of money right away. To finish
its first payment, it emptied its state coffers, sending it all
to France on a French ship, sealed in bags inside nailed crates
reinforced with iron bands. That left no money for public
services.
The French government threatened war to collect the rest.
“An army of 500,000 men is ready to fight,” wrote the French
foreign minister in 1831 to his consul in Haiti, “and behind
this imposing force, a reserve of two million.”
In response, President Boyer passed a law commanding every
Haitian to be ready to defend the country. He built the leafy
suburb of Pétionville, now the bastion of the Haitian elite, up
the hill from the harbor — out of range of cannon fire.
Even French diplomats recognized their threats had prompted the
Haitian government to pour money into its military, rather than
send it to France.
“The fear of France, which naturally wants to be paid, does not
allow it to reduce its military state,” reads a 1832 letter by
one French diplomat.
In late 1837, two French envoys arrived in Port-au-Prince with
orders to negotiate a new treaty and get the payments flowing
again. The so-called independence debt was reduced to 90 million
francs, and in 1838, another warship returned to France with
Haiti’s second payment, which swallowed much of Haiti’s revenues
once again.
The military sucked up another large chunk, according to the
French abolitionist writer and politician Victor Schœlcher.
After that, there was very little left for hospitals, public
works and other aspects of public welfare. Education had been
assigned a mere 15,816 gourdes — less than 1 percent of the
budget.
From the very beginning, French officials knew how disastrous
the payments would be for Haiti. But they kept insisting on
getting paid, and for decades — with some exceptions, notably
during periods of political upheaval — Haiti came up with the
money.
The Times tracked each payment Haiti made over the course of 64
years, drawing from thousands of pages of archival records in
France and Haiti, along with dozens of articles and books from
the 19th and early 20th centuries, including by the Haitian
finance minister Frédéric Marcelin.
In some years, Haiti’s payments to France soaked up more than 40
percent of the government’s total revenues.
“They don’t know which way to turn,” a French captain wrote to
the Baron of Mackau in 1826 after collecting a shipment of gold
from Haiti.
“After trying domestic loans, patriotic subscriptions, forced
donations, sales of public property, they have finally settled
on the worst of all options,” the captain wrote: 10 years of
exorbitant taxes that were “so out of all proportion to the
achievable resources of the country, that when each one sells
all that he possesses, and then sells himself, not even half of
the sums demanded will be collected.”
Yet by 1874, Haiti had paid down all but 12 million francs of
its double debt to France, in large part through coffee taxes.
To finish off the rest — and finally invest in the country’s
development by building bridges, railroads, lighthouses — the
government took out two more hefty loans from French bankers.
The borrowing ended up being a “shameless waste,” the president
of Haiti’s national assembly said after a parliamentary
investigation.
In an 1875 loan, the French bankers and investors took a 40
percent cut off the top.
...
The bank that benefited most from the 1875 loan was Crédit
Industriel et Commercial, the French institution that helped
finance the Eiffel Tower.[/quote]
One day we will demolish the Eiffel Tower! And all other
buildings in France built during this era!
[quote]And soon after its first lucrative foray into Haiti,
Crédit Industriel shaped the country yet again, helping to
establish the National Bank of Haiti.
Nearly the only thing Haitian about it was the name.
Headquartered in Paris, controlled by French businessmen and
aristocrats, the bank took over Haiti’s treasury operations,
charged a commission any time the Haitian government so much as
deposited money or paid a bill, and delivered the profits to its
shareholders in France. In 1894, a banner year, its French
investors earned more than the Haitian government’s proposed
agriculture budget for the entire country.
After 1915, when the Americans replaced the French as the
dominant force in Haiti, they did more than just control the
country’s national bank: They installed a puppet government,
dissolved parliament at gunpoint, entrenched segregation, forced
Haitians to build roads for no pay, killed protesters and
rewrote the nation’s Constitution, enabling foreigners to own
property for the first time since independence.
The military occupation lasted 19 years, and was justified as
vital to securing American interests in the region and taming
Haiti’s chaos. The United States, where lawmakers once feared
the contagion effect of Haitian independence, now depicted the
invasion as a civilizing mission, necessary because, as
Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote in 1918, “the African
race are devoid of any capacity for political organization.”
There was another hand behind the occupation, as well: Wall
Street, in particular the National City Bank of New York, the
predecessor of Citigroup. By 1922, its affiliate had bought all
the shares in Haiti’s national bank and, with a guarantee from
the American government that it would be repaid, won the chance
to lend still more money to Haiti. The bank ended up controlling
nearly all of Haiti’s foreign debt — and then followed a
well-established pattern.
It did little to develop Haiti, while sucking up a quarter of
the country’s revenues over the next decade, according to annual
fiscal reports reviewed by The Times.[/quote]
NEVER FORGIVE. NEVER FORGET.
This is why we need all present and future Haitians who want to
migrate to France (or the US, for that matter) being allowed to
do so, and better yet having their journeys and resettlement
processes actively assisted and funded.
#Post#: 14609--------------------------------------------------
Re : Coups & Colonialism in Haiti: France & U.S. Urged t
o Pay Reparations for Destroying Nation
By: guest30 Date: July 10, 2022, 12:09 am
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote]"One day we will demolish the Eiffel Tower! And all other
buildings in France built during this era!..."[/quote]
There's some movements which already tried to did that but fail
because they are betrayed. Not just to France, but the entire
Liberal Western Europe :
Source :
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Decree
[quote]...This was not the first time Hitler had tried to
destroy infrastructure before it could be taken. Shortly before
the Liberation of Paris, Hitler ordered explosives to be placed
around important landmarks, such as the Eiffel Tower, and key
transportation hubs. If the Allies came near the city, the
military governor, General Dietrich von Choltitz was to detonate
these bombs, leaving Paris "lying in complete debris."[4] Von
Choltitz, however, did not carry out the order and surrendered
to the Allies, later alleging that this was the moment he
realized that "Hitler was insane." Similarly, Hitler had issued
orders to enact a scorched earth policy upon the Netherlands in
late 1944, when it became obvious that the Allies were about to
retake the country, but Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the
Reichskommissar in charge of the Netherlands during its
occupation, was able to greatly limit the scope to which the
order was executed.[5]
[/quote]
More about the order of destructing Paris :
Source :
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_of_Paris#FFI_uprising_(19%E2%80%9323_August)
[quote]Despite repeated orders from Adolf Hitler that the French
capital "must not fall into the enemy's hand except lying in
complete debris", which was to be accomplished by bombing it and
blowing up its bridges,[20] Choltitz, as commander of the German
garrison and military governor of Paris, surrendered on 25
August at the Hôtel Meurice. He was then driven to the Paris
Police Prefecture where he signed the official surrender, then
to the Gare Montparnasse, Montparnasse train station, where
General Leclerc had established his command post, to sign the
surrender of the German troops in Paris. Choltitz was kept
prisoner until April 1947. In his memoir Brennt Paris? ("Is
Paris Burning?"), first published in 1950,[21] Choltitz
describes himself as the saviour of Paris, though some
historians opine that it was more the case that he had lost
control of the city and had no means to carry out Hitler's
orders.[/quote]
#Post#: 14924--------------------------------------------------
Inferiority of French Revolution
By: guest30 Date: July 30, 2022, 8:40 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
Can we make the Haitian Revolution as the inspiration rather
than French Revolution which did not contribute anything to the
destruction of Western Civilization? The "False-Leftist" always
concern on the "French Revolution" for their pretext of
enforcing human rights and democratization (Freemasonry
doctrine). Whereas the Haitian Revolution resulting the
superiority of organized community (More like system of
Fuhrerprinzip) and led the French and British's colonial losses?
#Post#: 17704--------------------------------------------------
Re: Coups & Colonialism in Haiti: France & U.S. Urged to
Pay Reparations for Destroying Nation
By: antihellenistic Date: January 29, 2023, 1:19 am
---------------------------------------------------------
Inferiority of French Revolution Part 2
Differences between the Islamic Unity Teachings and Unity Based
on the Ideology of the French Revolution.
[quote]Among the most important formulations that emerged from
the Renaissance was a total revision of the political system,
legislation and all systems of life. One of the political
conceptions that was born from the European Renaissance was
nationalism. When the drums of the French Revolution were
beating, half the head of King Louis XVI was beheaded in 1793,
the slogans "Freedom" (Liberté), "Equality" (égalité) and
"Brotherhood" (fraternité) became very popular among Europeans.
The last slogan, Fraternite, has a different meaning of
"brotherhood" between European and Islamic meanings. The
fraternite that is meant by the European conception is
brotherhood on the basis of the same language, race, fate, and
territory; and this is the basic idea of the concept of
nationalism. As stated in Islam, where brotherhood in the
Islamic world is more emphasized on unity based on following
Islamic religion[/quote]
Sources : The Caliphate and the Fear of the Dutch Colonialist
The conclusion is, French Revolution liberal ideology resulting
division of people based on their race and territory of their
live. It prevents people to unite regardless of their
territorial origins, languages, and races against the common
enemy, the Western Civilization. It was not "blacks" who made an
ideological structures which resulting unnecessary divisions,
but "whites"
#Post#: 17748--------------------------------------------------
Re: Western Democracy
By: antihellenistic Date: January 31, 2023, 10:51 pm
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Inferiority of French Revolution Part 3
Discriminative worldview of Western Liberalism
[quote]In On Liberty Mill argued that “Liberty, as a principle,
has no application to any state of things anterior to the time
when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and
equal discussion” (1963, vol. 18: 224). Thus “Despotism is a
legitimate form of government in dealing with barbarians,
provided the end be their improvement…” (1963, vol. 18: 224).
This passage — infused with the spirit of nineteenth century
imperialism (and perhaps, as some maintain, latent racism) — is
often ignored by defenders of Mill as an embarrassment (Parekh,
1994; Parekh, 1995; Mehta, 1999; Pitts, 2005).[/quote]
Continuing :
[quote]Rawls argues that liberal peoples must distinguish
‘decent’ non-liberal societies from ‘outlaw’ and other states;
the former have a claim on liberal peoples to tolerance while
the latter do not (1999a: 59–61). Decent peoples, argues Rawls,
‘simply do not tolerate’ outlaw states which ignore human
rights: such states may be subject to ‘forceful sanctions and
even to intervention’ (1999a: 81). In contrast, Rawls insists
that “liberal peoples must try to encourage [non-liberal] decent
peoples and not frustrate their vitality by coercively insisting
that all societies be liberal” (1999a: 62).[/quote]
Source :
HTML https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/#LibTheVal
Continuation of French Revolution's ideological ideas which
promoting democracy and progressivism or westernization,
resulting enhancement of racial-oppression, or colonialism
See previous analysis of French Revolution :
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/colonial-era/it-was-not-'blacks'-who-falsify-islamic-teachings-and-destroy-the-islamic-caliph/msg17417/#msg17417
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/colonial-era/coups-colonialism-in-haiti-france-u-s-urged-to-pay-reparations-for-destroying-na/msg17704/#msg17704
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/colonial-era/coups-colonialism-in-haiti-france-u-s-urged-to-pay-reparations-for-destroying-na/msg14924/#msg14924
#Post#: 21812--------------------------------------------------
Re: Coups & Colonialism in Haiti: France & U.S. Urged to
Pay Reparations for Destroying Nation
By: AltRightInternetPipeline Date: August 30, 2023, 4:52 pm
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"Modern Form of Slavery": Haitians at Dominican Sugar
Plantations Work Under Inhumane Conditions
[quote]We go with Democracy Now! correspondent Juan Carlos
Dávila to the Dominican Republic, where many Haitian migrants
and their descendants work on sugar plantations under conditions
amounting to forced labor and live in heavily underresourced
communities known as bateyes. Many bateyes do not have
electricity or running water. We speak to local residents and
members of the Reconocido movement, which fights for the rights
of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, about the workers'
inhumane treatment and their lack of legal status in the
country, as well as about efforts to improve living conditions
in the bateyes, such as an initiative spearheaded by the Puerto
Rican environmental group Casa Pueblo to install solar panels in
the communities. "The right of energy has to be for everyone,"
says Casa Pueblo's executive director, Arturo Massol-Deyá, who
shares how his organization is working in solidarity with batey
residents to disrupt the cycle of poverty and prepare for
climate adaptation.[/quote]
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ywzwUfFmHg
#Post#: 25591--------------------------------------------------
Re: Coups & Colonialism in Haiti: France & U.S. Urged to
Pay Reparations for Destroying Nation
By: antihellenistic Date: March 22, 2024, 9:57 am
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Simple History to Understand the Real Enlightenment, Haitian
Revolution
[quote]While most historians agree that the stormy exercise in
democracy was the genesis of the Haitian Revolution, it was also
the largest slave rebellion in the history of the world.
Contrary to most assumptions, the enslaved revolutionaries did
not consider their rebellion against slavery as a rebellion
against France: no, they were fighting for Black people. The
racial hierarchy in Haiti was more complex than just skin color,
and it involved four separate classes:
GRANDS BLANCS: The white planter class was the wealthiest of
Haiti’s enslavers and usually owned multiple slaves and large
plantations.
PETITS BLANCS: They were just as white as the planters, but not
as rich. Many were shopkeepers, artisans, teachers, and small
business owners. Because these categories were not officially
defined, it is impossible to accurately estimate the petit blanc
population, but Haiti’s combined white population numbered about
forty thousand.
FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR: These were about thirty thousand people of
mixed race in Haiti, many of whom were children of white
Frenchmen and enslaved women. French enslavers often emancipated
their mixed-race children. Many were wealthy and were often more
proslavery than the petits blancs.
SLAVES: Numbering about seven hundred thousand, enslaved
Africans outnumbered everyone else on the island.
For months, a rumor filtered through the slave quarters that the
king of France had issued a decree of emancipation that was
suppressed by the colony’s governor and the white ruling class,
or the grands blancs.* That rumor might have been spread by
Haiti’s free people of color, who actually had been granted
citizenship by the French Revolutionary Government in May 1791,
only to have white colonizers refuse to comply. Therefore, free
Blacks and mulattos who joined the revolt considered themselves
royalists —soldiers fighting in the name of the king of France.
By combining their struggle for full equality with the fight for
the abolition of slavery, the free people of color had turned
the Haitian Revolution into a “Black thing.”
In just two weeks, the rebels took a third of Saint-Domingue
while the whites tried to organize their own army. That
September, the slavery squad struck back, killing fifteen
thousand Black fighters. Meanwhile, in France, the National
Assembly realized that this group of angry free and enslaved
Black warriors might actually gain control of the wealthiest
colony in the Caribbean. To prevent the Black takeover, they
finally granted full citizenship rights to free people of color
and sent six thousand French soldiers to quell those pesky
negroes. After gaining citizenship, free people of color were
split into two factions. As the children, consorts, and family
members of the white ruling class, many free people of color
owned slaves and joined the grands blancs in their war to
protect slavery. Others fought alongside the rebels to dismantle
the system.
The revolt was not led by a single organized military leader but
a collective of similarly minded freedom-seekers.
François-Dominique Bréda —one of those free Black men whose
citizenship had been denied—joined the rebellion in its early
stages. He initially worked as a battlefield doctor, until the
other rebel leaders noticed he was a master strategist and
tactician. Bréda tried to negotiate a peace treaty with the
white planters, offering to free their captured countrymen in
exchange for modest reforms—an extra day of rest and an end to
using the whip. Even though he was an educated man and willing
to negotiate in good faith, the whites refused to meet with him.
According to French custom, honest negotiations could only occur
between equals. Therefore, dealing with a free Black man was
tantamount to an admission of equality.
Before that snub, Bréda’s main goal had been to end the war and
become a French citizen. He was not necessarily concerned with
eradicating the practice of slavery and considered himself a
soldier for the king. However, in 1792, others began to notice a
change in the military leader’s language. He had started using
words like “freedom,” “equality,” and “emancipation.” By 1793,
Bréda was fighting for revenge.
Soon, the largest colonial powers on the planet were easing
their way into the fight for the profitable island. Napoleon was
starting wars all over Europe, so Britain employed a defensive
tactic that would later become a foundational principle of all
hip-hop battles: “If we’re beefing, then nothing is
off-limits!”* Not-So-Great Britain had just gotten their butts
kicked by the rebels in America eight years prior, and so they
saw a takeover of Haiti as a way to make up for those losses.
Plus, they were concerned about British property. If the
Saint-Domingue revolt was successful, the slaves in Britain’s
nearby Jamaican colony might start getting ideas. So England
sent six hundred soldiers from Jamaica, promising to help
restore white supremacy if the grands blancs allied with
England.[/quote]
Source :
Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America page 85,
86
#Post#: 25621--------------------------------------------------
Re: Coups & Colonialism in Haiti: France & U.S. Urged to
Pay Reparations for Destroying Nation
By: antihellenistic Date: March 24, 2024, 2:47 am
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote]Historians say more than one-third of the Africans
brought to America practiced Islam, a fact that is still stamped
on the identity and religion of Black America.9 However, very
little has been recorded about Islam among enslaved Africans
because many Muslims worshipped in secret, and non- Muslims
often did not recognize the religion. “There was one man on this
plantation, who prayed five times every day,” explained Ball,
“always turning his face to the east, when in the performance of
his devotion.” Ball was describing salah, the Muslim prayer.
Among Sierra Leone’s Mandingo people, Islam was so prevalent
that slave traders eventually began using “Mandingo” to describe
Muslim slaves. Because enslaved Muslims were more likely to be
literate, many of the interpretations and translations of the
Christian Bible came from Muslims. The Muslim practice of
circling the Kaaba is still prevalent in Black churches during
the collecting of tithes and praise breaks for dancing a “ring
shout.”
In some of Georgia’s coastal communities, the majority of the
enslaved practiced Islam. In the 1820s, Bilal Muhammad, enslaved
on Sapelo Island in Georgia, wrote a thirteen-page text in
Arabic. Belali and Hester Mohomet, also enslaved on Sapelo
Island, reflected their family’s Muslim beliefs in their
children’s names, in the family’s use of Muslim prayer beads,
and in how they observed their hours of prayer, explained their
great-grandniece, Shad Hall:
Belali hab plenty daughtuhs, Medina, Yaruba, Fatima, Bentoo,
Hestuh, Magret, and Chaalut . . . Magret an uh daughtuh Cotto
use tuh say dat Belali an he wife Phoebe pray on duh bead. Dey
wuz bery puhticluh bout duh time dey pray an dey bery regluh
bout duh hour. Wen duh sun come up, wen it straight obuh head an
wen it set, das duh time dey pray. Dey bow tuh duh sun an hab
lill mat tuh kneel on. Duh beads is on a long string. Belali he
pull bead an he say, “Belambi, Hakabara, Mahamadu.” Phoebe she
say, “Ameen, Ameen.”10[/quote]
Source :
Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America page 123,
124
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