Posted on 10/30/2024 7:18:20 AM PDT by Cronos
The difference is that mainland France was an industrial power, not an agricultural state
Haiti got its independence before the Monroe doctrine.
At the point in time, the USA was still poor and unable to project power much internationally.
The USA also had half of its states as slave-states who would NOT look kindly on a state founded by freed slaves.
The USA was in no position to aid and would not have helped before the 1850s
“We can debate the brutality of slavery all day long”
Not really - here we’re talking about the brutality of FRENCH slaves IN Haiti in the 1700s - it was considered brutal by the Standards of the day, not by today’s standard (where it would be incredibly brutal).
Slavery is using a person without pay and forcing them to do some work - but it doesn’t HAVE to be brutal.
Some slave-owners in English colonies were not —> read the biography of Olaudah Equiano - a man who was enslaved as a 11 year old by Africans and then later sold to people who took him to the Carribean: he describes different types of slave owners:
To me, it would seem logical that you want to treat the slaves kindly so that they don’t rise up. You would also see better returns and you’d have less “replacement cost”.
Many of the slave-holders did understand this.
But we KNOW that in Haiti, they did not - the brutality was remarked upon by French observers of the time
How people are treated is crucial. The Haitian American known as Pierre Toussaint was born into slavery. Treated well, he was educated and trained for household work. Brought to New York, Toussaint prospered in freedom as a hairdresser and became the de facto founder of Catholic Charities. He was declared Venerable by the Catholic Church for his kindness and many acts of charity, which extended to the impoverished French family who had once owned him. Toussaint is now buried under the altar of St. Peters, a distinction otherwise reserved for bishops and cardinals.
I want to thank everyone who added greatly to this discussion— it’s classic FR!
Often wish I had paid more attention to history classes in school; but in adulthood, we have FR’s scholars, researchers and interested readers to shed light.
You can consider the genocide in light of whatever you wish.
I regard myself as being free to not care about Haiti, and to oppose having migration from there to here, and to want to deport every last one back.
“ Your upbringing, environment and choices play a role as important or sometimes more important than DNA”
DNA has a lot to do with IQ, and also testosterone levels (which affect propensity towards violence).
Interesting chart of the DNA of Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. One small point—the Y DNA is paternal and found only in males; the mtDNA is inherited from the mother (and both males and females have it). It is remarkable how much the different countries vary in the percentages of ancestral origins.
1. “different racial makeup” - The ethnic composition of the Dominican population is 70% mixed race, 18% white, and 12% black; while 95% of the Haitian population is black.
Here is a breakup of the maternal (Y) and paternal (mtDNA) breakdowns of the antilles
Thank you for the interesting post. I think you are underestimating the ethnic composition of Haitians. Your image shows 75% sub-Saharan mtDNA ( total population descent from the mother to child) and about 35% Sub-Saharan Y (male population descent). That makes for a population that is mostly descended from Sub-Saharan Africans. Historical documents tell us that those people were slaves. Yes they are mixed but by American standards, they are black.
By that time almost all slaves had been born here and didn’t have any more connection to Africa than you do. Since families were often broken apart upon the sale of their owners’ estates and children or parents split apart and sold there wasn’t much opportunity to pass on family histories or past national, or even tribal identity.
They probably didn’t even know which African country their ancestors came from. A few did, and a few were interested in at least founding the new American colony of Liberia, but most slaves were as Americanized as the whites. Some so mixed blooded they even looked white.
Sometimes if not most of the time our “aid” to the 3rd world was done more for our benefit than theirs, and has done more harm than good.
In the case of Haiti, to kiss up to our farmers the politicians in the US bought tons of grain, rice in particular, and then dumped it on Haiti as foreign aid. All that did was cause the price of rice to collapse and that destroyed Haitian farmers, making Haiti more, not less dependent on outside aid.
Worse, we let the thugs hand out the aid, rather than insuring fair distribution. That just empowered the worst elements of their society.
A similar problem occurred in Vietnam, where US aid was a boon for US farmers but did damage to Vietnamese farmers, who couldn’t compete with the huge quantities of free grain.
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