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Topic Summary

Posted by: antihellenistic
« on: March 24, 2024, 02:47:45 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

Source :

Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America page 123, 124
Posted by: antihellenistic
« on: March 22, 2024, 09:57:21 am »

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.

Source :

Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America page 85, 86
Posted by: AltRightInternetPipeline
« on: August 30, 2023, 04:52:02 pm »

"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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ywzwUfFmHg
Posted by: antihellenistic
« on: January 31, 2023, 10:51:52 pm »

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).

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).

Source : 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 :

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/colonial-era/it-was-not-'blacks'-who-falsify-islamic-teachings-and-destroy-the-islamic-caliph/msg17417/#msg17417

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/colonial-era/coups-colonialism-in-haiti-france-u-s-urged-to-pay-reparations-for-destroying-na/msg17704/#msg17704

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/colonial-era/coups-colonialism-in-haiti-france-u-s-urged-to-pay-reparations-for-destroying-na/msg14924/#msg14924
Posted by: antihellenistic
« on: January 29, 2023, 01:19:44 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

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"
Posted by: guest30
« on: July 30, 2022, 08:40:15 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?
Posted by: guest30
« on: July 10, 2022, 12:09:19 am »

Quote
"One day we will demolish the Eiffel Tower! And all other buildings in France built during this era!..."

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 : 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]

More about the order of destructing Paris :

Source : 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.
Posted by: 90sRetroFan
« on: May 25, 2022, 09:38:33 pm »

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.

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.

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.
Posted by: 90sRetroFan
« on: May 25, 2022, 09:37:48 pm »

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.
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“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.
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They called the burden imposed on Haiti “perhaps the single most odious sovereign debt in history.”
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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.
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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.

We need to revive this!
Posted by: guest55
« on: May 25, 2022, 06:15:30 pm »

Debt, Coups & Colonialism in Haiti: France & U.S. Urged to Pay Reparations for Destroying Nation
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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.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2q98odZz2U