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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

It’s described in that quote and in the article as if the Haitians defeated the French on their own. The Haitian revolution was essentially part of a fight between the French and the British, and internecine conflict between various French factions. 45,000 British soldiers died vs 75,000 french soldiers, so presumably the British involvement was also as significant as the French one.

Also, of the first leader of “liberated” Haiti, Dessalines:

“Dessalines marched into Port-au-Prince, where he was welcomed as a hero by the 100 whites who had chosen to stay behind. Dessalines thanked them all for their kindness and belief in racial equality, but then he said that the French had treated him as less than human when he was a slave, and so to avenge his mistreatment, he promptly had the 100 whites all hanged.”

Off to a great start…

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Please don't take HN threads into race flamewar hell or any other flamewar hell. With this glib and snarky provocation of atrocity grievance, you turned what was already a wretched subthread into a tire fire. I assume you didn't intend that, but if it wasn't arson it was criminal negligence. We want the exact opposite of this on HN.

You also have a history of posting flamebait to HN. Please review the site guidelines and take a lot more care with this place. The ecosystem here is fragile. I'm sure you wouldn't drop lit matches in a dry forest or at a gas station, or toss Molotov cocktails into crowds at parks. So please don't do the equivalent here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"It’s described in that quote and in the article as if the Americans defeated the British on their own. The American revolution was essentially part of a fight between the French and the British..."

How does that sound to you?

As a non-american, sounds accurate to me.

That sounds correct. That's what I was taught in school as an American. What is your point?

The second sentence is incorrect, according to the American founding myth. It was a fight between the revolutionaries and the British, with assistance of the French. It turns out, when it comes to the founding of countries, the parties you give agency to matters a lot

What a bizarre comment. Someone describes Haiti's revolution accurately (presumably), and your claim is "how dare you prioritize reality over mythology", using the (also-incorrect) American founding myth to somehow support your point?

What's incorrect about the American "founding myth"? Please explain what role France played in the disagreement about taxes between the colonists and the crown?

Mentally insert "under the assumption that these are myths", if that makes you feel better. I have no interest in getting derailed into an essentially irrelevant conversation.

> [...] your claim is "how dare you prioritize reality over mythology", using the (also-incorrect) American founding myth to somehow support your point?

I made no such claim. Also "founding myth" is a term with a distinct meaning separate from "mythology" in that it is not necessarily untrue - romanticizing the truth and excluding any unflattering details is usually enough.

I really wish more people read biographies, especially by multiple people who where belligerents in the same conflict. When you hear the same story told from different perspectives, you begin to question if the history your were taught was in fact, the objective "reality".

What you called "reality" was just a perspective from a single point of view, which I can safely assume was European.

That is absolutely not what any American high schooler is taught.

It’s also what I was taught in American (private) high school.

I'm curious to see the curricula that are teaching this incorrect rubbish.

What role did France play in the Boston Tea Party? I'm not aware of any at all. Certainly France jumped in once they saw the opportunity happening, but the idea that the revolution was really part of the conflict with France is just wrong.

It's 100% what I was taught, as I mentioned in my previous comment before even reading those. Where do you get such confidence in claims that are so incredibly wrong and so guaranteed to be easily rebutted?

It turns out that America is a big place with many school districts. They are not all teaching from the same books.

The joke's on you! I was taught world history in high school and never American history.

The "American" studies class was about the Constitution, various laws, major Lobbying groups (ACLU, NAACP, FOP, NRA), how primaries work, etc. etc. American history was left to grade school.

It's what we were taught when I was in school. Granted, that was 30 years ago, so it may have changed since.

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

One of my high school history classes presented this view; we used A People's History of the United States as a textbook.

Incorrect. The French didn't get involved until after Washington had scored a couple of (lucky) victories. Guess they didn't want to back a loser.

The French didn't get involved directly with the revolutionary war until then, but the greater impact was war with France in Canada and the Seven Years' War, which pulled British resources away from the New World.

Without France as a belligerent to England in the years up to the war, the latter would have been far better equipped to defend the colonies.

The David versus Goliath mythology that tells of feisty upstart democratic republic felling the great monarchy taught in school typically doesn't get into a Great Britain heavily depleted and indebted from years of war with France.

Agreed. It's also my impression that Britain didn't take the war seriously at first. Not until after maybe Trenton did they allocate real resources (as much as they had anyway).

The irony from the US perspective is we're taught the superior force was defeated by guerilla tactics and unconventional warfare. Then we completely forgot that when we went to Vietnam. Oops.

Undoubtedly. But saying conflicts with France significantly affected the outcome of the American Revolution is a far cry from saying the Revolution was essentially part of the conflicts between Britain and France, as if the Revolution was some kind of proxy war. That's just not true. France piled on, and the conflict with France helped set things up, but the colonies had legitimate beef with Britain and walked the path toward revolution without having to be nudged by the French.

How many French died on behalf of the US during the revolution ? In Haiti it was about 20 percent of the overall casualties.

France had maybe 10% of the actual battle losses, relative to the Americans, and less than 1% of the total war-related deaths, which includes disease and starvation.

That's how I was taught the American Revolution... What do you find so offensive about it?

Sounds about right.

Accurate. I have said basically this a number of times. And I am from the US.

And 200,000 Hatians.

Kinda odd you left that part out...

Not saying assassination by revenge was correct but one could argue that an even greater start would be the avoidance of transatlantic slave trade.

Haitians also continued using slavery - ah, excuse me, forced labor according to academic sources - after their revolution. They don’t really have the moral high-ground there either.

wouldn't mind a citation of those academic sources which use this term in this context.

https://www.brown.edu/Facilities/John_Carter_Brown_Library/e...

“The revolution ended slavery in Saint-Domingue but not forced labor. Louverture and several of the early governments of independent Haiti used the army to impose forced work on the plantations”

Thanks, the citation I was hoping for would be a published, peer reviewed paper with listed authors rather than a summary from what looks to be a departmental public outreach project, the grunt work of which are typically farmed out to grad students or RAs.

nonetheless I'm disappointed; the assertion looked so juicy and worthy of a deep dive. you made it sound like "academia" was conspiring to demote slavery to forced labor under specific conditions. yet no evidence of this is to be found in the linked text.

rather, the summary makes a point of distinguishing slavery from forced labor. granted, it doesn't define either term (as a proper paper would) but it doesn't pretend they are interchangeable either.

Mix corruption and France teaching them about how to profit from slavery and it's no surprise they might have continued with slavery.

Slavery and forced labor are not necessarily the same thing; thought the former usually implies the latter.

Being forced to work 8-12 hours a day, but free to go about your business the rest of the time is a very different scenario to being owned and having your offspring becoming another persons property.

Chattel slavery goes way beyond forced labor - both are terrible, but not equally so.

Yeah, the "worker" conditions that followed were more like serfdom than chattel slavery. A serf's offspring is still tied to the land like their parents, so the practical difference probably wasn't that great, but it's still an important distinction.

I always wonder, if there had never been a trans-Atlantic slave trade, would modern opinion in the West be that slavery is perfectly fine?

After all, the West still doesn't really care about slavery - there's more slaves today than ever in history. They also do not care about benefitting from slave labour or they would boycott the top countries in the Global Slavery Index: https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/data/maps/#prevalenc... Slavery continues to be a thriving industry in Africa and the Middle East for example, and for the most part concern about this only comes from a few Western NGOs.

It largely seems to be a matter that at some point became politically useful in the US and elsewhere, rather than an actual concern. I wonder if it will ever stop being in political vogue.

What does any of this have to do with the subject at hand?

Not OP, but the transatlantic slave trade is materially related to the history of Haiti, which is the topic at hand.

But he's not talking about the Transatlantic Slave Trade, he's talking about the bad-faith right-wing talking point of "There are slaves all around the world today!!!" None of the groups that OP professes to care about are part of the transatlantic slave trade.

The global elimination of slavery, to whatever incomplete extent that happened, was primarily a British and Christian moral crusade. Christian morality plus the feasibility of replacing slavery with industrialization is what made the global reduction of slavery possible. I say this as a non-Christian. I don’t think it’s reasonable to say the West “doesn’t really care” about slavery.

>It largely seems to be a matter that at some point became politically useful in the US and elsewhere, rather than an actual concern.

It's diabolical. The ruling class, who benefitted the most from slavery, have figured out how to use it to keep people from uniting against them. According to them, it was white people who enslaved black people, not rich people who enslaved poor people, and we should all be upset the former and never think about the latter.

It was less an assassination and more the beginning of a full genocide (a specifically French genocide, not against whites in general) around the country.

Dessalines went around the county killing all (fully white) French males. A lot of powerful Haitians opposed this, especially those of mixed racial background who had white family. The crimes that followed were really pushed forward by Dessalines the man, not the Haitian people in general.

Transatlantic slavery was incredibly cruel, but persecution by "the French" doesn't excuse a genocide of all French people on the island. Ironically, the people most responsible for the crimes against enslaved Africans (the "grand blanc") were largely back in France and so escaped personal harm.

I wonder who is the 'source' of this 'information'. Could it be a European?

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