> Before his departure from a city, Dessalines would proclaim an amnesty for all the whites who had survived in hiding during the massacre. When these people left their hiding place however, most (French) were killed as well.
You wonder why the journalists don't write about this part of the story. They are not journalists. They are social activists who wants to influence society into becoming a certain way. They have an agenda and the agenda is to portray some groups in the most favourable light, and others as bloody heartless murderers.
Their agenda is to find the root cause of inequalities, and the root cause must always lie outside the victimized group, preferably in the form of exploitation by another group. More slaves made it to the Middle East from Africa than to America, but the NYTimes couldn't care less about them, or the countries they came from.
The treatment of Haitian slaves was so bad that the King issued the Code Noir. People don’t just rise up in revolt and risk their lives for fun.
Martin Luther King Jr said it best, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” So what then is a revolt?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1070615/estimated-popula....
In contrast outside the black belt and the delta regions slavery in the US was a minority thing.
When you have a oppressed majority then you have a potential powder keg.
Slavery was wrong regardless.
Not because they were nice (being better than Belgium doesn’t say much) but because they inadvertently taught their colonies how to govern themselves.
Every other imperial government destroyed the ruling class and government with a heavy hand, with nothing to replace the destroyed knowledge and skills.
I don’t think the British decolonized because they wanted to either.
I understand Hong Kong during the 1950s or 1960s wasn’t exactly peaceful, but they handled it better than the other former European powers.
That is to say, they wanted to retain influence if not control.
Though you have flare-ups like the Falkland Islands; which from an outsider’s perspective seems weird that Britain retained influence and not given to Argentina.
Edit: Just to be clear, the British really screwed over nations like China. So it’s strictly about how they handled their pull-out in the last hundred years.
But from what I understand it was mostly a headache and cost center for the UK, given the distances involved.