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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

The GP I replied (summarizing the artice): "Haiti had a number of structural differences that would have prevented it from developing even if France didn't force Haiti to pay for its freedom."

This is not saying, "reparations weren't responsible for Haiti's underdevelopment". Money paid is economic opportunities lost. France was benefiting from the payments and Haitians were suffering.

The argument being made is that this is either insignificant or OK because if France had not done this, Haiti would have been underdeveloped some other way.

It's pretty exactly analogous to thief that steals from you on Friday and when confronted on Monday says "I'm not responsible for you being broke, you would have lost the money some other way". That's sort reprehensible even if it's true. Let I repeat even if it's true.

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It doesn't change the morality of the theft, but it is relevant when determining how the thief should make the victim whole. To use your paycheck analogy - consider these two situations:

1. The thief steals from you on your way to the bank, where you have a history of making on-time loan payments. The theft causes you to default on your loan and lose your car which leads to you losing your job.

2. The thief steals from you on your way to the tavern, where you have a history of drinking your paycheck.

Wouldn't you agree that in scenario 1, the thief owes you more compensation than just the money he stole?

Imagine if I said "If France hadn't forced Haiti to pay for its freedom, Haiti would have become a world leader in semiconductor manufacturing, like Taiwan". Do you have any evidence against that claim? Can you see why the extent of the damage is relevant for determining how France should make up for it?

To use your analogy here, France should determine how much they should pay back to Haiti for taking their wealth after long hardship as a colony? I'm just trying to make sure I don't build a strawman here.

France doesn't care. They're not going to pay. They still have colonies for that matter. Their museums aren't going to be losing plundered artifacts any time soon. But it's interesting that the argument against Haiti being able to ever rise out of its colonial mire was the fact they nationalized the plantations where they had been enslaved and doled them out to Haitians.

Maybe the fact the US sent marines to seize assets from the Haitian treasury (to ensure France got those payments) impacted their ability to adopt new technologies as they became available. Who's to say?

"If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there." — Malcolm X

I don't think anyone has ever asserted that stealing can be justified if the casual outcome for the victim is insignificant and it is certainly isn't a justification here. It is a valid historical question of the impact of the indemnity. Pointing out that haiti's economy was unable to develop should be relevant and certainly not reprehensible. There are a lot of cases of historical injustice including other instances that involved Haiti in the first place. Justice will be harmed if we can't fairly judge the outcome of these injustices.

> The argument being made is that this is either insignificant or OK

This is my point. Nobody is saying it's "okay". Facts are _upstream_ of the normative claims people use them to support, and don't always lead to conclusions that you can predict from kneejerk, nonsensical assumptions of the sort you're making.

A historian can object to the NYT (allegedly) explicitly making an incorrect _factual_ claim; that's practically his damn job! The only person rushing to project an agenda onto it so that you can get high off of outrage is you. Before we can make detailed normative decisions about reality, we need to understand the facts that underlie them.

> That's sort reprehensible even if it's true. Let I repeat even if it's true

Even the assumption that this exonerates the French doesn't make any sense! It's trivial to frame this as "the French further damaged an economy that was already at a disadvantage relative to its peers"! You're throwing away the truth for a "benefit" that doesn't even make any sense!

I apologize for the pointed language, but I can't think of anything in modern discourse that I loath more than this revolting focus on what factual claims _sound_ like instead of what they actually mean and how they contribute to our picture of the world. The world is _complicated_. Facts don't always lead you to the conclusions that this childish kneejerk style of analysis assumes they do. There are a lot of decent, serious people trying to understand the world and make it better, and it is _precisely_ this alternative-facts approach that is poisoning our modern discourse.

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