According to the voting population of El Salvador, yes.
If society has philosophically nice and clean set of rules that allow brutal gangs to terrorize the citizenry, just how worthwhile are those rules? Maybe the system needs a reboot before they can be worthwhile again.
The Haitian response to the circumstances would rightly be called a genocide today. Perhaps a bit more than simply “fighting back” led to the reaction.
The Haitian response to the circumstances would rightly be called a genocide today. Perhaps a bit more than simply “fighting back” led to the reaction.
Absolutely.
Let's not shy away from the fact either. They killed 3,000 to 7,000 people excluding the Polish legionnaires (contrary to myth, they did not kill their allies).
If you asked them why they did it, their response was that in the century of French Haitian slavery, a 1,000,000+ slaves were killed by the French slavers. It was cheaper to buy a new slave than fix working conditions. So the sugar plantations had 6% to 10% annual mortality rate.
They responded to evil with evil.
Perhaps a bit more than simply “fighting back” led to the reaction.
Haiti terrified the white supremacists who saw chattel slavery as the "natural" order. The idea that the slaves would fight back upset the cart quite a bit.
In the run-up to the U.S. presidential election of 1860, Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, wrote "I remember the horrors of St. Domingo" and said that the election "will determine whether anything like this is to be visited upon our own southern countrymen."[14]
Abolitionists recognized the strength of this argument on public opinion in both the North and South. In correspondence to the New York Times in September 1861 (during the war), an abolitionist named J. B. Lyon addressed this as a prominent argument of his opponents:
> We don't know any better than to imagine that emancipation would result in the utter extinction of civilization in the South, because the slave-holders, and those in their interest, have persistently told us ... and they always instance the 'horrors of St. Domingo.'[48]
Or, to recontextualize the bard,
These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume: the sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
Absolute domination is the sweetest honey until its violent delights lead to violent ends.
