Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to consume faeces? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man-eating dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?

I don’t know why he chose that name but it seems like a deliberate provocation. That violence begets violence, and still without violence we cannot resist the oppressors. And that you can only liberate yourself and others by getting your hands dirty.

So I think it’s hypocrisy to reduce the historical figure Dessalines to a genocidal dictator. To use a thought terminating cliche about simplistic “good vs evil” ethics and derail a discussion that was about something else.

Every time you start a war you accept that war crimes will happen. It is inevitable in wars. There are no clean wars. War is slaughter, and when soldiers or the oppressed are put into extremis some will act like animals.

So how much of the guilt for the massacre lies with the slavers?

Yet liberals pretend that they do not put people into extremis. That their reasons were justified and intentions noble, that their wars and their hands are clean. But violence begets violence.

That is what the name of the user tells me, and what that comment tells me.

Yup, that’s the main event under discussion.