Links - 3rd November 2024 (2 - Colonialism [including Haiti])

Meme - Dr Something? @Bur..: "French Slave owners in heaven watching Haitians starve to death"

Asian Dawn on X - "Haiti finished paying its debt to France in 1947. Adjusted for inflation, about $560 million. Haiti has received $20 billion in foreign aid. For comparison, the US gave Japan $15.2 billion and Germany got $29.6 billion after WW2 (both adjusted for inflation). Tell me again how Haiti couldn't make it work?"

Thread by @kunley_drukpa on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "DID YOU KNOW? The Dominican Republic actually celebrates its independence from Haiti, not Spain. In 1822 Haitians under the command of Mulatto President Jean-Pierre Boyer marched into and occupied the ethnic Latin east of Hispaniola - the Black Colonial Occupation lasted 22 Years
The occupation was supported by the Dominican Republic’s black population and mostly opposed by its mixed and white population. On arriving in the east, the Haitians immediately set about expropriating property from whites - and there was crop failure, looting and a lack of enforcement of laws. When the heavily outnumbered Dominicans finally took up arms against the Haitians after the death of Boyer they decisively won every major battle.
More ‘Forgotten Haiti’ - The Failed African American Resettlement Initiative.
More ‘Forgotten Haiti’ - The Dominican Republic’s ‘Antihatianismo’"
Clearly, the only reason Haiti occupied the Dominican Republic was French colonialism

Jeremy Kauffman 🦔 on X - "Haiti and the Dominican Republic are a fascinating natural experiment. Both countries share the island of Hispaniola, but have had vastly different histories and outcomes.
Dominican Republic:
- First European settlement in America
- Has many/most aspects of first world countries
- Average IQ over 90
- GDP per capita of over $10,000, fully independent country
Haiti:
- Founded nearly entirely via Africans slaves via bloody revolt
- People live in trash and eat mud
- One of the poorest, most violent countries in the world
- Average IQ under 80
- GDP per capita under $2,000, subsists on aid"

Thread by @klkmanitord on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App- "A Thread🧵 Haiti share the same island with the Dominican Republic.  Yet Haiti has an average IQ of 67 while the DR has an average IQ of 82-92 depending in the IQ sources  This manifest in the huge economic & cultural differences between the Mixed Hispanic 🇩🇴 & the Black Afro 🇭🇹
The D.R. has a literacy rate of 98.8%, compared to Haiti’s dismal 60.7%. The economic gap between the Dominican Republic and Haiti is striking, comparable only to North and South Korea. Today, the DR is about 8 times wealthier than Haiti, while Haiti’s standard of living hasn’t advanced at all since 1950. On top of this the DR already surpassed Brazil & Colombia in GDP per capita.
The Dominican Republic is 73% Triracial, 16% White, & 11% Black with the Triracial ancestry population being 58% European, 35% African & 6% Native.  Haiti is 95% Black & 5% Mixed being the most pure Afro descent people in the Americas
The Dominicans & Haitians have 2 totally different history. DR was a mostly settlers colony & Haiti was a slave colony. During the colonial time Dominicans were 38,000 White 38,000 Free Mixed 15,000 Slaves 2,000 owners. French-Haiti was 700,000 Slaves 22k Free Black/Mix 25k White
Race & Culture can affect IQ results. Test performance differences between racial groups have been observed since the inception of IQ testing in the early 20th century. This is more obvious between Dominicans & Haitians. Dominicans are majority Mixed with mostly European ancestry while Haitians are majority or pure African descendants...
Haitians blame all their misfortune on foreigners & whites so they dont have to take responsibility for their actions. Dominicans in the other side blamed their own governments for their failures and vote them out when ever they didn’t performed
Dominicans & Haitians are the best example of 2 people with different racial make up sharing the same island, ambient, nutrition, environment, resources, etc and having totally different economic & cultural outcomes.  🇩🇴
These differences IQ results wouldn’t be so different if Haitians didn’t massacre and genocide their white population.  Haitians were Black supremacists who banned whites from owning land or becoming citizens in Haiti, they massacred their white population & did the same to Dominicans.  Haitians were the only Black people in the world to oppressed & installed racist law against White. They did this in the Dominican side of the island during their military brutal occupation of Santo Domingo. Haitians were Black Imperialists who quickly named their country “Empire of Haiti” after gaining independence and within months invaded the Dominican side.  Haitians invaded & ordered the massacre of White🇩🇴 in March 25, 1805 . These populations of white descent were then deported to the large cities of Haiti where they were killed in public places by being crushed (by horses or beasts of burden) and quartered. Over 10,000 Whites-Dominicans(Spanish-Euro descent) were massacred by Black Haitians.  Thanks to the French this 1st invasion attempt was stopped at the gate of 🇩🇴 capital. These massacres laid the foundation for two centuries of animosity between the two countries.
Haitians once again invaded Dominicans in February 1822 & installed anti-White racists laws where they banned Whites from owning land, purchasing lands, gathering in big groups & forced many to get exiled from our island to Puerto Rico & Cuba (the reason for our relatively low pure white population).  Haitians were(or are?) Black Imperialists, Black Supremacists, Black Oppressors, Black Occupiers, & Black Mass Murderers. Now we are telling the real history, no the false glorified history of Haitians.  Haitians didn’t massacred all the white Dominicans, their descendants survived and are currently 16% or 1.8 Million of DR population.  🇩🇴White Dominicans 👇...
This satellite image highlights the stark contrast in nighttime illumination between the DR🇩🇴 and Haiti, showing their economic & IQ disparity. The DR🇩🇴 is brightly lit, indicating widespread electricity (over 98% of the country have 24/7 electricity) and development, while Haiti remains mostly dark, reflecting less infrastructure development and limited access to electricity.
This graph shows a sharp economic separation between the Dominican Republic and Haiti from 1950 to 2018. The Dominican Republic's GDP per capita rose significantly, exceeding $12,000, while Haiti's remained stagnant around $1,800, reflecting little economic growth. Haitians make excuses for their failures even though they had similar economy with the DR in the 50’s thanks in large part to DR going thru a dictatorship who controlled & owned most of the economy. In the 50’s most of the world was in ruins specially after WW2 just happened . This affects both DR & Haiti. After the 50’s many countries including many East Asian countries began to raise and become economic powerhouses. However, Haiti stayed the same while the DR growth at a rapid pace, specially after the mid 2000’s when DR started growing at 5-7% per year. According to the World Bank the Dominican Republic is on track to achieve its goal of becoming a high-income country(developed country) by the 2030’s , and is expected to grow 79% in this decade.
Many people have a very distorted perception of the Dominican Republic and Dominicans because we share an island with Haiti and somehow that means Haiti get to defined Dominicans even though Dominicans have been in the island as a Mixed Hispanic people for over 535+ years while Haitians are the new comers who were brought to our island around 245 years ago. The new comers cannot define the old ones. I’m defining the better views, Dominicans define themselves, Dominicans are different than Haitians & there is nothing wrong with it, we are like water & oil, two totally separate people. Some people believe that because Dominicans are right next to Haiti, that give Haiti the right to define the racial make up of Dominicans. Many tourists go to DR specifically Punta Cana & dont know that Punta Cana is 70% illegal haitian population & workers. They leave thinking Dominicans are just Spanish speaking looking Haitians.
Dominican-American explains why the Dominican Republic is having a rapid economic boom in the last decade, making DR the Largest-Economy in the Caribbean & Central America and the 6th economy in Latin America & the 4th largest economy in North America after 🇺🇸 , 🇨🇦 & 🇲🇽. The DR is many times safer than Haiti & a lot of places in the United States. Dominican-American explains why?"
Clearly, all this is due to the reparations France forced on Haiti, which ended in 1947 and thus explain why Haiti and the Dominican Republic diverged from the 50s

Meme - "Whitey can't fight *happy black man* *Map of Colonial Africa* *shocked black man*"

Anna Wiggy on X - "British "decolonization activist" argues that we have to "decolonize" the British school curriculum by removing works by white, European males. Then ironically quotes Santayana's famous "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" while lamenting having to use a quote by a white, European male.   Really can't make this stuff up."

Jeremy Kauffman 🦔 on X - "There are around 35 nations with an African population of over 80%. The wealthiest is Gabon, with a GDP per capita of $8,000, primarily from exporting oil. Did "exploitation" ruin all African nations forever? If not, how long should we expect to wait?"
𝙴𝙼𝙿𝙴𝚁𝙾𝚁𝙸𝙽𝚃𝙴𝚁𝙽𝙴𝚃 on X - "liberia has never been colonized. it has basically copied the united states constitution. it's one of the worst places on the continent."
Jeremy Kauffman 🦔 on X - "Liberia is terrible even with the same Constitution as the US? How could that be?"
𝙴𝙼𝙿𝙴𝚁𝙾𝚁𝙸𝙽𝚃𝙴𝚁𝙽𝙴𝚃 on X - "must be socio-economic factors. and systemic racism, obviously."

Meme - Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil: "Most of Africa had an economic lead over China not long ago.  The leaving colonial nations left behind railroads, irrigation, and other infrastructure in Africa that China wasn't blessed with.  Now China has the lead."
"1980. 2016. Higher GDP per capita than China. Lower GDP per capita than China"
Damn colonialism!
Someone claimed that no African country except South Africa had an extensive railway network, but in 1957 when Ghana gained independence, it had 947km of railway, which was a higher railway density than China

Wilfred Reilly on X - "The Taliban is an interesting example of what happens when a truly ancient society - Nadir Shah's West Persia/Afghanistan - wins a war with the West and actually "decolonizes."  Feminism has been totally broken - which took about a week, despite some brave resistance - and women ordered legally to head home and shut up. All girl's madrasas have been closed.  Homosexuality is now against the law. The punishment for receptive anal sodomy will be death.   The old "opium and arms" market in Kabul - this is not a joke - is scheduled to re-open. No word yet on battle captive slavery, which is specifically allowed by the Koran.  Anyone re-thinking the mixed but very real blessings of the West yet?"

Emil O W Kirkegaard on X - "Even extreme luck from natural resources does not outweigh psychology in explaining variation in wealth. Take Nauru, the fattest country in the world, 95% are overweight and 70%+ are obese. In the 1970s, they mined bird poo (guano) and sold it so that their country was the  wealthiest in the world GDP per capita (population about 10k Polynesians). The plan was to put the money into a national trust fund, like Norway does. The interests from this massive wealth would enable them to basically finance a welfare state perpetually. However, it was not to be due to "mismanagement and corruption". Today they are about as poor as they were to begin with. Rags to riches to rags...
NYT: Europeans fault Naurus are killing each other. Reality was that they were always trying to do this but were incapable of making proper weapons.  Nice guy Germans stepped in and ended the conflict, as they had done in African countries before that. The amazing thing is that Germany only sent 36 sailors, and they just walked around the island and arrested the local chiefs. After this, told them to stop fighting and hand over the weapons, which they then did. No more fighting! Amazing success story."
Clearly, if not for colonial oppression, Nauru would still be the wealthiest country in the world

ayatrollah on X - "📍London Can’t believe the Middle East’s youth have abandoned the Third Worldist cause of overthrowing Empire & instead want to DATE, shop at UNIQLO, & DANCE on TIKTOK? I’ll be giving a talk on this at SOAS tomorrow, afterwards cocktail hour w non-alcoholic options too!"
Talmud Enjoyer 🧬🇮🇱 on X - "SOAS is a microcosm of the transformation of British institutions in the 20th century. It was once where sons of the gentry studied skull sizes, learned Urdu to speak with Nawabs, and trained Bedouin emirs in modern war theory. Now it's the national centre for Gay Race Communism"

Meme - Dr. Maalouf ‏ @realMaalouf: "The Islamic Umayyad caliphate shown over modern-day borders.   And they have the nerve to call Europe and Israel ‘colonizers’. 🤡"

Meme - Sasan Ērān 𓃬☀ @SasanRebels: "If you’re a Muslim from outside of this area, don’t brag about how your ancestors “defeated Rome and Persia”.   You’re just a colonised idiot who identifies as their coloniser."
*Arabian Peninsula*

Meme - John Aziz @aziz0nomics: "The impact of Arab colonialism should be recognised in the same way and using the same tools as the impact of Roman colonialism, the impact of British colonialism, and the impact of Mongol colonialism, etc."
"540 - Arabic Majority - Arabian Peninsula. Significant amount of Arabic speakers - much of the Middle East
2022 - Arabic Majority - Much of the Middle East, most of North Africa and quite a bit more. Significant amount of Arabic speakers - part of the rest of the Middle East, more areas"

ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 on X - "LIBERIA: DREAM OF A NATION Inspiring Civil Rights drama based on true events. When African American colonists arrive in Liberia, they create a cruel apartheid system segregating them from native Africans. Witness the story of Black Struggle against African American oppressors"

Thread by @kunley_drukpa on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "LIBERIA: A DIVERSITY SUCCESS STORY
After freed African-American Slaves were encouraged to move back to Africa to create ‘their own Country for Coloreds’, they created their own Apartheid too - segregating themselves from Native Africans living there. Liberia soon became a Utopia
How Liberia’s Caste System developed and how it somehow led to Civil War
On Ethnic Conflict and the Civil War
The Cannibal Warlords of Liberia | VICE"
Damn US slavery causing Liberia to fail!

Thread by @royllovians on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Wrt "British Museum" discourse, it cannot be emphasized enough that, with few exceptions, the ancient civilizations of the Near East played no role at all in the culture or identity of the Arab and/or Islamic peoples of the region before European archaeologists rediscovered them It is not even that Muslims, in principle, often regarded pre-Islamic cultures with contempt—in fact, neither they nor anyone else had any knowledge or memory of ancient Near Eastern cultures beyond that preserved in Greek tradition until the work of 19thC European archaeologists.  The main exception being Iran, which did place significant value on its pre-Islamic history—even so, Muslims still regarded it with ambivalence. The Zoroastrian tradition through which this knowledge was preserved also did not preserve a coherent pre-Sassanid historical timeline. It is arguable that the ancient Egyptian heritage played a role in Egyptian culture via the prominent presence of ruins in the built landscape—but no Egyptian, whether scholar or peasant, knew the names of Narmer, Hatshepsut, or Nefertiti before Frenchmen discovered them Some might bring up non-Muslim minorities such as the Copts, but while they carried over certain practices (e.g. the use of a few glyphs from the Egyptian Demotic script), they did not preserve any real historical knowledge from the pre-Christian written traditions. As for why this even needs to be said: Starting in the Tumblr era, Anglosphere MENA diasporoids invented a notion that their cultures had a deep and sentimental attachment to cuneiform/hieroglyphic civilization—that Western archaeologists had cruelly stolen their beloved heritage. I recall a bunch of discourse back in 2013/2014 after Katy Perry released a music video with ancient Egyptian imagery, with Tumblr activists accusing her of committing "cultural appropriation" against the Egyptian people, since ancient Egypt is allegedly "sacred" to them (lol). Not to place it all on Tumblr; in the 20th century a number of political movements in MENA sought to connect modern-day nationalism with the pre-Islamic Near East. Let us be clear: Absolutely none of this would have been possible without Western archaeologists and scholarship. Not a single human being on the planet Earth, let alone anyone in Iraq standing 20 feet above the buried Sumerian ruins themselves, knew what "Sumer" was or who Hammurabi or Gilgamesh were, until British and French archaeologists dug up and translated the artifacts and tablets. Like, absolutely nobody knew how far back the history went: The Greek tradition and the Bible recorded information about the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the preceding Neo-Assyrian Empire, but there was no surviving information about anything in Mesopotamia further back than that. Again, the Greeks knew about the later pharaohs—what we call the "Late Period"—and knew some names of much earlier pharaohs via an extremely garbled and inaccurate history by Manetho, but *nobody* knew about the actual history of the Ramesside dynasty or Akhenten or any of that. Back to "the British Museum": These artifacts ended up in the West through various means, some licit and some illicit, but on the whole the Ottomans gave the green light to Western archaeologists because they did not give a fuck about any of this and it had no meaning to them. So, the Ancient Near East is just as foreign to the current inhabitants of MENA as it is to Westerners and all other humans. The legacy of these cultures was transmitted to much of humanity through fragments that survived in the Classical tradition and Abrahamic monotheism. So no, I definitely don't agree that the people of Iraq or Egypt have an exclusive *moral* or *cultural* right to house these artifacts. As for political rights, I'm no expert on that, but it's undoubtable that many of the artifacts were not "stolen" in any sense of the word. And ultimately, pragmatically speaking, it's a good thing that these artifacts were evacuated to the West: MENA and Muslim countries harbor large elements who remain hostile toward ancient heritage and have on numerous occasions sought to destroy what they can get their hands on. We can only hope for a day when large portions of the Middle East and other Muslim regions no longer subscribe to a belief system that views pre-Islamic heritage as a threat that needs to be destroyed.
A final disclaimer is that this thread is specifically about *archaeological* findings—objects that were long forgotten, neglected, or ruined by a society—Europeans certainly did "acquire" or "steal" objects that were still "in use", and that involves a different set of questions For those who need to hear it: This thread is *particularly* about the misapprehension that people in MENA societies had some preexisting cultural closeness to those ancient cultures known only through archaeology, beyond that of the archaeologists who actually discovered them!
"Umm actually there were ancient Arabs who engaged with surrou"—yeah I know Arabs existed before Muhammad. I'm talking about Hammurabi. Or about things from the Classical era that never got copied down by any post-Muhammad scribe, or that never made it into any garbled folk tale. And if you REALLY want to go there, insofar as some pre-Islamic civilizations *were* remembered and perhaps appreciated in Muslim MENA societies, it was almost always only as inferior shadows of Islam that merely anticipated the glory of the final revelation. Again—*before* Western scholarship! Your Pharaonist flights of fancy and neo-Babylonian raptures are the products of scholarly disciplines initiated and disseminated by Westerners! Before them, those ruins were only valued insofar as they fit into the story of Islam."

Ghada Sasa | غادة سعسع PhD(c) 🇵🇸 on X - "I never want to hear "tensions in the Middle East" ever again, as if Arabs and Muslims are a bunch of barbarians who simply exist to fight and destroy. From Iraq to Palestine to Yemen to Syria to Libya, we have been heavily colonized, brutalized, and exploited by the West."
Hussain Abdul-Hussain on X - "Western academia gave a sick civilization the nonsense words to deflect attention away from its own responsibility to reform itself, practice introspection.  Muslim dynasties were the biggest colonizers, exploiters, and enslavers in the history of human kind. Alien colonial rule over Muslim Arab countries has been a blip in their history, not the rule.  Between 636 and 2024, Lebanon, Syria were under non-Muslim rule for 23 years only (coastal area exceptions during Crusades), Egypt was ruled by British for 84 years since 640. Even the longest colonized Arab Muslim country, Algeria, was under French rule for 132 years and under Muslim rule for 1892 years since the Arab invasion in mid to late 600s CE."

Keith Woods on X - "🇱🇷 Liberia was one of two African countries never colonised Today, the beaches of its capital Monrovia are covered in human feces and used as public dumping grounds, with the city having hardly any waste management services Please explain to me how this is White people's fault"
This just shows how powerful and pernicious colonialism was!

Nick Buckley MBE on X - "The typical story of country that was part of the British Empire:
- We want the British to leave and the freedom to run our own country
- The British leave
- Everything gets worse
- Can we come and live with you?
Is the solution to our mass immigration problem a re-colonisation of failing countries by western nations? They cannot manage themselves to a level acceptable by their populace - can the west do any better. Maybe an ‘adopt a failing nation’ scheme."

Thread by @CompositeGuy_ on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Anyone who claims the British 'looted' $45 trillion immediately demonstrates that they haven't even bothered to look into how the figure was calculated.  The $45tn figure was derived using a 5% compound annual interest rate up until 2016.  In 2024, the figure is now $82tn.  The figure comes from Marxian economist Utsa Patnaik in her 2017 essay “Revisiting the Drain".  It does not represent any actual nominal transfer from India to the UK but rather adopts a series of strange methods to arrive at such a ludicrous number. The $45tn is the result of a compounded interest rate of 5%, projected to 2016.  In a later article, Mrs. Patnaik recalculated it to 2020. In this four year period, Britain had stolen an extra $19tn, bringing the figure up to $64.82 trillion! Using Mrs. Patnaik's kooky formula, by 2050, Britain would have "looted" $274.5 trillion.  By the end of the century, this would be a modest $4 quadrillion.  This is more than the total wealth generated in the history of the world. Mrs. Patnaik's calculations use a historical conversion rate of £1 to $4.84. But she misses the 30% devaluation of the UK pound in 1949 and another 14% in 1967.  These currency shifts are crucial for accurate calculations"
This is ironic, because usually left wingers don't think interest should count (e.g. for student loan repayments)

'Proud to be colonised?': statue of French politician torn down in Martinique - "A statue of the French politician Victor Schoelcher, who decreed the abolition of slavery in the West Indies in 1848, was decapitated and vandalised in Martinique on Friday night. The monument had been erected in 1998 to mark 150 years since the end of slavery on the Caribbean island. According to Le Figaro, the city hall in Martinique does not plan to replace it. Tagged on the plinth was the question: "Proud to be colonised?". On another side were tagged red, green and black stripes—the colours of the flag of the National Front for the Liberation of Martinique, a political group advocating for the independence of Martinique from France... Two other statues were pulled down from their plinths in Martinique on 22 May last year, the date that celebrates the abolition of slavery on the island. Young people declared that: “Schoelcher is not our saviour”. French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the acts that “dirtied” Schoelcher’s memory. A bust of Schoelcher was also removed in Guadeloupe last July. The political scientist Françoise Vergès tells The Art Newspaper: “Schoelcher was neither a slave trader nor a slave owner and was behind the decree making the abolition of slavery in the French colonies final and definitive. [But he] represents a past that offered absolutely no repair for the crimes, damages and wounds of the slaves and that facilitated and justified post-slavery colonisation.” To her mind, the tearing down of the Schoelcher statues is an attack by young Martinicans on the “false promises of equality in a world structured by racism, inequalities and injustices”."
Abolishing slavery was bad when it was done by white people. Forcing brown and black people to end slavery was proof of the violence of colonialism