Hacker News Reader

Comment by sudosysgen | Hacker News Reader

Yup, and the debt was due 200 years ago and worth around 21 billion dollars.

For fun I ran the numbers, at 4% real interest which is realistic for a developing country, that's 2.55 trillion dollars in lost interest.

View on HN

I wonder what is owed Haiti for the profits extracted from the enslaved peoples forced to work to death there.

Given that the slaves rose up and murdered their slaveowners, who were also Haitian, there is no one left for them to collect from, even if you could find someone still alive from that period who worked as a slave. In other words, those slaves took payment, via genocide, a long time ago. That's one of the problems with murdering all your oppressors and seizing all their assets -- at that point you have no one left to blame when things go bad over the next few hundred years.

Haiti wasn't a country then, so no, they weren't Haitian.

I recommend reading up on the history of Haiti. Independence was declared first (by the upper classes) and the 1804 massacre came later. There were, of course, a number of slave revolts that happened throughout that time, but the genocide was in 1804.

November 1803 to 1804 doesn't make much of a difference there. They were still french when they were extracting massive profits from the slaves.

"That's one of the problems with murdering all your oppressors and seizing all their assets -- at that point you have no one left to blame when things go bad over the next few hundred years."

Haiti was indebted to France for over 100 years after the revolution. They were forced to pay the losses sustained by the French, which included slaves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_indemnity_controversy

It doesn't get more unjust and wrong than that. To say they have no one to blame for their country's condition is misguided.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com