23052: Allouard: Re: 23049: Esser: Re: 23036: Allouard: Re: 23020: Esser: The White Curse (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Allouard <allouard@libertysurf.fr>

Dear Sir,

It seems I did not express myself well, or that I was misunderstood.

Like Socrates never wanted not to praise Love, my point was not that Haiti's
victory should not be praised...
It was rather that the truer praise is, the better it is.
My point was NOT to deny the unique and special nature of Haitian
independence war and victory.

It was to question the way it is often spoken about. It was, with this, (and
still not denying the very original quality of Haitian independence, its
exemplar value and its efficiency in Americas' diverse slavery abolitions),
it was to point that such an affirmation "On the first day of his year,
freedom in this world turned 200" has to be merely rhetorical and that it is
perhaps not to the benefit of Haiti to emphasize its originality to the
point of extracting it from world history.

Reasonably educated pupils learn to avoid sentences like "Ever since." and
"Never had..." And reasonably educated people use to be cautious when
reading in positive historical domain sentences like "In principio erat..."
and to leave it to religious or legendary speech.

If I mentioned Bathilde and Neustria (as reasonably educated people noted, I
wrote "French" between quotation marks precisely because "Frank" would have
been better and because it is seldom clear how to relate modern France to
Frank kingdoms and territories, as reasonably educated people of course
know...) it was to illustrate one move to abolish slavery. The fact that
slavery nevertheless existed after that, in Europe or outside, does not make
this move void... Exactly as the fact that slavery still exists now does not
void Haitian example but makes slavery all the more shameful to our eyes...
Exactly as the fact that oppression and what some call slavery existed in
Haiti after 1804 and is still existing in Haiti today still does not void
Haitian victory upon colonial slavery! Bad practices, scandals and offenses
to human rights should not void intellectual and moral victories... [And if
slavery appears now to us as a scandal, it has perhaps to do with Christian
teaching, Aquinas', Vitoria's, Montesinos', Las Casas' and XVIII century
philosophers' writings and deeds... (this being a sample list and not a
synthesis of human thought against slavery)]

Question: don't you think that if Haitian pupils were taught about this,
they would be only freer and all the more grateful to their national heroes?
While, learning about theit heroes as if they appeared in the middle of
nowhere just to fight the French, they grow without sense of history, having
their mind working upon isolated data's, with no links to what existed
before, and few clues about what existed after... An incredible example is
turned in ideology, and might thus become void and vain.
Best regards,

                            Philippe Allouard

" Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto"
Terence