Great sign. Some truth to it. I wonder if it was salvaged in Haiti:
The
1804 Haiti Massacre was a
genocide, which was carried out against the remaining white population of
French Creoles (or
Franco-Haitians) in
Haitiby the black population on the order of
Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The massacre, which took place in the entire territory of Haiti, was carried out from early February 1804 until 22 April 1804, and resulted in the deaths of between 3,000 to 5,000 people of all ages and genders.
[1]
Squads of soldiers moved from house to house, killing entire families.
[2] Even whites who had been friendly and sympathetic to the black population were imprisoned and later killed.
[3] A second wave of massacres targeted white women and children.
[3]
1804 Haiti Massacre - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Yeah, you gotta love people that fought for their very survival after nearly becoming extinct due to the inhumane treatment of the Europeans.
In Léogâne in 1772, a Haitian woman named Zabeth, her story recorded, lived a not uncommon life and death. Rebellious, like many, from childhood, she was chained for years when not working, chased and attacked by dogs when she escaped, her cheek branded with a fleur de lis. Zabeth was locked up in a sugar mill for punishment. She stuck her fingers in the grinder, then later bit off the bandages which stopped the flow of blood. She was then tied, her open wounds against the grinder, where particles of iron dust poisoned her blood before she died. Her owner lived unconcerned across the sea in Nantes.
The French colony of
Saint-Domingue was one of the richest colonies in the world - known as the "Pearl of the
Antilles". Enormous wealth was extracted through the implementation of a harsh system of
slavery:
"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?"
[5]
Haiti was reviled and feared by all the rich nations of the world precisely for its successful slave revolt which represented a threat not only in nations where slavery was legal, but in all countries, because of their large under-classes living in economic servitude. The strategy of the nations primarily affected, including the U.S., was to further impoverish Haiti, to make it an example. Racism in the hemisphere added a painful edge to the treatment of Haiti, which has remained the poorest country, with the darkest skin, the most isolated nation in the Americas. Even its language, spoken by so few beyond its borders, made Haiti the least accessible of countries and peoples.