this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
337 points (95.7% liked)

Fediverse

29939 readers
3284 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] btaf45@lemmy.world -1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

However, every revolution, Russian, French, Haitian, United States, etc. used violence and murder to achieve its goal.

This is a ridiculous false equivalence.

[–] Carl@lemm.ee 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You're right. The Bolsheviks and Haitians didn't own slaves!

[–] btaf45@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

You mean the French and Russians didn't have slavery before their revolutions. But the Bolsheviks killed millions. And they established slave labor camps for decades.

[Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917]

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE4.HTM

And in the French revolution, just a handful of people caused thousands of executions.

https://www.worldhistory.org/Reign_of_Terror/

[This led to the enactment of the Law of Suspects, which allowed for the arrests of between 300,000 and half a million citizens nationwide. 16,594 of these 'suspects' were formally executed after a trial, while around 10,000 died in prison, and thousands more were killed in various massacres staged across France. It is estimated that the total death toll during the ten-month Reign of Terror rests anywhere between 30-50,000.]

Did you really think I couldn't back up my statement with facts? How is the Reign of Terror in France and the mass genocide in the USSR in any way "equivalent" to the American and Haitian revolutions?

[–] Carl@lemm.ee 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That first link is pure cold warrior nonsense on par with the black book of communism. As for the second, I defer to the words of Mark Twain:

“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

Truthfully I support all of those revolutions as historical processes which have brought about necessary change, but the Haitians and the Russians fighting for their freedom from Slavery and Capitalism respectively are much more commendable than the Americans doing so because they didn't want to slow down their westward expansion.