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How it feels to scroll Lemmy as an Eastern European
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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TankieJerk
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Could you please elaborate a little?
Dessalines is the one who made Lemmy. Jean-Jacques Dessalines was a genocidal maniac. Modern tankies like him because some of the targets of his genocide were slave owners.
Edit: manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml sent me a DM calling me a fascist for liking Rush lmfao
I live not far away from a metro station called "Robespierre", and I don't think you could call him a nice guy. Context matters.
Context matters, but I'll go ahead and be a moral absolutist here and say that there is no context that justifies cutting children's heads off. Never heard of Robespierre, but if he was as bad as Dessalines, then I'd say he probably shouldn't have a metro station named after him
The targets of his genocide were slave owners?
The targets of his genocide were white French, regardless of economic class.
Some of them, yeah
Just like South African genocide...
The person you’re replying to is equivocating between the violence of slavery and the violence of a slave revolt, ie the Haitian revolution.
Dessalines was a former slave who became a leader of the revolution. He order the massacres of French colonists out of fear that they, with support from the French government, would overturn the revolution and reimpose slavery. His brutality was a reflection of the incomparably hellish conditions and violence that Haitian slaves endured.
That said, the questionable morality or necessity of his actions are not the reasons why he’s held up today. People don’t see him up as a figure to emulate. Instead, he’s a symbol and reminder to the perpetrators of imperial violence of the consequences that they will inevitably face.