Jean-Jacques Dessalines was appointed the emperor of Haiti after leading their army in a war of independence from France; after which he personally ordered and oversaw the killing of nearly every French man, woman, and child left in Haiti. The city council in Brooklyn have decided to honor Dessalines by naming a street after him. Is it right to celebrate the perpetrators of genocide so long as they killed the *right* people, or people who 'deserved' it? Can a group possess a collective guilt that is so extreme that it warrants their annihilation down to the very last man, woman and child?
https://www.city-journal.org/html/de...ard-16086.html
In New York City, street co-namings—in which a thoroughfare takes on an additional, ceremonial name in honor of a distinguished figure—rarely generate much fuss, and their approval is typically pro forma. But yesterday, a city council committee voted to co-name a street in Brooklyn after Jean-Jacques Dessalines, emperor of Haiti after the island won its independence from France in 1804.
The council’s designation of a two-mile stretch of Rogers Avenue in Brooklyn as Jean-Jacques Dessalines Boulevard sparked some controversy because Dessalines was an enthusiastic advocate of racial murder. Following the defeat of Napoleon’s forces and their retreat from Hispaniola, Dessalines named himself Governor-General-for-Life and decided to wipe the slate clean. Heeding the words of his personal secretary Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, framer of the Haitian Act of Independence, who declaimed, “we should use the skin of a white man as a parchment, his skull as an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen,” Dessalines ordered the murder of virtually every white man, followed soon afterward by all white women and children, in the new nation. Between 3,000 and 5,000 people were butchered in a few months.