Former President Barack Obama on Saturday seized on what he described as cruelty and indecency coming from President Donald Trump and his Republican allies, stepping into one of the nation’s ugliest midterm fights as he worked to rally Democratic voters in two Midwestern battlegrounds.
First in Ohio, Obama took aim at Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who has doubled down on an advertising campaign featuring the estranged mother of Democratic rival Dr. Amy Acton. Trump and Vice President JD Vance have also defended the ad, even as Republican leaders across Ohio, including Gov. Mike DeWine, have called for its removal.
Caused by the centuries of continuous violence brought upon the majority of the peoples of the world by European empire
You are only accounting for half the equation. Why are there so many refugees from Haiti coming to the USA? Because of what the French did over the course of several centuries and what English, Americans, Canadians, Spanish, Portuguese, and others decided to do in support of what the French did.
Had Europeans not gone out and raped the world they wouldn’t need immigration controls that allowed their most vaunted progressive leader to deport over 3 million people while drone striking weddings and funerals.
You are correct that European empires have done unimaginable harm. However, be careful not to strip agency away from the Haitian people themselves. To state that everything is a consequence of white people is to suggest that the Haitians have no control of anything and no agency. It’s almost like an accidental racism where nothing is attributable to people of color.
This is not meant to excuse anything the Europeans did, but evil can be found in all cultures. Immigration, economic disasters, and authoritarian takeovers would still happen without white imperialism.
Whether you intend it or not, this is a form of apologia.
The island that Haiti sits on would be completely inhabited by Taino right now if it wasn’t for the forcible European genocide. The people of Haiti today would not be descended from West Africa if not for the forcible human trafficking and enslavement of those people. The island would not split between Haiti and the DR if it were not for forcible European colonization backed up by overwhelming violence.
Obviously the people of Haiti have agency - they are the only successful slave revolt against Europeans. They have more agency than almost anyone else on the planet. But the fact that they are on that island, speak French, were human trafficked, split the island with the DR, and so many other things are absolutely the fault of the Europeans and the Haitians act with their agency within that forced context.
It’s almost like you’re saying that the Haitian people had sufficient agency to liberate themselves from their French slavers and therefore they also have the agency to take responsibility for the financial consequences, when France decided to levy a debt on Haiti for each slave they lost ownership of and every other European nation agreed. Haiti could have used their agency to say “fuck you we won’t pay such a debt” but then literally every single country around them was literally a European settler state and they would have no way to trade with anyone to feed their people. So they were forced, again, by Europeans to honor the debt they incurred by freeing themselves from forced European bondage. And then the US invaded Haiti and stole all of their banked gold reserves at gun point!
So yeah, the Haitian people are some of the most high agency people in history, but that doesn’t mean that the European globe spanning empire that has dominated the planet for 600 years and at its height dominated over 80% of the population of the world and forcibly trafficked, enslaved, genocided, assimilated, starved, and raped literally all of those people is somehow “just another example of evil that can be found in all cultures”