Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher is attempting to deflect criticism of a Christmas Eve tweet wishing for “white genocide” by claiming it was a satirical joke made at the expense of delusional white supremacists. But in a previously published philosophy paper, Ciccariello-Maher explicitly praised the systematic extermination of white people in Haiti as a means of achieving greater racial equality and “freedom.”
“‘So Much the Worse for the Whites’: Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution,” Ciccariello-Maher’s paper, was published in 2014 and is an attempt to apply dialectical thinking (truth-seeking through the competition of opposing viewpoints) to the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804. (RELATED: Drexel White Genocide Prof Won’t Apologize)
The Haitian Revolution was the second successful war of independence in the Americas, and was a much bloodier affair than the American one. The revolution began as a successful uprising by the island’s enslaved blacks, who successfully resisted efforts by France to reconquer the island. While successful, the revolt had a grim conclusion, which Haitian leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines carried out as a systematic extermination of Haiti’s remaining white population, including those who previously supported the black uprising.
That may seem like an obviously bad thing, but in his paper, Ciccariello-Maher argues it was a very good thing, and that Haiti’s previous leader Toussaint Louverture was mistaken in his attempts to protect the white minority from violence.
Most of Ciccariello-Maher’s paper is an assessment of prior work by philosopher Susan Buck-Morss. Buck-Morss analyzed the Haitian Revolution and criticized the genocide of whites on the island as a “deliberate retreat from universalist principles [of human liberty.]” But Ciccariello-Maher says she had it all wrong, repeatedly pointing toward Louverture’s “errors” in protecting Haiti’s white minority from violent retribution. Instead, he suggests killing all of Haiti’s whites is an essential step toward “universal emancipation.”
“These uneducated former slaves intuitively grasped what escaped their enlightened leader: that the white colonists wanted slavery back, and that Napoleon was attempting to make that wish a reality,” Ciccariello-Maher writes. “If anything stood as a barrier to universal emancipation—not to mention equality—it was tolerance for these same whites.”
He then goes on to directly praise Dessalines for his genocidal policies.
“Dessalines had properly grasped the objective importance of the subjective element of the struggle, the need to begin not from abstractly universal principles, but instead from that concrete action that is the only path toward equality,” he says.
While masked through the paper’s dense and unfriendly wording, the “concrete action” Ciccariello-Maher is praising is the wholesale extermination of Haitian whites. He goes on to add that Dessalines’ genocide “remedied” the errors of Louverture, and “expand[ed] freedom.”
Ciccariello-Maher’s paper suggests his Christmas Day tweet praising the murder of Haitian whites as a “very good thing indeed” is unlikely to be the satirical joke he claims it was. In reality, the professor has a substantial history of praising genocidal violence against whites.
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