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A French historian has caused uproar by claiming Napoleon provided the model for Hitler's Final Solution with the slaughter of more than 100,000 Caribbean slaves.In The Crime of Napoleon, Claude Ribbe accuses the emperor of genocide, gassing rebellious blacks more than a century before the Nazis' extermination of the Jews.? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/11/26/wfra26.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/11/26/ixworld.html
Very interesting account. Still, I'd hesitate to believe it without examining the author's work. At face value, it seems rather odd to kill 100,000 slaves. Hitler killed the Jews because he despised them as a race; to kill 100,000 slaves because they were rebellious seems far-fetched. I don't know how an economy would have survived with this kind of destruction of one's work force. Further, I don't know how they would have been able to do it on such a large scale in the 19th Century. Hitler had a systematic method for exterminating the Jews, and from what I have learned at Dachau it was not a simple task. For Napoleon do kill 100,000 would have been more difficult.
I would have to take issue with this. The Final Solution was the brainchild of Adolph Eichmann; not Hitler. You can read about the genesis of the Final Solution in Hanna Arendt's The Banality of Evil.
Very interesting account.? Still, I'd hesitate to believe it without examining the author's work.? At face value, it seems rather odd to kill 100,000 slaves.? Hitler killed the Jews because he despised them as a race; to kill 100,000 slaves because they were rebellious seems far-fetched.? I don't know how an economy would have survived with this kind of destruction of one's work force.? Further, I don't know how they would have been able to do it on such a large scale in the 19th Century.? Hitler had a systematic method for exterminating the Jews, and from what I have learned at Dachau it was not a simple task.? For Napoleon do kill 100,000 would have been more difficult.
It does seem a bit far-fetched, doesn't it? Racial extermination is a lot different from suppressing rebellion. Napoleon had his faults, but he was no Hitler.
Didn't the Romans crucify something like 20,000 rebellious slaves and line the Appian way with their crucifixes after the failed slave rebeliion of Spartacus?
Not to mention Ivan Dracul's mutilation of his own people in Transylvania in much the same manner (impalement).
Napolean wishes he thought up genocide! I think the bible predates Napolean and alot of other historical figures and last I checked there was some ethnic cleansing going on then and I'm sure it was an old idea by the time they wrote it down then.
So-called Ethnic Cleansing is as old as war itself. It is part and parcel of one group trying to rid themselves of the OTHER. Research the Khwarazmian Turkish method of conquering Anatolia if you want to read about genocide. I guarantee that one way to ensure a conquest is not contested is to kill all the inhabitants.
