Though Cowards Flinch

So apparently, via Fark.com (see also these from Journeyman and Liberal Conspiracy), Pat Robertson has been saying nasty things in his usual vein, about how absolutely everything bad that happens to anyone is a direct result of what they’ve done wrong with their lives. Even if it’s just a case of being the wrong religion (or, one might sometimes surmise, the way Robertson says this shit every time something bad happens to black people, the wrong colour). This time it’s Haiti.

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, you know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said we will serve you if you will get us free from the French. True story. And so the devil said Ok it’s a deal, and they kicked the French out, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor.

That island of Hispaniola is one island cut down the middle – on one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc. and Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. They need to have, and we need to pray for them, a great turning to God, and out of this tragedy, I’m optimistic something good may come, but right now we’re helping the suffering people and the suffering is unimaginable.

It’s the ‘true story’ quip which really makes it art, I think. But enough of my (hitherto unexplained) derision.

1. Haiti was held in slavery until Napoleon I. Independence was declared on January 1st 1804, several years before Napoleon III was actually born. A minor point, I know, but still. If you’re going to denounce a whole people for satanic, one idea might be to at least get the facts right beforehand.

2. Consider the possibility that the Haitians did indeed swear a pact with the Devil. He then gives them victory in battle and, possibly more importantly, cripples the French with Yellow Fever, even killing General Leclerc the leader of the last expedition. Except, the leaders of the Haitian Revolution, like Toussaint L’Ouverture, were Catholic – and indeed Catholicism was made, for a brief while, the official state religion.

I’m not saying it’s beyond the realms of possibility that Robertson would declare Catholics to be satan-lovers. Yet the widespread existence of Christianity on the island surely makes it a little less likely that the appeal to the Devil was what secured victory, regardless of the native vodou. It may as well be that back then, the Haitian leaders appealed to God, and poverty and this earthquake are the Devil’s revenge.

Except that might not sit well with Pat Robertson’s view of America as God’s chosen nation,* since America has played an active part in ensuring that poverty was a long term visitor to Haiti.

3. If indeed it was vodou which secured the freedom of Haiti, why haven’t the repercussions affected the Dominican Republic as well? Robertson may not know that vodou exists there as well, and at the time of the Haitian Revolution, the two territories were one, both controlled by the French, the Spanish having surrendered their separate colony in 1795. Many slaves from ‘Santo Domingo’ participated in the revolutionary armies that fought the French, Spanish and British.

I’m pleased that Robertson and his gay-bashing moronic cult are sending aid to Haiti. Yet I find using yet another natural disaster as an excuse to wax lyrical about the sins of a whole people – none of whom were alive at the time of the Haitian Revolution, the vast majority of whom are Christian – is just obscene. But it’s par for the course with Pat Robertson.

*Except the gays, ACLU and abortionists, obviously, who are eroding the shield of God’s protection from around the US, thus making the country vulnerable to terrorist attack.