John Cook at Gawker has an informative and appropriately vitriolic piece on “Reverend” Pat Robertson’s appeal to the Bourbons’ time-honored “sound scholarly historic research”, aka penny-ante blood libel:
Galactically vile Christian cleric Pat Robertson told his CBN viewers today that Haitians are “cursed” because their ancestors “swore a pact with the devil” to liberate themselves from the French in 1804. “True story.”
What else would he say? Robertson can’t let human suffering pass without finding a way to insinuate that God did it deliberately because he hates gay people, black people, Catholics, or whatever other poor dying sap he can find to cruelly mock and use to his own political and fundraising advantage…
Pat Robertson is as hateful and seized by superstition as any Taliban mullah with a knot in his forehead from obsessively banging it into a prayer mat. The motivation for this latest proclamation is no doubt the fact that about half the people in Haiti practice voodoo, an amalgam of Catholicism and African animism that dates to the importation of West African slaves there in the 16th century, and that was common to the slaves whose uprising against their French owners eventually became the Haitian Revolution…
So because the people of Haiti practice a different religion from Robertson—about which everything he knows he learned from watching The Serpent and the Rainbow—it follows that their historic liberation in a bloody war must have been the result of a negotiation with a malevolent supernatural being who intervenes in worldly affairs. And every tragedy that has befallen their ancestors since has been deliberately directed at them by an all-powerful and loving god who wants to kill them, repeatedly, because they gained freedom by striking a deal with his enemy.
Who’s the fucking witch doctor?
Actually, I think Cook gives Robertson more credit than the old thug deserves. Forget the religious disagreement — the “Curse of the Revolution” fantasy has been passed down from bigot to bigot for two hundred years and counting because it’s simply impossible for them to believe that a bunch of African savages and half-breeds could win an actual war against the majesty, however tattered, of the extremely white French nobility. The people who came up with this bullshit were direct spiritual ancestors of the Birfers and Teabaggers who can’t believe that a Black president could be legitimately elected and seated in “their” White House.
Yahweh Needs A Better Class of MouthpiecePost + Comments (286)