The Straight Dope: What's this "pact with the devil" that Pat Robertson says caused Haiti's woes?

[meegbear]

Dear Straight Dope:

What "pact with the Devil" was Pat Robertson referring to that supposedly caused the recent earthquake and most of the rest of Haiti's historic woes? And what is the reverend's source of exact quotes from Satan himself?

— Joanne

SDSTAFF JillGat replies:

How Pat Robertson got so chummy with the devil is a subject I'm not getting into. However, it's interesting that the prince of darkness speaks in colloquial U.S. English. Here's Robertson's account of how the diabolical deal went down, as heard on the Christian Broadcasting Network's "The 700 Club":

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'll get us free from the French.' True story. And so the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal,' and … the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other.

One detail we need to clear up right away. Haiti's bargain with the devil was supposedly struck in 1791. Napoleon III wasn't elected ruler of France until 1848, and Napoleon I didn't become big cheese until 1799. The French entity whose collective heel the Haitians were under in 1791 was the Constituent Assembly. We'll assume Satan didn't screw this up and the fault lies with poor note taking on the part of Pat Robertson, who presumably still gets nervous when dealing with infernal forces. You'd think he'd be used to it by now.

Be that as it may, Robertson got a few bits of the story right. The "pact with the Devil" in Haiti refers to the ceremony of Bois Caïman, which took place in August, 1791. This event is credited with launching the Haitian revolution that brought independence and freed the slaves in that country. Too bad they had to go to Satan for this favor, eh? The higher power holding the franchise in the U.S. let slavery persist for another seventy years.

The story goes that a houngan (voodoo priest) named Dutty Boukman held a meeting of black slaves and runaways at Bois Caïman in the mountains of the north to prepare to rise up against their oppressors. With the aid of an African-born priestess, they conducted a religious ceremony in which the group swore on the blood of a sacrificial pig, invoking the spirits of the forest and their ancestors, that they would live free or die. According to tradition, this was the catalyst for the Haitian revolution. Though Boukman was captured and beheaded, the revolt continued, and after much strife Haiti became an independent republic in 1804.

Although the Bois Caïman ceremony is well known in Haiti, separating fact from legend is difficult. The first historical account wasn't published until 1814. I've seen a claim that the ceremony didn't happen at all, while others contend there were two meetings in August 1791, with the voodoo ritual occurring at one while the revolt was planned at the other.

Legend has it that Boukman offered a prayer at Bois Caïman in which he drew a distinction between the wicked god of the whites and the benevolent god of the blacks. Whether the prayer was actually uttered is debatable; nonetheless, it can be taken as a fair indication of the rebels' sentiments, namely, that they were aligning themselves with the forces of good. Clearly the idea they were bargaining with Satan was an interpretation by Christians, who figured our god is righteous, everybody else's god is evil. In short, the "pact with the devil" is bigoted nonsense.

In his CBN broadcast Pat Robertson used the "devil pact" to explain why Haiti is in worse shape environmentally and economically than its neighbor, the Dominican Republic:

That island of Hispaniola is one island. It's cut down the middle. On the one side is Haiti; on the other is the Dominican Republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc. 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.

The histories of Haiti and the Dominican Republic are complicated and beyond the scope of this report. I refer you to Jared Diamond's book Collapse (2005), chapter 11: "One Island, Two Peoples, Two Histories: The Dominican Republic and Haiti." Some points made by Diamond: The Spanish settled on the naturally greener (rainier) side of the island, with higher mountains and rivers flowing in their direction. The French took the drier side, but despite the fragile environment exploited the hell out of the land and its people for as long as possible. France imported enormous numbers of slaves, giving Haiti a much larger and blacker population than the Dominican Republic, so later European investors preferred the DR over Haiti.

The Dominican Republic developed multiple cash crops and also focused on industrial development. While the DR had its share of tyrants, at least a couple of them fortunately were tree huggers. The two countries thus took different paths. While the DR remains quite poor, it's in better shape than Haiti.

Haiti has endured extraordinarily tough times since independence, including 32 coups and many brutal dictators, a cruel post-colonial racial caste system with inequitable distribution of wealth and resources, desperate poverty, environmental ruin, health problems, lack of infrastructure, and continued political instability. In recent times many of the blows to Haiti were dealt by "Papa Doc" Duvalier, succeeded by his only slightly less despicable son. The downward spiral continued, with Haiti's poor having no choice but to rely on charcoal from wood for fuel, decimating the remaining forests. And now this earthquake.

Let's say you believe in the Devil; is there evidence he's to blame? Forgive me for dignifying this with a response, but you asked. According to some versions of the legend of Bois Caïman, the pact with Satan was supposed to last for 200 years. Personally I think this was another lurid invention by outsiders, but even if you buy it, the pact should have expired in 1991, making the current disaster a late hit.

The scientific explanation for the earthquake in Haiti is that the Caribbean and North American tectonic plates have been grinding against each other under Hispaniola and Jamaica for eons. The stress builds up over time, causing earthquakes big and small. An earlier, magnitude 7.5 earthquake along the same fault line leveled Port-au-Prince in 1770, two decades before the supposed "pact with the Devil" at Bois Caïman.

Still, as David Brooks notes in a recent New York Times column, "This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story." An earthquake of comparable intensity in northern California in 1989 killed 63 people, compared to 50,000 to 100,000 in Haiti. Much of the difference is due to flimsy construction and a general lack of preparedness on Haiti's part. Brooks cites Lawrence E. Harrison's 2006 book The Central Liberal Truth, which attributes Haiti's problems to among other things "the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile."

What voodoo has to do with liberal truth I don't know. However, if the claim is that superstition and ignorance impede progress, you won't get an argument from me. Haiti possibly is one example. Pat Robertson is another.

—SDSTAFF JillGat

[phantom power]

1. I knew it would turn out to be some damn "black slave voodoo" thing.

:eyes:

[Deep13]

2. That N.III was mid-19th century occurred to me the other day.

Thanks for the explanation. Of course in a fundy's mind, non-christian = devil.

[blogslut]

3. Good old SD.

Thanks for that. :)

[NeeDeep]

4. Thanks for the historical tidbits

I do think the most influential aspects for Haiti are being poor, uneducated and never having the longterm tools to decide for themselves what is in their best interest. "life is capricious and planning futile" is simply an aspect of this, along with all else that follows such an enviroment. As for Pat Robertson that billionaire is just another good example of the "the uncaring" zombies who are immediately attracted to reasoning the points people "away", ""let them eat cake" and heres a prayer, now be on your way".

[Initech]

5. Reminds me of a quote from Dexter:

"If this is what's considered to be God's plan, you have to wonder if Satan has a few tricks up his sleeve."

[Oilwellian]

6. You should read Matt Taibbi's response to Brooks column

BROOKS: "Third, it is time to put the thorny issue of culture at the center of efforts to tackle global poverty. Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. But so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty well. Haiti has endured ruthless dictators, corruption and foreign invasions. But so has the Dominican Republic, and the D.R. is in much better shape. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same island and the same basic environment, yet the border between the two societies offers one of the starkest contrasts on earth — with trees and progress on one side, and deforestation and poverty and early death on the other.

As Lawrence E. Harrison explained in his book “The Central Liberal Truth,” Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.

We’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them."

TAIBBI'S TRANSLATION: Although it is true that Haiti was just like five minutes ago a victim of a random earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people, I’m going to skip right past the fake mourning period and point out that Haitians are a bunch of lazy niggers who can’t keep their dongs in their pants and probably wouldn’t be pancaked under fifty tons of rubble if they had spent a little more time over the years listening to the clarion call of white progress, and learning to use a freaking T-square, instead of singing and dancing and dabbling in not-entirely-Christian religions and making babies all the fucking time. I know I’m supposed to respect other cultures and keep my mouth shut about this stuff, but my penis is only four and a third inches long when fully engorged and so I’m kind of at the end of my patience just generally, especially when it comes to “progress-resistant” cultures.

BROOKS: "Fourth, it’s time to promote locally led paternalism. In this country, we first tried to tackle poverty by throwing money at it, just as we did abroad. Then we tried microcommunity efforts, just as we did abroad. But the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.

These programs, like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the No Excuses schools, are led by people who figure they don’t understand all the factors that have contributed to poverty, but they don’t care. They are going to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement — involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job performance.

It’s time to take that approach abroad, too. It’s time to find self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses countercultures in places like Haiti, surrounding people — maybe just in a neighborhood or a school — with middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.

The late political scientist Samuel P. Huntington used to acknowledge that cultural change is hard, but cultures do change after major traumas. This earthquake is certainly a trauma. The only question is whether the outside world continues with the same old, same old."

TAIBBI'S TRANSLATION: The best thing we can do for the Haitians is let them deal with the earthquake all by themselves and wallow in their own filth and shitty engineering so they can come face to face with how achievement-oriented and middle-class they aren’t. Then when it’s all over we can come in and institute a program making the survivors earn the right to keep their kids by opening their own Checkers’ franchises and completing Associate’s Degrees in marketing at the online University of Phoenix. Maybe then they’ll learn the No Excuses attitude real life demands, so the next time something like this happens they won’t be pulling this “woe is us” act and bawling their fucking eyes out on CNN while begging for fresh water and band-aids and other handouts. Maybe that will happen, or maybe we’ll just keep sending money, fools that we are, so that they can keep making more of those illiterate ambitionless babies we’ll have to pull out of the next disaster wreckage.

p.s. Did I miss anything? Because I think that’s pretty much it. One would have thought a column on the Haitian’s lack of an achievement culture could maybe wait until after the bodies were cold, but… hey, who am I to judge?

p.p.s. I’ve got to put this comment up on the main piece, since so many people seem to have missed my point.

Again, unlike Brooks, I actually lived in the Third World for ten years and I admit it — I’m not exactly in the habit of sending checks to Abkhazian refugees, mainly because I’m not interested in buying some local Russian gangster a new Suzuki Samurai to tool around Sochi in. And I’ve actually seen what happens to the money people think they’re giving to Russian orphanages goes, so no dice there, either.

But you know what? Next time there’s an earthquake in Russia or Georgia, I’m probably going to wait at least until they’re finished pulling the bodies of dead children out of the rubble before I start writing articles blasting a foreign people for being corrupt, lazy drunks with an unsatisfactorily pervasive achievement culture whose child-rearing responsibilities might have to be yanked from them by with-it Whitey for their own good.

An earthquake is nobody’s fault. There’s nothing to do after a deadly earthquake but express remorse and feel sorry. It’s certainly not the time to scoff at all the victim country’s bastard children and put it out there on the Times editorial page that if these goddamned peasants don’t get their act together after a disaster this big, it might just be necessary to start swinging the big stick of Paternalism at them.

More:http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2010/01/18/translating-david-brooks-haiti/

[JVS]

10. Thank you for posting that!

[brooklynite]

7. Too bad Pat's never available for a follow-up...

The question I'd like to ask him is not "Why are you such an idiot", but rather, "so, do you believe it's right for God to hold modern Haitians responsible for a deal made 200 years ago?". I actually woudln't be surprised if his answer was "yes".

[LuvNewcastle]

8. That's a perfect example of fundie ignorance of

other cultures. They equate a voodoo ceremony with a pact with the Devil while having no real knowledge of voodoo's beliefs and practices. Most Haitians are Catholic too, so that makes them a double threat. I guess it's too much to ask for Robertson and others to do a little research before they go shooting off their mouths.

[Festivito]

9. Thank you. And thanks for voting. /nt

[ck4829]

11. Kick