I’m weary of people blaming me for calamities both natural and premeditated. Recently, religious charlatan Pat Robertson attributed the disastrous earthquake in Haiti – as well as its tragic history of slavery, colonialism, bloodthirsty leaders, crime, poverty, hurricanes, floods, and other disasters – to a “pact with the devil” by leaders of the 1791 slave revolt who urged other owned humans “to throw away the image of the god of the whites who thirst for our tears and listen to the voice of liberty that speaks in the hearts of all of us.” They sealed their commitment by drinking the blood of a pig. What has this to do with the devil? I assure you I was not present – God and I are never plausibly present – and most strenuously denounce Robertson’s deceitful claim that I said, “Okay, it’s a deal.”

The devils Haitians dealt with were French who enforced a trade blockade then bled the small nation with eighty years of reparations. The French, and slave owners as an unholy group, were doubtless aggrieved by the specter of similar revolts elsewhere if slaves learned about the only successful act of liberation in the New World. It was inevitable that newly freed but uneducated and untrained people struggled to subsist in a strange and distant land of tropical heat and storms and disease. But Pat Robertson really believes Haitians suffered then, and continue to do so, because they sacrilegiously fought to free themselves from Christians armed with chains.