What I would direct you to are two stories: One in BoingBoing explains Haiti's real "deal with the devil" :
Pat Robertson thinks that Haiti is poverty stricken (and earthquake-stricken) because the country made a deal with Satan to help them overthrow the French.
Back in May, the Times Online provided some slightly better insight into Haiti's past. Beyond a vague assumption that Imperialism had probably screwed Haiti somehow, I didn't know much about the country's history. Reading this story has been nothing short of nauseating.
Summary: Haiti was forced to pay France for its freedom. When they couldn't afford the ransom, France (and other countries, including the United States) helpfully offered high-interest loans. By 1900, 80% of Haiti's annual budget went to paying off its "reparation" debt. They didn't make the last payment until 1947. Just 10 years later, dictator François Duvalier took over the country and promptly bankrupted it, taking out more high-interest loans to pay for his corrupt lifestyle. The Duvalier family, with the blind-eye financial assistance of Western countries, killed 10s of thousands of Haitians, until the Haitian people overthrew them in 1986. Today, Haiti is still paying off the debt of an oppressive dictator no one would help them get rid of for 30 years.
The rest of the world refuses to forgive this debt.
So, in a way, maybe Robertson is right. Haiti is caught in a deal with the devil, and the devil is us.
Update: mgfarrelly points out another thing I didn't know—the U.S. Congress is currently considering a bill called The Jubilee Act for Responsible Lending and Expanded Debt Cancellation. Part of what this bill would do is help countries like Haiti get their debt canceled, without making that cancellation conditional on things like closing down free schools or raising the cost of fresh water. Maybe a good time to contact your representatives about about this bi-partisan measure.
The second link is from TheAwl:
Pat Robertson's ability to use any natural disaster as the springboard for a provocative and deeply ignorant remark that expresses his own blinkered and bigoted worldview of "morality" is so commonplace and predictable by this point that it usually seems unworthy of noting. His comment yesterday about Haiti having caused its own massive tragedy by making "a pact with the devil" falls well within this category, and ordinarily I'd ignore it, but this response by Haitian ambassador Raymond Joseph is so perfect—direct, intelligent, filled with more history in one minute than pretty much anything you see on most news programs all evening—that it deserves as much currency as it can get. It's a shame that we live in a world where something like this is both necessary and remarkable, but there you are.
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id recommend "the black jacobins" by clr james if you're interested in french colonial rule on the island, their overthrow and the aftermath. a really amazing, marking point in life read.
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