The recent bizarre diatribe by Pat Robertson, right after the recent earthquake in Haiti, is generally described merely as “thoughtless”, or “in bad taste”, or “the ramblings of an old man.” But I think there is something much more specific going on here. Read for yourself what the man said:<\/p>\n
\n“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 togethter 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 its a deal, and they kicked the French out, the Haitians revolted and got themselvers free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nContext is everything. And part of the context here is that Haiti is the only nation in history that was ever formed as the result of a successful military revolt of black slaves against a white colonial power. This “pact with the devil” myth is an old story. By repeating it now, Robertson is fulfilling a familiar role. Jews know this role all too well from their long history with the myths of the “Blood Libel”.<\/p>\n
In the case of the Jews, the essence of the myth is that Jews kill Christian children for some sort of bizarre secret ritual purpose. Of course belief in such myths would give indignant Christians license to deny rights to Jews, or even to kill them outright.<\/p>\n
In the case of blacks, the essence is even more insidious. The myth Robertson is repeating essentially says “Those black people could not possibly have won a war against us white people. Since they did, it must have been the devil who actually won the war for them.”<\/p>\n
Notice how particularly, pointedly ugly this is. He is very specifically using an occasion of great tragedy to assert a claim that blacks are inferior to whites. Having done this, he is effectively casting any aid or help for Haiti not as a hand reaching across from one nation to another, but rather as a gesture from a superior people to an inferior people.<\/p>\n
It is difficult even to talk about something like this. The sheer horror of contemplating minds that can spin this kind of filth is right at the edge of what any sane and reasonable human being can take in.<\/p>\n
But it is important, when this kind of naked hatred (which so often disguises itself in one sort of sanctimony or another) shows its true self out in the open, that we look at it straight on, no matter how disgusted we may be.<\/p>\n
We owe it not just to the people of Haiti, but to ourselves, to understand the nature of hate agendas, and the ways that those agendas disguise themselves, so that we can be effective in counteracting them. Don’t kid yourself that you are safe from this sort of thing. Sooner or later, no matter who you are or where you live, the people who spread these kinds of monstrous ideas of hate will come after you and your own children.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The recent bizarre diatribe by Pat Robertson, right after the recent earthquake in Haiti, is generally described merely as “thoughtless”, or “in bad taste”, or “the ramblings of an old man.” But I think there is something much more specific going on here. Read for yourself what the man said: “Something happened a long time … Continue reading “Hatred revealed”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2957"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2957"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2958,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2957\/revisions\/2958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}