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Christian Reponses to Haiti
Posted by: "[email protected]" [email protected]
Sat Jan 16, 2010
Below are pasted some conservative responses to the disaster in Haiti. As usual, these heartfelt comments exhibit the warm love that Christian conservatives have for minorities. How dare the White House accuse conservative Christians of not being compassionate!!!
Gary
[link to news.yahoo.com]

Pat Robertson Haiti comments: French view theory with disbelief
By Robert Marquand Thu Jan 14, 1:48 pm ET

Paris – It took about five nanoseconds for evangelical Pat Robertson's video verdict on the causes of the Haiti earthquake to start making the rounds in France.

Mr. Robertson's theory that Haitian slaves made a "pact with the devil" 200 years ago in order to free themselves from the hated clutches of Napoleon Bonaparte's regime – resulting in a curse that led to the destruction of much of Port-au-Prince and a massive loss of life in Tuesday's earthquake – got the usual chuckles of disbelief among local intelligentsia about American culture.

It was bad enough that he said the successful slave revolt came during the reign of "Napoleon III, or whatever" (the Haitian Revolution led by Francois-Dominique Toussaint L'ouverture was in fact completed in 1804 when Napoleon Bonaparte ruled France, 44 years before his nephew Napoleon III came to power). But here in Haiti's former colonial master, talk about the Robertson"

theory" clouds with myth an early if awkward chapter in self-determination: the Haitian slaves are considered the first to collectively and successfully overthrow their colonial masters. In this case, the French.

After the French revolution, in 1794, the 500,000 slaves brought from
Africa to work Haiti's lucrative sugar and coffee plantations, were freed by decree. But Napoleon Bonaparte, seeking empire, wealth, and territory, tried re-enslave them in 1802.

Once slaves breathed the free air, they did not wish to return to their former status as drones or fodder for empire. Toussaint L'ouverture, a house slave whose father came from Africa, and whose master, Count de Breda, educated him – stepped up. Mr. L'ouverture's reading of French enlightenment and revolutionary writers Mirabeau and Voltaire is thought to have been extensive. The slave revolt itself took place in the name of the values and ideals of the French revolution in many readings of history here.

Haiti had been "a hell on earth" for the slaves, writes Le Monde's history specialist, Jerome Gautheret. "Each year, 50,000 slaves were brought to Haiti to compensate for the … terrible mortality among the slaves. In such a fragile society, order could only be precarious, based on terror and violence: the French Revolution shook it in an irreversible way. In Paris, while`
Friends of the Blacks' pled for civil equality for all free men and gradual emancipation of the slaves, a powerful colonial party [in Haiti] tried to maintain the status quo."
Quoted Thursday on Salon.com, UCLA anthropologist Andrew Apter says the notion of a "pact with the devil" as behind the slave victory "is so absurd it is almost funny. This notion of a pact with the devil is basically an echo of an old colonial response to the successes of the 1790s Haitian revolution."
The problem for Haiti is that if it was a hell on earth under slavery, it was also so after the slave revolt, French historians argue. Africans plucked and sent to Haiti to work under the lash and suddenly freed were not a model constituency for civil society. Haiti went from the largest sugar exporter in the world to chaos. "The plantations were deserted. The former slaves refused to work on the places they were enslaved," Mr. Apter said.
An emerging understanding of Haiti during this time is of an island
increasingly divided between the 30,000 to 40,000 mixed race former slaves, and the more recently arrived slaves from Africa.

UCLA's Apter argues, "the reason Haiti is poor is because Europe imposed a blockade on trade after the slave revolt in 1804, and you have an extremely polarized class structure in which a few families stepped into the positions of the former colonial plantation owners. There has been a horrible cycle of plundering and autocracy within Haitian leadership."

Follow the Global News Blog for updates on Haiti throughout the day.
[link to news.yahoo.com]

Rush 'meant' what he said about Haiti
Rush Limbaugh is not backing down from his claim that President Barack Obama is trying to score political points off the earthquake in Haiti.
Challenged by a caller during his show Thursday, Limbaugh said: "If I said it, I meant to say it, and I do believe that everything is political to this president."

"Everything this president sees is a political opportunity, including
Haiti, and he will use it to burnish his credentials with minorities in this country and around the world, and to accuse Republicans of having no compassion,"
Limbaugh said in comments flagged by the liberal blog Think Progress.

Limbaugh has come under fire from both the right and the left for saying that the earthquake played directly into Obama's hands, allowing him to look"
compassionate." The host claimed the White House's response would bolster Obama's standing in the "light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country."
He also appeared to discourage help for the island nation, saying, "We've already donated to Haiti. It's called the U.S. income tax."

Critics have characterized Limbaugh's comments as insensitive and tone-deaf at a time when heartbreaking images of the devastation dominate news coverage.
Confronted with some of that criticism, Limbaugh slammed a caller as "
close-minded."
"What I'm illustrating here is that you're a blockhead," Limbaugh shot back. "What I'm illustrating here is that you're a close-minded bigot who is ill-informed."

"If you had listened to this program for a modicum of time, you would know it," he said. "But instead, you're a blockhead. Your mind is totally closed. You have tampons in your ears. Nothing is getting through other than the biased crap that you read."
.

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Lotus

"in 1794, the 500,000 slaves brought from
Africa to work Haiti's lucrative sugar and coffee plantations"

Can somebody explain to me why they don't produce
and make business anymore with sugar and coffee?
French established this business there and then left
it to them.