Slavery, National Founders, and Pacts with the Devil

After this week's horrible disaster in Haiti there has been an outpouring of humanitarian aid from around the world. There have also been some incredibly lunkheaded comments made by idiots such as Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson.

Most notable in my mind is that Pat Robertson would attribute the disaster to his claim that Founder of Haiti made a pact with the devil to escape French rule. The first question of course, is whether or not Robertson can give even the vaguest information about Haiti's rebellion against the French, let alone its complex relationship with the French Revolution.

Also it raises the question of the whole idea of making a pact with the devil or something evil. For that could apply to many founders of the US Constitution. In a way, the inclusion of slavery into the Constituion was an equally, err, Faustian bargain. Largely it was made because many of the Southern states would refuse to side with the revolutionaries against England, unless their peculiar institution was not touched.

Of course, many people today will try to rationalize slavery with various explanations such as the fact that it existed in most societies until recently, that slaves weren't necessarily worse off materially than a lot of free men and women. Of course, some of these claims were probably true (ei that the average Irish immigrant in the mid 19th century US was much poorer, hungrier, and than the average slave), but they are also immaterial. To rely on material conditions alone to to judge the evils of slavery is to write of any concept of human dignity entirely, not to mention that little thing known as "liberty"-supposedly a core principle of this country.

But more importantly still was the fact that connections to the Middle Passage were in and of themselves something of a deal with the devil. If slavery was a great moral evil, than the horrors of the Transatlantic Slave Trade were a pervasive corrupting influence on almost everything they touched.

The abolitionists of the time understood that, even if modern cynicism tends to portray them as a bunch of old time "bleeding hearts". They knew better than most modern anti-racism activists seem to acknowledge that freedom of speech was almost dead in the South, and that democracy was undermined in the whole country as a result of that "peculiar institution". Whether or not, slavery could have been ended without the Civil War is still a matter of controversy among very qualified historians.

But one thing is certain. Both Haiti and the US are countries that have in their own ways paid especially dearly for the problem of slavery. Haiti through it's extremely violent struggle for independence and the US through a very bloody Civil War.

And in that sense Robertson has made his own deal with the Devil in the sense that he cannot accept that it is possible for a nation to suffer any misfortune whether it was 9/11 or the earthquake in Haiti without somehow deserving it. As a result he has to lie, find blame, and show a complete lack of compassion when something like this happens.

Say Goodnight Readers!