Evangelist Pat Robertson blames Haitians for quake

Wouldn't you love to have been a bug on the wall during that epic dialogue between Satan and the collective "Haitian people?" Apparently, Mr. Robertson was. I would like a detailed account of how a nation of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children "got together and swore a pact" with Satan long ago and how Mr. Robertson came to be privy to the conversation such that he knew the Devil's exact words in reply.

Did the Haitians elect a spokesperson, or did they to a man memorize the request and chant it in unison?

Perhaps Mr. Robertson means that their leaders (whoever they were under the French) made a pact with the Devil. If so, how does he account for a just God—the God revealed by Christ—taking it out so many years later on an entire people? People who were not even alive at the time this pact was supposedly put into place?

These questions are, by their very nature, rhetorical. I feel truly sorry for Mr. Robertson. I can only assume he is mentally ill and therefore not completely responsible for what he says and does. I pray that God will overlook his very un-Christian message.

with a being named God talking to him, revealing secrets unknown to everybody else, and a person named The Devil that does soul-catching business in the Caribbean...
And all this is broadcast to people who don't know anything about the horrible history of Hispaniola, the genocide of its indigenous Taino people - 250,000 of them between 1492 and 1517 - the suffering of hundreds of thousands of imported African slaves...
France got the Eastern part of the island (today's Haiti) as a result of the "nine years war" as late as 1697, Treaty of Ryswyck . Spain kept the west part of the island, today's Dominican Republic. Following the French Revolution (1789), a slave revolt resulted in the abolition of slavery on the whole island, 1781. No devilish intervention, but the rebellion is said to have started with a voodoo ceremony by Houngan Dutty Boukman. Maybe that's what he refers to...
After a few atrocious interventions by French and British troops and a horrible revenge by the freed slaves, Haiti became independent in 1804, later conquered the whole Island, until, in 1844, a revolt led to the separation of what is today the Dominican Republic. Politics has ever since been chaotic in both parts of the Island. The US Marine Corps occupied and de facto ruled Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and the US (self interestedly) retained control of Haiti's external finances until 1947. A sequence of military-backed dictatorships, all attached to American patronage, defined the next 50 years of Haiti's history.
The Dominican part of the island had a similar fate, with Papa Doc and Baby Doc en lieu of Duvalier and his Tonton Macoutes ...
But all this - partly painful for the redneck - history stuff can much better be explained by a devilish deal and a furious god who punishes till the seventh generation. Using, it seems, surgically precise earthquakes...

I'm appalled at how few people know that history. I made sure my kids understood what sort of "exploration" Cristobal Colonne was really about and what his impact was on the aboriginal islanders.

When my daughter was in the fifth grade, she wrote an essay entitled, "Why We Should not Celebrate Columbus Day." She was not given a lot of support for her views; I think the teacher was shocked. I was proud of her for taking flak over it.

I was unhappy enough with the way the whole Columbus discovers America deal worked out that I decided to rewrite history. The result was a novelette entitled "O, Pioneer" which was published in Paradox magazine several years ago and nominated for the Sidewise Award for alternate history fiction. If anybody would like to read it, it's up online at http://www.bookviewcafe.com on the Historical fiction "shelf".

I find I like dabbling in history (bwa-ha-ha)!

Chinese refugees from the collapsing Southern Song Dynasty ( Fall of Hangzhou was 1276, the final court suicide 1279 after the battle of Yamen on the Pearl River Delta) inspire Central American tribes... so they can withstand C.Colon 200 years later. And conquer Spain/Europe, too, while they're at it. Ah, yes, hope dies last...
My only problem with alternative history is that technology/science transfers do not work straightforward: The Mongolian Yuan Dynasty found own uses for all the conquered Song culture, and brought the empire down in less than 100 years...
Nevertheless, a nice story.

I actually got the idea for the story through a confluence of Columbus Day and the Eddie Izzard "flag" sketch, where he has the conquering heroes arrive in India. The Indians object, of course, "You can't claim us; there are 5 million people living here!" To which the conqueror replies, "Do you have a flag?"

I originally set out to send Chris C to India, but since I was researching Chinese history for another story and really wondered what would've happened if Columbus had encountered a culture NOT decimated by foreign disease, I decided to let the story write itself.

The log entries, by the way, are from primary sources. Some of the dialogue between Chris and his brother are constructed from his logs, as well. Did I mention that I'm a research junkie?

Did I mention that I'm a research junkie?
So am I... And I love Eddie Izzard's "Gotta flag?" piece a lot, especially as those Indians got thousands of flags...
Just stumbled over T. Pratchett's "Strata", where, in an alternate universe, a lucky mixture of Norse (Eric the red) and Red Indian tribes leads to a rationalist cultural explosion in North America, resulting in the "discovery" of Europe before the Xians have time to mess everything up... it's just a few pages in the book, but really funny.