Thoughts from Kansas

A few weeks ago, televangelist Pat Robertson got in some righteous trouble for claiming that Haiti deserved its earthquake devastation because Haitians two hundred years ago "sw[ore] a pact with the devil."

Turns out, Robertson knows something about making deals with the devil:

Former Liberian president Charles Taylor, testifying in his war crimes trial in The Hague on Thursday, said that his government had awarded American televangelist Pat Robertson a gold mining concession in 1999 and that Robertson later offered to lobby the Bush administration on the government's behalf.

The revelations came in the midst of Taylor's U.N.-backed trial on 11 counts of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during Sierra Leone's 1990s civil war. Taylor is accused of directing a Sierra Leonean rebel group, the United Revolutionary Front, in a campaign aimed at securing access to the country's diamond mines. The rebel movement stands accused of committing mass atrocities in the West African country in the late 1990s, including the mutilation of thousands of civilians.

Prosecutors at the Special Court for Sierra Leone contend that Taylor offered concessions to Westerners in exchange for lobbying work aimed at enhancing his image in the United States.

Taylor is known as one of Africa's more brutal military dictators, a distinction of genuine consequence. His bands of underaged soldiers raped and murdered anyone who stood in Taylor's way. He ate the flesh of his rivals and ordered his army to do the same. Aided by Taylor, Sierra Leonian rebels created their own child army in which soldiers were encouraged to chop off the arms of people in villages, to rape and murder at whim, to cut off the genitals of captured children. All to gain control of local diamond mines.

Sometimes, an incident perfectly captures a moment in history, and this is one such instance. Pat Robertson and Charles Taylor are both monsters. Monsters on a deep and moral level. And they saw some glimmer of similarity in one another. The similarity is not rooted in religion, but in political outlook.

I oppose Pat Robertson because I oppose authoritarianism, and Pat Robertson's theology and politics both lead to authoritarianism. Not necessarily to Charles Taylor's style of authoritarianism, but authoritarianism is authoritarianism. If Pat Robertson wanted to be an asshole in his private life, his friends could choose to ostracize him until he learned a lesson, or he could be a private asshole whose dickery didn't affect anyone else. That's his right, I suppose. The problem comes not when he starts thinking stupid things, but when he tries to impose those things on other people.
This is why I find the whole "it's not about politics, it's about epistemology" argument so frustrating. Fuck epistemology. Pat Robertson and Charles Taylor didn't pair up because of a shared epistemology, they paired up because of politics and money. And Charles Taylor's epistemology didn't cut the genitals off of children, or gamble on the sex of unborn fetuses and then cut them out to test the bet. Charles Taylor's politics did that. A lesser form of that politics drives the creation/evolution fight. It's what drives anti-vaxx. It's what drives global warming denial. It's what drives decisions about how to fund public education, and how to value scientific expertise. If you ignore the politics, you miss the point.