Word: voodoos
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Duvalier had long harbored a resentment against the church, considering it a bastion of the opposition. Most of the priests are white, French-born and close to the mulatto upper classes that strongly oppose Duvalier, a Catholic himself but with close political links to the voodoo priesthood. When 1,000 priests, nuns and churchgoers gathered in Port-au-Prince's Notre Dame Cathedral to protest the expulsion order, Clement Barbot, the President's cold-eyed secretary and secret police chief, led a gang of bullyboys into the cathedral on a wild, baton-swinging charge, arrested...
...would embolden opposition elements to start trouble, his aides stuck to a diagnosis of "grippe," but only succeeded in starting dangerous rumors-that Duvalier was paralyzed, was already dead, or had left the country. Superstitious blacks in the Port-au-Prince slums whispered that the President's ouangas (voodoo charms) had lost their power...
...Duvalier, who has been running the country in one-man style, will be out of action for weeks, and his political enemies are using his illness in their war of nerves. The most effective method is a vicious appeal to voodoo believers, who are convinced that Duvalier is powerful because of ouangas that he planted about Port-au-Prince. As every practitioner of voodoo knows, the surest way to deprive a charm of its power is to apply human excrement. Last week the President's enemies went after what was supposed to be one of his strongest ouangas...
...directly employed or under contract. All their people have been enlisted as part-time hunters: when Francis C. Brown, president of New Jersey's Schering Corp., was in Port-au-Prince for the recent opening of the Haiti Psychiatric Institute, he heard of a red nut used by voodoo practitioners to calm disturbed patients, brought back samples that are now under laboratory test. Schering chemists are also analyzing a concoction which an African vendor labeled Mafuta Bhubesi-lion...
...universities, a basic idea of democracy, "that truth will emerge victorious in a free contest of ideas," takes the form of "the distilled voodoo of academic freedom," Buckley, who is author of God and Man at Yale, continued. Universities do not take sides, because the acceptance of truth would involve the rejection of its opposite as an error, a violation of "academic freedom...