Behind the Bastards - Part One: General Butt-Naked and the Liberian Civil War

Episode Date: May 24, 2022

Robert is joined by Shereen Lani Younes to discuss the Liberian Civil War. Footnotes: https://abcnews.go.com/International/penitent-warlord-atoning-20000-war-crimes/story?id=20749940 https://mobile.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/africa/The-chilling-story-of-a-Liberian-warlord-turned-preacher-1388905  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/14/general-butt-naked-the-repentant-warlord  https://www.thoughtco.com/brief-history-of-liberia-4019127  https://thegrio.com/2010/02/01/former-american-slaves-played-oppressive-role-in-liberias-past/ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/12/the-bizarre-case-of-general-butt-naked-and-his-demon-powered-warriors/  http://www.thepatrioticvanguard.com/liberia-rampant-ritual-killings-or-gboyo  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRuSS0iiFyo&vl=en https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/1040650/Wyszomierski%20Final%20Thesis.pdf?sequence=1 https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/lsj/article/download/4138/3765/13244 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H3B87RR/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1   Behind the Bastards is once again raising money to fund the Portland Diaper Bank! We've done this the last two years running and in 2021 your donations helped buy 1 million+ diapers for low income families! https://www.gofundme.com/f/btb-fundraiser-for-pdx-diaper-bankSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And this year we're trying to get $25,000 raised for the Portland Diaper Bank, which is going to allow us to help even more kids. So if you want to help, you can go to BTB Fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank at GoFundMe. Just type in GoFundMe, BTB Fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank. Again, that's GoFundMe, BTB Fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank, or find the link in the show notes. Thank you all. Oh, what is viciously executing and publicly torturing my son of God?

It's Good Friday. Not when you listen to this. You'll listen to this weeks after Good Friday. Hi, Shareen. Lonnie Unis, how are you doing? Hi, Robert Evans. I'm okay. Robert's your middle name, right?

I'm not going to confirm or deny what my name is or isn't. I have a number of names, like most people. Like Jesus. Like Allah. Exactly. Like our Lord and sovereign Allah. Like Ahura Mazda. Like Buddha.

There's all sorts of... This time of year, for whatever reason, all the religions are like, we should have a thing. Yeah, exactly. We'll have us a Ramadan. We'll have us a Passover. We'll have us an Easter. We're all... Or at least all of the Abrahamic faiths.

I don't know if like... I don't think anything Hindu's going on right now. I don't think anything Zoroastrian's going on. Anything Buddhist, probably not any Shinto stuff happening right now. But whatever. Maybe there is. It is like spring... We got a couple major ones up there.

Although it's also... I think it's like the dead of summer where a lot of those religions are. Southeast Asia, this is kind of like the hottest point of the... I don't know. I don't know. Anyway. Religion! Do you like religions, Shireen?

No. Please don't hate me, Internet. No, I don't. I actually... That's fine. I'm not a big fan myself. My teenager self would say like, I despise religion. I loathe it.

It made me so angry. I hated it. And I think I've like eased up on that language recently because I don't want to offend anybody. And like I realize for some people it's like meditative and depending on their religion, it can really help people. It's not for me. I just don't... I don't like it. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, like that's completely where I am too, Shireen. Because like when I was a kid, I was a really angry atheist. Yeah, exactly. You know, after... Not when I was... Like when I was like 18, 19... I was like 17 is kind of when I decided I was an atheist.

But yeah, I started to get really angry about it as a young adult. And I'm not angry about it anymore. Just because like I've realized that all of the things that are shitty about religion are shitty about a bunch of stuff. Yeah. And some people just choose to do shitty stuff. Yeah. And whether or not they use a religion to justify it, they'll find other things to justify it if it's not religion. But that's really beside the point today.

Yeah. Shireen... It's not religion that's shitty. It's humans. I get it. Yeah. Yeah. It's not that they're shitty.

It's just that shitty people will find reasons to do shitty things. Yes, exactly. Religion or not. Yeah. It's just a thing that we do because we're cool. Speaking of... Actually, this does tie in a bit to what we're talking about today. A little bit.

A good segue from Robert Evans. There's some religion. There's definitely some religious stuff involved here. It's going to be real uncomfortable. Shireen, what do you know about Liberia? Liberia. Yeah. Nothing.

I was going to say that. You are more or less in the... Where most Americans are. Okay, great. I know nothing about most things, so I'm excited to learn about Liberia today. You are aware that there's been a bunch of war there, right? Yes. Yeah, you've kind of seen some...

I'm aware at least that there's conflict and... Yeah. ...and tragedy and things that my brain sometimes turns off because I can only handle so much trauma, but that's my luxury of being a privileged asshole. You know what I mean? Well, yeah, it's very funny because there's a bunch of places in the world where horrible things are going on, places like Myanmar, places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Palestine, where people don't... Americans are able not to care because...

And to some degree, it's like, yeah, man, the world's fucking big. There's a lot of stuff going on. No one can know about all of the bad things that are happening, and you shouldn't be expected to be aware of every single terrible thing happening in the world. There's a particular reason why Americans ought to know more about Liberia, and it's because we made Liberia. Now, I'm going to talk, Shareen, today. The main subject of our episode is a fellow who went by the name General Butt Naked.

That's a... that's of truth. That's... it's pretty fun. It's a pretty fun name, not a fun guy. Not a fun guy. But he's one of those dudes, the broad strokes is that, like, he was this warlord, did a bunch of horrible stuff in the Liberian Civil War, fought Naked, hence the name, and then afterwards, repented. And there's been a bunch of documentaries about how he's a Christian preacher now,

and he's apologizing to all his victims. He's a grifter, in my opinion. But in order to properly talk about this guy, because a lot of the shit he did, there's a lot of witchcraft and sacrificing babies and all sorts of fucked up shit. Oh, yeah, well, but the thing is, like, that all sounds a lot more like, you know, there's a problematic history of particularly white dudes like me talking about witchcraft and occult practices in different African countries and getting all like, oh my god, they did this and they did that.

None of it is exactly the way that it seems with, like, the casual description of what's going on. So before we talk about General Butt Naked, we're going to have to spend an hour or so talking about the history of conflict in Liberia, where it came from, and how shit like human sacrifice wound up getting kind of ground into the mix there. So, you ready? You ready for this? Buckle in?

Yeah, let me click. Get your sad pants on. My what pants on? Sad pants? Uh-huh, yeah. Yeah, they're always on. Do I ever take those off? That's good.

No. Yeah. So, the first enslaved African people from North America landed at Jamestown on August 1619. This is pretty famous because of that New York Times thing now. Most of these folks were Angolans who had been captured by Portuguese slavers in the centuries that followed they and the Africans who followed them became an integral part of agriculture and economic viability in the colonies.

When the United States became a thing, a number of the founding fathers, chiefly Thomas Paine, denounced slavery as a terrible evil that would one day tear the new nation apart. Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner himself, realized this when he wrote his notes on the state of Virginia in 1785. Here's what he had to say. Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state and thus save the expense of supplying by importation of white settlers the vacancies they will leave? Deep-rooted prejudice is entertained by the whites, 10,000 recollections by the blacks

of the injuries they have sustained. New provocations, the real distinctions which nature has made and many other circumstances will divide us into parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race. So what he's talking about here is his idea that if you're going to end slavery, you should send the black people who were brought here back to Africa. That's kind of Thomas because otherwise there will inevitably be a race conflict. You can't just keep them here if you're going to free them.

That's Thomas Jefferson's attitude. And there's a number, he thinks that black people were probably inferior to white people. And he thinks that again, there's just too much anger and whatnot. He also does note that white people are probably too bigoted for it. It's a weird mix of things. He's a strange man. Now, others among his peers disagreed. There was an attitude among abolitionists in this early period.

Some felt that black people had just been temporarily degraded by slavery and they could be gradually uplifted to the point of social responsibility. This is still problematic, the idea that they need to be uplifted rather than just freed but is generally better than the idea that they're genetically different. So I don't know. As the abolitionist movement picked up steam in the mid 1800s, advocates were often extremely racist themselves. Many abolitionists believed that freed black people could not exist or keep up in white society. Others like Jefferson just felt that there would be too much understandable anger over slavery

for them to live alongside white people, which is not like an unreasonable attitude to be like, well, shit, why would they want to hang out here? Like after all the fucked up shit we did to them. I mean, it's mostly just like they're fearful for their own lives, right? Like, oh, the minute they are able to, they're going to come after us for us treating them like actual animals. You know what I mean? I think there's a mix of that. I think there's some people who are honest abolitionists and for the time, very racially progressive

who just can't imagine them wanting to. And obviously, one of the problems you'll hear again and again is a lot of people who are abolitionists are not great at actually listening to black people. That's a problem the whole abolitionist movement has. Some people are better at it than others, but it's like a thing that happens at periods of time. So, yeah, all of these discussions are going on. Late 1700s, early 1800s, is this abolitionist movement is building up steam. And some of the people who are for abolition start to advocate for a sort of sponsored immigration program

to send freed black slaves out of the United States and back to Africa. And so this is not, they're advocating for abolition in the United States, but they're also saying, we've got all these free black people. We should create a colony in Africa for them to send them back to. And that once we start freeing more slaves, those people can go to that colony, right? One of these men was Pennsylvania reformer John Parrish. He advocated manumitting, that means freeing slaves and sending them back home where they could experience, quote, liberty and the rights of citizenship without being particularly near him.

His hope was that sending over a small number of black folks would convince other free black people to leave North America and that this would somehow inspire the better nature of slave owners to free their own people. Quote, many persons of humanity who continue to hold slaves would be willing to liberate them on condition of their so removing. You get what he's saying? He's actually kind of saying the same thing Jefferson was, because Jefferson was arguing like, well, you can't just free him and have him stay here,

otherwise it'll be a problem. So Parrish is being like, well, obviously, maybe a lot of these slave owners are really good people. They just see that it's too dangerous to let these people be free. So we have to, it's very racist again. But it's also not a kind of racism in America that we talk about a lot, because a lot of this history has been kind of brushed over. I mean, yeah, it's kind of backwards because you're like, they're not saying like, oh my God, controlling another human is terrible because you're still controlling them.

You're still like, okay, let's show them out. They are saying that they're just saying it's not the worst thing. Right, exactly. Like freeing them would be right because they are saying it's bad to have slaves, but they're just saying it's worse to, you know, again, very racist, just kind of a type of racism we maybe don't talk about enough that existed in this period. So he felt like a lot of slave owners didn't want slaves. They just kind of inherited them and they were scared about what black people would do if they were free,

which is a very silly thing to think. In December of 1816, a mix of people with good, bad, racist, and only slightly racist intentions formed the American Colonization Society. Now, part of this group, some of these people are very legitimately just like, again, if you're like a civil rights advocate, you're born into the mid-1800s, you see this nightmare system. I can see a ways that a decent person would be like, maybe this is the best thing, maybe providing these people like, it's so racist here, it's so hard for them.

Maybe if we tried to set them up with a place nice back in Africa, this would be a more ethical situation than having to live with all these fucking horrible racists, right? Some people in the American Colonization Society are like that. However, it is primarily a dark money organization funded by slave owners. And what's going on here is that powerful slave owners want to push the idea of an African colony for freed slaves, because this will remove free black people out of the Americas, and free black people they see as like competition for slave labor that they can profit from. Wait, competition for slave? Repeat that?

Yeah, they've got slaves, which is free labor. Yeah. But free black people, because they, you know, work for less than free white people because of racism, right? That's competition for low-paying work that otherwise will go to their slaves that they just profit from. I see, okay. You know? Yes, yes. I think they also see it as like a safety valve, because again, they're really racist.

They understand that like some states, black people are going to get free, but they don't want them sticking around, because as long as there are free black people in North America, that's a body of people who are going to organize to abolish slavery, right? That's why the point was invented, right? Yes. So there's a number of reasons why slave owners really like the idea of a colony in Africa for free slaves, their dark money is kind of funding the American colonization society. Yeah.

And again, this group, there are abolitionists in this group, but it's not committed to abolition. I want to quote now from a write-up on the American, I want to quote now from a write-up on the African-American Intellectual History Society's Black Perspectives blog by Nicholas Gouyet. Its origins and trajectory always evinced a watery commitment to abolition. Two facts made this commitment supremely insidious. First, it placed the burden of ending slavery on the benevolent slaveholders themselves, who would supposedly free their slaves when provided with an outlet for doing so. Second, it marked an epic endorsement of racial segregation, effectively denying the possibility of coexistence while promoting what would later be termed separate but equal.

So you can see the roots of a couple of really fucked up things in the American colonization society. Now, before the souring of sectional relations in the 1830s and 1840s, colonization also supplied a bridge between mainstream anti-slavery sentiments in both north and south. The ACS opened auxiliary societies from New England through North Carolina, when upper southern legislatures engaged with the question of ending slavery, and variably they identified a black colony as the prerequisite for general emancipation. Only the deep south became a no-go zone for colonization enthusiasts, white politicians, editors, and businessmen, mobilizing their considerable power

against even a feather-light anti-slavery challenge. In New England, by contrast, colonization retained a considerable appeal through the first years of the Civil War. So colonization is proper in like these kind of progressive, you might say, liberal chunks of the north, where abolitionists, and that's why slavery enthusiasts don't want any discussion of this in the south, right, because it's even a little bit of abolitionist tendency is too much for them. But they love pushing this in the north because it's a lot, if you can get people focusing on this, they're not focusing on abolishing slavery, which would actually hurt them, right? Right, right.

You get what's going on here? Yeah. So the chief accomplishment of the American Colonization Society was the establishment of the Colony of Liberia on Africa's west coast. It was founded in 1821 by a group of roughly 10,000 free black migrants who took one look at the US in the 1820s and figured, well, shit, anywhere's better than here, right? Like, from the part of you of these guys who are leaving and ladies who are leaving, it's like, yeah, of course.

Like, I get why you wouldn't want to stick around North America right about now. Yeah. It doesn't seem like that's a safe bet. The first big wave of immigration to Liberia was, yeah, about 10,000 people, and this occurs over a period of time from 1822 to 1841 in several successive waves. And these migrants formed several towns on the coast with names like Robertsport, Monrovia, Buchanan, and Greenville. Although I think their initial Monrovia is first capital name is Christopolis.

Christopolis, yeah, that was the first name. Very funny. Very funny. Although it's not going to be funny, actually, because spoilers, colonialism. Yeah. So because of racism, these black people who have gone to Liberia are not actually the masters of their own domain at first. Liberia is a colony of the United States,

and the new immigrants are ruled by a white governor who appoints white officials. Wow. Now, the new residents of the city did have a legislative council that they got to vote for and their own elected representatives who work with the governor, right? So they do have representation, certainly more than they did in the United States at the time, right? But final approval for all actions voted for by the council, pinded on approval by a board of managers for the colonization society who lived in Washington, DC. Oh, my God.

So if the black people living there voted for something, they had to send it back across the Atlantic to get ratified by this council who could also annul laws. So they basically just, like, they leave these plantations they're enslaved in in the states, and they go to this just dry island plantation. Anyway, you have predicted some of where this is going. Oh, no. But not for them, actually. But yeah, there is, like, this is obviously very fucked up.

It's in keeping, though, with the idea of some of these dudes that, like, they need to be trained up before they can run their own country, right? That's why they're doing it this way. That's why the white people are doing it this way. Right. Right. Very conscious of things. So now it is, the good news is that anytime they send a dude over there, a white dude over there,

to help govern the colony, that motherfucker dies immediately, right? Because there's all sorts of, there's all sorts of bugs and shit that are biting white people. Right, like, there's all sorts of shit that, like, kills white people in Africa in this period, because we don't have good medicine. Yeah, they're just dropping like flies. We're the best race in the world, like, to get killed in a fight. Can't handle a fucking mosquito bite. It's so funny for me.

White-ass motherfuckers. I got a sunburn. Ow. No, it's so funny. These guys keep dying, which is a real problem. It makes it difficult for them to, like, run the colony the way they want to. It makes it hard for them to have white people to report back to DC. And beyond that, the society, after the earliest years, runs into a funding crunch.

So part of this is because they stop getting donations, because abolitionists wake up to the fact that this is a dark money thing for slave owners. Part of this is that, like, the conflict over slavery gets nastier, and slave owners stop putting, like, they start putting money elsewhere, right? So starting in the 1840s, white oversight of Liberia starts to peel away. Liberians begin to agitate for total autonomy, and when the last white governor dies in 1841, they get it. The society appoints a black governor, Joseph Roberts,

who became the first not-white person to run things in Liberia. Now, the colony then, at this point, you know, stops being a colony, not really a colony after this moment, and it becomes an independent nation in July of 1847. And if that had been all that happened, should be. This would be one of the less depressing stories in the history of slavery. God damn it, Robert. Here's the thing.

Now, you send 10,000 black people in America, pretty much all born in the United States as slaves. Some of them were born free, but you take these black Americans, and you send them to the west coast of Africa to set up cities. Now, are you seeing any potential problems here? Well, I mean, are there, wait, I'm confused. Were there already people on Liberia before this? Oh, yes, there sure were. Is that?

Am I in the right direction here? They're absolutely were people there before. Okay, yeah, I think I understand where it's going. They're 100% were people there. I'm sounding like people that don't understand about Palestine. Of course, there's a ton of people there. Okay, great. Again, these dudes, these migrants are obviously these people were stolen from somewhere in Africa,

or at least their ancestors were, right? But they're from potentially all over, certainly not Liberia in specific, generally. And also, they speak English. They're Christian. They dress like Americans. They have been living free in US cities. Yeah, right.

So these are, this is not a case of like these people returning to their homeland. These people are colonizing Liberia. And if you know anything about colonization, it's not nice. No, it's not. And this was not suddenly fine just because the guys doing the colonization in Africa were black. It's still pretty messy. And I'm going to quote now from an article by M.B. Aqpan in the Canadian Journal of African Studies, titled Black Imperialism, quote,

The settlers constituted the rulers who ran the Liberian government in much the same way as the British and French constituted rulers in neighboring colonial territories like Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast. However, actual power rested in the hands of prominent members of certain leading settler families or lineages in a manner that maintained some balance of power among the families. The settlers on whom the government of Liberia that evolved as from 1841 were essentially American rather than African in outlook and orientation. They retained a strong sentimental attachment to America, which they regarded as their native land. They wore the western mode of dress, which they had become accustomed to in America. However, unsuitable this dress was to Liberia's tropical weather, a black silk topper and a long black frock coat for men

and a Victorian silk gown for women. They built themselves frames, stone or brick porticoed houses of one and a half to two stories similar to those of the plantation owners in the southern states of America. And they preferred American food like flour, cornmeal, butter, lard, pickle beef, bacon and American grown rice, large quantities of which they imported annually, to African foodstuff like cassava, plantain, yams, palm oil, sweet potatoes and country rice grown by Africans in the Liberian hinterland. They were Christians, spoke English as their mother tongue and practiced monogamy. They held land individually in contrast with the communal ownership of the African population.

And their political institutions were modeled on those of America with an elected president and a legislature made up of a Senate and a House of Representatives. So that in spite of their color, they were as a rule as foreign and lacking in sentimental attachment to Africa as were European colonialists elsewhere in Africa like the British, the French, the Portuguese and the Spaniards. Yeah, that's a really stern the pot here. I mean, like it just they're like conduits or like vessels for still like white agendas. It sounds like even if they don't mean to be. I mean, it's not so much white as like Western because obviously they're not white. For me, it's interchangeable. I know that's a mistake, but yeah.

Yeah, but they are very much they are Westerners and they see to a large extent the people who had been living in Liberia as like backwards devil worshiping weirdos who don't deserve political rights, right? So the indigenous Liberians don't get to vote in the same way that like, yeah, like they are shut out to a significant extent at least from the franchise, right? And if you're thinking, boy, howdy, I bet this caused a problem somewhere down the line. Then good news, you're right on the money over the next half century and change. The American Liberians became an oligarchy, practicing what one historian called a quote sort of sub imperialism at African expense. By 1900, about 15,000 black American immigrants had settled in Liberia, along with around 300 immigrants from the West Indies.

Liberia is often claimed in 20th century history books as one of two African states that remained independent during the scramble for Africa, the other being Ethiopia, but this is not quite accurate. Ethiopia is for sure, but Liberia was a colony that just became independent in 1847. Like certainly a lot earlier than other colonies did because most of Africa hadn't been colonized in 1847. But the fact that it was not re-colonized doesn't really mean anything because it was already a colony. Right, right. And the actual indigenous people in Liberia were a subclass within their own homeland with very little economic or political power. The American Liberians held all of the power, and their American Liberian Whig Party was essentially the only legal political party in the country from 1860 to 1980.

Despite the fact that immigrant-descended Liberians made up only 2% of the population, they effectively turned the rest of the country into a profit-making engine for themselves. In 1931, an international commission found that several prominent American Liberians had enslaved indigenous Africans. No. So, yeah, the West is pretty... It's a fucking virus. Yeah, it does work that way sometimes. God. You know what else is a virus, Shireen?

Racing on. It is a virus. It is a virus that keeps our democracy functioning in a healthy manner. Like the Epstein Bar virus, you know? You can't get enough of it. No. Just nom, nom, nom. Good and tasty. Shoot me up, yeah.

Huh? That's what everyone says about the Epstein Bar virus. Anyway, here's some ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. Because the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space.

313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. We're really enjoying that message from our sponsors, the Epstein Bar Virus. Catch it tomorrow. Anyway, so if you want a good example of how like the good people at the Epstein Bar Virus paid us serious money for that plug. Whatever makes you happy, Robert. That does make me happy. I'd be happier if everybody went and got the Epstein Bar Virus. Let's move on from the bit, I think.

Should we move on from the bit? You think so? I'm going to look up what the Epstein Bar Virus does, because I've forgotten. After all that time. Yeah, well, you know, I just remembered the name. I'm so lucky. Oh, it's like it's the herpes virus, I guess. Oh, wait, no, it's mono. Is it mono? I don't know. Let's let's let's ignore. Yeah, I think it's mono. It's mono.

Say it for the 17th time. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's that good shit. Yeah, so get mono. Everybody get mono. Okay. Yeah. Sophie, how are we doing? You happy? You happy with me as a podcaster? No. You glad you made this series of choices in your life that led to you sitting here? Well, a guy talks about how everyone should get mono on a podcast about Liberia.

Kind of. You psyched? Kind of, actually. I was going to say, I was going to say, even though Sophie is like, not, she's like, wasn't talking. Like, I'm just so glad her camera's always on, because I can just like, every time you say something, I can just look up and I know Sophie is like, we connect, you know, she shakes her head. I'm like, yes. We connect. And you know what? Connecting is how people get mono. Robert. Anyway, what?

Move on from the bit. Okay. Try to make a segue at this. So we're talking about like mono, colonization spreads like the colonial mindset and the imperial mindset spreads from the United States to Liberia. That is very impressive, actually. That is a great segue. As we noted, like some of these American Liberians take slaves from the Native Africans for themselves. They also create a plantation.

I mean, several, but there's one in particular we're going to talk about right now, because this really highlights how fucked up some of the stuff going on here is starting in the 1920s. The Firestone Corporation starts a massive rubber plantation in Liberia, which profits obviously the 2% of people who are American Liberian, that sprawls from the coast to like the hills of Central Liberia. It's this like massive thousands and thousands of acres with people like living on it, harvesting rubber for very little money and have very little control over their own lives, like indigenous people laboring day in and day out to harvest the rubber that makes the tires

and like the cars that first start filling American streets. It's pretty cool. I'm going to quote from a write-up in ProPublica. At the center of this kingdom was House 53, reserved for the plantation boss. It stood on a hill overlooking the rest of the plantation, a two-story antebellum-style Georgian colonial mansion of pink brick. It had a wide porch, six white Corinthian columns and Jalusi windows. Other homes for expatriates featuring verandas and manicured gardens were scattered nearby in a section of the plantation known as Harble Hills.

There was an old golf course, tennis courts, and a country club with a bar. About three miles down the road was Harble, Firestone's own company town, a portmanteau formed from the names of the business's founder, Harvey S. Firestone Sr. and his wife, Ida Bell. It held Firestone's central office, industrial garages, and a latex-practicing plant, redolent of ammonia and other chemicals. The town itself was a collection of tin-roofed homes and shops, a grocery store, a bank, schools, and brick and cinder-block bungalows

for mid-level Liberian managers and domestic staff. Homes of the Tappers, the Liberian workers who did the hard work of extracting the latex sap from the trees. The camps were long, low rows of residences, almost like coupes. Units generally consisted of a single room. The homes had waddle and daub walls and aluminum roofs. There were no windows and no kitchens. The work camps had communal pumps for water and outdoor kitchens for cooking.

There was no electricity. Bathrooms were outhouses or the nearby bush. This was the world of the Firestone operation, in 1990 by one company executive as resembling an old Southern plantation. Wow. So, fucking George H.W. Bush's in the White House, and white people are running a plantation in Africa with the collusion of the American Liberian government,

where the workers there are just a couple of steps above being enslaved. That was like yesterday. Yeah, real recent. And when the Civil War starts, Firestone's company representatives are going to make some cool choices about how to help. Yeah, this is Firestone. Tire, rubber. Yeah, this is where the rubber comes from, a plantation in Africa.

So that's neat. Now, you will not be surprised to hear that an awful lot of Liberians, and I mean like indigenous Liberians, were not jazzed with the status quo, right? People have problems with it. Not jazzed, yes, at least. Yeah, not psyched. It was, you have to give it a really effective system,

because Liberia, kind of, if you treat the American Liberian rule as a colonial project, it lasts longer than basically any other African colony, other than South Africa, arguably. Right, maybe it's because people are never taught about it, or like you know what I mean, it went under the radar because no one even knew it was there. Well, I don't know, I think there's a number of factors here.

Am I just an ignorant, and I just don't know enough about geography. I mean, I think very little of this history is known to Americans. It's not something we really talk about. I remember vaguely hearing that one of the, I remember in a textbook I had in high school that was talking about abolition movement pre-Civil War, there was a little box in one of the pages that summarized the American Colonization Society

and the Colonizing of Liberia and like four paragraphs, and that was just kind of like, oh, some people went over there. This was one thing that folks tried. I didn't hear this. I didn't learn anything about the, again, like black imperialism is the title of one of the, and obviously it's not, I think they're using that to kind of elicit a reaction.

This is still, in a lot of ways, white imperialism. It's just using black people, there's a huge financial benefit and a military benefit which we'll discuss later to the United States because Liberia functions this way. So, yeah, it's a pretty effective system. The American Liberians remain in charge until 1980 when things begin to go terribly wrong.

The last president that the oligarchy was able to successfully keep in power, well, install in power, I should say, was a guy named William Tolbert. His administration was severely weakened early on due to a series of rice riots in the end of the 1970s. And by early 1980, his ability to stay in power was teetering on the brink.

You might guess there was a lot of hunger. Poor people who are indigenous Liberians generally are starving. They riot because they want food. The government cracks down on it brutally. They arrest a bunch of organizers. But, you know, they beat this down, but their hold on power is not secure.

Tolbert does not seem to have been a very bright dude because he's not entirely aware of how shaky his position is. He and his fellow oligarchs felt like they had control, mostly lockdown, because all of the officers in the Liberian military were American Liberian. You could not be an indigenous Liberian and be an officer. Now, here's what's interesting. All of the enlisted men are indigenous.

And so all of the sergeants and corporals are indigenous men. This is exactly the same way. We talked about years ago, I did an episode on Idi Amin, who becomes the dictator of Uganda, which is a British colony after the British come out. And Idi Amin was like the highest ranking native African military officer in the military in Uganda when the British left, and he was a sergeant

because the way the British military worked in Africa, all of your officers are white dudes. All of the enlisted men are black Africans. Right, so the people that could die are usually not white. Yes, but also the officers are the ones who are supposed to be able to do the coordinating and the actual executing of military operations. So that's part of why you don't want indigenous people to be officers,

because sergeants are never supposed to have command over big units of guys. That's a thing for captains and majors and colonels and whatnot. So you can see that the Liberian military is organized the same way that like the British and the French organize their colonial militaries. And because, again, Idi Amin was a sergeant before he became dictator,

when Liberia has its civil war and the government gets overthrown, it's going to be a sergeant who do the overthrowing, because that's as high as you can rise in the military as an indigenous person. So Tolbert was so convinced that he was in a secure position, that he started doing the one thing, an oligarchic leader of what is effectively a U.S. backed dictatorship should never do.

He starts to fuck with the U.S. See, the U.S. Department of Defense had come to expect we liked Liberia, in part because there's a bunch of benefits, financial benefits, U.S. companies make a lot of money, cheap labor, get rubber and shit from Liberia. But also the U.S. has a bunch of fuckery we get up to in Africa, right? We got a ton of shit going on in Africa,

especially in this period. And Liberia, we say, hey, we need to land some fucking planes. We got to keep some Marines there. We need to keep like a rapid deployment force or whatever. In the past, Liberia is always like, absolutely, send as many troops as you want. Like, land your planes here, fly out of here, you're good to go, we're buddies, you know?

Because intelligent people who are part of this oligarchy recognize that the United States being in your pocket is basically the best thing you can do in terms of staying in power. Well, why does he decide to fuck with the U.S. exactly? What does he think is the benefit of that? I don't think he's a very bright dude. I'm going to admit I'm not the most knowledgeable on this, but it's generally reviewed,

regarded as kind of a baffling decision. But he's also like, you know, the U.S. is kind of like, I think withholding some aid funding and stuff out of civil rights concerns. So there's some pressure being put on his regime, I think, by the U.S. and he decides to push back in this way. This proves to be a really bad call because when basically DC decides

we want a new U.S. rapid deployment force in Liberia and they ask permission and Tobur is like, no. So then the CIA and the Department of Defense are like, well, why do we want this guy in power now? This doesn't benefit us at all. Well, they try to, it's kind of debatable as to how much of an impact they really have on this, but they certainly start thinking about it

and they start going through some names of like, what's sergeants and whatnot in the Liberian military do we think could like overthrow the government? It was generally assumed Liberia doesn't have much in the way of other political parties yet, so there's not really an established opposition. So it was assumed the Army is the best place to actually get some kind of revolutionary leader.

They're not really able to move forward unless the situation changes though and that change starts to come courtesy of the Progressive Alliance of Liberia, a policy group which decides to become a political party in 1980. They start holding events and talk spread that Tobur's regime was planning to execute a bunch of the organizers of the riots

who were still imprisoned on the one year anniversary of the Rice Riots to like kind of solidify power, threaten these people. So this inspires a lot of local Liberians to do something ahead of that date and it's very likely that the CIA had some sort of, I don't think we know exactly what, they were certainly talking about overthrowing Tobur

and then it happens, it's again, I can't tell you exactly their role here, but what happens is that a group of 17 soldiers, mostly Sergeants, which is the highest rank that Liberians could hold, attempt to launch a coup ahead of that anniversary and I'm going to quote now from the Liberian Civil Wars by Charles River Editors.

The senior ranking member of the coup party, although not its leader, was Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, an almost entirely unknown figure. The mission was rather spontaneous and aided by alcohol. The party set off on the evening of the 11th, fully armed and made its way to the foot of the Barclay Training Center towards Capitol Hill

and the executive mansion. The streets were unlit and entry to the grounds of the mansion was gained without challenge. At about 0100 hours on the morning of the 12th, the coup party broke into the basement, also without encountering any challenge and cautiously entered the upstairs section. Now, purely by chance,

it turns out that President Tobur had been out at a Baptist convention, he was a preacher, so he had been preaching at this convention. And instead of going back to his compound, he decides to go back and sleep at the Capitol building that night. So he's in his bathroom in his pajamas when he hears gunfire,

which is the coup members assaulting his guards. The whole thing is very messy. It ends with Tobur, his teenage nephew and a bunch of guards all executed, just brutally, these are very violent killings. When Tobur's body is discovered the next day, his corpse was found mutilated. As best as anyone can tell,

a corporal named Harrison Pinot had shot him in the head after Tobur attempted to bribe him. For more detail, I'm going to turn again to the quote from that book, The Liberian Civil Wars. After the shooting, Corporal Pinot was asked what he thought he was doing, and his reply was that he wanted to see Tobur die

in order to debunk a generally held belief that the president was a witch doctor. The idea of leadership allied to sorcery remains common enough in Africa, and most Liberian leaders tended to allow mythology of that nature to pass since it added to the mystique of their rule. Tobur habitually carried a short ivory-tipped cane,

and the belief was that it was carved from the femur of a human leg bone. It was remarked by one soldier that if Tobur had laid the cane down, he would not have been killed, but it is unlikely that he was carrying any ceremonial accoutrement at that particular moment. Regardless, three more bullets were put in his head

just to ensure the job was done, and with that, the 19th president of the Liberian Republic lay dead on the floor of his bedroom in a pool of blood. He gets disemboweled after this. At some point after he's killed, his guts get removed, which is, again, seen as like the best way to kill a witch doctor.

It is hard to say who did this because after the coup proved successful, these 17 initial dudes are joined by like 100 other soldiers. They find the president's liquor cabinet and they all just get shithouse drunk and go on a killing spree. They just start murdering anybody associated

with the old government, right? So this is gnarly, it's also like you're part of an oppressed class, you're used as cannon fodder by the government, like you have no rights and you get a chance to murder them all. Historically, you murder them all. This is not the only place

something like this has happened. So we're going to talk a lot more about disembowelment, cannibalism, and other similar subjects, but we should probably discuss what those things mean in a Liberian context because, again, a lot of this stuff gets over-focused on by

foreigners talking about this conflict and being like, oh my god, there's cannibals and witch doctors. Talk about why that exists and what that means, huh? Are we going to talk about witchy stuff? A little bit, yeah, we're going to talk about the particular part of West Africa where the Liberian colony is established

has a history of a practice called goboyo. And goboyo is a practice whereby people are killed so that their body parts can be used as sacrifices to magically obtain certain benefits. Now, one local news source, this is kind of like

a West African news source, described this as an ancient practice and notes that Liberian elites, which generally means the American Liberians, never really attempted to find ways to stop this and never really worked on a good way for how to do it. And since they

tended to be Christian and kind of dicks, indigenous practices developed a degree of gravity as like acts of resistance to the oligarchy, a version of this happens in Haiti, where a lot of these traditional practices become associated with resistance to the colonial regime. Now, also

that local source I found scholars will quibble with aspects of that because again, as was noted above, Tolbert, who's American Liberian and other presidents would definitely signpost to some of these kind of beliefs about witchcraft. Because it makes them a little bit invincible

with the mystique that you said, you know? Yeah, yeah. So anyway, the fact that a lot of these these kind of traditional, like Guboyo, this traditional practice is seen as kind of a resistance practice to the Christian and like very Western regime,

this seems to have caused what had been very fairly uncommon practices, spiritual practices before colonization to grow and mutate. University, yeah, because this is what happens in Liberia, all of the shit we're going to be talking about

that happens in the civil world, these really fucked up practices, these are a lot of people will argue did not really exist in the same fashion prior to colonization. Yeah, they were they were like in response to being colonized and oppressed, they were like, we should latch on to

these things that are becoming this form of resistance. Yeah, and they're also, they're going to change over time. So University of Wisconsin Professor Florence Bernaud writes that quote, public rumors depict human sacrifice and often related sorceries as the most common way to achieve personal success,

wealth and prestige in times of economic shortage and declining social opportunities. Political leaders are widely believed to perform ritual murder to ensure electoral success and power and many skillfully use these perceptions to build visibility and deference. So people like a lot of these

these rulers in this period like aren't necessarily doing these things, but they are kind of signaling that they do, which leads to an increased belief that there's some efficacy to this. And Bernaud notes that rather being a truly ancient practice, Caboio and other similar practices have roots in

the past, but are influenced in their modern forms by the extractive nature of colonialism. Quote, the colonial situation revealed significant contradictions in the western fiction of a modern disconnect between body and power. The series of political and moral transgressions triggered by the conquest

made apparent how Europeans themselves envisioned political survival as a form of positive exchange revolving around the body fetish. In the colony, black and white bodies became re-sacralized as political resources. Think about how in the Can you explain, what do you mean body

fetish? Like what are you saying? Fetish is kind of like a religious term for like an object of sort of like worship or at least of spiritual focus. Okay, that's like needed to understand that, but like that's so... Think about, so one of the things people talk about like cannibalism in the

Congo, and one thing they'll point out is that a lot of these practices were influenced to even have their origin in what the Belgians were doing and taking the hands of people who did not harvest enough rubber because like what they're pointing at is that like, well from the perspective of these people living in this region, Europeans are engaging

in the same acts. They're taking pieces of human bodies and they are using them to gain power in some way. Like as trophies. Why wouldn't that work for... It's like you get power by taking somebody's hand from them, right? You get power over the whole community, you know, as this threat. How is that any meaningfully

different than like you kill somebody and you take a part of their body part and like eat it or whatever? Like you can see a relation between those two things and you can see how like the extractive nature of colonial capitalism on these people influences these

ideas of like sacrificing and taking pieces of the body in order to gain power. You know, it's not this is not evolving enough. The point that these scholars, this doesn't, these practices aren't, they're not novel. It's not just people doing what they've been doing for thousands of years. They have evolved and changed

over the period of colonization as much as everyone has and so have these practices and these practices cannot be extricated from capitalism or from colonization, right? Yeah. So by the time Sergeant Doe and his allies

overthrow the government, these practices have become, quote, not a marginal, but a central dimension of the nature of public authority, leadership, and popular identities. And this is going to cause a lot of real nasty problems but you know what else is going to cause some real nasty problem, Shireen?

Uh, Epstein Bar Virus? Oh boy, howdy. Let me tell you the Epstein Bar Virus. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have brought it back. I'm sorry. Causes the problem of having a good time. Look, everybody loves a little bit of mono. Smooth, smooth. Mm-hmm. It was very popular in my high

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by mononucleosis. That's on me. Sophie, it's on me. It is. NPRs, whatever thing they do, the daily that New York Times podcast, those fucking cowards would never be sponsored

by those cowards. I will say though, there's an impulse that I won't entertain. This fascination with physical body and power and what that means on a philosophical level.

I'm so fascinated by that. I said this before on another podcast, but there's always a tendency I have in any podcast I guest on to just become philosophizing. And I won't do that this time. I will say I have the impulse too because it's very fascinating

when you think about that overlap and that connection because it's like so... I don't know what it is. It's just fucking... I don't know what the word is. I would really encourage people to read some of what Bruno has written

on Florence Bruno, B-E-R-N-A-U-L-T. I think that's how it's pronounced from the University of Wisconsin because there's a lot of writing on this, not just in Liberia because versions of this are recognized in other colonies. But it is really...

We talked about it a bit in some of our Congo episodes. It is a really fascinating dimension. And it also... You often get... Not just from racists because obviously racists be racisting, but from people who are racist but don't want to frame themselves that way talking about problems in Africa

as like, well, you do have this problem of you've got this ancient and culture that has some really savage dimensions. This is a problem in Liberia of like, attaining any kind of peace. And it's like, well, actually those practices aren't... they are evolved from ancient practices, but they're very much rooted

in the shit that was done to these people to make them a productive rubber plantation. You know? Yeah, no, totally. That part does not get... It gets glossed over, you know what I mean? It's just like savage practices. It should be discussed.

They are not any more savage than slavery and then colonialism. You know? They're just nasty or looking because there's a lot of value put in kind of like making the plantations... That's why people have weddings at plantations, right? Because you're a slave owner, you dress it up more.

It is so embarrassing how many friends or friends or whatever. The photos of having a wedding on a plantation makes me want to vomit, but like... Why is it glossed over that lynching happened and all these things and like... It still fucking happens, you know what I mean?

Like these violent acts that are so disgusting. I will say it right here. I think killing a dude in battle and eating his heart is a thousand times less gross than forcing a man to labor for you until he dies. 100% agree, yes.

Way less gross. God, that's... I don't know. I fucking people, man. I don't know. But also like body, power, all this stuff. Not every culture. I can like think of a few cultures that still incorporate this like fascination with like someone...

taking a part of someone's body to demonstrate your power over. You know what I mean? I want to deep dive into this off air. It's so interesting. A lot has been written. This is really a fascinating thing

to read into. We're not gonna... I don't want to pretend we're doing anything but scratching the surface. But it is important to scratch the surface because when we read these lurid stories of like child sacrifice and cannibalism you need to know that it's more complicated than just like

look at this fucked up thing they do in Liberia, right? Look at this fucked up thing these non-white people have done for all this time because they're uncivilized or whatever. It's like... It's important to understand that it's like it's part of a continuum of violence and it's not the... it's an ugly... it's certainly bad

but it's not like... it's not the start of it and it's not the part that has caused the most harm at scale. By the time Sergeant Doe and his allies overthrew the government these practices had become again like central to the nature of public authority.

And guys like Tolbert probably maybe aren't actually doing anything. Certainly not aren't doing some of the stuff that other people will do. But when these indigenous folks come into power they have this expectation that like this is what you do when you're in power. These practices are both how you cement your power

publicly and also how you ensure that you won't lose it. So Doe founds a new military junta government with himself at the head. Most of the people that he let run the country are members of the Kron ethnic group because Doe is Kron. They had been traditionally a fairly minor group

in terms of their like numbers and power in the country. But Doe puts them at the center of a building shit show. The government he headed was at least as brutal and violent as the one he'd replaced. And by the way the Firestone Plantation keeps right on chugging along. I don't know about that for a brief moment.

Well Doe comes in in part to be pro-U.S. right? He doesn't want to fuck up things for business. He understands that U.S. alliance is beneficial to him. Exactly. He's all about that. They're nasty as shit.

One of the most infamous moments like right after taking power when everyone's still kind of like because again Liberia prior to this had been they were very integrated into African the continent. Like there's all these different economic and political organizations that are

four different that all these multiple African states will be a part of right? So even before they're integrated in Africa. Yeah. But even as a colonized state it was still like not it wasn't like shitty. Like before they became like

before it was black imperialized it was still a colony right? No. It was established by the U.S. like it had just been people living in Africa. Like I'm sorry. The government Doe overthrows right? The Taubert government, the America Liberian government they're integrated into the

political map of Africa. I understand that. So all of these when he overthrows the government all of these he's arrests all of these government officials who have who are like friends with the people running Nigeria and like Kenya and all of these other countries right?

They're in political organizations together. They're like managing trade deals. They're going on vacation. They're like they are buds with the other people who are in power in Africa and now they're in prison and Doe in a surprise moment has them all

executed by drunken soldiers on television. So oh my god I forgot how modern this was. This is like the 80s baby. Oh my god. So this really pisses off a lot of other people like a lot of other African governmental leaders

because that's my fucking buddy you just shot in the street like what the fuck dude. Jesus Christ man. So this causes a lot of folks in the international community to support his ouster. Still though the Reagan administration is like hey you're willing to let us land planes there like we'll play ball

you know. They invite Doe to the White House. Where Ronald Reagan in what it might be an early senior moment refers to him as Chairman Moe instead of Chairman Doe. And Doe just kind of like goes with it you know. Oh my god.

We have to stop having these not to be aegis but there has to be a fucking country. There's things we're all fine with the idea that you can be too young to do certain things. Maybe you can be too old to do certain things.

You're right exactly even now I mean not to whatever. There are so many moments where. Like being Congress look. Yeah just oh my god we're being governed by people that are slowly fading away and not confident anymore.

You can't be president until 35 which is an implicit acknowledgement that the age you are impacts your ability to do the job property. Anyway this is a rant for elsewhere. Yeah so Moe which is what Reagan calls him

assures the Reagan administration that Liberia is totally going to return to democracy December of 1985 right. Need a couple of years to get stuff into shape right. Get purge the government of all these bad people you know I'm going to fix stuff up and then

I'm going to stop being dictator right. 1985 we're a democracy baby so Moe knows he does have to hold or Doe knows he just does have to hold an election. Sorry that made me laugh. Yeah he knows he's got to hold an election

but he also knows that like I'm not going to have a real election so he does the kind of shit dictators do right you know and he cracks down every time political parties will rise up we'll find excuses to arrest them he's constantly arresting and purging people including other folks

he'd carried out the coup with and obviously a lot of resistance starts to bubble up to his regime and the nexus of anti-dose sentiment forms around a woman named Ellen Johnson Sirleaf she's an economist who'd been educated in the U.S. and had worked as an executive for city bank

she decided to run for election alongside Jackson F. Doe who is not related to sergeant Doe right separate Doe's and they she's in the she she comes back she comes back that's one of the things she gets a lot of like early kind of respect as she like

leaves the U.S. to go back to Liberia to run so they run for president with the Liberian action party the election is held largely so the bad Doe I'm going to call him good Doe and bad Doe from this point on because it's going to get too confusing anyways

and Doe's doing this because there's like 93 million dollars in U.S. aid funds that he wants but he has to do an election first and quotes election right he wins the election but like immediately and every like independent observer is like

well that was completely fraudulent yeah the U.S. decides to work with bad Doe anyway because again he's smarter than Tolbert he's not going to like say no to the U.S. military establishment so Doe sets to work carrying out happily carrying out an ethnic cleansing in Nimba County

where Jackson Doe had called home because he gets to see where people are voting against him he burns their ballots and then he sends his soldiers to massacre them so my election was a way to just see where he's hated the most yep yep fucking hell man

so again the troops carrying out these massacres are mostly Cron like him right because again he's very much and there's other ethnic groups that are kind of allied with the Cron this does really break down on like racial lines, tribal lines kind of whatever you want to call it but so he sends his Cron soldiers into this region

which is inhabited by other peoples and he massacres a shitload of them because he sees them as like enemies of the regime and whenever he captures men who had been like political leaders agitating against him he'll have them mutilated and have their corpses paraded through the streets

so soldiers can cut off pieces to eat or keep as souvenirs this isn't good for the economy Shireen now I'm not an economic expert but I'm not surprised to hear that this was like bad for money you might not want to invest

in a country where this is going on quite as much you know and televisions exist remember so this is able to be documented people are looking at this and like well maybe I'm going to pause on some of those building funds for a moment

might want to wait until this parading corpses thing is over see how it shakes out so further economic problems are caused by the fact that the minister of procurement shoe designer Charles Taylor had embezzled something like a million dollars shoe designer?

he's the what of what? he's the guy who designed the Chuck Taylor's shoes no no before what was his Charles Taylor, well he's the minister of procurement for Liberia why do you say that as if it was like duh, how was that a thing? you've heard of Chuck Taylor's shoes

I didn't know the adventure of fucking converse yeah he's a Liberian warlord don't look that up is that something everyone knows again? I just like yeah definitely common knowledge God I'm

willfully ignorant so much of my life I just can't handle this that was a lie Shireen I'm sorry I can't do this to you anymore yeah I was lying it was just a joke well no there's a Charles Taylor and he embezzled a million dollars from the Liberian government you don't understand

the world is so fucked up and crazy I don't believe anything you say I was going to burn my fucking converse after this fucking episode I can't believe it was just a joke because I'm way too gullible when it comes to you I'm way too gullible when it comes to you

I'm gonna get roasted on the internet I don't fucking care Shireen this is why I tell everybody one lie you should never trust me never trust Robert I thought that I trust you maybe there's a level of me that trusts you this isn't on you

this is on me Shireen Firestone that's all real that's why we provide sources okay that's the thing I know the firestone thing is real but it doesn't mean it's so far out that another fucking big American brand is rooted in you

shoes and rubber I could have just gone through with this and just waited for people on Twitter to get really angry or on Reddit to get really angry at me you wouldn't do that to me I felt bad I felt bad don't worry he lied to me too

I lied to everybody once well now I haven't lied to you yet Shireen but I'll figure one out lying is the most human quality you can have so it's fine I understand you don't have to I'm so excited for Reddit

I'm just kidding trust me I'm the one who's gonna look bad as a result of this because you were so earnest about being angry about the converse guy saying the warlord that's okay this is to all my gullible people out there

I represent you, I hear you, I see you I have to say it would have been really funny if the actual Chuck Taylor guy had been a Liberian warlord that would have been hilarious so Taylor had been born in Liberia but his dad was an American Liberian

his mom though he's mixed kind of and his mom is a member of the indigenous Gola tribe now that said he is raised as an American Liberian the fact that his dad is means that obviously one of the things you have to say about Liberia

kind of the racial caste system is not nearly what it is in colonies that are run by white people so Taylor benefits even though his mom is indigenous and his dad is an American Liberian he's raised an American Liberian he attends college in the United States Bentley College in Massachusetts

so he doesn't have gone there and be like holy shit, once we talk about this guy holy shit this dude went to my alma mater but the point is in his early life he's thoroughly Americanized he speaks English very I should note here they all speak English

English is the official language of Liberia if you go to Liberia you don't need to learn there's a patois like accents are kind of different sort of like it is in parts of Louisiana but it's English like you listen to these interviews

with warlords and shit there they're all speaking in English and stuff because again it's a colony of the United States but he is he's not just he's incredibly Americanized his previous political experience came from rising through the ranks of a Liberian

expat organization in Philadelphia and when he flies back or so he goes back to Liberia after Doe's revolution and gets a job in the government and then he embezzles a bunch of money and he gets kicked out so he flees to the US because he doesn't want to get executed and paraded through the streets

Doe tries to extradite him because he had almost certainly actually committed the crimes he was being accused of Charles Taylor is initially arrested by the United States and we keep him in a correctional facility for two years while we're trying to decide what to do to the man

but then and I'm going to quote again from the Liberian Civil Wars the story grows rather murky Taylor escaped from Plymouth House on the evening of September 15th 1985 apparently with the help of the CIA responding to an obvious reluctance on the part of the government to extradite Taylor to face almost certain execution at the moment he landed

it is also possible that the CIA felt Taylor might be useful because if someone replaced or toppled Doe Taylor certainly seemed the most likely to do so either way the popular version of the story has it that Taylor and three fellow escapees cut through prison bars with hacksaws before lowering themselves to the ground

outside on knotted bedsheets more realistically perhaps arrangements were made for his cell to be left unlocked one night and he simply walked out he was picked up by his wife Jewel at a local freeway exit after which he dropped out of sight for a few months later he reappeared in Ghana having traveled

to Africa via Mexico in Ghana he was arrested immediately on suspicion that he was somehow involved with the CIA which tends to lean credence to the latter version of his escape Taylor's lawyer at the time was Ramsey Clark the former US Attorney General so certainly there was money and influence floating around

somewhere no charges were ever brought against Taylor in America for his escape so he gets over to Ghana and while he's in the US he spends two years in custody right he gets the CIA kind of smuggles him out well all this is happening Doe is in power in Liberia

but there are constant coup attempts right or at least attempts at coup attempts that Doe cracks down on and every time there's a threat to his reign he does the same thing he sends his soldiers to that region of the country and he massacres all of the men that he can find you know

and often like you know rapes the women kills baby like it's it's ethnic cleansing kind of shit it's really nasty so by 1987 Doe has murdered a lot of people and he has repeatedly purged ethnic groups so that's around

the time when Charles Taylor makes his way to the Ivory Coast and he meets a guy who's like a friend of the Ivorian president who decides to back him in his plans to overthrow Doe now by this point Doe has made the major mistake of pissing off

Momar Gaddafi because he again he's on the side of the United States right and he the United States I don't know if you're aware of this not big fans of Momar Gaddafi Oh really? Yeah so Doe expels Libyan

diplomats from his capital now this is a problem because not only is Gaddafi kind of a petty dude he also runs a gigantic pan ideological training camp for insurgents right if you are an insurgent and you want to learn how to build bombs and shoot people Momar Gaddafi

has got you you're the IRA you're the you're the palestinian or you're like you don't give a shit like Momar will take as long as you're like cool with Momar he'll train you dudes you know 1-800-Momar for all of your insurgents needs so he and he and Taylor

so Momar Gaddafi Doe pisses him off and so Gaddafi's like well I'm gonna fucking get back at that son of a bitch and he hears there's this motherfucker named Taylor who's got connections to the government of you know in the Ivory Coast and shit and so he and Taylor get into

contact and in very short order a number of militants who are like on Taylor's side these are like generally like Liberians who've had to flee the country because they were also associated with some sort of rebellion or another that Taylor's gathering to him these folks go over and get trained in Libya right

and again good chance there's some CIA involvement here it's very murky I assume they're everywhere so yeah they're always doing some shit I mean they certainly seems to have like helped Taylor get out right Gaddafi's maybe more a bigger part of like how he actually gets to carry out is whatever

on December 24th 1989 Charles Taylor and 168 insurgents enter Liberia through the Ivory or yeah the Ivory Coast Chuck makes an announcement through the BBC using a satellite phone he'd been given by somebody

again who knows where he gets this kind of shit that he has no personal ambitions for higher office he just wants to liberate his people from President Doe open civil war results resulting in bits in pieces here and there and gradually like

Taylor's forces start to make progress they're pretty well organized they're competent they expand quickly and more and more of the country starts to fall out of Doe's ability to control because he's not really popular because of all the massacres so he starts having his security forces round up hundreds and

hundreds of residents of the capital from ethnic groups he viewed as rebellious and these people just disappear some of them do show back up headless on the streets so citizens of the capital start greeting each other with the phrase glad to see you've still got your head members of their

and members of the ethnic groups targeted by Doe's purges start flooding into Taylor's growing army right they get away from where the president controls and a lot of them pick up guns as they won victories they replace the initial weapons that they invade with the armies mostly equipped with these old Soviet

Soviet like World War II era submachine guns PPSH's and they gradually replace these with US M16's from Doe's dead US backed fighters and once his regular forces start to get real rifles he hands these submachine guns off to little

kids and he uses them to form what he calls his small boy units quote from the Liberian Civil Wars the bulk of advancing forces were locally recruited youth handed guns and fortified by alcohol and cheaply sourced Chinese amphetamines known colloquially as bubbles

and of course a great deal of local marijuana in much the same way as the Cron dominated AFL that's Doe's party took excruciatingly violent revenge against Geo and Mano these are other ethnic groups roving bands of armed youth singled out Cron and Mandingo for similar treatment newsreel images

of the Liberian Civil War as the initial coup of it inevitably became came to be characterized by images of children and young people both male and female dressed in civilian clothes often in wigs and bizarre fancy dress enacting scenes that might have been extracted from Lord of the Flies these were the first

high-profile displays of child soldiers at work in the African context of war and the spectacle was utterly terrifying well so that's where we're gonna end for today what a high note to just leave me on the vibes yeah

um well I was hoping that I mean I was hoping there was gonna be more more witchy stuff to be honest that's something that's been interesting to me there will be next episode this is not gonna be an interesting or it'll be interesting it's not gonna be much of a um you'll want to go elsewhere to learn and detail some more

discussion of that but we will talk about kind of one expression of these things from people who are like power hungry grifters hmm you're not gonna get a great sense of what the actual religious practices were among these people but you will see some folks

doing fucked up shit and then deciding to be born in Christians yeah at this point I'm not at a certain point when this is just me theorizing and not don't take any of these blanket statements seriously but I would imagine that

at a certain point when like a religion or a practice is just used to gain power it's more used for the violence versus the belief you know I'm not like I'm not convinced so many people believe it I'm just convinced they're using it to benefit themselves or like you know so that's just like it's one of those things I like there's you know

about cannibalism and other kind of beliefs that involve taking pieces of the body certainly thousands of years ago there were groups doing that in Africa as there were in many other parts of the world for different reasons but what you're going to see during the Liberian Civil War has about as much is related

to those indigenous practices in the same way that like a modern Baptist revival meeting is related to a Christian church meeting in like 850 AD you know to like a church service

in 850 AD yeah there is like a line of descendants from one to the other but it's changed tremendously over time for a variety of reasons and if someone partaking in the 850 AD church service might look at a modern one and be like well I don't really know what the fuck's going

on here you know anyway any plugs at the end here Shreen I'm Shreen Allegedly Allegedly I'm on twitter shirohero666 Instagram is just shirohero

I'm honestly like I'm not really on the internet much these days I try have an impulse to delete everything all the time but I think I just need it just for this kind of stuff but follow me if you want

I'm posting less but the stuff I post gold you know so just stick around for that but I will say I was thinking about this as you were teaching me all these terrible things it's like like sometimes I get frustrated

for example that no one knows the history of Palestine or Syria or whatever and there's like selective things as you said like people can there's so much bullshit and violence and terrible things in the world you can only learn so much about it you can only handle so much of it so I for one

am happy I know about this terrible thing because I maybe was ignorant before and I hope people feel that way when they learn about other terrible things you know context is important not because it mitigates bad things but it's like it would be fucked up

to just get angry about the IRA bombing a bar and not recognize that that act of terrorism was directly influenced by the genocide of half of the Irish population right that would be fucked up likewise yes it's bad to

it's certainly bad to like shoot missiles into cities like Hamas does but also that's not happening in a vacuum and it's happening in response to missiles being shot into there and a bunch of other fucked up shit in this history of like really horrible things and likewise

it is bad to recruit child soldiers and carry out human sacrifices it's not they didn't just decide to do that because Liberians are brutal all of this occurred as part of a continuum of things that is heavily influenced by US policy

and is heavily influenced by colonialism yeah again it's just it's not a matter of like saying well this isn't bad because of this bad thing it's a matter of you don't understand what's happening if you if you're only focused on one part of this picture and the thing is the information we all receive

is usually funneled through a white supremacist fucking colonial you know what I mean like it's all funneled through a different a certain lens to make us think certain people are good certain people are bad so I don't know use your brains I suppose I will always try to use mine so I don't think

fucking converse are evil yeah yeah destroy your converse shoes light their headquarters on fire hunt down their corporate representatives in the street no vengeance can be enough for converse Robert on another note

we should probably plug two new podcasts on cool zone media that are recently out shouldn't we we have what are now Sophie real quick sidebar what is a podcast alright so

there's not no where that was going I was like is he actually doing this it's like an edit note this is a bit but also this is why I've been charged there's Sophie this is like 10% of why you're in charge we have

two new podcasts on cool zone media that you should check out if you haven't checked them out already we have a ghost church by Jamie Loftus which is a ghost church fascinating podcast about American spiritualism yes and we and we also have cool people who did

cool stuff hosted by Margaret Killjoy that is in fact about cool people who did cool stuff it's like the allegedly it's the uplifting version of whatever the fuck this podcast is you know what I mean it's great

there's some really cool people who do some really cool stuff in this next episode are you familiar with the story of Liz Estrada I don't know just stop talking Robert but yeah check those podcasts out Sharon actually works on cool people

who did cool stuff and she's allegedly and both Robert and Sharon are guests or upcoming guests depending on when this drops on the show so check it out I'm so happy, Sharon working with Margaret has taught you the most important thing about being an anarchist which is

saying allegedly before almost any statement yep yep in my vocab forever and that is the episode behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media for more from cool zone media

visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts alphabet boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations in the first season

we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protest it involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse was like a lot of guns but are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? he was just waiting for me to set the date, the time

and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen listen to alphabet boys on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

listen to the last soviet on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcasts he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world