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

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

Robert is joined again by Shereen Lani Younes to continue to discuss the Liberian Civil War.See 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?

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here. And for the last two years, behind the bastard's listeners have funded the Portland Diaper Bank, which provides diapers for low-income families. Last year, y'all raised more than $21,000, which was able to purchase 1.1 million diapers for children and families in need in 2021. 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, behind the bastard's. That's how I would say the show's name if we were drivetime radio DJs. I'm really glad we're not. You want to quit this life of podcasting with me?

Get up at 5 a.m. every morning and talk to people on there. Well, it's a horn dog and the apple here with you. Who's the horn dog and the apple? Who's the horn dog and the apple? Butts day travel thing. Here's the fart sound. That could be us, Shireen. That could be how we live our lives. Anything for you, Robert.

I would quit. Kings will both get really addicted to cocaine. I mean, Shireen, problematically addicted to cocaine. And then I'll OD and have to go to the hospital and then I'll become a born again Christian. And I'll start another radio show, but it's super racist and right wing. And then I'll become a congressman and then the vice president of the United States. That's the logical timeline and route of any white man. I'm going to, that's like the shirt I wear every day.

I'm going to just pince it. Robert, Robert, Robert. Everybody, we all love, we all love our former vice president, Michael Pence. Yeah, bless God bless. Well, pin in that. I mean, we're just talking about how God isn't real. Come on. That's an obvious joke. We were just talking about how Charles Taylor has invaded Liberia.

I mean, or is like carrying out a liberation freedom, civil war, yada, yada, yada. Anyway, he's got his troops. They're taking more and more of the country. And there's other warlords and there's other people like fighting against the government. Like it's not all Charles Taylor, but his forces are like gradually advancing on the capital. And as they advance on the capital in April of 1990, one of the places they advance on. I was born in April of 1990. Oh, well, the sapping during when you're a little baby.

That is so recent and weird. Little baby shireen. Little baby shireen. Baby Charles Taylor's liberation forces reaching the outskirts of the Firestone rubber plantation. Now, the guy in charge of it, this dude in Sminger, who's again like the ex-pat, the white dude who's like running this plantation. He sends out a message to all of the Liberian, like the indigenous workers who live on the plantation. And he's like, don't worry, be calm. There's nothing to fear. He says repeatedly like, I'm not, you know, worried about what's going to happen.

The rebels, you know, aren't going to fuck with you. Like everything's fine. Keep right on working. Now, you want to guess if he's saying the same thing to the ex-pats, the white workers who live there with their families? I don't like where this is going. He sends them a confidential letter saying due to the current unstable political situation in Liberia, we believe it is prudent to plan for the worst case scenario. He tells them to pack emergency supplies to fill up their cars to meet its secret rally points in case of an evacuation. And he states the information contained in this memo, even the very existence of this memo,

should not be discussed with persons covered by it. He also sends home the wives and children of all the ex-pats who work there. So, here's the cool thing. Wish I was surprised. They're fine. Because again, Charles Taylor, also not a stupid person, I don't want to... But he invented converse. He did. After inventing converse, he invades Liberia.

And he's like, I'm not going to murder a bunch of like white people working at the Firestone. That's not good for me. Like, that's going to piss off all of these governments that I don't particularly want angry at me right now. Yeah, because that's the kind of thing that's going to get Doe a bunch of weapons from whoever, right? Like, you don't want to murder... So, he has, I don't think he ever had any intention of harming the ex-pats working there just because it wouldn't have been a smart thing to do. But this has become an ethnic war at this point, right?

Doe is massacring the members of ethnic groups that are opposed to him. Taylor is massacring Kron and members of like other allied... like ethnic groups that are allied with Doe in his regime, right? So, when Charles Taylor's forces reach the Firestone Plantation, they start picking out all of the people who are members of these groups that are their enemies and massacring them. Quote from ProPublica. The first person the rebels killed after crossing the river, according to several witnesses,

was a mentally handicapped man. He was gunned down in the street. Next, the rebels began hunting down people who belonged to tribes closely associated with the ruling regime. Kevin Estle, a British expatriate who was Firestone's agricultural operations manager, recalled seeing piles of dead bodies of Liberians lying outside the Harbell supermarket. He was told the rebels had executed them in public because they were from a rival tribe. They had been stitched, riddled with bullets from A.K.A.'s 47, straight up and down their bodies, he said. They were left in the street, their bodies swelling in the sun.

So, that's good for Firestone, like, hey, you guys are fine. Don't worry about it. White people, get the fuck out! Exactly. Pretty messed up. Pretty bad stuff. God, fucking white people. Well, I would say so. I would say none of that's good behavior. I would say both abandoning your workers, not telling them they're in danger, only protecting the white people.

Yeah, should we boycott Firestone? Why? Why do I know this? I think there are things we do to Firestone property that would be good, but boycotting, I don't know if that's the most effective thing that could be done. Well, I've gone there a bunch of times. I don't know this blood diamond history, you know what I mean? Yeah. Make a Molotov out of a Chuck Taylor Converse and hook it through the window of a Firestone Tire Store. Deal.

So, yeah, when Charles Taylor invaded Liberia, his plan probably was not to spark the building of a series of child militias filled with drug-addled and heavily armed kids, but it kind of happens as the invasion proceeds, right? Once his forces are in country, they're engaging with those forces, he's running up into shortages of manpower, the decision to arm kids just becomes militarily pragmatic. So, at this point, Doe has spent like the half decade he's been in power

sending his military to different provinces and killing all of the men he can find, raping most of the women and then often killing them too, right? And as a result, there's a shitload of angry starving orphans in Liberia, you know? Whose parents got murdered by the regime. Now, if you're Charles Taylor, you're always short of dudes to hand guns, what's a great source of manpower, but a bunch of like 12-year-old kids who were pissed off because their families died?

Yeah. How do you think they're like... They're potentially more loyal because you're giving them like... They're very loyal. Yeah, purpose and a family-ish. They are starving and they need an authority figure. Charles Taylor provides both, so he gives these kids guns and he gives them cocaine and other drugs, but cocaine is the big one because, man, let me tell you,

I mean, this is just something I've learned a lot. If you want to get a child to fight for you, you got to give them a lot of cocaine. It's good to know. That's the best way to get kids to fight with you. It's good to know. Or for you, whatever, both, really. So, these kids had been exposed to the culture of human sacrifice and corpse desecration engaged in by the most prominent and powerful adults in their world.

And these kids grow up seeing both kind of the president's signpost aspects of this. And then after the Civil War, they see all of these warlords doing this shit. I mean, they're beyond traumatized. You can only imagine what they saw before their very eyes all the time. It's not... It's more than traumatized. Certain aspects of this have become normalized. This is what you do in a war.

This is what you do to exert power, right? And to take power for yourself, to protect yourself. These are practices you engage in. So, as Taylor's men take more and more of the country, journalists start to see roadblocks manned by small boys' units, draping their command posts with the bones and guts of slaughtered enemies and civilians for, like, ritual purposes to protect themselves. Doe responds in the predictable way by handing guns out to Cron kids

and kids of any other allied ethnic groups in Monrovia and sending them out in ad hoc death squads and platoons to attack Taylor's soldiers, who by late 1990 are laying siege to the capital. These children that Doe arms in the city become known as the 1990 soldiers. At one point, they attack a Lutheran church that's filled with members of rival ethnic groups and using axes and machetes, they murder more than 600 refugees from these kind of ethnic groups that are seen as being opposed to the president. Like, kids just massacring 600 people with axes.

And these are like, some of them are like 10, like 9 and 10, like little kids often. So, Taylor has a lot of initial international support for obvious reasons, but it becomes quickly obvious that he is just as vicious as Doe, right? There is not a real moral difference between these two dudes. Which means I want power, we'll do anything. Yeah, Liberian expat pet positions like Ellen Surleaf, who had supported Taylor initially, quickly dropped him. He didn't get, like, attacked later on because she helps fund him early.

The Economist? Is this word? Yeah, but also, like, you know, he didn't start off doing some of the shit he would later do. I don't know, I'm not going to weigh in on that too much. So, the good Doe, Jackson Doe, tries to join up with Charles Taylor's forces at one point, and Taylor, like, uses him a little bit as like a billboard. Like, look at us, you know, we're legitimate. This guy really won the election, he's on our side. But then a couple of weeks later, Jackson Doe disappears and nobody knows what happens to him.

Probably because Taylor's like, well, I don't actually, I'm going to be the president. So, let's get rid of this guy. You're actually needed here. Yeah, you're not really needed, you're not really useful here. So, as all this killing continues, the world just kind of watches on in shock. Taylor's forces gradually box Doe into pretty much just controlling the capital. And his overthrow was only halted by the arrival of an international military mission made up by soldiers from West African states.

Although, Nigeria is basically 100% of the effort, and it's more or less Nigeria intervening in order to try and have things work out in a way that's best for Nigeria, right? That's often what you'll hear people claim at least. Right. So, this- It's because, like, Doe connected to the U.S. and Nigeria also wants some benefit of that. Yeah, there's a number of reasons. I'm not going to like, I'm not going to attempt to lay into like,

but yeah, this supposedly international mission is primarily Nigeria, and it's primarily Nigerian forces. So, they set up shop in the capital to like, monitor things and try to negotiate a peace between Taylor's forces and the rebel- Taylor's forces and Doe's, or the different rebel groups dominated by Taylor and Doe. But this isn't really- doesn't go anywhere, because none of the belligerents are really willing to discuss any kind of peace as long as Doe remains in the country, and Doe's not willing to leave.

And so, the situation is stymied once again, until on September 9th, 1990, President Doe gets in his motorcade to visit the International Military Mission's headquarters, and through a comedic series of errors, he winds up captured by troops from the AFL, which is the party that Charles Taylor is a member of. Now, the AFL splits in two at one point, and Taylor is in charge of a bunch of the troops, and then another guy named Prince Johnson, who's a warlord, is like, in control. He's like, also a major warlord in this period. Right, so these guys are in the party that Taylor's affiliated with,

but they're under the command of this other warlord, Prince Johnson. And I'm going to quote from the Liberian Civil Wars. The events that followed were captured on film by a Palestinian journalist representing a Middle Eastern news agency, the result of which was a snuff film that later found its way into circulation all across West Africa. The sequence opens with Prince Johnson seated at a desk, a can of Budweiser beer in his hand, and a string of hand grenades slung around his neck. Opposite him, seated on the floor and dressed only in underwear, with his arms and legs tightly bound was Samuel Doe,

a rambling interrogation followed, interspersed with him singing in prayer, as Prince Johnson and an audience of his men grew steadily more inebriated. Doe could be heard pleading for his arms to be loosened and appealing for brotherhood, while jeers in general conversation punctuate the background scenes. Then at a certain point, Johnson thumped the desk and ordered Doe's ear to be cut off. Doe was held down by several men as one man armed with a knife cut off his ears as he wailed and thrashed on the floor. And so it continued. The torture went on between bouts of muddled interrogation and snippets of discussion of Doe's potential to escape,

despite his condition, thanks to his juju power. Death no doubt came slowly, and it is generally accepted that he died in the early hours of September 10th. Wow. So, pretty nasty, also pretty similar to how the last guy goes out. To how Doe kills the last president, right? That's a good point. That's a very good throwback, yes. Liberia at this point, when you've had two presidents get tortured and executed by the guy who takes over after them, that's not a good precedent, right?

Yeah, that's not a good track record, I would say. Like, look, the U.S. has had some complicated history with democracy. I don't want to get up on our high horse, but I think it's fair to say that's not an ideal transition of power. That's not the best way that can go. Yeah. Yeah. I just recently remembered how you opened up this entire story about someone named Butt naked, and I'm so curious how we're going to land there.

General Butt naked's coming, baby. Okay, okay. I would love... Yeah. That was a graphic fucking... He's not as fun a figure as you're thinking right now. Well, I know you know, because I told you he's not. I know, I just...

He's not as fun as he sounds. Right, okay, fine, fine, fine. So, you might think this would have been the end of things, hopefully, but obviously, the violence just continues. Taylor's victory against Doe sets off a six-year period of kind of free-for-all civil warfare. Now, Taylor is in charge in the capital for much of this. But the capital city and a lot of the country gets split up by this patchwork of different militia units. They're all allied to different strongmen. All of them call themselves generals.

Some of them are in charge of armies that have thousands of guys. Some of them, it's just like a couple of dozen dudes, right? They all call themselves generals. Most of these guys are pretty young. We're talking in like their 20s. Basically, none have formal military experience. Some of them had been in the Liberian military. A lot of them are just like fucking dudes who join militias during the early stage of the Civil War

and wind up, you know, in charge of units. At this point, are you... I know no one has all the answers, but like, is Taylor like revered or like, oh, this person's... He is feared. ...fading us, he's feared? No. Because the violence never ends. Okay.

Like, nobody likes Doe, but like, Taylor's not bringing peace to Liberia. Yeah, I just... Some people, he is definitely very popular among members of ethnic groups that had been purged by Doe. Okay. Right? But that does not, obviously the country kind of falls apart into this massive Civil War afterwards. So he's not like widely seen as legitimate, you know? Okay.

And of all these different warlords and generals and whatnot, basically, since they don't have much in the way of military experience, their understanding of war and how to prosecute it comes from American action movies. Of course. It's a mix of like, it's a mix of American action movies. The own, like the trauma they remember from being like 12 and seeing the early days of the war, right? Yeah. And then myths they kind of remember from childhood about like different indigenous practices. And as an adult, they adopt gnomes de guerre for themselves that are a dizzying mix of awesome and nonsense.

Famous rebel leaders included General Chuck Norris, General One Foot Devil, General Mosquito, General Mosquito Spray, and of course the guy we're going to spend most of this episode discussing, General Butt Naked. So that's where that, of course, is a child fucking... Yeah, they're fucking like kids, man. Yeah. I mean like 20 or something, but like they were kids when the fighting started in many cases. I think it's, you would most likely get stunted at that age. You know what I mean? There's only so much developing you do when you're traumatized so young.

And so, I don't know. Yeah. This is, by the time Taylor is in power, this is a civil war that's being fought by kids who probably don't have a ton of memories from before shit started to go really, get really violent. Yeah, that's all they know. And go over through things. Yeah. So General Butt Naked's real name was Joshua Milton Blahie.

He was born on September 30th, 1971, as a member of the Sarpo tribe, one source I found, the credibly named MysteriousUniverse.org, gives this description of his upbringing. And obviously, I'm going to explain why this is largely bullshit, but I want to read this because it gives you an idea of how kind of like popularly and more in like less credible, but like main, not mainstream, but like one of the ways, like the way in which people talk about this guy's background most commonly, even though it's not accurate. Quote,

Now, these are lies. Joshua Milton Blahie, General Butt Naked is a huge liar. The Mysterious Universe thing is based heavily on a book that he wrote after he became a born-again Christian. His book titled The Redemption of an African Warlord is a pretty standard redemption narrative. You see a lot of evangelical, I used to be a satanic priest, sacrificing babies. Actually, this exact period, the satanic panic is hitting in the United States and you're getting a lot of these like people being like, Oh, I was a devil worshiper and then I found Jesus Christ.

Blahie's narrative is like the same thing. One of the differences though is that he absolutely murders little kids. He kills a shitload of people and does a bunch of like, Anyway. So what you're saying is he runs this website. No, no, this was just kind of based on, yeah. So Blahie claims to have engaged from an early age in elaborate nightmare acts of child sacrifice to gain powers.

Like even as a little kid, he says he's doing this as the priest. So that part's true. Well, no, because he's not a child priest. But he's committing, but like he's doing fucked up things, no? As an adult, he is claiming that at age 11, he becomes a priest and learns human visits by the devil and starts sacrificing people. That's pretty certainly not true. There's basically one good article about this guy that I found.

It's called The Greater, The Center. It's in the New Yorker. It's written by Damon Tabore. And a lot of reporters who aren't Tabore get kind of taken in and charmed by Blahie. He's a very charming guy. Tabore talked to his family though and among other things, he pretty easily punctures the myth that Blahie was some sort of child murder priest. Quote,

Harrison Shine Chalor, another of Blahie's half-brothers, told me that he had been unaware of Blahie's life as a priest. As far as Chalor knew, Blahie was merely a rebellious youth. Their mother would give him money to buy food for the family and he would disappear into the streets of Monrovia for weeks at a time. He left school after the third grade and later sold Kool-Aid and chicken soup at a local market, wearing a purple necktie, purple shirt, purple trousers and purple shoes,

so people would recognize him. He then moved on to drug trafficking and robbery. Sometimes Chalor said he and Blahie worked together. An Nigerian soldier once asked Blahie to help him gain spiritual powers. Blahie prescribed a witchcraft treatment, an enema, and while the soldier was indisposed, Chalor stole his money. So, this I think is a more credible version of his backstory. He is a con man.

He knows how to, he's always thinking about an angle. He wants to make money. And I think he will get into this more later, but I think he adopts this very American Christian, but although not just because Liberian Christianity has a lot in common with like the revival, you see a lot of the same things over there, these revival meetings, speaking in tongues. They have as much acclaim to it as Americans do, obviously,

because again, they're started out as a colony, but that's what he's doing. When you hear about these crazy stories of like him sacrificing babies for magical powers, that's what he's doing. Yeah, it's all part of the con. He is also, as a warlord, as we're going to get to, he commits a lot of crimes against humanity. Do not get me wrong. This is a very complicated story for that reason.

So, again, in order to puncture his claims about his early life, Tabor also goes on to note that while witchcraft and human sacrifice are a part of some indigenous beliefs in West Africa, nothing like the sort of child priesthood that Blahie describes, where he's like picked to be the tribe priest at 11 and has to carry sacrifice, nothing like anthropologists have found no evidence of anything like that existing in indigenous societies and communities in Liberia. Quote, David Brown, a social anthropologist who has worked in Liberia

since the 1970s, said that he had never heard of a secret society that matches Blahie's description. I spoke with many other experts who agreed, one called Blahie's story ludicrous. And again, part of what he's playing on here is the fact that white people are willing to believe any kind of shit that you tell about this stuff. I was going to say, that's why so many people bought into it.

They were like, oh my God, these cultures are crazy, savage. Of course that would happen, yeah. And you know what else white people are always willing to believe in, Shirin? Yeah, capitalism. And the products and services that support this podcast, all backed heavily by white people. Oh, God. I mean, that was too real. I mean, yeah.

I did not enjoy that at all. Well, sometimes things happen and they can't be stopped. 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've got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

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Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back from ads. So we're talking about Milton Blahey. So Blahey now claims that when Sergeant Doe took control, and this is, again, I'm going to be talking a lot about things he claims about his backstory, I will tell you when it's true, I think it's true, okay, right?

So one of the things Blahey claims is that when Sergeant Doe took control of the country, right, back in the 80s, he was Doe's official spiritual advisor. That's what Blahey claims. That already sounds like bullshit. Absolute, there's no evidence of this. A lot of casual write-ups of General Buttnaked will either just say that he was or that he,

sometimes they'll say he claims. I don't think they put enough emphasis on the fact that, like, there's no fucking evidence of this. Yeah. One source claims he did black magic to help Doe win election or re-election, which is not true. Doe did not win re-election. He burned people's ballots and committed genocides.

I don't know. He was, he does get affiliated with Doe at some point. It's not impossible. They did some sort of, like, ritual or something together. Maybe he said hello. No, no, no. The idea that, like, he was his spiritual, I just have not seen hard evidence of it.

But to give you an idea of more of the lurid claims made about Blahey during the Doe period of time in Liberia, I'm going to quote again from mysteriousuniverse.org. You can tell that's a credible site. Yeah, 100%. 100%. He would get involved as a high priest of a secret cult that practiced black magic, human sacrifice,

and worshiped a god called Nianbe Awe, who he believed was actually the devil. During this time, he claims he regularly talked to the devil, as well as displayed many supernatural powers, such as invisibility, flight, and immunity to bullets. And he was already accustomed to the sight of blood due to the monthly sacrifices he helped carry out. But it would not be until Civil War came to Liberia

that he would truly carve out his legacy as a ruthless, frightening force to be reckoned with, and truly earned his moniker the most evil man in the world. He just made himself into like a superhero villain. Yeah, he kind of does. Yeah, that's absurd. And he is a really bad dude. Don't get me wrong, but like, well, we'll continue.

So when it comes to the question of what did this guy actually do, right? What is his real background? Things are a lot murkier. Many sources will say that he will kind of just because he calls himself a general, will assume he was a major military leader. He was certainly well known. He was infamous within the city of Monrovia,

which is where he was active, right? And where a lot of the fighting is occurring. A lot of people knew him in Monrovia. But basically all good documented evidence of him as the warlord general, but naked, is pretty much just 1996, right? Now, he's fighting, he's involved in different militias to some extent prior to that, but really his career as but naked is like one year.

That's when he's 25, if I get the math right. Something like that, yeah. Now, based on what his brother said, we can assume he probably spends the early year, like while Doe is in power, he's probably mostly like smuggling drugs, doing some mid-level scams and crimes. He's not Cron, but he's like an ethnicity

that is kind of allied with Doe's, with the Cron, with like Doe's people. So he does, when the Civil War starts, he joins a militia that's allied with Doe's political party, and he fights on that side of the conflict of Taylor. So he's on the losing side of the initial stage of the Civil War, right? And when Doe gets killed,

Blahie joins a militia called the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy, which is made up of former soldiers in Doe's army and other Cron. Charles Taylor is the big enemy that Blahie and all of his fellows were fighting, and by the mid-1990s, Taylor had turned the process of making child soldiers

into something of a science. Taylor's small boys' units numbered thousands of kids and were made up mostly of orphans who swore allegiance to Popeye, as they called him, like Popeye, I think like Papa. And he would have to prove, and he would have some prove their loyalty by killing their parents. Because they were so loyal and impressionable and drugged up, they made excellent shock troops,

from a write-up in ProPublica. He presented himself as a Baptist who neither smoked nor drank. A mesmeric speaker, he would appear before adoring crowds dressed in fine white linen, spouting promises of democracy, jobs and better days. At other times, he wore camouflage and carried an AK-47. He would talk to the radio to announce the impending capture of a nearby town, then magically do it.

For many in Liberia, the spirit world remains close at hand. In such a place, Taylor became something more than a man. Mystical, powerful, otherworldly. So this is the guy that Blahie is fighting against, right? So he starts in the mid-1990s, I'm not going to say he was only but naked for a year, but he starts to go from just being a guy involved in the Civil War to a militia leader

in kind of the mid-90s, when he starts recruiting children himself. Mostly kids who are like 9 to 10, some who are older in their teens, but a lot of the kids he's recruiting are little kids. And he has them fight naked, and he fights naked. Blahie claimed that this was because being naked made his magical powers more effective.

He could go invisible and he could avoid bullets more easily. And one thing people point out is that he legitimately was fighting in a bunch of battles naked. There's video of him naked with guns and fighting, killing people with machetes and stuff. And he doesn't get shot. It's one of those things. You can see how a mystique builds around this guy.

Because yeah, he and his kids are fighting nude, but also they're winning a lot of the time. And these are street fights with guns. We're not talking like tanks and shit fighting each other. It helps his narrative being like he doesn't need any armor. He doesn't need anything. Well, they don't have, we'll talk about that in a bit. So he and his soldiers, they'll fight nude.

They're also, he's mashing cocaine up into the foods of these kids in his unit to make them fight better. I really feel for all these children that were on this island. Oh, it's horrible, yeah. And they massacre the shit out of anyone they see as an enemy. Right up from ABC notes, Blahyi had a reputation for being more brutal than other military leaders. Everyone knows his nom de guerre, General Butt Naked.

He was a cannibal who prefers to, who preferred to sacrifice babies because he believed their death promised the greatest amount of protection. He went into battle naked, wearing only sneakers and carrying a machete, because he believed it made him invulnerable. And he was in fact never hit by a bullet. His soldiers would make bets on whether a pregnant woman was carrying a boy or girl. Then they would slit open her belly to see who was right. And, you know, these are things Blahyi claims.

A lot of it's certainly true. He has soldiers who kill a shitload of women and children. Also that's slitting open the belly of a pregnant woman. You hear that a lot as like claims of war crimes in stories and often like, I don't know the degree to which they did it. It is something he claims. A lot of things he claims are lies that said they do stuff that's on that level. That's documented.

That's on that level of horrible. So it's not out of the question either. We have footage and photos of him naked and wielding rifles and machetes. Foreign journalist reported on what he did. He was really doing some of this stuff. Numerous Liberian civilians since the war have talked to press about how he'd do stuff like, shoot off their legs with his handgun or machete, their husband to death, kill their brothers and sisters by hacking them to pieces.

So like, again, this is very much like a lot of those traditional evangelical Christian narratives where they will like luridly claim to have been doing horrible satanic shit. But like also he did a bunch of that. Like we do know, like he's not making all of this up. A lot of it's documented. It's just that there's a lot of like lurid occult stuff that isn't so much documented, that is more questionable. Anyway, years later, while he was testifying at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,

which we'll talk about more later, he claims that how he talked about how he would, he called it planting violence in his child soldiers, how he would radicalize them to fight for him. And the way he would do this is he would show them American action movies like Rambo and shit. And a lot of these movies, different Hollywood movies, right? You'll see the same actors in multiple movies, right? And you'll die in one movie and then that actor will be back as a character in another movie, right? So he would show them multiple movies where like kind of the same actors are playing extras or bad guys

and get killed and then they're back alive in another movie. And he would explain to these kids that like real war works the same way. So if you kill people, they're going to come back somewhere else. He tells them war is just an act. You're just playing a role like these, like Rambo, you know? So it's not real. So we can do whatever, you know? He also testifies that when he shot and wounded enemies,

he'd have his child soldiers cut them to pieces in order to desensitize them. Then they would eat and share the heart. So that's not great. For a better idea of the kind of war crimes this guy and his boys got up to, I'm going to quote again from that ABC article. And this is based on interviews with a young woman who blah he met with after the war to apologize for murdering her family. Part of why I'm reading this is like, we can, we know this is a true, like again,

a lot of the claims he's make aren't true. His victim is alive. Like we can talk to her. That's why I'm reading this because this is one that we know is one of the things. So are you saying like he apologized when he was like doing his Christian shit? We're getting to that. I want to give you an idea of one of the verified war crimes. We know that he was doing a group from the Cron tribe was searching for enemies within the country,

which in a civil war consists of any member of another tribe. Her older brother Daniel was hiding a nanny from the Geo tribe who had been working for the family for years. It'll be okay. The mother said faith heard the screams outside the huts as the men approached. Suddenly she saw a naked man with only a machete in his hand. Why is the man naked? She wondered. Then she saw the other men about 25 of them as she estimates today carrying guns.

They had heard there was a Geo woman in the village. Daniel stood in front of the nanny to protect her. She is a human being like you and me. He said to Blahie. Blahie responded with an order. One of the boys stepped forward and chopped off her brother's foot. Then he hacked off his lower leg followed by his thigh and his hip methodically working his way up the body. Eventually her brother fell silent.

Blahie told everyone to lie on the ground. His men raped her mother and her sisters and then killed them. Guai says they didn't rape her but they didn't rape me but they did things to me I don't want to talk about. They left me with a blish that I will always have. At some point Blahie said that things were moving too slowly and that there were other military operations to attend to. That was when he began to participate. Well. So again to be clear we're talking about he makes a lot of claims I don't think happened.

This guy is doing some like nightmarish crimes against humanity. Real bad stuff. So. Yeah. We can. Oh my god. I don't know. The things that humans are capable of truly are just mind melting.

And the thing is you could say that if one person is capable of that then we all are. Right. If it's like if that's what I just. I don't like it here. We're not all capable of physically participating in mass murder and rape. I'm not saying that. For one thing we're all capable of supporting the people who do that. Yeah.

Which is really one of the stories that's most important from the Holocaust. Exactly. No I mean. A lot of. Sorry. No no no. I'm just baffled by. I mean I know humans have done horrible things since the dawn of humans.

But it's still so unsettling to me to really wrap your head around what that means. It's one of those things. One of the worst crimes in the Holocaust was the Bavarian massacre where I think like 30,000 Jewish people are shot to death in a single day by German forces. A horrific, horrific act. Probably the biggest mass shooting of people in history. In the same war the United States Air Force incinerates between like 80 and 150,000 people in a single night in Tokyo knowingly killing civilians.

Knowing that that's most of who will die as civilians, that we're going to burn them to death by the tens of thousands. Which of those is a worse war crime? Well people have strong opinions on that but at the end of the day both of them are the targeted killing of civilians. For different purposes one could argue but both are military forces using military grade weaponry to massacre civilians by the tens of thousands. It's a thing that every side in a sufficiently large war, every side finds a reason to justify.

And so I think as lurid as the crimes of these Liberian warlords are you get so many breathless descriptions of guys like Butt naked murdering little kids and raping women and all these horrible things that happened that are worth documenting and worth discussing but they often get talked like they are somehow separate from the kinds of war crimes that we endorse and I don't think they are. I think the targeting and killing and torturing and raping of civilians is bad. Whether it's being done using missiles or being done by a man with a rifle going face to face. I don't think that the separation or that we trade one kind of massacre for another makes a tremendous mortal difference to me when you're still killing civilians.

Well I agree with that 100%. That's a good reminder. One of the arguments you could make is that usually when we kill civilians it's an accident. That guy blew up that family of 10 in Afghanistan, right? If people simply believe that. Well, Glawi wanted to rape and murder these people. We didn't want to kill that family, we just fucked up. And it's like, okay, I don't know how you want to apportion out the morality of that. No, totally. I just think that's real ignorance and if you still believe some of that bullshit

and after all this technology and all these things you can make. We can sit at home and debate which of those is more or less a moral act. I don't know that it matters to the people getting blown up. Exactly. Yeah. But whatever. I just state this because it frustrates me when the fighting in Liberia and the brutality of it is seen as something exceptional rather than this is what happens when there are civil wars.

No, it's very true. They're bad. That's very true. And maybe it's more digestible when things are just large numbers versus like this happened to this person and you can visualize it in your head, right? Or if it's like a village of people, it doesn't really... When I read a story like that of him killing this family and repeatedly raping the women and having his soldiers do it, that is horrific and deeply painful to hear and a way that if I say a U.S. airstrike killed a family of 11.

Exactly. Yeah. So it's different. Now, if I were to describe to you what shrapnel does to the bodies of little children. Yeah. Then perhaps you would have that reaction to it. If you went into detail about what that bombing did to the bodies of these people. Yeah, exactly.

But it's just like sometimes, especially now, we just hear all these 18 casualties in Palestine or whatever. And it's like we're desensitized to numbers. What does that fucking mean? Yeah. And we get these stories because they seem foreign and terrifying and like they're doing magic and they're these drug addled warlords doing these horrible things. And that's, again, he is committing unfathomably brutal crimes on the same level of horribleness as any Nazi Einsatzgruppe member carried out.

You know these guys slaughtering their way through Russia? I don't mean to mitigate what he's doing at all. I just hate that it is often portrayed as somehow separate from the history of Western warfare. No, I hear you. In the way that we do. And I think it's, I don't, I didn't see it as you mitigating anything. I think it's just a good reminder to just, if you think this is bad, realize that it's just like other things. It is.

But like, this is also not unique. Yeah. Okay, sorry. Blague would later claim that as General Butt naked, he used human sacrifice and cannibalism to gain magic powers. Quote, every town I entered, they would give me the chance to do my human sacrifices, which included innocent children. He elaborated, anytime we captured a town, I had to make a human sacrifice. They bring me a living child that I slaughter and take the heart out to eat it. I'm perfectly willing to believe this happens sometimes.

It is worth noting. I've read a lot of accounts that journalists have had because he's, now that he's, for like, apologized, he goes around and talks to his victims to try to get like, we'll get into that more later. All of their stories are horrible. They're like the one I read earlier. I have not run into any of them talking about like, yeah, we had to, he sacrificed an infant in my village or something like that. That's all from him as opposed to the things that like his victims, so I don't know how true it is. They're not beyond disbelief or whatever. It was a thing he did sometimes, but he's exaggerating how often it happened.

Like, very unclear. It's just weird to me that like, I can come up with a lot of stories of fucked up shit we knew this guy did and none of them are like that kind of stuff, but whatever. He did definitely kill a lot of civilians. He was definitely into like, magic kind of stuff, which is not a lot of Liberian warlords are doing different kind of witch doctor kind of stuff. It's usually framed, right? In the years since, Blahie has attempted to make amends with his victims. And overwhelmingly, I think most of them are men and boys, although a lot of them are, especially a lot of the people he does violence to that's not murder are women. There are two ways you can look at his lurid claims of committing wartime atrocities.

Either he did everything he said and literally believed he was engaging in witchcraft and gaining powers. Or he was making a very rational decision based on elements of the local culture and battlefield efficacy. For one thing, people in this culture, because of what everyone else has been doing, are primed to take seriously some of these signifiers of being involved in witchcraft, being a witch doctor and whatnot. So they make people take you more seriously. Also, if other people who are seen as powerful are doing sacrifices and engaging in cannibalism, then engaging in that too makes you like he's fighting Charles Taylor and Taylor's forces are doing stuff like this. And this allows him to like, you have to build yourself up into like in a mythic sense. Something as formidable as what you're fighting, right? Yeah, you're naked, not getting shot by bullets.

Yeah, it just like feeds the legend. And it's also, it's worth noting, in fighting like what's happening in Liberia, fighting naked does not expose you to much more danger than fighting with clothing on. This is not a war. This is before people outside of like very advanced militaries have ready access to quality body armor, right? It just does not exist for most people in this fighting. And a t-shirt offers no more protection from a bullet than being naked. That's fair. And in fact, one thing like, and this is from, there have been forces who fought naked earlier in history. And one of the things that was noted is like, well, when they would get stabbed or shot, they were less likely to die because they're not having like a filthy matted fur or something pushed into an open wound.

Less likely to have infections. And this is also, there's not a lot of great access to medical care. So it's not, it sounds wacky and crazy. It's not as irrational a decision as it may seem. It has its weird benefits. But also seeing a naked dude charging, he was terrifying. And as he gains a reputation from being, not being able to be killed, that benefit, that makes people less likely to fight him. People will tell stories that like whole towns would flee when you hear General Butt naked is coming.

Because he's a fucking dangerous, crazy person. You want to get the fuck out of there, right? Yeah, the legend is working. And that's a benefit for him. So again, as wild as all the sounds, there are very rational reasons for everything he's doing in addition to whatever he does happen to believe. Yeah. And so again, that's just important to note that like all of the stuff that is most lurid about this makes a kind of sense as a cold-blooded military calculation. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a force multiplier, right? Yeah. It's like a grifting. It's like a different form of like just like how it's just conning people in a much more intense, violent way. I think what I want to point out is, again, you get a lot of ableism this with people who describe behavior like what he's doing, like taking cocaine and fighting naked is insane. And like this is extremely sane. He is very much acting within the strictures of the society that has devolved in Liberia over wartime.

And his actions are perfectly rational within the context that he lives. And part of the evidence for that is he survives the war. Yeah. So, and I tend to think he is a pretty calculating guy. Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, he's not stupid, it sounds like, you know. Yeah. No, you have to, yeah.

He's, I think he was a pretty pragmatic dude. Yeah. So, Blahi now claims that his career as General Butt-naked ended after a battle on April 6th or in some versions right before a battle to take a bridge in like April of 1996. And he has this vision, and I'm going to quote from a write-up in The New Yorker. I met Jesus there for the first time, he said. In his memoir, Blahi describes killing a child near this bridge by opening the little girl's back and plucking out her heart. Her blood was still in his hands, he told me when he heard a voice. When I looked back, I saw a man standing there.

He was so bright, brighter than the sun. The voice told him, repent and live or refuse and die. I wanted to continue fighting, but my mind never left this person, how bright he was and how passionate his words, Blahi continued. He soon quit fighting, leaving his child soldiers to fend for themselves, and he began sleeping in a pew in a nearby church. The pastor there gathered his congregation and they asked God to strip Blahi of his demonic powers. The next day, Blahi went to see his commanding officer, handed over his weapons and amulets and said, My new commander is Jesus Christ. Okay, as a grifter, as a con man, what was the reason he disappeared?

There has to be a benefit to this. We are getting to that. So, it is worth noting for context that this year, 1996, the year he claims he converted and left war behind, is also the year there's a ceasefire in Liberia. Okay, that's a good thing to note. Yeah, everyone is fucking exhaust. At this point, for like 16 years basically, they've been either at war or this dictator's been purging people, there's been coups, it's been like 15 plus years of just like constant traumatizing bullshit.

Everyone's exhausted. And they agree like, okay, let's have a fucking election and we'll see if that works any better than what we've been doing. So, Charles Taylor is like in charge in Monrovia at this point, and he decides to run for president. And since violence has gotten kind of out of favor, he declares that he's been born again as a Christian. So, Blah-Yee is not, like his rival does, his rival does start signaling some of this witchcraft shit and using child soldiers. Blah-Yee does it. Charles Taylor becomes born again. Blah-Yee, right?

That's an element here. Now, there is widespread skepticism about Charles Taylor's claims that he's born again. And it's generally seen as a ploy to make himself more palatable. The next year in 1997, he runs for presidents under the incredible slogan, he killed my ma, he killed my pa, I'll vote for him. That was not where I thought that was going. Right, that's pretty, quite a presidential slogan actually. At least throwing a rhyme or something.

Interesting. The New Yorker explains, quote, the phrase was darkly ironic. Taylor was claiming to be the only leader powerful enough to prevent another war. Right? So, like, that's his, that's what he's saying is like, yeah, man, I killed your fucking family. But now I've got what it, the amount, the might that it will take to keep Liberia peaceful. Yeah. So vote for me.

Like, no one else is going to, to, to, to defeat me. Like, this is it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he wins the election. You can either say this is because of his brilliant strategy or because it's not, not a great election. Election in quotes again.

But whatever, Taylor wins or wins, you know, however you want to see it. And he immediately sets to persecuting his rivals, including Blah-Yee. The former general butt naked flees to Ghana where he lives in a refugee camp. And he claims he learns to read and studies the Bible during this time. Of course he does. And he also says this is when he starts spending time face to face with people who had been his victims. Who are like, what the fuck are you doing here? You're the reason that we had to leave, you know?

So he spends like a decade kind of hiding. In 1999, the civil war starts up again, right? They have like three years as during where there's this election and Taylor wins. And then another rebel invades the same way Taylor had from like a bordering country and tries to house Doe, right? I mean, like, right, you know, this, none of this should be surprising. By 2003, at least a quarter of a million people have been killed in the two Liberian civil wars. And this has now been going like the civil wars have been going on for 14 years, right? And then you had Doe's reign before that, which was pretty nasty.

People just have nothing left in them. But the war has, like I say, regular people, the warlords and their fucking child armies, all they do is keep escalating. And as kind of the year begins, Taylor is fighting for his life in the city against a siege from an opposing rebel party, just like Doe had been doing against him, right? It's like the third time this shit has happened. So it is at this point that the women of Liberia start to get seriously politically organized. Women bore the brunt of the violence in both civil wars. And there had been attempts to organize nonviolent protest campaigns earlier in the first civil war.

I think one of the issues is that Muslim and Christian women have trouble like organizing together for a variety of reasons. And I'm going to tell you this story, which is pretty fucking cool. But you know what else is pretty cool? Let's see. What is it this time? Well, it's not mono. That was last episode. It's not. Mono is pretty cool. It's all the cool kids are getting it because they're making out. I mean, honestly, in my high school, if you didn't get it, that means you weren't kissing anybody. I know. You're not getting any action if you're not catching mono, right?

I'm surprised I didn't. No, actually, no. That's a reason. Because all your... I never had it if that's not clear. Yeah, it's a... Yeah, neither did I. I wasn't cool enough to get mono. I don't think I'll ever have it. That makes sense. Anyway, womp, womp. Go ahead. I have faith in everyone here's ability to catch mono.

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. As the FBI sometimes, you got to 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 was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. 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. Oh, so it is, you know, bad stuff. This has mostly been bad stuff. But now we're going to talk about some cool shit because all of the women in Liberia start to organize a protest campaign.

Let's bring women into the story, finally. So they've been involved just mostly getting murdered and raped. Now they are going to. I mean, it's been horrible and that's part of why this is able to happen. And this is one of the coolest stories I've ever heard. Okay, great. I'm excited. So to explain what happened next, I'm going to quote from an article in the Journal of International Women's studies by Maxwell Ajay Adjaye. There you go. It's a very good poem.

More importantly, having a united front of Christian and Muslim women would send a clear message to the people of Liberia that neither the government forces, predominantly Christian nor LURD forces, predominantly Muslim, were fighting for their religious interests. While addressing WLMAP for the first time, Gabawi declared that, In the past we were silent, but after being killed, raped, dehumanized and infected with diseases, war has taught us that the future lies in saying no to violence and yes to peace. For the thousands of women gathered, this impassioned speech by Gabawi, more than any ethnic or religious affinities, represented the level of frustration with the conflict and the extent to which they were willing to commit to bring peace to their country. So, Gabawi and her fellow organizers start holding rallies at mosques, markets and churches. They'll do three rallies a week, one at a mosque, one at a market, one at a church. These are all like, so that they're reaching everyone, right? These are the three places everyone's going to go to, at least one of these three places. And they start reaching out to other women and gradually expanding the reach of their organization and demanding peace. Once they built themselves up into a sizable organization and they'd had time to discuss a more detailed plan of action, they issued a statement condemning all sides in the Civil War for their abuses of women and children,

basically saying none of you were legitimate because all of you were just massacring people, which is not an inaccurate way to analyze the life here in Civil War. Next, quote, in defiance of President Taylor's ban on public marches, WLMAP staged its first mass protest at Monrovia's Fish Market, a location that would make the president see them on his daily commute to the office. While using radio and printed flyers to spread word about the protest, Gabawi and her team encouraged women to show up for the protests in white clothing without any jewelry or makeup. For them, this would send a signal about their serious commitment to peace and unrelenting desire to remain independent of either side of the conflict. Heeding to their calls on the radio, over 2,500 women from different social backgrounds clad in white t-shirts showed up daily for the sit-in protests which took place over the next several weeks. In each of the gatherings, the women would sit, dance, and sing for peace while displaying placards and banners with messages such as, the women of Liberia want peace now. We are tired. We want peace. No more war. Etc.

For a while, Taylor was able to ignore the women, but their crowds kept growing larger and larger. He was eventually forced to take their petition and promise his willingness to hold ceasefire talks with the rebels. They didn't consider this the end, though, and brainstormed other tactics to apply pressure. Eventually, they decided to go on a sex strike. And this is a quote again from the same document. To prevent their husbands from forcibly having sex with them, they set up safe spaces where they could stay and sleep together. After some initial setbacks, the strategies seemed to be effective as many men began to pray with their wives and demand an end to the conflict. More importantly, the sex strike gave the campaign extremely valuable media attention outside of Liberia. Following the successes with the sex strike and President Taylor's meeting, the women turned their attention to the rebels,

demanding that they, too, agree to attend the peace talks. Upon hearing that the warlords were meeting at a hotel in a neighboring country, Sierra Leone, a delegation of the women traveled to the country. On their arrival, the delegation was able to arrange a private meeting with the warlords and get them to commit to attending peace talks. Damn. Women are geniuses. That's what I'm hearing. It's a pretty good story. You know, there's other stuff going on. Other factors working for peace, obviously, like talk about these ceasefires and stuff have been going on for a while. It is not just this that leads to an end, but this plays a significant role in the end of the Second Liberian Civil War, which is pretty cool, I think.

Not that we need more evidence of this, but women are smarter than men, you know what I mean? This is definitely a story where the women aren't the ones who are much smarter. Liz Estrada is this old Greek play about the Peloponnesian War with the plot of, like, this is the plot of it. The women in Athens decide to go on a sex strike to force an end to the war. I mean, if you think about it, if nothing else is working, you use what is weaponized to you for your benefit, you know what I mean? Or you take advantage of what people see you as. And it's important to note, there's a lot that they have to do in order to make this work, including setting up safe spaces where they cannot get... The document that I cited there is really worth reading, because there's a ton of organizations.

This is a very involved process. I'm giving you, like, really broad strokes here. So Taylor is eventually forced to resign and go into exile. International peacekeeping troops enter the country. The rebels lay down some of their arms. And broadly speaking, things get a lot better. There were elections and more elections, and these all eventually culminate in the election of Ellen Johnson Surleaf, who becomes Liberia's first female president. So this is all great, and things in Liberia get much better because of this.

But peace is only achieved because there have to be a lot of ugly compromises, right? So when the war ends, one side isn't crushed. Everyone's got people under arms. The country is filled with tens of thousands of men and boys who have done the things we just talked about why are you doing. Who have raped women in mass and, like, gunned down babies and all this kind of shit. These guys are, like, still around, but also, what are you going to do about it? If you start going after every individual who committed a war crime in a militia, how does that not cause another civil war?

Because they're going to pick up guns again, and also their families are going to be pissed. The ethnic groups are going to be like, well, they did what they did because that was done to us, and they were defending us, and, like, it's a really messy problem, right? We have achieved peace. What do we do? To what extent can we punish the people who did bad things during the war? So this is not, they don't have a simple answer to this, but they decide to hold a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And the purpose of this is to investigate the worst offenders and basically go through this list of people they know had done fucked up shit, talk to as many of them as they can, investigate it, and then decide, broadly speaking,

do we pardon them or do we prosecute them, you know? And this is where General Butt naked comes back into the historic record. So he's been hiding for, like, a decade, you know, hanging around. When he hears about this, he shows up on day one of the hearings and becomes the first warlord to testify. He admits- Like of his own volition. Yeah, he shows, he enters that he's not even in the country. He comes back to testify.

He is the first, I think, like the only person to admit to war crimes on this level. He admits in front of this to recruiting child soldiers, to raping women, to murdering civilians, to sacrificing babies, to everything we've talked about. He admits his personal death toll at 20,000 people. Now, that's not possible. He is effectively leading a platoon. There's, like, 30, 40 kids that he's commanding at any given time, maybe a company at the most. There's just no way he killed a tenth of the people who died in the Liberian Civil War. Yeah, but this guy exaggerates, right? We know that.

Right, right. He's a fan. And also, there's a vice documentary about him, which we'll talk about in a bit. There's problematic aspects of that. But some of the Liberians who were interviewed in that suggest that, well, he's not literally saying, me and my forces killed 20,000, but we were the side we were working on in the period where I was one of the leaders of that side killed, which is broadly plausible, right? So that's the thing you'll hear. The commission did not really question him on anything. They seem to kind of be in awe of him and the fact that he's coming and admitting and he's saying, like, I feel terrible, you know?

It's the smart move. If you did something stupid and you immediately admit to it, there's something almost endearing about it. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's why I always, when I finished drunk driving my forerunner through a trailer park and shooting an AK-47 out the window, I always leave a note that says, real sorry. And that's why everybody loves me in the trailer parks. If you all treat on your partners, instead of getting caught, if you admit to it, less likely they're going to hate you. You know what I mean? Stuff like that.

Not the AK whatever the shit that you just said, but yeah. Also, none of this works on cops, so don't try it. So the commission does not really question him on any of this stuff. One member tells him he has good leadership qualities. They seem to just be blown away that this guy's like coming to them and just saying what people broadly know is true. Next from the New Yorker, quote, Blahy's testimony was front page news in Liberia. Strangers hugged him on the streets of Monrovia and journalists came from all over the world to interview him. The Daily Mail ran a profile under the headline, face to face with General Butt Naked, the most evil man in the world.

Vice featured Blahy in a lurid travel documentary called The Vice Guide to Liberia, which has been viewed more than 10 million times on YouTube. Bojan Jansic, the pastor of an evangelical church in the East Village, saw the video and later became one of Blahy's benefactors. Blahy has written five books, a memoir titled The Redemption of an African Warlord. It was published in 2013 by a small Christian press. In the forward, Jansic wrote, Not since the conversion of Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, have I ever heard a conversion story more radically compelling? I'm trying to look him up because I need to know, again, we talked about this before, I'm sure, on an episode I've been on, but like, you said he was charming, but if you're good-looking-ish, even above average, you can get away with more shit.

So I want to know what he looks like really quick. I mean, he's not, he's like a big dude. He's pretty like muscular. Blah. So it's Blah and then he- So he's not really B-L-A-H-Y-E-Y-I. He's not really my, I'm kind of more into like, anyway, whatever. But you said he was charismatic, so that's probably part of it too.

He's very charismatic. There's a reason he's conning people all his life. I'm sure some, and when he's younger, I'm sure he's also considered more handsome. Okay, sorry. But I think he's just, he's a really good talker, you know, that's kind of more the deal. I guess more than attraction, that's what, or attractiveness, that's what probably gets you more cons. It's the talking ability, charisma and charisma. Yeah.

So Blah used to tractors will argue that he pretty much just partly his fame as the repentant warlord into a new career. Wow. Charismatic and well-spoken. He's been, and again, he's in this like, this vice documentary early on and it gets him a benefactor. Somebody starts giving him money to like do things, to like try and make things right. That's so fucked up, dude. And he's, like right after he gets kind of famous for going to this thing, he establishes a home for former child soldiers, like a rehab home to like help them.

It definitely exists, or it has it points. There's a vice documentary from 2011 called the, I think it's called the Redemption of General Buttnaked. And it films him and his soldiers and like, or these kitsch former child soldiers and they're all saying like, oh, he saved my life. I would have died with, I was living on the street. He's, you know, he's, he's, he did bad things, but like, you know, he's, he's our, are basically our father now. He's like, he's saving us. But interestingly, that documentary is filming him while he gets a death threat and he flees the country for Ghana.

And his soldiers all wind up back on the street and are like, what the fuck? He abandoned us while he lives in a hotel. Right. Yeah. That there's, there's criticisms of vice's coverage of him, which spans a couple of pieces, but they do get that piece of his, his life. I mean, but then it benefited him more than anything. Like imagine this, you're in hiding and you, you, he thinks of a way that not only can he get out of hiding,

but he can be fucking, he can benefit off of it and make money. You know what I mean? Like he, he did the perfect con. He's smart. Yeah. So by the time that New Yorker article comes out, he's back to running a halfway house. He comes back to Monrovia. He starts another halfway house.

He's running one again for these child soldiers in Monrovia. And this seems to be thanks, he gets the funding to do this from a white American lady named Brenda Weber, who saw the redemption of general butt naked, one of the vice documentaries and contacted him on Facebook. Now she has been owned a small pharmacy. I forget just how modern everything is all the time when you're talking Facebook. So she sees this guy and she is taken by him and she wants to help. And she does this like, big, a lot of white ladies do where they decide like, and white dudes, just white people thing where they decide, I want to help Africa.

Yeah. And this guy seems legit. Let me just give him a bunch of money to do a thing. So yeah, they do this. They set up a halfway house using this lady's money. And in the New Yorker interview, this woman, she's getting grifted and conned out of her life savings. I also don't care too much. She says during the interview, quote, I could just tell he was genuine.

I knew he wasn't the same person that he was a totally different man. And then she would go on to say shit like this. You should see them when someone cares, especially a white woman from America. It makes them feel like they are worth something for the first time in years. Jesus Christ. This is what she's saying about like the child soldiers that she's helping to fund. Like, when a white woman likes them, they feel great. Like, I don't care that this lady's getting grifted.

Yeah, no me either. But also, is there a whole like psychological study about how serial killers or whatever, even if they're in jail, like women are, there's like, there's a... It's certainly a thing that a number of serial killers have had like women fall in love with them. Yeah, I wonder what that's about. That's a bigger topic than we can get into today. Next time in therapy, yeah. So yeah, so she's, she's at this point when New Yorker writes about them,

he's sending Blayee $800 a month, half of it goes to him directly for him to live on. And again, to a white lady living in like, you know, running a pharmacy. Well, I mean, he's just, he's living off $400 a month. It doesn't sound like a lot, but that's 10 times the local wage. That's pretty good money for him. The other half is supposed to go to run this home for child soldiers. Yeah, right. But we'll talk about that in a second.

It's also worth noting she's spending more than 800 bucks a month. By the time the New Yorker gets to her, she says that in the first year, she ran through their entire family savings account of $40,000. And she's taken out like a $50,000 credit line in order to continue funding him. Oh my God. And she's, she's definitely the same kind of like really frustrating evangelical prosperity gospel shit that like Blayee is selling. Yeah, maybe she's like redemption body.

Well, exact. She tells the New Yorker, I know everything's going to be fine. You can't give and give like that and not get something in return. And she's like, hasn't told her husband. She's spending all the money on this and like, but like she believes, you know, you give money for God and God will make you make it right. He'll get you money back. Yeah.

And I think that New Yorker article makes it really clear the vice, the redemption of general butt naked vice documentary. I actually think, and this is like not the first thing they do about him. I don't think it's, yeah, but it is, it, I came away being like, well, this dude's a fucking con man. I guess you can kind of make either conclusion from it. It's kind of murky. I mean, if you are easily or like, if you have a predisposition to

maybe believe religious stories about redemption or like someone that claims he found God, like maybe that's something different. You know what I mean? I don't know. Yeah. Now the New Yorker article, though, I want to read another quote from it that kind of further makes that case. At one point, another resident of the house pulled me aside

and told me that bloggy was misappropriating the program's money for his own benefit. The administration is run by his entire family and no one really questions it. Sometimes the young man added, the residents of the house went without breakfast or their meals consisted of plain rice with salt and pepper. When Western reporters arrive, bloggy and his staff say, okay, stand in front of this camera and tell the man,

we are Joshua bloggy beneficiaries. But what have I benefited? When one of the residents texted Weber to report that they weren't being fed breakfast, she started sending an additional $300 a month. Bloggy hadn't told her about the problem she believed out of concern for her finances. I wholeheartedly trust Joshua, she went on. If he ever makes a mistake, it's not willfully. Well...

Now, that con has been successful in a lot of foreign journalists. The linchpin of his entire act, though, the thing that he makes sure to do whenever he's interviewed, is find one of the people he victimized and ask them to forgive him on camera. Now, there are some of these people who he's helped in one way, he's given them money and he has good relations with them. But it is really ugly and a lot of them haven't and he'll harass them on camera to demand.

He'll say stuff like, you have to forgive me. And I want to play a clip from one of these moments. This is a woman he murdered her brother in front of her. So... Does he think they're less likely to say... Yeah, that's probably what he's thinking. Let's just watch it and watch her face. This is from 2011.

I'm sorry. I beg you. Forgive me. No, don't just go like that. I beg you. I beg you something. I kill your brother out of madness. But please, I will be able to play the better for you. I'm not going to be able to do everything that your brother can do. But I will stand there whenever you need a brotherly counsel.

Whenever you need a brotherly protection, try to call on me. I beg you, please. So, the whole time this has happened. Because if you just hear what he's saying, it may sound okay. She is turning away and trying to get away from him. And he is repeatedly standing in front of her and stopping her from leaving while he says all this. And there are people in the background nodding along to what he's saying, too.

He's not letting her go when she wants to leave. There's no part of her that wants anything what he's saying. There's a moment where her eyes are so dead and just staring off. She's like, I can be your brother. She's like, I'm out of here. She's also cornered with a camera interface, too. Cornered with a camera interface. Yeah, it's pretty gross.

So, yeah, that's the episode. There's more to say about the Liberian Civil War. Charles Taylor just got sentenced to prison, by the way. He's one of the people who does not get... The Truth and Reconciliation thing recommends prosecution. He goes to the International Criminal Court, and he does a whole thing, and he gets sentenced to, like, 50 years in prison.

So that's good. I guess. That means whatever. Yeah, I mean, fuck him. He shouldn't be allowed to just retire. He shouldn't be alive. It's good when war criminals get punished for being war criminals. Yes.

I feel mixed about Blahki where he's not doing nothing, and there's definitely people who, at least on camera, will say that, like, he's helped them. He's helped them after the war and stuff. But he's also, like, he goes to all these revival meetings. He's, like, raising money, and it's questionable where it goes. No. It's like, I don't know.

I don't know what you do. I'm not going to tell the Liberians one way or the other. This is how you should handle the aftermath of your Civil War. I mean, that's fair, but, like... This guy is a pretty familiar kind of grifter, I think. Yeah, no, I agree. Usually, these grifters somehow are able to live a long life, just continuing some type of grift, and, like, look at him now.

He's, like, he's only 50. He has a... You know what I mean? It's... I don't know. He's doing great. He's doing great. All things considered, he fucking...

He won. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You know who else wins, Shireen? Mm-hmm. Who? Who listens to your plugs. That's correct, Robert.

Wow. Thank you so much. You can follow me if you want on the internet. Twitter is shirohero666, and Instagram is just shirohero. I have some poetry books out that you can buy if you want. And a podcast as well. Uh, ethnically ambiguous. And that's about...

That's enough for today. Yay! All right, motherfuckers. That's the episode. Bye! So, get out of here. Thanks for having me. Get out of here.

Go home. Also, Robert, I do think we bonded on this episode. Do you feel it? Oh, yeah. We had, like, that discussion about whatever the fuck that was. Yeah, that was, like... That was a conversation that we just happened to record. You know what I mean?

Mm-hmm. That was. That was. You want to smoke weed and listen to King Crimson? Hell yeah. All right. Okay, bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.

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