Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 263 - The Madness of Francisco Macías Nguema

Episode Date: June 4, 2023

*CONTENT WARNING* Joe and Tom discuss The Madness of Francisco Macías Nguema, a dictator nicknamed The Pol Pot of Africa. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: Tufts Mass Atrocity Endings for Equatorial Guinea Paul Kenyon. Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa. https://web.archive.org/web/20230306160338/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3610187/If-you-think-this-ones-bad-you-should-have-seen-his-uncle.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230517050409/https://www.icj.org/the-trial-of-macias-in-equatorial-guinea-the-story-of-a-dictatorship/

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad free and is totally supporter driven we use that money to pay our bills buy research materials that make this show possible and support charities like the curtis red crescent the flint water fund and the halo trust consider joining the legion of the old

crow today and now back to the show hey everybody welcome back to lions up by Donkeys podcast. I am Joe, and with me again is Tom. What's up, buddy? Joe, why must I suffer so? Why am I subjected to this misery on the regular? Look, I feel like, and the fans feel like, you have not been properly broken in as a co-host to the Lions Led by Donkeys, because I have yet to make you question your humanity.

If I have any left. Yeah, that's one of the fun benefits of working here on the show is I sand away your humanity until you're eventually a ruined nub such as myself. I'm just like hollow level 99 in Dark Souls. I need like some human effigy to... I need some like humanity to use for my item wheel to restore my humanity now before we get started today because this episode is gonna be dark i'm gonna say probably the darkest episode the two of us have ever done outside of the bloody sunday episode of the trouble series i think that

one is gonna be hard to top uh okay i'll let you be the judge of that when we be when we get toward when we get to the end so let's start this with a what is a bright spot right now uh in your life that you feel comfortable talking about um i'm moving soon so i'm looking forward to that um so that's gonna be really fun also i just want to like take a quick second to shout out some like wonderful people from the discord who invited me on their podcast at the weekend it's called failure to launch it's about a we talked about the chinese space program in the 60s and 70s and essentially how it devolved into gang warfare between differing groups of a chinese rocket scientists it was really fun so hell yeah keep an eye out for that when that comes out um shout out uh all the crew on that hell yeah uh i have not guested in any podcast in quite some

time uh so if you're listening and you host a podcast let me know uh i know my time zone is a fucking nightmare uh but i can generally make it work uh john john from uh let's fight a boss if you're here if you're hearing this super eyepatch wolf invite joe on the show come on this show that would be incredible um yeah have i done anything that counts as a bright spot recently um i so when i moved here i stopped going to jujitsu uh i know a lot of people uh know that i've been doing jujitsu for years um and i've recently managed to carve out enough time in my daily life to go a couple times a week and uh my bright spot is i still suck at it um it's it's one of those things that like it brings me great joy to just be humbled on a day to day basis. I mean, it's also a great workout, which obviously I'm a huge fan of.

But everybody's very nice. I'm not going to say who where I go, because, again, I live in a very small city and I don't want to I don't want to like it's a small place as well. So like but everybody's very friendly. place as well uh so like uh but everybody's very friendly uh there's uh like on any given day there's three or four different languages being spoken on the mats like you have guys uh who only speak russian guys only speak armenian uh guys who speak a mix of the two and then me uh who speaks very bad armenian and english um so it's like a fun language exchange while uh a sweaty man is choking you out it's a lot of fun i mean it sounds like a lot of fun i'm sure it'd be very fun to a lot of people yeah it's it's great um i mean assuming you are comfortable with wrestling uh because if

you're not you're gonna have a bad time uh actually speaking speaking of wrestling we haven't talked about this on the last couple episodes we know well specifically you now sponsor a wrestling production we haven't talked about it yeah uh i am helping promote uh enjoy wrestling which is based out of pennsylvania um and uh you know everybody knows at this point i'm a pretty big wrestling fan but wrestling itself is insanely toxic. The major productions have made great strides to not being as toxic as they were when I first started watching them. I'm not going to say they're not toxic because they fucking absolutely are, but they are less so now. Yeah. And, you know,we has its problems aw who i am a pretty big fan

of has its own problems as well uh but enjoy wrestling is very cool it's very inclusive uh very uh pro trans pro gay pro representation pro wrestling company which is something of a unicorn in this industry so i am i'm happy to help promote and support them and the good work that they're doing. So I encourage everybody to watch it. You can find it for free on their YouTube. You don't have to pay shit. If you live in PA or the surrounding areas, I encourage you to try to get a ticket because I've heard that seeing it live is great. And I look forward to maybe sometime in the future whenever i'm back in the midwest whenever the hell that's going to be catching a show uh but yeah watch it for free

on youtube i kind of forgot about that that's a very cool bright spot it's cool to do to try to help something good exist in the world you know uh in a world so full of shit exactly shout out enjoy wrestling yeah um now that we've also also i want before we actually start uh talking about what we're going to talk about i just want to address something something that was said in a previous episode of this show oh boy which i have gotten so much shit for over the past couple of weeks you have're going to have to be more specific. That happens a lot around here. The hack squat is a valuable piece of gym equipment, and anyone who has given me shit for it, you are just weak. You are

weak-minded. You cannot see outside of your perceptions of the barbell squat, of those plates on, like, a foot and a half away from your head. Open your mind to activating other muscle groups. Use the hack squat. You've opened your mind so much your gains

are falling out. Well, you know, if you use the hack squat correctly, they might be falling out of somewhere. Look, I am not going to rebirth our schism on the basics of the hack squat other than just accept that you're wrong.

This is like the Reformation. We're protestants versus catholics i'm gonna go to your new apartment and nail a squat rack to the door i'm gonna nail my 95 theses to the uh the pad of the squat rack okay another thing if you're using a pad on the squat rack why are you just stop god damn it tom you're doing this to me on purpose i knew that would piss you off god okay now that you've uh uh sufficiently upset me i get to make you sad have you ever heard of the country equatorial guinea oh god yes i have uh because it's been a long time since we've talked about a psychopathic dictator well okay not that long um it's only been a couple weeks a week yeah it's been it hasn't been that long um but you know hong uh our beloved hong christ of the of the taiping rebellion um i honestly think he pales in comparison to this guy though

they do have some in some things in common um because we're talking about a man named francisco masias noema um and just for a hint how bad this episode is going to be right up top and this is going to be your warning for people who do not like these kinds of episodes he is often known as the pole pot of Africa and all of that entails so if those kinds of things bother you

now is your time to check out I am so worried about this because you've been texting me about this for the past few days and I am so worried about this because you've been texting me about this for the past few days, and I am so worried. It's a lot. This guy, you know, like Pol Pot was, you know, and his Khmer Rouge regime was very obviously like needed to be explained in a series. Francisco, not so much. And in related news, I believe this podcast is now banned

in Equatorial Guinea. Now, Equatorial Guinea had been a Spanish colony since 1778, and as far as colonial efforts go, it was something of a failure. They didn't pay much attention to it. It was sparsely

populated and covered in jungle, making it a wonderful vector for disease for any assholes from Europe who might show up, but also its own population. Sleeping sickness and smallpox regularly just destroyed the population, while the Spanish administers were horrible alcoholics, which probably really didn't help on the administration front um you know the main reason why this disease like these disease waves were so common is because one of the first things the spanish did was pretty much wipe out a lot of the native population um and they know what like honestly the spanish do not get enough shit for their colonial past and well colonial and uh fascist past uh don't worry that comes up as well in this episode somehow oh my god we can thank francisco franco for a lot of this um why yeah why uh imagine a guy so fucked up that franco is like too much that happens

um that was a laugh a very uncomfortable laugh yeah we are defaulting to our our nervous laughter um i believe that is actually a bullet point on the tv tropes page that someone made about this podcast i don't know who made it. Yeah, that's a thing that exists. I don't know if it's ever updated, but someone made it. Already within like 10 minutes, I'm derailing the podcast. So, Lines Out by Donkeys is a weekly

history podcast largely devoted to laughing at military blunders, incompetent leadership, and generally covering wild stories from the front lines. Hosts Joe Kasabian and Blank, RIP Nick, along with part-time hosts, blah, blah, blah,

Rich and Liam, plus a cast of guest hosts also cover subjects such as Animals in War, the history of the T-55 and the M-16, taste some MREs and review movies related to military history, however tenuous the connection they are to reality um some of the tropes are acceptable targets armchair military

berserk button uh the catchphrase it gets worse chest of medals historical in jokes uh mirthless laughter nailed it mirthless laughter i'm laughing mirthlessly if i had a wrestling name i'd be mirthless joe you'd expect merciless but i'm mirthless also one of the tropes is this podcast is now banned in insert country and or group they just made fun of look i'm nothing if not consistent man yeah yeah and connecting to god's wi-fi yeah oh so someone has been updating it i suppose anyway um now the reason why i say most of the native population is wiped out it wasn't all of it the the spanish generally worked people literally to death um and then they replace them with people from other colonies this is something that's really common throughout most of colonial history, especially the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in South and Latin America, the British colonies in the Caribbean.

It's a trend. Now, one group of people they couldn't quite wipe out was the Fang, who pretty much were in a constant state of rebellion. And no matter how hard the Spanish just kept trying to to wipe them out they just kept on fighting back and the result of this was it was kind of a money sink for spain um it was their only colony in sub-saharan africa so it was something of a you know imperial flex and a strategic position for them to hold it did produce coffee, coca, and other things, but the thing that they were really holding on for was oil, because Shell had discovered oil

in nearby Nigeria, and they were like, well, there's probably oil here as well. They never did find it while it was a Spanish colony. Spain finally cut their losses in 1968, and this led to the first and so far only fair general election in equatorial guinean history um and this oh no they would decide

where uh who took over when the spanish left and of course the spanish heavily influenced this election because they wanted someone to take over who would be pliable to them and one yeah it's not like a the withdrawal of a colonial power causes a power vacuum and creates even worse problems yeah and it was one that didn't happen from a war so you know this the spanish were still very heavily involved and one of the people running for election was our main character for today francisco masias noema uh now francisco was born on january 1st 1924 in what today would be uh gabon uh but uh yeah back then it was the same territory under the same spanish administration he was a member

of the fang tribe and i swear to god this is the last normal thing I'm ever going to say about him. It's all downhill from here. Have we, have we, have we ever discussed on this show, like the origins of the banana Republic? Not yet. That's definitely somewhere in there.

Yeah. We're going to do it eventually because that would be something of a pretty, pretty expansion, expansive series that would have to, honestly, it's probably more than one series just so something doesn't have to quite be left in the on the cutting room floor the only thing longer than the soviet afghan

war is the origins of the banana republic man uh i have a hard time editing myself now so we'll see i can't wait because as everyone knows I am monkey pilled I love all monkeys and apes so you know I hope it features apes and monkeys I have some bad news where this term comes from oh no now his dad was the local witch doctor and

when he was a young man he murdered his own brother in front of his son Francisco yeah okay that's a good start we're off to a good start and while growing up francisco really uh took to the witch doctor lifestyle of his father which was doing just an insane amount of drugs uh both drinking smoking and eating uh specifically a local hallucinogen known as iboga uh but uh he did everything he'd get his

hands on um there's also evidence to suggest he was pretty horribly abused by his witch doctor father who was taking the same amount of drugs so i mean i'm sure that's not that surprising for anybody because he just murdered someone in front of his son um yeah now it became clear at a very young age that francisco was dangerously mentally ill um now i say dangerously not because he was mentally ill of course but because whatever it was that he was suffering through there was no treatment for him back then um it was just non-existent and especially as a colonial subject in the Spanish colonial empire, he wasn't exactly going to have a therapist available to him. Yeah, it's more so like you're going to get a hole drilled in your skull. Yeah, you're going to get trapanned.

He's got ghosts in his blood. Yeah, he's got voices in his teeth. They've got to be taken out. However, his dad attempted to treat him with magic and drugs um so that did not help you know there's no amount of drug-induced magician uh work that is going to help your mental health crisis yeah i mean like it is kind of like people rubbing crystals on your forehead yeah like it might it might work if you believe it hard enough but uh chakras are all fucked up young francisco yeah here take these

mushrooms and drink this like a toilet wine it's gonna help you yeah that's right uh i've been brewing this out of ketchup and orange peels in my toilet for weeks this should fix you right up medicinal pruno look look that could probably exist somewhere in like uh gwyneth paltrow's website yeah we need to rebrand pruno as like a goop product i'm saying you know like it is a goop it's holistically made it's all natural you know it's natural fermentation it's a sustainable because you're using like leftover like fruit peels and stuff you know and it's a it's small batch you know it's it's made by a home brewery you're supporting small business this is a business plan art is a business plan i

i'm starting the lions led by donkeys artisanal pruno distillery uh i i feel like that's probably legal where i live i could do that i mean yeah armenians make very good wine you can just like get a guy like but the question is if you're brewing it in a commercial uh quantities are you buying multiple toilets or you just have one massive toilet i mean to to legally call it small small batch, you're going to have a whole warehouse full of toilets. And not good ones, either. Like, they have to be the stainless steel toilets bolted to the wall of a prison. Shout out to Armitage Shanks.

Now, eventually, he finished Catholic school. It was not a very high level. Catholic school then was basic literacy, and not much else. And he attempted to get a job in the spanish administration but failed the injury exam three times oh why do we have a series of academic failures on the show we had hong now we have this guy look i'm starting to be worried about people who fail civil service exams and as someone because like after the hong series a lot of people specifically like nurses and paramedics reached out to me to talk to me about how hard their exam is trust me i know i had to take it it fucking sucks however i will say if i failed it once i would have quit uh because that

yeah reasonable and the way that i don't know if the the the nurse's exam is the same way that nurses write in and tell me uh but the paramedic exam is given to you in the worst possible way it's on a computer and it doesn't tell you how many questions you have to take or have to answer you just answer them and then at a certain point the computer decides you you're done and it shuts off you do not know if you passed or failed you don't know like you could do 100 questions you could do 150 questions it just cuts off and then at that moment like you just want to die because you have no idea what just happened okay it's like it is it's not pericles what's the greek god that was or is it the biblical figure that was um condemned to be like stuck in a mountain and every day like

a crow or something would come and like eat out his liver yeah yeah it's i believe that's greek uh yeah get out the greeks love suvlaki um so yeah he failed uh but somehow he managed to get a job in the administration anyway nothing important he was a low-level clerk in the courts department working as an interpreter and translator um as soon as he got this job he kind of showed himself to be a very interesting kind of hustler. He was deeply and pretty much foundationally corrupt as soon as he got even the smallest amount of power, because now he was translating court documents, which included witness testimony as an evidence and things like that. So he would collect bribes to translate your documents to make you look better,

look innocent, change the way the evidence came out on paper, change witness statements to make you look better. Look innocent. Change the way the evidence came out on paper. Change witness statements to make you innocent. Or to absolve you of your crimes. Whatever. And if you didn't pay him. He would change them the other way. So he of course. Incredible grief.

It's something that even his dumb ass could do. Because he spoke several different languages. And he was literate. And a lot of the people he was ripping off were not literate. So he could fuck them over deeply. And this built a massive amount of influence in the court system, obviously. He literally was effectively judge, jury, and executioner of people who didn't have money. And the Spanish took attention to this, but not the reason that you would hope like, oh man, this guy is fucking up our administration. We should probably fire him. But what they saw was, wow, he seems very important. People gravitate towards him. But they didn't really decide to figure out why he had that much influence. who failed their entrance exam three times was his education level was literacy. That was it.

And they assumed he must be some kind of backroom political dealer and able to navigate the government structure that they had in place. So they started promoting him a lot and quickly. Now he started again as a failed civil service candidate uh and was a low-level translator in the courts department and within a single year he became the deputy president of the governing council see this is just how politics works in general is if you are good at petty corruption it will get noticed and you will get promoted especially in a colonial administration where petty corruption makes the world go around colonial you know uh colonial outpost british government irish government pretty much

governments anywhere if you are a middling civil servant but you are very good at backroom dealings then you will reach a kind of senior mid-level role if but if you're really vicious you could be like president or something yeah yeah that's but like that that's the uh the biggest fallacy of the ending of malcolm in the middle is that like they go on about how malcolm's gonna become president it was like yeah malcolm's smart enough to become president but he's not evil enough to become president yeah yeah he's he's too good he's like chaotic good because he's not necessarily good good he's look at the family he came from they're all hustlers but he's not evil that's like you know that when the tried and true baseline like theories

is anybody who thinks they should run a country is probably a little fucked up in the head yeah yeah like i only i can fix this like they're they're either evil or delusional or both um now the spanish were not stupid and like well they were but not for this reasoning for starters they propped him up he was not anti-spanish and there was a very vibrant independence movement going and he was pro independence but he was not anti-spain yet um they also saw him as someone who could very very easily be manipulated and it turned out that both of those things were correct. However, he was already showing anybody who was paying attention that there was something not quite right going on with Francisco. Now, at one point, he was invited

to Madrid to speak during a celebration of Francisco Franco. I believe his 25th year in power. They invited Francisco from Equatorial Guinea to speak, and he broke out in what has to be one of the most bizarre speeches I've ever talked about on this show. This is just like the weirdest parody of when Julia met Julia. I'm unfamiliar with that reference.

It's a movie about a food journalist meeting Julia Childs, the famous TV chef. All right. The joke isn't funny when I have to explain it. Please go on. Now, he started his speech with, quote, I consider Hitler to be the savior of Africa. And Hitler's intention was to end colonialism throughout the world although it is said that he persecuted the jews what he wanted to do was combat colonialism

but he got confused and instead wanted to command all of the peoples of europe that is a direct quote uh hitler was simply misunderstood he got confused on his way to liberate Africa. Now, during other speeches, he would randomly get distracted and wander off stage like a confused child, like someone dangling car keys in front of them. And he had like the Spanish literally gave him handlers to kind of try to keep him on target. And they were not able to do that. So during the country's first elections, of course, this is the guy that Spain backed. During the campaign trail, he would give speeches that randomly changed languages, spoke at length and jumbled sentences that made no sense in languages that he spoke fluently. And when that didn't engage the crowd, he would simply point

to the biggest nearby house, which probably belonged to a Spaniard, and said, hey, if you vote for me, I'll give you that guy's house. And this became so chaotic that the Spanish gave him a speechwriter, who he also ignored. King. Of course, he won the election and became the country's first and so far only freely elected president a title that he still holds as soon as he took office he showed himself to be intensely paranoid and all of the the spanish hope for him like being not anti-spanish quickly went out the window um he blamed the spanish for everything he saw a spanish plot around every corner and he attempted to kidnap the runner-up of the election a guy named edu before the runner-up had to flee to gabon

so with him out of arm's reach he simply arrested and executed his foreign minister by throwing him out of a window i mean you know i i have been uh wanting to re-watch lord of war uh well not re-watch watch it for the first time, Lord of War. And I feel like this is like a scene from it where, like, Nicolas Cage is trying to sell him a gun. He's like, why do I need a gun? And he just throws a guy out a window. It's efficient.

The main guy in that is based on Charles Taylor, who is also absolutely insane. Now, like, Francisco is interesting because most guys who get who become like legendarily despotic murderous dictators it's it's a gradual thing he hits the ground at a dead sprint and never stops he's got that grind set he's got that dictator grind set you know like he has a vision he knows what he wants to do he's prepared to follow through on it and he goes and gets that bread oh he has visions a lot of them all the time because of all the hallucinations um now edu was eventually kidnapped and gabon delivered back across the border and he was also executed and this is around the time that a prison known as

black beach became infamous now black beach had been built during the colonial era and francisco now began to pack it full of his political enemies both real and imagined and they were all executed without a trial it is said that francisco often took part in these tortures and executions himself where he would seal people into barrels of water to drown them, or simply tear out their eyes with his bare hands. Just five months, five

whole months into his rule, Francisco Franco of Spain decided that he was simply too dangerous, and emergency evacuated all Spanish citizens from the country. How much of an insane person do you have to be that francisco franco of all people is like yeah i'm gonna evacuate my people out of this guy's country this guy's a bit much

for me i'm outie uh this is where i say it gets worse he scoured the country for anybody that could be considered a spanish spy offering people huge amounts of rewards for something as small as a tip that would lead to their capture and this is a country that is desperately poor so you can imagine how this played out immediately everybody turned on everyone and reported their neighbors to francisco's party militia the youth on the march with masius or jmm um and like the evidence necessary if you want to call it evidence that required some to be considered a spanish spy is something as simple as speaking spanish to someone else which was the dominant language at the time due to it being a spanish colony yeah i was gonna, I feel like that that would cause some logistical issues

just existing in that country. Look, if there's one person that doesn't care about the logistics of human existence, it is this guy. Anybody accused of even being a spy was whisked away to the Black Beach, and most of them were never seen again.

In the off chance there was a trial within the walls of the prison, it was a complete sham. And the defendant's own lawyers argued in favor of the death penalty. And this is because all trained judges and lawyers had vanished, either murdered, thrown in the prison themselves, or they'd fled the country.

And they had all been replaced by some random dudes from the JMM without any kind of education law whatsoever um yeah this is going to become a trend uh hence the comparison to pol pot francisco hates education and the educated class so things are not good uh and they're only going to get worse and i should it goes without saying during this time franc Francisco had never stopped taking drugs every single day to the point that he would completely lose his mind. He would sit around and talk to himself. And

when people asked like, hey man, you all right? Like everything going okay? He would insist he was communicating with the dead. Okay, so you have a dictator who is having like spiders are under my skin moments. Yeah.

And is like disappearing people on a mass scale. Oh, the mass scale has yet to start, my friend. Okay, okay. Is disappearing people at a large scale. Hates the language that is the dominant language in the country i can imagine the next eight years are gonna go well just sitting in a cabinet meeting with the his ministers and he's like gentlemen you ever hate when you discover that your blood is actually made of ants i know i do uh whom's among us whom's among us? Whom's among us?

Are you sick of the constant itching of bugs on your skin? We should pass a law against that. Everybody's glancing around. Yeah, Mr. President, we should really handle this bug on skin issue. Do you have any suggestions of how we handle that? Yes, we should tear off everybody's skin. Oh boy, he's doing it again. Smoking that ants in my blood pack.

Just mainlining the most powerful shatter on earth and tearing out his own bones. Now, at this point, everybody knew something was up with him, to include Francisco. He knew what he was doing was not normal. So he flew to Barcelona for a mental health care visit. This is not the first time he did this, actually. Back when he was deputy president or deputy of the governing council, he also met with

a therapist in Spain. And we have no idea what that therapist did or what they said or any kind of treatment they gave him. We just know it didn't work or he just ignored it completely because as soon as he was done in barcelona he flew back to equatorial guinea on christmas eve 1969 and did something that is so legitimately insane so over the top that if there was not evidence of this happening you would assume it only came from

like a hollywood movie where they have no subtlety in describing their their like antagonists or whatever 186 political prisoners were taken from black beach and brought to the national football stadium where they were executed by a firing squad of jmm men who were dressed as santa claus while a loudspeaker played the mary hopkins song those were the days my friend in the background what what for everybody uh who cannot see what is happening right now which is everybody other than me tom has taken his headphones off you are not you are not serious i'm'm dead serious. This happened.

You know when you said the other day that you're going to get revenge? You're getting there. Another 36 people were ordered to dig their own graves. They were buried up to their necks, at which point they had red ants dumped onto their heads and were eaten alive over the course of the next several days.

Yeah, man. This is only the start. We're four pages into a nine page script. Christ. History is fun. By the early 1970s, Francisco had taken a break from large scale murder to unleash a spree of new laws. murder to unleash a spree of new laws. The Christian faith was now completely banned,

though some Catholic churches were still allowed to operate with different rules. And we'll get to what those rules were in a little bit. Any novels or books from the Spanish era were banned and school curriculum was inspected for hints of what he called disloyalty. What counted as disloyalty changed pretty much every single day. And those found guilty would be arrested by the JMM and sent to Black Beach. For example one man was sentenced to five

years in prison for having Spanish olives and ham. He survived he actually survived his prison sentence. Do you know what? Big up to him. Big up surviving five years for having some ham and olives Look that ham fucking slapped I bet he's like he gets out he's like you know what worth it where's my motherfucking olives that bitch he got out and

just immediately went to the shop and was like he also issued decree 415 which granted him absolute power to rule by decree which was something he had been doing anyway. He also merged all political parties into one, his own, the United National Party, and named himself president for life. Now, we've already established he hated the educated because he had never really gotten much of what you consider real education himself.

And this became a bit of a thing for him. He started giving himself titles like grand master of education uh and banned the word intellectual from being spoken aloud how has hollywood made a movie about charles taylor ed i mean but not this guy i think it's the same reason why there's never been a movie like a major movie that focused on pole pot um it's just too much yeah um he didn't ban the department of education um which is unique because that's something like people in america want to do and even he didn't do that but he did randomly start picking out its employees to be murdered uh as a random pastime of his well example, one of his directors was beaten to death

in his office just because. I am despondent. I'm shaking my head. I do not agree with this. My shirt, I do not agree with Francisco Macias Noema as bringing up a lot of questions that my shirt should answer. The sentences for these crimes

did not stop with the guilty party. If you were found guilty of one of these whatever amount of imagined crimes, your entire family would suffer with you. The families were banned from living in towns or cities, they no longer get rations from the government, and they were forced to live on a government-controlled plantation in the middle of the jungle

where they are forbidden to leave under threat of murder so you could say that was this a camp where people were concentrated you could say that uh you're we would not be the only people who would say that in fact um now if this punishment is pinging a few things in the back of your head yes this is something that the Khmer Rouge did this is also something done by North Korea to this day and there's a reason for that Francisco is a huge fucking fan

of Kim Il Sung at this point um and we'll become close friends like not in a diplomatic way like fishing trips kind of way they're just a dictatorial version of way they're they're just a dictatorial version of me and you yeah they would have a podcast like uh everybody welcome back to the uh the the equatorial juche cast and today on the show

we have idiomi idi have you got anything to say and it's just him screaming into the mic screaming and eating human flesh yeah um now he had since become so much of an asshole that francisco franco criminalized even mentioning the country in the spanish media oh yeah how do you ban well yeah no it's franco speech or media i was about to say like how do you just like pretend the country doesn't exist you hit the delete button on your own history i think the spanish and the americans listening are quite familiar with that um now at this point he had imploded his economy as one could imagine we'll go into more detail of how badly he did implode his economy in a little bit, but he needed money.

So there's two games in town, right? You are naturally wealthy through natural resources and the like, and that will probably bring you more into the Western sphere of influence so they could be exploited or whatever or you're broke and you just say you're communist at which point the soviet union just is like have a blank check my friends welcome to the fold and that is what he did 40 here is 14 million kalashnikovs please don't do anything bad with them oh they didn't care about that as much um so he declared himself communist um and his way of working with the soviet union was there was a civil war going on in angola which without going into details it's a clusterfuck of different sides one of one of the said sides was supported by the soviet union and the soviet union was having a hard time getting them weapons so francisco's like oh you can smuggle

that shit through here and you know they became best friends um he got huge amounts of cash from the soviet union if you ask your mom can uh you stay at my house and i ask my mom and she's okay with it let's be friends is your dad okay if we smuggle weapons into your into your neighbor's house um yeah this is this is literally the version of like oh we i can stay at timmy's house as long as his dad like doesn't like bring out the guns or let us drink and another thing they got support from was north korea because kim il-sung and francisco became fast friends um north korea supplied his bodyguards um because he didn't trust his own people to protect him to include his own

party militia, which, to be fair, was probably a good decision on his part. I'm just wondering what those North Korean bodyguards thought the first time they arrived in Equatorial Guinea. They were probably not very happy. Oh, and he also sent his kids to

North Korea, one of whom was so young that Korean is their first spoken language, and I believe they still live there. Yeah. Interesting. One of the weird deals he worked out for the Soviets was a lucrative fishing trade. So this allowed the Soviets to have free reign to equatorial Ghanaian waters for fishing. free reign to equatorial guinean waters for fishing they could fish as much as they want without restriction in exchange for very very discounted fish being delivered into the equatorial guinean market now this is a weird deal because fishing was one of the few industries in equatorial

guinea that people could still take part in uh and so he outlawed fishing to make room for the soviets and sank all of their boats. Okay. Yeah. I want to ask first, and I don't know if you know this or not, what type of fish are they catching? Are they talking about some red snapper? Are they talking about saltfish? I don't know.

I have no idea, honestly. I'm going to look this up. This is me being your Jamie to your Joe Rogan. Equatorial. Hey, Jamie, what kind of fish they got in Equatorial Guinea? Let me tell you, Joe. Let me tell you, Joe. Equatorial Guinea fish.

What kind of fish are in Equatorial? So freshwater fish. Lots of catfish. Chiloglanus. I know this is not what happened, but I would really like to see a whole bunch of confused Soviet fishermen going noodling for equatorial Ghanaian catfish. Under some leopard eels.

Are you familiar with noodling? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for people who are unaware, noodling is something done mostly in rural areas of the United States where people go catfish fishing by shoving their fist into places where they believe catfish are and then they bite onto their hands um oh i'm looking up some recipes for like equatorial guinean like a pescado con tres salsas and it's actually it looks really nice i got some bad news for you nobody is eating that

at this point in time because they're not eating much of anything. Also, a huge loss to the world that whoever nicknamed it noodling did not nickname it instead cat fisting. Now, pretty much the only thing Francisco did try to look

communist, to put on the aesthetic that a lot of Soviet proxies would have was that he changed the name of his political party to the United National Workers Party he added the word workers in there of course and he loudly declared himself to be a

Hitlerian Marxist okay we're just like through this man we are channeling the weirdest people online with the weirdest political tendencies. Yeah, this is what happens if they actually take over a country. I mean, like,

a Hitlerian Marxist is just some shit that, like, Brendan O'Neill would write in The Spectator. Oh, God. Now, the Soviets themselves quickly learned that Francisco

was a bit of a fucking bastard. And they didn't like dealing with him because every few months he'd be like, I'm ending our partnership. Right. I'm going to start talking to the United States or whatever. Knowing that in order to keep them in their fold, the Soviets would just give him a raise for how much money they were giving him. And then he would shut up for a little while. He was just hustling them hardcore, which anybody who's being dominated by an imperial power should do. Now, this didn't matter because he was very short on funds anyway, because at this point,

the equatorial Ghanaian economy had ceased to exist. He was very short on money so he got into the the game of ransoming off foreigners for huge cast payouts now for example he got fifty seven thousand dollars for a german woman forty thousand dollars for a spanish professor and six thousand dollars for the corpse of a soviet citizen who died under mysterious circumstances like you know sometimes you got to respect the grind set but it's a bit too far because the money like it's not going into a treasury we'll get to that point but like any money that's being given to equatorial guinea is just going to him like please tell me he has like a gold ak or something i don't think so he does he has a much bigger flex that we'll get to. So at this point, he was ruling as president for life by a law that he passed and voted for by their parliament. And by 1973, he won a constitutional plebiscite.

So a popular vote that would enshrine all of these things in the national constitution. And would you guess that it passed with 99 approval and 100 of people voting because it did those are some great numbers yeah great numbers people a lot of great things happening in ecuatoria guinea what you couldn't get 100 you might as well fucking quit man how are you gonna how are you gonna rig a vote so blatantly and not even give yourself 100 of the vote this just sounds like my parents when i came home with school tests yeah what you didn't want an a i was a c grade student at best until i did my my ba a couple years ago where i got like incredible first uh grades like everything else c all the way because i was the exact same i

slept walked my way through high school and barely passed and then i was on the dean's list through my ba and graduated my master's very well as well so like so if you're listening to this and you were a c grade student maybe consider becoming a podcaster you know what they call a doctor who gets c's doctor exactly um now the entire country was formed around three pillars francisco himself his party and, and the JMM. Every level of government was controlled by a member of his family, which include his nephew, Teodoro, who was vice commander of the armed forces after Francisco himself and the military governor of the Capitol. And Teodoro liked to spend his free time in Black Beach murdering people with his bare hands, just like his uncle there. Teodoro would become important later.

And if you happen to live in Equatorial Guinea, he's important now. Now, at this point, Francisco decided he wanted to build himself a good old-fashioned personality cult. Because again, he's very good friends with Kim Il-sung. And he actually envied the personality cult that Kim Il Sung and he actually like envied the personality cult that Kim Il Sung had built around himself he named islands after himself he gave himself the title of unique

miracle and began to hang billboards around the country that said things like God created Equatorial Guinea thanks to Masius and there is no God other than Masius which became something of an unofficial national motto so things are about to go really good i assume it's this this episode has a happy ending uh happy is relative i'll say uh in the catholic churches that were still allowed to

operate priests had to open services by thanking francisco himself before they ever muttered the words jesus or god his picture would hang in the place of the traditional crucifix um and the entire capital would lose power whenever he left town because they didn't need it anymore he wasn't there they would simply turn off the electricity when francisco left the capital which was a lot they opened like buenos dias mimigos uh muchas gracias por masias amen yeah pretty much also you just spoke spanish to the black beach with you oh shit now by the 70s his paranoia had increased to a level I had never heard of before.

He saw the Spanish plots everywhere, which only existed in his mind, and he murdered the entire government outside of a few family members. I'm not kidding. The entire government, the National Assembly, entire offices of government workers, government ministers, everyone. The government died. He killed it. So who's running the country, Joe?

Nobody. Now, the family members that he put in charge of ministries, he also killed them from time to time. The only arm of the government, if you could call it that, was the JMM, who was a para-state paramilitary because while it was a pillar of the state, nobody controlled it. They spent their time getting blind drunk and wandering the streets, murdering people at random. And in the countryside, the JMM acted as something akin to a human pestilence. They would move across the country and pillage entire towns, burn others to the ground, and effectively ripped up the things that made a society a society. In some cases,

like, Francisco would be like, I believe there's an anti-government dissident in this village. They would murder the entire village. They would just kill it. And the dissident never existed anyway. Okay, so the government's dying,

the citizens are dying. Who's left alive at this stage? Hard to say. Not many people who had any official role. The concept of government ceased to exist because Francisco killed it. For example, the director of the Institute of Statistics turned in data showing, we can't run the state like this. So Francisco dismembered them to quote in order to help him learn how to count.

Ah, I see. When the head of the central bank said, you know, we can't run an economy without, you know, keeping account of what we spend on what we make. He was executed and the entire contents of the national treasury was boxed up, brought to Francisco's house where it was shoved under his bed for safekeeping. If I hadn't already taken my headphones off earlier on at that point, at this point, I would have taken them off again. Like Tom, Tom, would it surprise you if I tell you that the economy had completely collapsed at this point I would have taken them off again. Tom, would it surprise you if I tell you that the economy had completely collapsed at this point? No, not at all. Because it did.

Soon the entire GDP was made up of foreign aid from the Soviet Union and North Korea. One journalist noted that the only thing that he seemed to be able to find in the marketplace was tin sardines and pink champagne, which he remarked were strangely plentiful. Is there any reason

why they were very plentiful? No. The best thing anybody can assume is they had like a meeting of African leaders there at one point so he imported a fuckload of pink champagne and so much that it just like

it became better than the water because the nobody was doing sanitation anymore yeah you kill all the sanitation workers there's no clean water drink so you have to drink pink champagne there's probably like kids running around drunk because the only thing they have to drink is pink champagne yeah i'm actually losing my mind oh and after this uh he uh effectively shut equatorial guinea off from the outside world no one was allowed in from the outside other than like soviet north korean government officials so this is just going to give president a precedence to the rise of the equatorial guinea equivalent of the tokugawa shogunate i assume we're gonna have guinean samurai i wish um that

would be a much better turn than this takes now oh god even francisco who didn't believe in the concept of statistics or gdp um he knew his economy was was rightly fucked and he took a step to fix it you want to guess what it was? Opening the country back up, repairing relations with other countries, stepping down and holding a fair and equal election, trying to make some sort of amends for the mass murders and the executions and the genocide,

and kind of putting books back into schools with teachers ready to accurately kind of parse the recent history. Slavery. He reintroduced slavery. Oh, for fuck's sake, Joe! Tom has put down his headphones again. You know, I expected more killing I didn't expect slavery to be brought back Now there's a small problem when it comes to

Pressing people into labor Enslaving them if they're you know Dying already they can't exactly do The physical labor that you require them to do not to mention they have no idea how to farm um so the coca plant uh like the coca crop just died it nearly wiped out the entire nation's crop his paranoia during the educated class because when when this fails he blames like an intellectual plot against him like they're they're sabotaging my my crops um he so his hatred and paranoia towards the educated class spiraled out of control even

owning a book or a single page of printed material got you sent to black beach he instituted a mandatory death sentence for anybody who wore glasses because they were too smart for him. How bitter do you have to be after failing out of higher education to do this? And then in 1975 he bans school. For whatever way it existed at this point

in time. Look, if you had have told me that at 15, I would have been real happy. Aside from all the other stuff going on yeah i'll scoot he he's also going to abolish bedtimes uh uh mandatory nap time and uh doing your homework well i mean he's effectively already banned eating vegetables because there's nothing left to eat he kind of banned eating uh unfortunately um you know previous to this the country actually had a pretty robust health care system um and it was considered the best in the spanish like former colonial empire they left behind a pretty decent health care system

obviously francisco couldn't allow this health care system to continue functioning he banned western medicine um He banned western medicine. He banned western medicine and instead told people, if you're sick, you should use magic. Joe, I don't know if you have one to hand, but I could use an animal fact right now. I don't have any. Fuck.

Let me find one. You know, for everyone listening at home, I am struggling. I know all of you sick fucks have been rooting for this, but yeah, it's finally gotten to the point where I need an animal fact on one of these series. Now, according to PetalWildlife.org, Bactrian camels,

also known as the two-humped camels, can drink 88 pints of water or 50 liters that's like chugging 25 big soda bottles camels love water so much they even learn to drink salty water does that sound good to you i mean what if you filled a camel up with baja blast what if you trained a camel to only drink pink champagne? Now, during this time where he pivoted towards a mostly wizard-based healthcare system, he also attempted to show himself as the most powerful witch doctor in the world. And there is some normal-based belief on the concept of witch doctors in Equatorial Guinea. However, not like this.

And he also pushed natural healthcare, herbal remedies and things of that nature. So, of course... He'll goop. Yeah, he gooped it. He gooped it real hard. So, of course, he gooped it. He gooped it could leave the country did leading to a brain drain at a level that the world will probably never see again numbers of the country's population at the time are hard to come by because francisco killed the guy who was supposed to take the census but one estimate put the country's population at around 215,000. It's a very small country.

And the same estimate suggests that 47% of the population had fled the country, almost half. So many people were leaving the country. He put soldiers at border crossings with shoot-to-kill orders, laid landmines in all the roads leading out, and they dug pits around the border and filled them with spikes because he isn't too much of a cartoonish super villain already i i'm kind of like running out of things to say in disbelief i'm just kind of like what is going on this this is turning into 40k it it's like you can see why he's often compared to pol Pot. Yeah. Though Pol Pot ruled over a much bigger country

with a much larger population. So the level of total control that Francisco had is much more intense because it's a much smaller population that he had to control. So you now have about 100,000 or so people trapped in a situation that if they try to leave, they will die.

And if they stay, they will also die. It was called an open air concentration camp or most grimly, the Dachau of Africa. Jesus Christ. The only function that his government could carry out was violence. They did nothing else. They didn't even bother to run a budget or take account of the money that they had on their treasury because the treasurer had been murdered, and the treasury was now hidden under someone's bed like an old porn magazine. Nobody was getting paid anymore.

Nobody was getting paid for anything, though I guess Francisco cut the budget by murdering most of the people he would have to pay. His bodyguards were all employed by North Korea, like we said, though that didn't mean that they were paid or even fed. When they weren't on shift protecting Francisco, they'd have to go out and forge the countryside for food in order to survive. At this point, some of his bodyguards are also Cuban, but they also...

God damn it, Castro. Why'd you do this? He ordered the execution of all of his former lovers and his mistresses, as well as the husbands of the women that he wanted to bang. Before traveling abroad for state visits, he would have Black Beach liquidated entirely to dissuade others from plotting against him while he was gone.

Where was he traveling to? Mostly the Soviet Union, North Korea, yeah. I'm like, how do you have, like, you're doing all of this. How do you have the time to go on holiday? And he was, it's not like he was a pariah. Like, he also still traveled to other African states as well. By the mid-1970s, he was so paranoid about being overthrown, he abandoned the presidential palace and instead moved to his home village of Mangamo, which was on an island off the coast in a fortified villa that was fully

equipped with bodyguards and a 300-man prison so he could still murder people when he got bored. At this point, Black Beach, which had been liquidated several times already, and other prisons had become so packed with political prisoners all there for virtually no reason that there's hardly any room for them to lie down and they no longer had the food to feed them because they didn't have food or the money to buy food the commander like i i know we're joking about and everything but like that last sentence like just like is eviscerating to the mind. Imagine being someone who is stuck in Equatorial Guinea at this time. There's not many of them.

Yeah, it's real bad. It's probably one of the worst dictatorial regimes that the world just simply doesn't talk about. And the reason for that, I think we will get to at the end. So the commander of the prison told Francisco, like, hey, you stopped paying us and we can't feed anybody. So can we fix that, please? So he simply ordered the prison to be liquidated, killing everybody who wasn't already dying from starvation. This became a standard practice for the country, for the prison going forward. Fill it to the brim and then kill

everybody when the administration ran out of tin sardines and pink champagne to feed them with. And another comparison to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. And if you're still listening and have not been tuned out yet, this is going to be a pretty graphic description of violence, so skip ahead, if you will. This is a quote from the Tufts mass atrocity endings for Equatorial Guinea. Quote, most victims were garroted and forced to kneel, and the backs of their skulls were shattered open by the blow of a machete or an iron bar. Others were beaten to death with whips and sticks by crowds of children in the JMM. Yeah. Can I get another animal fact, please?

A lion's roar is the loudest of any big cat. Its roar can reach 114 decibels, the same loudness as a chainsaw, and can be heard as far away as five miles. This is because lions have a square and flat-shaped voice box, where other

big cats in the pack have a triangle shaped voice box. Okay, I'll the pack have a triangle shaped voice box. Okay. That was fun. I'll take that. That was suitably fun. Then of course there was the genocide. Wait. The genocide's only happening now? Yeah. Okay. So without going into the weeds too much on this

he wasn't targeting anybody specifically. A political identifier or ideology does not make a genocide um okay and without going into the weeds of why that is the case and why it is not the case mostly the fault of the united states and the soviet union on the definition of genocide uh because rafael lemkin the man who coined the term wanted that to be included um and it did not make the un definition because imperialists get the vote on these kind of things a political identifier say you're a communist or

a capitalist or not a member of his political party does not technically make it a genocide a genocide to fire is an ethnic group a religion uh things of that nature people that belong to a group um gender identity and uh sexual identity are not included as well for the same reasons as i previously stated uh and that desperately needs to be revised by the un but the un is the un so don't expect that to ever happen especially when most of the countries who vote on these things, the major players in the UN, are still in favor of doing these things to gay and trans people. So, sorry. However, I should state that that is when you look at genocide as a crime. In the research field, where you research it as a mass atrocity and a historical

event we do count those things okay so you know the UN fucking sucks long story short yeah now the vast majority of Francisco's violence could be categorized as political violence even if it only existed in his drug addled mind it's easiest

to accept this as random paranoid acts of violence. The official government line was nationalists, but also fang supremacists. And he unleashed his JMM militia against the minority Bubby people who are native to Bioko Island.

Now, this is mostly because he saw them as a heightened class intellectuals. There was no anti-Bubby kind of propaganda, but that was also probably because he lacked the ability to do that in general because his government lacked the capacity to do anything other than murder at this point. And he nearly wiped them out entirely.

This got the U.S. House of Representatives to propose a resolution condemning him for genocide and religious persecution. Something that the U.S. House of Representatives generally doesn't do anymore. Now, animal fact. Hermit crabs drink water by dipping their claws into the water and scooping it into their mouths. Oh, that's cool. Then for some reason to ask, can you do this? Out of my fucking lobster boy, am I going to fucking scoop this? I have hands, I use cups.

Yeah, I was going to ask, what's the name of that process of evolution where anything under the sea turns into a crab? Crabification. Fair, I'll take it. I said that with a level of confidence, someone's probably gonna think that is what it's called and i have no idea someone's someone's gonna say that in a bar after hearing you say that and someone's got the other person's gonna turn just like let's fucking not call that

i i welcome all of us slowly turning into crabs i'm'm already crab dancing, so it's fine. We're crab-pilled. Deeply claw-pilled and crab-based. I hate myself for saying that. Now, at this point, Francisco had all but removed himself from daily governing, if you can call what he did governing. Instead, he remained in his compound

on his island, attempting to conjure magic with the help of a pile of human heads that he had gathered for this purpose. Okay. Yeah. He would occasionally order his servants to prepare large banquet dinners for eight or more people

and then sit down by himself to eat and then start having lively conversations with nobody. According to the servants, he insisted he was eating and speaking with the dead. Well, you know, there's quite a lot of them at this stage. Yeah, he's indeed more than eight seats. Do ghosts eat? Do ghosts

get hungry? Do ghosts respect a succulent Chinese meal? Yes, exactly. Democracy manifest. Now, you're probably wondering, how the fuck was he getting away with all of this without someone trying to overthrow him, right? Most of his government was run, as much as it was as run at all by his family. And of course, some members of his family had already

been killed at this point, but the most powerful member of his family, his nephew Teodoro, had yet to be impacted. So everybody who was still there just kind of treated the country like a rundown house and were stripping it bare to make themselves rich as everything fell apart around them. However, in 1979, Francisco went too far. He accused several members of his family of being members of a Spanish plot against him and had them executed. Now, one of these people was the brother of Francisco's nephew, Teodoro, who was vice commander of the military and JMM, who at this point meant he was the commander of everything because Francisco is

pretty much only doing drugs and attempting to do magic in his island fortress. I mean, like, yeah, like whom's among us wouldn't want to do that and not in these circumstances, but yeah, it seems like a really bad idea to piss off the guy who controls the main group, which has a monopoly on violence in your country.

Yeah. And at that point, Teodoro, either out of revenge or realizing that this is eventually going to happen to me, launched a coup on August the 3rd, 1979. coup on August the 3rd, 1979. Now, ironically, since Francisco had moved out of his home on an island away from the Capitol, he did that because he was terrified of being overthrown. But by removing himself from the seat of power, he actually made it much easier to overthrow him because he was not anywhere nearby to try to rally anyone on his side or in his defense. Even the Cuban and North Korean guards left at his presidential palace in the capital had joined in the coup.

When word finally got to Francisco that his time was up, he chucked the entire nation's treasury into a pile and set it on fire before running off into the jungle. It's not that he burned about a hundred million dollars. What? Yeah. Like, okay, I should have, I should just

suspend any disbelief I have at this stage. He was found there a few days later sitting under a tree, deliriously speaking to himself and gnawing on some sugar cane. He was arrested and found with four million dollars in cash on him which he claimed he earned from his own

coffee plantation. I like that that's his argument. It's like, oh, this money is actually mine. It's from my side hustle. Yeah, I got this from my, I don't know, selling Herbalife. Selling goop? Yeah. His nephew Teodoro, who enthusiastically took part

in everything that had been going on in the country up until this point, and especially with the walls of Black Beach, seized power for himself, a position that he still holds today. And then he put his uncle on trial, charging him with just an absolutely shit ton amount of crimes, all of which he absolutely did. And these included genocide and embezzlement, though he ran into a small problem when he discovered that genocide wasn't actually a crime in the country, as they had never got around to

ratifying the UN charter that made it a crime. So they settled for mass murder instead. When confronted by the fact he stole literally the entire treasury and burnt it, he said he did so because he was worried that if he left it in the bank, someone

would have robbed it. And then he denied setting fire to the whole thing with the solid defense of Nuh-uh, you can't prove it was me. The court immediately found him guilty and sentenced him to death 101 separate times because if anybody

was done enough to deserve dying over 100 times, it was him. Though, upon his sentencing, he proclaimed on the stand that he was the most powerful witch doctor in the world and if anybody shot him he would haunt them forever and take van vengeance upon them and their families and remember he had spent years convincing people that this was true so yeah all the equatorial guinean soldiers refused to carry out the death sentence for fear of you know ghost wizards i mean do you

know what this is a very relevant to an episode of my podcast that's coming that has come out at this stage about russian prison tattoos and that there was this common belief in the criminal underworld in russia during the 50s and 60s that they would get a tattoo of the face of Stalin or Lenin over their heart and they believed that, oh, no soldier will execute me because they won't shoot Stalin. How did that work? They turned him around

and shot them in the back. See, adapt and overcome. Then Teodoro decided to simply hire some Moroccan mercenaries who didn't have any worries about wizard vengeance and shot him. Ironically, he was executed in Black Beach Prison, a place where he had sent so many others

to die. Now, the damage his reign left on Equatorial Guinea is hard to calculate and what we can is fucking astronomical. By the end of his reign, the entire country had two doctors and fewer than a dozen college graduates. The depopulation was the most extreme in recorded history when going by per capita scale.

Like we said, the population is about 215,000 and about half had fled the country. Of the people trapped in the country's borders, between 50 and 80,000 people died out of the 100,000 people who remained. Jesus Christ. It has been considered a form of auto-genocide because he murdered his own people. That is insane. Like, that is between, what, 65 and 85% of the entire population that was left. It means that maybe about 15,000 people were left in the country. The country still has not recovered from the decade plus unhinged insanity and most likely never will within our lived lifetimes. It is currently ruled by Teodoro, who is considered the most

repressive and violent dictator in all of Africa and possibly the fucking world. Oh, but they did find oil eventually. Nothing bad ever happens to a country that finds oil. Oh, I thought it. Joe, why? Why must you do this to me?

You deserve what you get, Tom. Gorillas have wrinkles on their noses unique to each ape, just like our fingerprints. Oh, cool. That's really cool. I was going to ask, is there any turtle facts? I'm in the mood for a turtle fact. I have nothing. This website that I've pulled up,

which is the first Google search result when you ask for an animal fact, is devoid of turtle facts. Disappointing. Definitely the only disappointing thing that's occurred in the last hour and a half. Now, Tom, let's lighten the mood here.

We have a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, you can write into the show on Patreon or you can ask us on discord which is where we normally get our questions because it's normally like the quickest way tom today we were both teachers at one point or another um what is your favorite experience you had as a teacher now favorite could also just mean funny um because mine is not exactly my

favorite but it is the funniest thing that ever happened to me. Now, for people unaware, I used to be a high school teacher and I taught at what could be considered a high school that was much like my own, which is quite rough. So, you know, that's fine. I didn't mind. The kids were great. The school administration was terrible, and that's normally the case in situations like that. But one time I did have a kid that wanted to test me, as kids tend to do in 10th and 11th grade. And he sat down in the front row of my English class and lit a joint and made eye contact with me. You know, balls. Takes balls.

Yeah. I mean, I was like, you can go out of the class and put that out and come back in and he's like you're not gonna kick me out of class he's like no you still need to come to class but you can put the fucking joint out he's like all right like he wanted me to he very obviously wanted to be like scream and yell and call the cops or something which like i'm never gonna call the cops on one of my students unless they're actively shooting at me like I was just like no you can go

throw that out and come back if you don't come back to class I'll be mad that's some good teaching that's you know that's a very empathetic approach to teaching yeah for me like I don't have that many because I haven't done a huge amount of it.

But I gave a workshop, I think it was, like, October last year. And it was kind of an intro to podcasting workshop where I ran, like, all the students through, like, all the basic things that you need to know in terms of, like, production. How to come up with an idea for a show. How to, like, put it together in a kind of package state so that's a plan you can execute on and it was just a like a kid came up to me afterwards and like you know came up and like shook my hand and was like i really enjoyed that like i learned so much and it was just that really like it was something small to think that you know i like i have so many people who've like mentored me over the years and I kind of kind of not dictated, but like I've helped steered my path to like the way I work now and the type of stuff I do now. And it was just kind of nice to think that, like, hopefully, you know, that kid is going to make something, even if they don't make money for it from it.

Like I told him at the start, I was like, if you're going into this to make money, you're kind of doing it the wrong way around. You should do it because you enjoy doing it, and then people will kind of be attracted to your sense of joy that you get out of your work. But yeah, it was just something really simple like that, and I kind of walked out of it afterwards when I was waiting for the bus,

and I was like, hopefully that has some effect on that guy's life. walked out of it uh afterwards when i was waiting for the bus and i was like joel like hopefully that has like some effect on that guy's life yeah like that happens like a lot on this show where i'll get messages from like high school students um who like listen to this show and now they want to go to like university for history um or someone wants to switch their major to history and it's like those really small things are very, very cool. It rules because one of the reasons we started this show is because I believe that standard history education is very boring,

which is why a lot of people believe history education is boring. It's very important, and it can be incredibly entertaining when presented correctly. I'm not saying we present it correctly all the time, but we do our best. So now, Tom, thank you so much for joining me on this very lighthearted, uplifting episode. You can use this time to plug your show. Yeah, listen to Beneath Skins, the show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing. skins to show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing and so we're kind of a general history show that uses tattooing as a as a lens to discuss like wider things in

history you know like colonialism and history of you know racism the history of art and like i always say um check out like our series we did on the history of japan or like really check out any of the episodes um we're on all good streaming platforms and yeah check us out on instagram as well it's beneath the skin pod if you just want to like you just want to see some cool tattoo history stuff yeah and thank you so much for listening to the show if you like what we do here consider supporting us on Patreon. You get episodes like this a week early or more for as little as a dollar. For $5,

you can get five plus years at this point worth of bonus content. There's a lot on there. You get discord access where we have a nice little community we've built over the years. You get all sorts of other stuff. You get stickers. You get, I of other stuff. You get stickers. You get I'm working through doing an audio book for Hooligans of Kandahar, which people have been requesting for literally years now.

So I'm finally doing it. So support the show via Patreon. Get all of that. The link will be in the show notes as always. And if you don't want to, that's fine. Leave us a review on wherever it is you listen to podcasts. It helps us greatly. if you don't want to that's fine leave us a review on wherever it is you listen to podcasts it helps us greatly uh and until next time uh the next episode will not be this depressing