Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 12 - General Butt Naked and the Liberian Civil War

Episode Date: August 14, 2018

On the most depressing episode yet Joe and Nick talk about the Liberian Civil War and a insane, blood drinking, heart eating warlord by the name of General Butt Naked. A man who ran screaming into battle totally naked while leading a legion of sundress wearing, clown wig headed, cannibals against his enemies. Follow the podcast on Twitter @lions_by Follow Joe @jkass99 Follow Nick @nickcasm1

Liberia Hail! All hail, Liberia hail! All hail, Liberia hail! This glorious land of liberty shall long be ours The new my name bring me again MIT be our boss Hello and welcome to another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. We're recording. Yeah, we are. That's very observant of you, Nick. Yeah, we are.

Sweet. Yeah, so I'm one of the hosts, Joe. I'm Nick. And today we're talking about something just incredibly depressing, and that is the first Liberian Civil War. It's fucking rough. Afterwards I kind of felt like I needed to take a shower.

Agreed. But like in bleach. No. That's the only thing that can make you clean after this. I think a regular shower for me would do. I'm not complaining as someone that sits next to you all the time in this hot box um sweating out old crow and ginger ale let's do that podcast thing all right ring the bells so uh today we are going to be talking about one of the darkest parts of

human history um and i think it's full of some of the worst people I've ever read about or ever done research on. And also some of the absolute strangest parts of history that I kind of think it's glossed over. I mean, really, some of the stuff is so awful, I almost want to start with some kind of disclaimer or warning. I know we normally delve into some pretty dark shit um but it's mostly our humor not like the actual subject matter um this one's really hard to scrape some type of humor out of yeah it really is i'm gonna say we we just didn't um i mean we might come up with something i don't know we're swinging for the fences here um so we're going to talk about this stuff in depth um this thing includes but is not limited to murder rape genocide mutilations crimes against children cannibalism and sometimes all of them at once um but to understand this you know the

madness that we're talking about to understand um liberia and its current form and the Liberian civil war, all this stuff's kind of integral. You can't skip over it. It's kind of like talking about world war two without the Holocaust. Yeah. So, but to understand all of this madness, you have to kind of understand where library, right.

Where I Liberia started. And that is that it began to existence as an idea by the American Colonialization Society in the mid-1800s. You see, by then there had been enough freeborn black Americans and freed slaves. They began to find themselves in a society that hated them. And their numbers were rising, which led to enough of pearl-clutching rich white people to get together and decided that these poor souls are just never going to get fair treatment um in the states and their only hope was to just kick their sorry asses back to africa where they came from yeah always seen as second class citizens yeah we're not citizens at all um and this is before the civil war so there's

not like you know millions of free uh blacks wandering the streets or anything like that it's a couple couple thousand tens of thousands um too many yeah too many just too many for jebediah and his clan to deal with um so this is like if you're drunk racist uncle from thanksgiving who uses words like colored and thugs about football players actually began to form a governmental policy so in 1822 around 20 000 free black americans were put on ships and sent back to africa just like your friend the lifted truck and the three percenter stickers has always dreamed of uh now this is stupid right from the get-go by this time the slaves uh in the united states were hardly coming from africa and droves most of these people were born into slavery in america and had

no connection no understanding no nothing of the culture and society that they came from in the continent of africa yeah all they knew was their slave life essentially yeah the slave culture that sprung up um and you know you know we're not obviously saying that like freeing them was bad that's not an argument that we have here no uh um but they're literally being sent back to somewhere that uh was a completely foreign land um it would be like if you know ice kicked on my door tomorrow told me to pack my shit i was getting sent back to armenia which is fucking insane yeah i have no connection they're like oh yeah send them back i don't need to go anywhere i'm good yeah thankfully uh to

mexican americans that doesn't happen yeah thank god it's nothing nick ever has to worry about um but you know that was part of the rationale behind america's really only real foray into african colonialism these savages had been raised in america and though they weren't equal to us whites they could spread our wonderful philosophy of liberty and freedom to the savage continent um that that's what these fine folks in acS thought. So the newly freed men and women settled in what is now modern day Liberia. But I also want to tell there's a lot of acronyms being thrown around during this episode. Oh, yeah.

There's going to be a lot. And we're just going to shotgun them at you pretty much all at once later on. Because you don't have to understand them because we don't understand them because they don't understand them. Nobody understands them. Nobody. It's okay. The people of the ACS were proven kind of right in that Liberia elected its first president.

There's not exactly a lot of records about how free this first election was, but free enough, I guess. A rich man who was born into freedom he was never a slave free with an asterisk yeah um named joseph roberts became liberia's first president they modeled their flag after america's and their capital monrovia is named after a former american president isn't it just a star in the blue section it's yeah it's it's red and white stripes with a star instead of like the 50 stars just one's yeah it's it's red and white stripes with a a star instead of like

the 50 stars just one star yeah it's just one star yeah um they lack originality now um then their only political party i mean this is a one party state all the way up into the 1980s um was called the true wig party obviously named after the for one of the first political parties in the United States, the Whig Party. These people would eventually be known as the Amero Liberians, and they learned one more important... Terrible name. Yeah, I guess they could just...

It's not a good name. It's like a terrible band name. They could just call them Americans. Settlers, maybe. Colonials. So they learned one more important lesson from their American masters, though, and that was how to deal with all these pesky natives. The land they bought from the ACS for the purpose of colonialization was inhabited by dozens of native tribes

who were made second-class citizens by their new overlords. The Amero-Liberians oppressed, enslaved, and murdered the tribes until they quickly gained dominion over them um the native liberians were banned from political and economic power for generations the slavery and brutality was actually so widespread that the league of nations made note of it it's still a great name. You just think of it because League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Great movie. And I'll only say that because it's a bad movie, which makes it a great movie. It's like one of the worst.

It's not one of the worst. You're right. It might be the worst. You like Chappie. Get fucked. It might not be a good movie. It's probably League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I'd rather watch League of Extraordinary Gentlemen than apparently leave extraordinary gentleman i'd rather watch league of extraordinary gentlemen than some fucking i'd rather watch your mom i think a lot of people honestly at least the next box live yeah um

so uh this economy fueled by slave labor eventually made the liberian economy one the fastest growing in the world which weird it's almost like having a massive legion of unpaid laborers is like really really good for your economy because you don't have to pay them shit yeah um so liberia declared independence on the dollar yeah so uh what's the uh the cost of all this nothing they have to throw rice at him every once in a while i guess i guess you can call it like a hobby what slaving yeah slaving back in the day back in the day it probably was well you're saying the slaves were a hobby having slaves no that's definitely a job

having slaves yeah they made money for you yeah i feel like it was also probably a hobby to them i don't know if it's a hobby. To them, it could have been. We don't know. I'm pretty sure it was all commercial-based. Nobody's just owning people for funsies. We don't know this. We do, though.

There's papers. I feel like some people are probably like, hey, check this one out. Like, yeah, it was free trade. I'm going to move on here. Let's do that. I'm going to leave this one in the dirt um so there's now a lot of text accounts and anecdotes at play that uh kind of put liberia some kind of democratic gem through in the middle of uh african turmoil and it really couldn't be

further from the truth the true wig party was the only legal party in the country, like I said, until 1980. And natives had zero say in anything. It was kind of like an apartheid state. And power wasn't elected as much as just passed on. Whoever was president could just keep running for elections until they died. And they often did. Which brings us to one William Tolbert. William Tolbert became president in 1971 after his predecessor died, as is tradition.

So how do you gain that type of power? Well, I know. How are you next in seat? I know William Tolbert's connection to power was that he's from a rich family, which is kind of a thing that you see from throughout history. Right. Um, be from a rich and powerful family and things just kind of happen for you,

especially in a slave apartheid state. Um, maybe they just picked, Hey, who owns the most people? And that's how they won the election. That's me. Oh,

I own 15. Yeah. Um, so, uh, he was a bit of a liberal in that, you know, a Liberian liberal, which just means he would admit that the native population had a harder life than the Amero-Liberians. And if that is the stretch of a liberal in Liberia, holy shit. It doesn't seem really hard to admit. It does. roll in liberia holy shit it doesn't seem really hard to admit it does um it's a lot like um nowadays where you see people just just completely unable to accept that people who live in like

inner cities and what people call ghettos are have like a harder life and it's racially based um okay yeah i can see it yeah because like they don't they cannot possibly understand what people are going through because they didn't have to go through it. They cannot and will not put themselves in somebody else's shoes. Okay, no, yeah, I totally see that. I lived in inner city. Yeah, I grew up in a white trash hood, and I ran into a lot of people that me pointing that out, that hey no some people um they really have it harder and a lot of it's due to uh racial economic reasons and suddenly i'm some kind of social justice warrior communist oh yeah you're the snowflake apparently yeah you know yeah i can talk it's a

different podcast don't get into it um so uh tolbert also made one more progressive movement and that was allowing the creation of another political party um the progressive alliance for liberia or the pal or else call them our pals that's a real nice way don't worry they won't stick around long um he was from a prominent family like we said and benefited immensely from the way things were and hired most of his family into cabinet positions which thankfully we have never seen that in america especially not like say 2016 as fucked as the whole situation was most people actually just turned a blind eye to it because the economy was still strong and is booming pretty much held aloft by one bumper crop, and that was rubber.

The entire economy was pretty much rubber-based. And as recent history in Venezuela and some parts of the Dakotas have showed us, if you have an entire economy based on one product, you're going to have a hard time. Yeah. You're going to have a hard time. Yeah. You're going to have a bad time. I fucking love that episode. Holy shit. So in the mid-1970s, rubber collapsed.

Taking the entire economy with it, Tolbert, in response, trying to fill the government's coffers so they can continue to fund what little programming they had, raised a tax on rice to replace the money. Seeing how the vast majority of the population survived on rice, this was not a good idea. Our pals quickly organized a demonstration against the measure,

and in a level-headed response, Tolbert just banned the entire party. These guys were around like less than a year. Your pals are fucking gone dude and i would just like to point out in um less than a year of existence this political party had did more for people uh than any in the preceding 100 years of the country apparently yeah um apparently helping people is like a fucking terrible thing to do in that country no holy you swiftly just get annihilated for it um it was then on april 12th 1980 that members of the liberian army led by a master sergeant named samuel doe

launched a coup samuel doe was a member of the native crawl tribe and he and his supporters quickly took the presidential palace they swiftly executed tolbert and his cabinet meaning he did a quick family cleansing of the tolbert family tree and dumped their bodies in a mass grave did some tree removal yeah just did some shearing some quick arborist work cuban arborist yeah um now there's a lot of evidence pointing that the u.s actually had a head in this and it makes a lot of sense tolbert was about to accept aid from libya and cuba and the united uh ussr because this is you know the uh 80s uh ussr will pretty much throw money at anybody who is willing to look at a copy of the communist manifesto it's like a it's like a blank check it's almost like

some of the cults going to the to the communists saying hey we support communism will you support us right they'll actually look into them yeah and with the soviet union was so desperate for like anything that looked like um like a sphere of influence increase like in africa especially they did all over africa that they wouldn't look too much into anything like yep yep here's some money have some tanks and airplanes and shit. Fucking AKs growing trees. Communism is great. Thumbs up.

So, as you can imagine, being even remotely accessible to communist ideas makes you a target for our friends in the cia um this is paired with eyewitness accounts of the attack on talbert's palace that stated they saw several white men among those soldiers um so pretty much everything points to some good old-fashioned cia regime change where did they see like they they said they saw white gunmen um obviously there's no evidence of this other than eyewitness testimony and you know obviously eyewitness testimony is incredibly fallible uh but occam's razor says there's a good chance the cia is involved there hasn't been a regime change in like 50 years that may have involved a leftist being deposed the CIA wasn't involved in. Right, right, right.

Can we go on a... It's kind of their thing. Can we go on a really, really, really, really far limb? Aliens? That or albinos. It was not albinos. I can... From a distance, squinting could have been so it you know what i'll give

this to you if samuel doe is leading an army of people with cataracts who did not wear their corrective lenses maybe albinos but squinting at the same time uh tribal religious beliefs in the area make albinos something that you eat yeah that's true so they're endangered kind of all right so aliens are a better option i'm not saying it was aliens but i'm saying aliens yeah this is two episodes in a row now we brought up aliens let's keep it moving i'm starting i'm starting to think we're not credible um so as most strongman we're almost like the history channel and now we just need a pawn shop named like...

I don't know. I was trying to make an oral sex joke about TVs and I couldn't think of one. I can't think of one either. I feel like lines led by donkeys is enough. I'm not getting into that. So as most strongmen cool leaders go, Doe tossed away his country's constitution, banned political parties, or at least the one that was left,

and created a military junta that he would lead, at least for a little while. In 1985, he ordered an election and promptly became the first native Liberian president, though the election was so fraudulent it was almost comical, and he ended up winning something like 113% of the popular vote. What? I believe that's where the fraudulent part comes from.

I mean, there's no international minors on the whole thing. It was just Doe probably just had his entire tribe go out and fucking vote five times apiece. Yeah, 100% cool. Where do you get the 13%? 100%. Nobody's winning 100% of any vote. You could put out a vote tomorrow that said

ice cream is good and you'll win maybe 60 of us no but you know i'm like fraudulent yeah 100 sure where the fuck do you get the 13 uh zombies i don't know well it's next um but because he was anti-communist he won the support of the united states government who lavished tons of aid money on him at least for a few years this being the 1980s the u.s had to tighten his belt a bit and started cutting off aid um unfortunately for liberia they were one of the targets for cuts doe had been using the money to bribe people that could possibly be his opponents and building things that could distract people uh from him outright stealing money nepotism and favoring his tribe more than virtually anybody else in the entire country once the money was gone now they have virtually no rice they have no rubber and now they have

no money people started to think of doe as the reason for all their issues. Probably were mostly right. It didn't take long for the dissent to turn violent. Soon, the former head of the Liberian army, a guy named Thomas Kwinopaka, who had actually originally backed dough during the Civil War, but almost immediately afterwards afterwards he got demoted and had to flee for his life to Sierra Leone.

Quinwock Paca didn't take the demotion sitting down. He whipped up a base of support in Sierra Leone, which does actually have a sizable Liberian diaspora, and covertly entered Liberia in the middle of the night with his sights and on doe's head and the presidential palace unfortunately that base of support he whipped up was about 12 guys it's all you fucking need dude as long as you believe that's not even an entire squad as long as you believe man well believing didn't get him very far uh they were all i didn't believe they

were all captured mercilessly tortured mut mutilated, torn apart, and eaten. Yes, eaten by Doe's Kron tribal soldiers. To make matters worse, Doe decided that because the general took part in this attempted coup, his entire tribe must have been involved, which clearly they were not, because he was only able to get 12 people to support him. And he waged an outright genocide against the G.O.N. mano-ethnic groups. So for all you people that know, this is a form of mass punishment, as some viewers may know of, others may not. You may see it in a large formation of uniformed soldiers.

It's a pretty common tool for people who don't know how to control a situation and they find themselves. Yeah. They basically just blame it on everybody else. can't possibly be my fault it must be everybody else's exactly um now everybody gets fucked except me as you can imagine the outright ethnic violence combined with those obvious favoring of his own made liberia is the bonfire waiting to get lit by a match that match's name was charles taylor taylor an american educated former government worker who had been fired for embezzlement shortly after doe took power though he was originally a

supporter um actually had dual citizenship with the united states so when he saw doe coming for him he simply fucked off back to the united states for in safety doe realizing wait america is my ally put on an order of extradition which the u.s followed uh taylor was arrested and thrown in a massachusetts jail for hold on for 16 months uh this is where things get a little weird it's fucking great taylor mysteriously vanished um out of the jail 16 months after he was thrown in it there is no official record of a breakout there is no official record of his release he's just gone and there's a good reason for that which we'll get into later but next time anybody sees him he's in the ivory coast taylor popped up back in west africa in the

ivory coast to build a rebel army bankrolled by libya and mo margadafi and he called it the national patriotic front for liberia or the npfl now taylor's army was not the only one operating in the areas where there is a literal salad of acronyms and different army names that we are, instead of trying to tell you who's side is on what, we're just going to list them for you. I don't even know whose side is, because they ended up fighting each other sometimes anyway.

There is no real loyalty here. Nobody really knows who's fighting for what. And I don't think they're actually fighting for control of the country, except maybe Charles Taylor. Because I don't think anybody actually wanted to rule over this mess at the end of this whole thing i think they just did it just i don't even know if they want to say for funsies they just did it for i think they were they had their reason they had a hundred years of pent-up colonial rage, and they were finally able...

A Civil War pops off because of Taylor. There's a native person in charge. Taylor is not an Amero-Liberian, but a lot of his army is made up of Amero-Liberians. Tribal people want to get revenge for having a president in office for two years before another Civil War kicks off. There's a lot of really old, bad blood.

So you can almost say somebody was like, let's rage. Kind of. It was like when you dump a ton of gasoline on a bonfire and then throw a match in it. It's like you dump way too much gas on it. I feel like this one was just like a calm fire and somebody threw, back from my bonfire days we threw axe body spray into a bonfire and it took a little bit it took just a little bit and it just threw flames and then all of a sudden just fucking

wham so fucking went off hit me with some of these army names i'm gonna hit you with some of them because there's probably a lot more but i'll hit you with the uh main uh let's say i'm going to assume that each one of these armies is a sub army but we're just going to tackle the big ones yeah so you have what you said before was the independent national patriotic front of of liberia i n pfl you also have the fucking there it is national patriotic Front of Liberia Central Revolution Council That's NPFL CRC It's just

Like there's three of them There's literally three of them From the first one which is the National Patriotic Front of Liberia Then you have the Independent And then you have the National And they all fought each other And then yeah they all fought each other And then then, yeah, they all fought each other. And then I'm pretty sure the guys that were in the national fought the national guys,

thinking they were probably the independent guys. Well, it's not like there's any uniforms. Exactly. So it's like, what the fuck's going on? Nobody knows. So in 1989, Taylor's army invaded and officially started the first Liberian Civil War. army invaded and officially started the first liberian civil war uh now i know a lot of people don't know that there is a first and a second liberian civil war that's because there was no real break and nick described it as a seven inning stretch um where there was like you basically

single you have a little sing-along that take me out to the ball game but this one's like a let's have a stretch then get back to the fucking drugs and murdering and yeah generally it's considered the the civil war went from 1989 to 2003 um though it is split into two civil wars for reasons i'm not entirely sure of um but i think did i know they had a peace talkings Oh, sure. There's Peace Talks throughout the entire thing. Yeah, there's Peace Talkings, but the biggest one that they brought up, and I'll skip ahead just for this part. Don't skip ahead. Don't go out of order.

I'm only going to do it for this part because it doesn't really matter because it only was a few days. And it was just like, let's keep going. Because one group didn't show up in the 90s. And I believe that was the INPFL. They didn't show up. What do you mean? They didn't show up at all to their fucking peace agreement. And then they said, all right, let's just resume the chaos.

And they kept going. That was one of the peace agreements I was reading into in the 90s. All right, moving on. But I thought that was fucking hilarious. So the sectarian lines through all the tribes that Doe had created kind of created something resembling a large-scale guerrilla war. There was no real government soldiers. There was no real rebel fighters everybody was just like an ununiform swirling mass of murder and mayhem

the war was a strange irregular event with no battle lines or uniforms and send of dissolve into a loose collection of warlords that would intermittently turn against one another but then work together all committing rampant war crimes against one another for one or more bizarre incidents um it's kind of like a thing that happens throughout um african civil wars where like a good example is the congolese civil wars and the sierra leone civil wars the congo civil war was so big that um there's no africa's world war like it sucked in the entire continent but even then large-scale battles were kind of unheard of just these small groups independently functioning and running out against one another is more par for the course just more acronyms running out of each other yeah yeah that nobody's really charting

anywhere everybody's a general. There's no real chain of command. And that's another thing. We're going to list a few of the nicknames later on, but obviously we're talking about General Butt Naked mostly in this episode. But there's dozens of other generals. But there's literally no other rank ever named. There's no colonels.

There's no sergeants. It's like you're some heroine doing mind freak on the streets of monrovia or you're a general no i feel like yeah there's like three stages you go into you're either the the fucking really poor kid the child soldier the general you survive a couple battles boom you're general fuck i'm 19 general sweet not unheard of um not unheard of it's not so which brings us to our main character for the day joseph milton blighy better known as general butt naked butt naked is a member of the sarpo tribe which is a sub tribe of president doe's con tribe or cron tribe most of what we know about butt naked's early life comes from the man itself so it should be

taken with a grain of salt though for a man who may be lying he never once makes himself sound good ever every single time he opens up his mouth he makes himself sound worse and when he's done telling his story he sounds like quite possibly one of the worst human beings to ever exist so i'm kind of inclined to believe that most people lie to make themselves sound good he makes himself sound like he's uh like the death penalty is the only option for him he has nothing to lose he could go to court he already makes himself sound bad yeah he. What else can he lose? Nothing. So Butt Naked claims that he was made a tribal priest at the age of 11. The initiation into the priesthood involved drinking a ton of hallucinogenic drugs,

causing wicked hallucinations. Just when he was at the peak of his trip, he participated in his first human sacrifice. You gotta go real fucking fast where this guy's from it's like going to a rave and then something you're having a good time and you're just like like just feeling the music and then someone's like here take this knife and follow me and you're like wait what and then before you know it you're drinking human blood i know it's happened to me before no i could speak of the first rave I went to when I was in high school. And me and my cousin walk in.

And this dude goes, welcome to the dungeon. And he takes out this fucking, like, fucking, I don't even know. Fuck, I can't even think. Syringe. Jesus Christ. I don't even. All right. Brain fart.

Syringe. And it was, like, neon glowing. And he was going to stick it in our arms because he did it to the people in front of us. What was in it? I don't know, but it was fucking glowing. So being me at the time, I didn't really know anything. LA is a different planet. This wasn't LA.

This was outside LA. But I'm from LA. So my cousin, thank God he was there because if I was there, I probably would have gotten stuck. He looked up to the guy and said, fuck off and the dude was like all right dude and we went in we fucking partied and we weren't hallucinating thank god i probably said i think that the first hint should have been you're going to a party in a place called the dungeon it wasn't called the dungeon though but you just said it was the dungeon the dude said welcome to the dungeon that's when you run how am i supposed to know that because he said welcome to the dungeon that's that's your cue

as a 16 year old guy no as a 16 year old guy still would run it's the dungeon man as a 16 year old guy how did you make it to 18 without dying i really don't so uh this particular rave or priesthood initiation in this case lasted three days uh that followed um he had several crazed visions all blurred together about the devil who told him that to become a great warrior he had to keep sacrificing people and eating them to increase his power his power fucking level dude yeah and holy shit did he listen to keep sacrificing people and eating them to increase his power his power fucking level dude yeah and holy shit did he listen to that advice he became such a powerful priest he was appointed as the high priest of the entire tribe in charge of the spiritual well-being of everybody which means he also became the spiritual advisor to president samuel doe which explains how he ended up as a something of a warlord even

though he was not at all from the military um eventually butt naked found himself commanding his own personal army called what else but the butt naked brigade which was which was bankrolled by money from a warlord named david roosevelt johnson little dick brigade general butt naked created an army out of a mixture of crazed hallucinating uh tribesmen mercenaries from the army and child soldiers that's right child soldiers and these soldiers clearly did not enlist under their free will they were kidnapped but naked's army would descend upon villages any village would do to include his own tribes and uh they would without any kind of battle plan or strategy and of any kind they would just start killing people they would kill virtually everything that moved and then snatch up the kids that was if the village

was lucky like that's like how awful does your existence have to be to be considered lucky like you just die quickly and have your children stolen from you like so what would normally happen is uh butt naked would rouse the soldiers up into a fighting spirit using sermons drugs and then to top off, they would ritually sacrifice a child and drink its blood. Not only would they drink their blood, they'd also, from what he says, start fucking cutting them from the back and then ripping their heart out from their back while they're still alive,

cutting the heart into pieces and giving out to his own children soldiers so that's where moral combat got that idea from yeah pretty much this guy except somehow moral combat was more humane just straight out the front real fast um butt naked said quote most of my boys would drain the blood of an innocent child and drink it before battle. They would go into the village, torture, mutilate, and eat the vast majority of the civilians. They were careful to keep young boys alive to be forcefully conscripted into their army. The boys would then be forced at gunpoint to rape, torture, and kill their own family. Young girls would be kept as sex slaves, or once the fighters were bored with them, their hearts would be ripped out and eaten and divided amongst the fighters, like Nick just said.

One of Butt Naked's former soldiers was interviewed by Vice, which may be one of the more unsettling interviews I've ever seen in my life. um so the kid is in this rundown shanty town of you know tin shacks and uh he is freebasing heroin off of like this small piece of tinfoil and smoking it through like a straw it's like a metal straw yeah and like he's just ripped out of his mind um he's in fucking space and hasn't come down yet it's it's kind of hard to watch um but he stated quote i made the big bellied woman and by big millie woman he means a pregnant woman quote bend over the counter and then i took her afterwards i took my knife and i stuck her end quote it needs to be pointed out that stories like this are absolutely not an outlier they are by and large an everyday part of this war. This brutality was commanded by men,

but committed almost entirely by children. By the end of the war, 40% of all fighters taking part in the fighting were 15 years or less, which is the highest known percentage of any known conflict in human history. So I guess we should probably talk about that nickname um general butt naked though it's an obvious one it was a nickname which he gave himself which wasn't uncommon during the time um increasingly more insane warlords emerged and gave themselves

nicknames like general bin laden general rambo and jungle jaba there is even a general mosquito and then his fucking arch rival dude yeah his arch rival on the other side of battle was mosquito general mosquito spray yeah but it fucking is true yeah but um and they're actually interviewed on youtube you can look it up um but unlike other warlords butt naked earned his nickname he would go into battle completely and totally naked with the exception of pair of lace-dipped combat boots and his gun and his gun uh he believed that being naked and a stomach full of children's blood would make him both invisible and invincible and his enemies would not be able to touch him it would grant him the powers to capture villages by

himself which the last part is true because he's attacking villages full of unarmed civilians and the majority of time there wasn't exactly a lot of resistance going on his soldiers would kind of do the same thing they would sometimes decide to get real all fancy like and they would choose to wear flowing floral dresses paired with wild long wigs which were actually sometimes just clown wigs. According to General Butt Naked, it was to terrify the enemy while they attacked. And as dumb as this sounds, let's put you in the situation.

You're farming in your village, scratching out a terrible existence in this hell world that Liberia has turned into during the Civil War. Somewhere off in the distance, you hear hundreds of screaming voices. You turn, and that's when you see a group of men on the horizon. As they get closer, you see a man, who's about 6'3", and he's

huge. General Buttnaked's not a small guy. He's yoinked. Oink. Thicker than a snicker. He's butt naked and covered in blood. He's screaming in tongues his fucking troops are fucking looking fabulous behind him there's a legion of clown haired cross dressers of blood paintings on their faces and they're carrying fetishes made of human bones this is

before they descend on your village and start eating your fucking neighbors so i also want to say other than them wearing like colorful wigs and whatnot they'd also wear what they say is imaginary purses we looted from the citizens why are they imaginary i don't know i think he just is wearing purses i'm sure they were a man's bag yeah it was just a man purse no big deal it's a satchel yeah it's to carry was in friends joey just had a satchel full of sandwiches like i said before there was very few if any pitched battles um so butt naked's insane blood-drinking genocidal rampage was and this is gonna hurt to say he was integral to sam Doe's war effort. So Doe had no, I mean, this might blow your mind here, but he wasn't a deep thinker.

He didn't have an overlying strategy here other than to just try to oppress and terrorize every other tribe in the world. No, yeah, and it's funny that you say that because from what our boy says over here, General Butt Naked, is sometimes I would enter under the water where children were playing. I would dive under and grab them under and carry them and break their necks. So he would just swoop up from the water like an alligator. He would basically say, I'd cause accidents sometimes and then I'd just slaughter them. He admitted this in January of 2008. So one, oh, God, this is hard to process.

So this guy, who was supposed to be, like, an army's leader, would just, like, fuck off into the night. Yeah. Dive into the water and snatch little kids under the surface basically how did nobody realize like there's a rather large man swimming about the waves taking her children he's also naked he doesn't blend into much he's a huge guy he's bigger than i am he's bigger than the both of us he's he's not exactly gonna be stealth he's probably just like doggy paddling around yeah i really wonder how the kids didn't fucking see him coming like i wonder if he just like saw him from afar and he was like

there they are that's why i think he's probably the seal team six of uh his fucking uh no he hasn't written a book yet oh yeah he did write a book he did write a book he's a little dick brigade that he created jesus christ so i mean, he really like the concept of spreading terror or the concept of terrorism was Samuel Doe's entire plan, which it wasn't working. he was losing ground considerably to Charles Taylor, um, which we need to actually double back here on Charles Taylor. Cause I know at this point there's probably, you know, one or two people who are listening and they're like,

how the fuck are you getting Charles Taylor a pass here? And we're not, um, Charles Taylor. So everything that we've talked about so far that Samuel Doe has done, that Tolbert did that, but naked did Charlesles taylor did it three or four times over um taylor's use of child soldiers was somehow even more widespread

to the point they're the backbone of his entire army uh he also engaged in human sacrifice cannibalism and burying pregnant women alive yeah uh he also also blazed a trail in using HIV-positive fighters of his as a weapon, unleashing them into villages to rape enemy fighters' wives and spread the disease to them and would not kill them afterwards, meaning husbands would come back from the fighting, people would get fresh with one another, as married couples do, and then they'd spread the disease.

Can you call it chemical warfare? It'd be biological warfare. Biological, there we go. I mean, if Genghis Khan can chuck plague bodies over walls and it'd be considered biological warfare, it's a form? It's like biological warfare on a shoestring budget you know charles taylor took what he had and he worked with it which was like modern

humanity's most awful disease yeah um so all this brutality eventually brought in international mediation as it normally does. This time, it was the former of the Economic Community of Western African States, or ECOWAS, quite possibly the only organization more useless than the UN. It was a 16-member group that deployed a joint military intervention to try to quell the otherworldly chaos taking place across the country. So that was the end of the madness, right? Like, you just tied up a neat little bow. It's right good to go oh god no god no um so taylor's second in command a man by the name of prince johnson hold on he commanded his own fancily named army which was his own little faction so it's close to the original faction, the OGs,

the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy, the ULIMO. And he made his own United Liberation Movement for Liberia for Democracy dash Johnson faction. So he had his own little thing going on. He had to start his own brand so once johnson forces penetrated the remnants of once sorry once johnson's forces penetrated the city of monrovia uh the remnants of the liberian army and all of its allies to include our friend general butt naked ran for the hills and this is where things get kind of weird

butt naked stopped fighting from just about here on out he according to him he did not fight in the second portion of the liberian civil war which is a little weird yeah um because he doesn't say when exactly he stopped fighting there's no record of when he stopped fighting um but he does say uh for the first time um when the when uh people were shooting at him he felt fear and uh like it shook his very belief system because clearly the devil isn't protecting him anymore in this and the devil he meets with uh regularly like on a weekly like they have a schedule they got a schedule they go see they go have lunch they schedule brunch every saturday maybe hit some mimosas yeah uh but their mimosas are full of like fingers and um they're really into it yeah but i think what really happened was uh for the first time

he was getting shot at uh people were actually defending themselves yeah he could have died and you know he was never wounded the whole time so i think there's not that we know of at least i feeling he would have talked about it i mean talks about everything else no you know what yeah but it might ruin his brain later on i can get actually no i can get into something after that because i got something but uh so um sorry where was i and uh while we wait we're going to go ahead and go to our unofficial sponsor sponsor oh yeah our unofficial sponsor old crow um which is the only kentucky straight bourbon whiskey with the ability to wash the taste of child genocide out of your mouth that's right you heard it from us first old crow gets the genocide out really tastes like chemistry yeah um so they saw a lost cause and they ran for it um and apparently eco us also saw that this was a lost cause instead of fighting on either side of the conflict they barely fired a shot they decided the best way to end the whole

thing was to simply get rid of samuel doe which is you know can you can hardly argue with that they promised him a safe passage to any one of the 16 member states and he could remain in exile for the rest of his life doe refused instead he insisted that he was the rightful president and um no nothing else could uh could compete with that uh so on 9 september 1990 doe was attending um doe was attending another meeting at the ecowas headquarters at the port of monrovia around the same time and mysteriously nobody knows how a contingent of johnson's rebel army was there waiting for him um now here's the thing like i said before eco ass is armed are you mean the uli mo dash j i guess um so eco ass is armed to the teeth they have tanks

they have artillery they have helicopters um but yep surprise, there's Johnson's army just sitting there waiting for Doe. Basically, Johnson's ULIMO-J are waiting for him. Why do you do this? What took place next could really only be described as a massacre of Doe's forces. But, of course, the standard bearers of african democracy eco us stop this right right nick probably no you'd be so wrong they actually just ran um no way yeah who'd have thought right eco us ran without firing a single shot um and the single shot was not fired at them so uh you know conspiracy theory here they knew that they couldn't

get rid of doe peacefully so they got rid of him in other ways and get rid of him a little under the table deal yeah and get rid of them they sure did um what took place next might accurately be described as the first snuff film starring a head of state um the only other one i can actually think of is uh the time omar gaddafi got sodomized with a knife in the street um which spawned yeah which spawned a internet meme which i tosh yeah i don't it's really weird to think that a guy getting stabbed to death up the butt in the street in libya spawned internet meme but uh the 21st century is garbage and that happened it did um and it ran rapid rapid through my high school your high school

is awful i know it was a supervisor got shot in the head while i was there good god yeah over a bag of weed ellie's on a different planet. Anyway, Johnson, with his feet kicked up on the desk of the ECOWAS headquarters and drinking a fucking Budweiser. He's literally just sitting there, slam back tall boys. On film. His feet fucking kicked up. And you hear a fucking old boy in the back. Screaming in pain.

Literally, yeah. I'll talk. I'll talk. Yeah. And you hear... Doe is screaming for his life and Johnson is laughing. Yeah, no. Johnson says, I don't want I'll talk. Doe is screaming for his life and Johnson is laughing. Johnson says, I don't want to kill you.

I don't want to kill you. And Doe knows he's going to die. I think Doe knew exactly what was going to happen to him when he saw Johnson walk through that door. It's like record scratch. I bet you're wondering how he got here. While he was drinking his beer, he ordered his men to torture Doe, all while video camera was rolling

and the whole thing being broadcasted to Liberian national TV as well as being secondly stringed through the entire goddamn world. Johnson's men beat Doe, they cut off his fingers, chopped off his ears, sodomized him him and then finally shot him in the head they finally dismembered his corpse and dragged it through the streets of monrovia to prove that doe was no longer protected by black magic that was really his excuse for that not that i mean once you go once you go in so deep to cut up a body and drag it through the streets you can say it's a chase off barney nobody really cares it's pretty clear you're nuts yeah um clips of it are freely available on youtube and i would share it on the podcast twitter page if i didn't feel like getting it

suspended permanently yeah i almost believe you could find out live leak as well yeah you can't find the whole thing on youtube you just find the you find the part where uh doe's on the ground hank it's it's pretty painful to watch off pretty quick um yeah you don't want to watch but you definitely see the part where he's fucking sitting back chillax and yep open up a cold one with the boys i'll screenshot that and i'll post on the page oh they also show the part where he gets his ear cut off they do yeah uh so eventually the un got involved becauseOWAS was clearly such a magnificent success. And a ceasefire was quickly signed and the war came to an end. At least for a little while.

The Second Liberian Civil War began virtually immediately and would continue all the way until 2003. So whatever happened to our horrible large adult son, General Butt Naked? He found Jesus, of course well what else what i want to say uh before this during the first i'll air quote this one into the microphone in the first liberian civil war around 200 that 200 000 liberians had suffered like death? Yeah, I'll say that. Death. So they were killed. Pretty much. Don't know why. They suffered death. I don't know where I was getting. Don't know where I was going with that one.

That's some interesting verbiage there, Trump. Yeah. So one out of 17 of them in Liberia died. One out of 17 people died. And I believe it is General Butt Naked claims he killed 20,000 of them. Yeah. Personally.

He says, oh, less than, no more than 20,000. I believe he said. That's a high number. Yeah, it is. For the 200,000 that died, and for him, out of the hundreds probably of generals that were out there?

Yeah, probably thousands. At least hundreds of different groups. Yeah. So our boy, but naked, found Jesus. He became a born-again Christian and built numerous churches to preach the wonderful gospel of our Lord. He actually, as well as becoming a born-again christian he became something of a veteran's advocate yeah um along with the help of general bin laden if you remember him that we talked about for five seconds um they began to teach former child soldiers carpentry

skills they fed them and clothed them while the rest of the country is, for the most part, still completely in ashes. For his part, Butt Naked has been completely upfront and honest with his crimes that he and his army committed during the wars. Though he accepts them, he doesn't accept responsibility for them. He blames them all on his rapport that he had with the devil. His old boy yeah his uh his brother from another mother um so i mean i don't know if i can give him props for that but the guy's clearly insane it's almost like a hazy type of thing because he's trying

uh he's trying to help i guess in a way but then he's also not taking responsibility for the shit that he did. And he even says he has nightmares about the shit that he did. But nobody is taking responsibility for what happened in Liberia, which we will get into. So, Butt Naked's staying in trial, right? He sure isn't. He's never actually been asked to stay in trial. Yeah.

He claims he received a pardon, which he did not. Nobody has received a pardon which he did not um nobody has received a pardon he claims he received a pardon just for saying he converted he claims to the lord his pardon is jesus-based and as far as i know uh jesus-based pardons are not part of liberia's constitution he stopped having brunches with the devil on about every or Sunday. Another part about this is nobody has been held responsible for the crimes in Liberia, though two people have been arrested. One of them is a guy named Tom Wojewu, who is one of Charles Taylor's generals, was arrested in Philadelphia, of all places, in 2014.

Probably huge Eagles fans. Now, before you get too excited, he wasn't arrested for any crimes against humanity. He also didn't see the Super Bowl. No, he sure didn't. He probably saw it from prison. He was arrested for lying on his immigration form, not war crimes.

Now, what do you think he lied on his immigration form? Do tell me. For committing war crimes. Now, what do you think he lied on his immigration form? Do tell me. For committing war crimes. What? Yes. So when you, this is actually how they got a lot of Nazis through the back door. Giggity, giggity. Was you have to be completely honest about foreign military service and stuff on immigration forms.

To include, like, if you fought in any wars, you know, what your capacity of serving was. Shit like that okay they all just lie about it because they know that like a five-minute search will discover they're a horrible human being so they lie on them um so that's how he got got as well there was another there was a nazi not too long ago i believe in ohio named john demaniuk they got the same way where uh he lied on his immigration form saying that he never served in any capacity for the Nazi government and he was a fucking death camp guard.

Oh. Yeah, he ended up getting charged with like accessory to murder for like 100,000 counts. Holy fuck. Yeah. But anyway, so Tom Mohebu. Oh, good. Was found guilty of immigration crimes and sentenced to 70 years so he will never be held liable for crimes in liberia and i know what a lot of you are saying

right now joe you stupid motherfucker charles taylor is in prison for war crimes you'd be right but those war crimes were in sierra leone get fucked um so uh charles taylor was arrested while he was in exile and meant and made to stand trial um one of the things that we talked about earlier was when he mysteriously vanished from jail in massachusetts about that yes this is the best part when he was uh being questioned at the international criminal courts he simply stated the cia got him out of jail i know what you're thinking every asshole on the planet thinks the cia is responsible for everything and this is clearly the rantings of a madman well about that except when the cios asked about it they confirmed they began working with one charles taylor in early 1980s and then promptly refused to comment further

for national security reasons so yeah yeah that's fucking awesome and uh i know what you're saying what about charles charles taylor's president of liberia he did become president of liberia he was elected with the campaign of and i swear to god this is true quote he killed my ma he killed my pa but i'm gonna vote for him end quote that really got to people and give credit where credit's due. It is the most truthful political slogan I have ever heard. It is. There's no lie about that. No, yeah, and that's why it got to people. They're like, oh, he did.

All right, this guy's really honest. Yeah, well, he was eventually deposed at the end of the second Liberian Civil War and arrested and tried at the international criminal courts. He was found guilty of the following charges acts of terrorism murder rape violence to life health and physical or mental well-being of a person sexual slavery outrages upon personal dignity conscripting or enlisting in children enslavement and pillage taylor claimed that he was a victim of all this and he was innocent because as president of liberia he was not able to be charged for crimes because that makes sense right um he was eventually sentenced to 50 years in prison 50 years 50 years and it should be noted that these are for crimes that

were committed in the sierra leonean civil war these were not for the liberian civil war i want to add that uh the liberians also voted for him to uh bring down the bloodshed in their country it did slow it down considerably but it did not end like shit still happened well it slowed down because the guy causing all the bloodshed was elected president exactly that was their whole thing that's like hey uh so if you vote isis in 2016 the terrorist attacks will end nice got my vote yeah well they earned it yeah um so like i said uh there's been virtually no uh anybody has stood trial for any of this um and they never will at this point they just never will uh the international criminal court's a joke the un's a bigger joke and uh africa as a continent has kind of said fuck you to the international criminal court At this point, they just never will. The International Criminal Court is a joke. The UN is a bigger joke.

And Africa as a continent has kind of said, fuck you to the International Criminal Court because of reasons like this. Kind of gets swept under the rug. Yeah, and people in the West don't really care about it. Not to bring up a different podcast, but there's a podcast called Last Podcast on the Left. One of my favorites. Yeah, mine too um they describe uh sex workers and um homeless people as the less than dead because not in any

disrespect to them but when they're murdered nobody really cares right cops don't look into it too hard it makes the back page of the newspaper. Nobody's really outraged. It's almost like less than human. Yeah, they're subhuman because they're out of society. It's almost like the victims of the Liberian Civil War, and at a greater extent, the entire continent of Africa is less than victims. They're less than war victims. A couple years ago there you hear about, you know, these tens of thousands of refugees running from the Syrians of war, and I'm not trying to distract from, you know, the humanitarian crisis that has happened and is happening there. But the fact remains that something worse than that has been going on in Africa for decades, and nobody seems to really give a shit. They're less than.

They're not as important refugees. And it's almost like what you said before. It's like a media blackout that's happened. No pun intended. Think about it this way. There was a genocide in South Sudan in the Darfur region. The whole reason the UN was created was post-World War II. think about it this way um there's a genocide in south sudan in the darfur region the un literally the whole reason the un was created was post-world war ii in its charter it is stated that they will

stop genocide around the world right and they have promptly not stopped a single fucking genocide ever since um because it was a european genocide um oh they they you know after after um world war ii they were outraged that a genocide could happen in in europe and want to know what happened when there was a genocide in kosovo and everybody got involved again yeah um when there's a genocide in rwanda when samuel doe and charles taylor running rampant through the the countryside of liberia when you know charles taylor's forces are chopping people's hands off in sierra leone people's heads are getting chopped off to play fucking soccer and people are being eaten yeah uh well we all we could be outraged forever about this but um the fact remains is uh i would say the world community could do better but it's almost like since the dawn of time that we have been on a runaway message

to only prove that no wait it gets worse hold my beer yeah so i hate to say that. God. That only works if you're Prince Johnson. That's our podcast. You mean the United Liberation Movement of Liberia? No, I mean the United Democratic Freedom Forces of Space. It would probably make a lot more sense, too. Space Force. So that's our podcast. Rate and review us on itunes please uh you can follow the podcast on twitter at lions underscore by you can follow me at jcast99 you can follow me nick at nickcastm1

and by the time this podcast come out my book the hooligans of kandahar will be published um comes out on thursday which is tomorrow, actually. Oh, you gave it the day we record. Yeah. Buy and review it if you would. Thanks for the Patreon. Yeah. Holy shit.

Yeah. We out-clipsed what we thought we were going to make in total in one day. Yeah, we were like, fuck! So, like I said before before our podcast will always be free we'll never charge for it but if you think what we do is worth a buck um we actually i tried to make it 50 cents and patreon wouldn't let me so i actually tried to make it worth less for you um but uh patreon would let me so if you think it's worth a dollar throw us a dollar um we will do everything we can to use that money to pay for more just the podcast yeah just pay for equipment pay for

server price either for podcast or old crow yeah until they give us that sponsorship yeah bastards old crow drink her old crow it's made out of real crows um anyway in a boot what's that brood in a boot it's a boot i think he said it's brood in a butt i think i said that at first caught myself halfway through i'm fucking heat stroke yeah fucking i am sweating so much i'm sweating um anyway uh thank you for tuning in this week and we will see you next time later