Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Dumbest Coup In World History
Aired: 2020-06-09
Duration: 01:15:32


=== Fictional Seeds of African Coups (15:04) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[00:00:11]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:00:15]  I doctored the test once.
[00:00:17]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:00:22]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:00:24]  Greg Goespie and Michael Mancini.
[00:00:26]  My mind was blown.
[00:00:27]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:00:29]  This is Love Trapped.
[00:00:30]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:00:32]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:00:37]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:44]  10-10 shots fired in the city hall building.
[00:00:47]  Did this ever happen in City Hall?
[00:00:49]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:00:50]  A shocking public murder.
[00:00:52]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[00:00:58]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[00:01:00]  Those are shots.
[00:01:02]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[00:01:04]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
[00:01:07]  That may have been about sex.
[00:01:09]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:18]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:01:26]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:01:29]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:01:31]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:01:33]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[00:01:38]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:01:39]  Trust me, babe.
[00:01:40]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:50]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[00:01:54]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:01:58]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
[00:02:05]  An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
[00:02:09]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:02:12]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:02:23]  Shit.
[00:02:24]  Damn it.
[00:02:24]  Nope.
[00:02:25]  Bad.
[00:02:26]  That's the introduction for the podcast, though, because we're recording.
[00:02:30]  Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that is not introduced very well, but often includes stories of terrible people.
[00:02:38]  Today, my guest to help me kind of rewrite the ship after that terrible introduction is the inimitable Bridget Todd.
[00:02:47]  Bridget, hello.
[00:02:48]  Hello.
[00:02:49]  I'm so happy to be here.
[00:02:50]  Even though we're not physically in the same place, I am happy to be here doing this socially distant podcast with you.
[00:02:57]  We are very socially distant because you and I are almost as distant as we could possibly be while still being on the same continent.
[00:03:05]  So that's very, very responsible.
[00:03:07]  Yeah.
[00:03:08]  It's true.
[00:03:09]  You're on one side.
[00:03:10]  I'm on the other.
[00:03:10]  I'm in DC.
[00:03:12]  We're all wearing our masks and freaking the fuck out, you know, here in Turkey, the nation's capital.
[00:03:18]  Yeah, here in where I am, no one is wearing a mask and we all live in the woods.
[00:03:25]  But we are both coastal elites, so that's fun.
[00:03:30]  Oh, definitely.
[00:03:31]  Bridget, you are a veteran podcaster.
[00:03:34]  You were on my podcast early on in Behind the Bastards Run when we went to protest Nazis at the second Unite the Right rally in DC.
[00:03:43]  That was fun.
[00:03:44]  It was so fun.
[00:03:46]  That was my first time.
[00:03:47]  I protested a lot of things in my life.
[00:03:49]  That was my first time specifically protesting Nazis.
[00:03:53]  It was a good time.
[00:03:55]  It was a little like, it was a little, it was a new experience.
[00:03:59]  I'll put it that way.
[00:04:00]  Yeah, it was a good thing to have done.
[00:04:02]  And speaking of good things to have done, you know, what's not a good thing to do?
[00:04:09]  What's that?
[00:04:10]  Attempt to overthrow the government of a sovereign nation for your own profit.
[00:04:15]  I don't think that's a good thing to do.
[00:04:17]  No.
[00:04:18]  That was such a good intro.
[00:04:19]  I'm so proud of that.
[00:04:20]  Thank you.
[00:04:20]  Thank you.
[00:04:21]  Yeah, that's what we're talking about today.
[00:04:22]  We're talking specifically about, we're talking about coups because coups are in the news.
[00:04:27]  I'm proud of that one too.
[00:04:30]  You remember when those guys tried to invade Venezuela and it didn't work out?
[00:04:34]  And one of them wound up lying in his own pee?
[00:04:37]  Yes, I do remember that.
[00:04:39]  Well, when that happened, I started getting a whole bunch of people hit me up on Twitter being like, you should do an episode about this.
[00:04:45]  And we will someday, but there's so many more dumb details that haven't come out yet, I'm certain, that it would be silly to cover it right now.
[00:04:54]  But also, some folks reached out and said, like, you should cover something called the Wonga coup, which was a coup in 2004 in Equatorial Guinea that's generally seen as one of the worst coup attempts of all time.
[00:05:07]  So that's kind of what we're talking about today.
[00:05:10]  But I fell down a rabbit hole researching it.
[00:05:12]  And so mostly we're going to talk about like the whole weird and dumb history of white people trying to overthrow governments in Africa and usually doing a really bad job of it.
[00:05:23]  So that's today.
[00:05:24]  Yeah, that shit never goes well, right?
[00:05:27]  Like it always turns out badly.
[00:05:30]  Yeah.
[00:05:30]  Yeah, and it's awesome because like it doesn't matter if the leader they're trying to overthrow is legitimately shitty or not.
[00:05:37]  They always make the situation worse.
[00:05:39]  And given how bad some of the dictators are, it's kind of incredible that they manage to like, like you've got a guy who like takes hands from people for fun and then like they make it worse somehow.
[00:05:51]  It's incredible.
[00:05:52]  So that's today's podcast topic.
[00:05:54]  Are you ready?
[00:05:54]  Are you ready to dive into this, Bridget?
[00:05:56]  I'm ready.
[00:05:56]  I'm locked and loaded.
[00:05:57]  I'm strapped in.
[00:05:58]  Let's do this.
[00:05:59]  All right.
[00:06:01]  All right.
[00:06:01]  So I want to start by going back in time to what I think is the piece of fiction that is kind of the seed for this desire in the heads of some white dudes to carry out coups in Africa because there's a single fictional book that really started this ball rolling.
[00:06:18]  And it's a book called King Solomon's Minds.
[00:06:22]  Have you ever heard of King Solomon's Minds?
[00:06:24]  I have not.
[00:06:25]  Oh my gosh.
[00:06:26]  So this is, I read, my dad read this to me when I was a kid.
[00:06:29]  And it's like, it was one of the big influences behind Indiana Jones, which should give you an idea of kind of like some of the themes that we can expect from King Solomon's Minds.
[00:06:39]  And it was written by a fellow named H. Ryder Haggard.
[00:06:43]  And H. Ryder Haggard is like the colonial fiction writer of the 1800s and early 1900s.
[00:06:51]  And King Solomon's Minds is considered to be like the quintessential classic of British colonialist leadership.
[00:06:56]  It's the first novel to star big game hunter and explorer Alan Quartermain, who was like kind of like the James Bond of the colonialism.
[00:07:06]  And in fact, in the movie League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, he was played by Sean Connery.
[00:07:11]  So that's interesting.
[00:07:12]  Oh, shit.
[00:07:13]  Yeah.
[00:07:13]  Yeah.
[00:07:14]  Now I know it.
[00:07:15]  Yeah, he's like the, and if you've never even read one of these books, you've been influenced by this guy because he's like, Alan Quartermain is like the archetype of like the British big game hunting, like safari dude.
[00:07:27]  And like, yeah, like the guy in fucking Jumanji, like the white guy hunter is based off of Alan Quartermain.
[00:07:33]  Like that's just how they always do it.
[00:07:35]  So very influential character.
[00:07:36]  And King Solomon's Minds is generally regarded as the first example of a book in the lost world genre of fiction.
[00:07:44]  So you know those kinds of books and movies where like a bunch of explorers or scientists find a lost or forgotten city in some desolate chunk of the world?
[00:07:51]  Yeah, I'm pretty familiar with that genre.
[00:07:53]  Yeah, H. Ryder Haggard invented it.
[00:07:55]  King Solomon's Minds is like the first example of that kind of book.
[00:08:00]  I feel like I can picture what this guy looks like.
[00:08:02]  Like, I'm picturing a safari hat, like, maybe some, like, loose khaki pants of some kind.
[00:08:08]  Yeah, a very specific kind of facial hair.
[00:08:10]  Yes, you, you know it, you know everything about H. Ryder Haggard and his life now.
[00:08:18]  Um, I mean, you kind of get it by the name.
[00:08:20]  Like, if someone tells you there's a famous author named H. Ryder Haggard, you could probably guess, oh, he wrote books about how colonialism's awesome, didn't he?
[00:08:32]  Yeah.
[00:08:33]  So, the basic gist of the story is that a group of explorers led by Alan Quartermain go on the search for a lost European who went missing looking for the fabled King Solomon's mines.
[00:08:43]  And that's the big biblical King Solomon.
[00:08:45]  There's this rumor that he had these famous diamond mines, yada yada yada.
[00:08:49]  So, they go off looking for these white guy and these mines, and they wind up finding a lost African civilization that possesses tremendous wealth.
[00:08:58]  The movie Congo, based off the Michael Crichton book of the same name, is the modern adaptation of this story.
[00:09:03]  So, yeah.
[00:09:04]  And interestingly enough, for as racist as this book is, it's not as racist as you might assume.
[00:09:13]  It actually opens with the main character, Alan Quartermain, going on an angry rant about how the N-word is never okay to use.
[00:09:22]  So, that's good, right?
[00:09:23]  Like, that's a step.
[00:09:25]  That's pretty progressive.
[00:09:26]  I guess I see what you mean.
[00:09:28]  Yeah.
[00:09:28]  Yeah, and there's even an interracial relationship in it, although the black woman dating the white guy dies.
[00:09:36]  But like, 1895, that's about as good as you're going to get from a white guy book.
[00:09:43]  Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be expecting that from the 1800s, like a little, like, interracial pairing.
[00:09:48]  Of course, she has to die in the end.
[00:09:50]  Of course, she has to die.
[00:09:54]  Yeah, and H. Ryder Haggard did repeatedly point out through his characters that a lot of European colonialist officers were horrible people.
[00:10:00]  Alan Quartermain regularly notes that a lot of black Africans he meets are more worthy of the word gentlemen than British officials.
[00:10:07]  So it's not the kind of racist you'd expect, but it's also simultaneously still one of the most racist books ever written for a very specific reason.
[00:10:17]  See, the climax of the book comes when the explorers manage to finally locate the lost kingdom of Kuwanaland, which is a surprisingly well-organized and advanced society that's completely cut off from the rest of the world by tall mountains and a wide desert.
[00:10:30]  The kingdom is ruled by a cruel king, Twala, who maintains power by dint of horrific violence.
[00:10:36]  The white explorers are able to get special treatment by convincing the natives that they're white men from the stars, basically magical gods, but they're horrified by the brutality of the king and his evil advisor, Gagul, who regularly burns innocent people as witches and traitors.
[00:10:52]  Yeah, I know, Gagul's a pro-woof.
[00:10:55]  So it becomes gradually clear that the current king earned his position by murdering his brother, the old king, and forcing his brother's wife and infant son out into the desert to die.
[00:11:05]  So there's a lot of the Lion King in this story, too.
[00:11:08]  Like, it was clearly inspired by King Solomon's minds in a lot of ways.
[00:11:12]  And anyway, it turns out that one of the porters that the white expedition team brought along, this guy named Umbopa, is the royal child who got exiled, you know, decades earlier.
[00:11:23]  And he was noted throughout the book as being better looking and more well-spoken than the other Africans who were working for the expedition.
[00:11:29]  So the white people decide to overthrow the king of Kuwanaland and put their friend Umbopa on the throne instead.
[00:11:36]  And after a vicious battle that kills a lot of black people, but no white people, they succeed in instituting regime change in Kuanaland, and they get to go home with pockets full of diamonds.
[00:11:45]  So that's like the story of like you can draw a straight line from King Solomon's mind to the thinking that led us to war in Iraq if you really like.
[00:11:55]  It's not hard.
[00:11:57]  Yeah, just killing off black and brown people and like coming back with your pockets full of diamonds.
[00:12:03]  Yeah, that fantasy.
[00:12:05]  And you make everything better by putting your one black friend in charge.
[00:12:08]  And like, yeah, that's the whole...
[00:12:12]  That's the story.
[00:12:14]  So...
[00:12:14]  Oh, I also have to say, it really is very Lion King, this idea that, you know, this guy was more handsome and like somehow better.
[00:12:23]  And then he goes away, comes back.
[00:12:26]  I want to rewatch The Lion King now.
[00:12:28]  Yeah, there's some of this in The Lion King for sure.
[00:12:31]  Obviously, it has a lot of influences, but there's pieces of H. Ryder Haggard in that script.
[00:12:37]  So yeah, this book was a huge success.
[00:12:40]  It was like one of the biggest books of the 19th century, period.
[00:12:45]  And like I said, it inspired the whole lost world genre.
[00:12:48]  It inspired probably tens of thousands of particularly white British kids, but a lot of Americans too, to go to Africa and like overthrow fucking countries.
[00:12:59]  And while he did, like, absolutely, this book inspired real world coups, it was also inspired by stuff that had happened earlier in the history of like African colonialism.
[00:13:09]  Cecil Rhodes' mercenary army with the British South Africa Company had conquered Zimbabwe and Zambia.
[00:13:15]  The British East Africa Company under the command of mercenary Frederick Lugart had conquered large chunks of East and West Africa.
[00:13:21]  And in all these places, local leaders were selected to rule based on their amenability to the desires of white Europeans.
[00:13:28]  And for decades, this whole story was repeated all over the continent.
[00:13:31]  So H. Ryder Haggard didn't come up with this idea, obviously, but he created like this very classical and attractive fictional justification for it that helped solidify it in the heads of white colonialists as like the way things ought to go.
[00:13:51]  So yeah, that's cool.
[00:13:55]  It's not cool, but it happened.
[00:13:57]  It's not cool.
[00:13:58]  It's funny.
[00:13:59]  I really feel like in addition to the way that we understand, you know, kind of American exceptionalism and the idea of like going to another country or another continent and like we're going to quote save them and then get rich in the process.
[00:14:13]  I feel like I see that vibe reverberated in so many different ways.
[00:14:17]  Like even the idea of like how white people have this idea that they're going to go to Africa and save the babies and they post a picture of them like helping an African baby on Instagram.
[00:14:27]  Like the entire kind of gross vibe, I feel like is sort of established as a blueprint in this work.
[00:14:35]  Yeah, it really is.
[00:14:36]  And it's like right down to the fact that this would actually be, I think, a less unsettling novel, King Solomon's Minds, if H. Ryder Haggard had been super hatefully racist.
[00:14:48]  But he's like, you see part of like a lot of the horror that comes from like attempts, even particularly in the modern day.
[00:14:55]  Like we talked about that lady, that white girl in Africa who like ran that baby killing clinic.
[00:15:01]  Yeah.
[00:15:02]  That was fucking wild.

=== Mad Mike and Cold War Mercenaries (15:13) ===

[00:15:04]  Yeah.
[00:15:04]  So remember this.
[00:15:05]  Wild.
[00:15:06]  And it's, it's always, it's always sketchier and often more dangerous when the person doing this stuff is like super woke about it, right?
[00:15:15]  And that's kind of what's so scary about King Solomon's Minds is that it's this white guy being like, oh, these white dudes in Africa are doing horrible things.
[00:15:22]  I know the right thing white dudes in Africa should be doing.
[00:15:28]  Yeah, I think you totally hit on something that it's sort of like scary.
[00:15:32]  If someone is evil and racist, I get it.
[00:15:36]  I understand it.
[00:15:36]  I know where they're coming from.
[00:15:38]  Cool.
[00:15:38]  If they have a mentality that they are righteous or that they're like, the fact that this person probably thought he was like doing something good, like that is so much scarier.
[00:15:48]  And I feel like has such a more bigger capacity for evil when you think that you're righteous.
[00:15:54]  Yep.
[00:15:55]  And the person we will eventually get to who carries out this possibly the worst planned coup in all of history is like the patron, well, the archetype at least of that kind of person.
[00:16:09]  So, as the 1800s turned into the 1900s and the World Wars came and went, Europeans in particular and white folks in general gradually started to accept that on balance, colonialism had at least been a problematic idea.
[00:16:23]  Europe gradually began to release their active or their captive African colonies from their chains.
[00:16:28]  And since there was no profit in doing this, colonies were generally let go in the laziest way possible.
[00:16:34]  Slapdash elections were held, and as a general rule, men were left in charge who colonialists thought would be trusted to rule in a manner beneficial to European economic interests.
[00:16:44]  One example of this would be former British military sergeant Idi Amin, who we did an episode about.
[00:16:50]  You know, you just like, we got to leave this country.
[00:16:53]  There's no money in like actually setting up a functional government before we go.
[00:16:59]  So like, this guy's good at beating people up and likes us.
[00:17:02]  Let's put him in charge.
[00:17:03]  Nothing will go wrong.
[00:17:06]  Yeah.
[00:17:07]  So obviously, sometimes these newly freed local peoples made decisions that white folks thought were dangerous.
[00:17:13]  Since the militaries of states like Great Britain and Belgium could no longer be used to enforce order directly, they often turned to mercenaries to do so.
[00:17:21]  These modern-day descendants of Alan Quartermain and his companions regularly use their superior military training and access to firepower to carry out their own coups.
[00:17:30]  Mad Mike Hoare is probably the patron saint of this kind of guy.
[00:17:35]  He was originally a British soldier, born in Calcutta and raised on a steady diet of novels by H. Ryder Haggard and his fellow adventure writers.
[00:17:42]  Mad Mike joined the British Army, but by the 1960s, the empire was in steep decline, and the colonies he'd been raised to help control were flying free.
[00:17:51]  So, Mad Mike became a mercenary.
[00:17:53]  In 1961, he traveled to the Congo to fight Moishi Shambe, who wanted to create a breakaway nation by leading the Congo's wealthiest territory in secession.
[00:18:03]  Now, this was all in reality a plot by rich Belgian business owners and the CIA to ensure that black Africans didn't have the opportunity to control a huge chunk of their continent's wealth.
[00:18:12]  Like this breakaway chunk of the Congo was more friendly to Belgian economic interests, and the Congo at that point was controlled by this socialist leader who they later assassinated.
[00:18:21]  We did an episode on that, Patrice Lumumba.
[00:18:25]  But yeah, so the whole attempt failed.
[00:18:27]  The secession attempt failed, and two of Mike's men were allegedly cannibalized in the attempt, but he didn't lose the bug for trying to like lead coups in African nations.
[00:18:37]  A couple years later, Shambe was elected prime minister of the Congo under shady read the CIA put him in power circumstances.
[00:18:44]  And Shambe angled himself as an anti-communist fighter, but he was really just a tyrant.
[00:18:49]  Unhappy Congolese people revolted against Shambe, backed by the USSR and the Cuban government.
[00:18:54]  Shea Guevara got involved, and obviously these guys weren't super great either.
[00:18:59]  So basically you just had kind of, and this is like the story of Africa in a lot of the Cold War.
[00:19:03]  You have like Soviet imperialists on one side being like, we'll give you guns if you do the thing we like.
[00:19:10]  And you have capitalist imperialists on the other side going like, we'll give you guns if you do the thing that we like.
[00:19:16]  And Mad Mike Hoare and his fellow mercenaries made a lot of money by just kind of standing in the middle and shooting at whoever had the most cash or shooting for whoever had the most cash.
[00:19:27]  For years, the Congo wars provided white combat veterans with steady employment.
[00:19:31]  Mad Mike was a World War II veteran.
[00:19:33]  A lot of these guys were World War II veterans.
[00:19:35]  And they were just guys who like, after the war ended, they couldn't do anything else but kill people.
[00:19:41]  And a number of them were actually Nazi military veterans.
[00:19:43]  That was even in like the French Foreign Legion had a lot of Nazi military veterans because they were like, all I know how to do is kill people.
[00:19:50]  And the French Foreign Legion's like, will you help us kill people who aren't white in Africa?
[00:19:54]  And they were like, absolutely.
[00:19:56]  As long as I'm killing.
[00:19:58]  So, now, Mad Mike, again, is probably the most famous of these guys.
[00:20:03]  And among other things, he was renowned for telling black mercenaries who attempted to join his mercenary army that he only hired white women or white men.
[00:20:13]  He earned a colorful reputation for, among other things, shooting the toes off of a fellow mercenary who'd raped a woman in the field.
[00:20:20]  And as a general rule, Mad Mike soldiers were kind of rough customers, you might say.
[00:20:27]  Yeah.
[00:20:28]  Yeah, I would say they sound like rope customers.
[00:20:32]  Yeah, yeah, shot the toes off a man.
[00:20:35]  I mean, you know.
[00:20:36]  So as the fighting in the Congo wore on, Mad Mike wound up on the side of Mabotu Sese Siku, the Congo's longest-lived dictator.
[00:20:44]  Mabotu also patterned himself as an anti-communist fighter, which was enough to earn the allegiance of the CIA and of Mad Mike.
[00:20:51]  In order to help Mabotu stay in power and fight against rebels, he put together a commando army of Irish mercenaries, the Wild Geese.
[00:20:59]  Here's how the Washington Post recalled their service in the obituary they wrote for Mad Mike.
[00:21:03]  Earlier this year, this guy fucking had the longest life.
[00:21:08]  Holy shit.
[00:21:10]  Sorry.
[00:21:11]  In a million years, I never would have thought that you were going to say he died earlier this year.
[00:21:16]  Yeah, he was 100 years old.
[00:21:18]  Like, fucking incredible.
[00:21:22]  Quote, I believe we have a great mission here, he told a fellow mercenary, according to a history of the Simba Rebellion by John Hopkins professor Piero Gilgesi.
[00:21:31]  The Africans have gotten used to the idea that they can do whatever they like to us whites, that they can trample on us and spit on us.
[00:21:38]  So that's the kind of fella Mike is.
[00:21:40]  Dubbed the White Giants, Mr. Horror's men swept through the country, mowing down untrained and outnumbered Simba forces who believed that witchcraft made them impervious to bullets.
[00:21:50]  In total, the mercenary unit was paid about $300,000 a month by U.S. authorities, according to a post report, and backed by what the New York Times described as an instant air force created by the CIA.
[00:22:02]  Can we back up to the white giants?
[00:22:05]  Just for like one second, that needed more attention.
[00:22:09]  It's actually the reason why they were called giants is actually pretty sad.
[00:22:12]  It's because they all grew up in wealthier Western countries and had access to a lot of protein and milk and stuff like that when they were growing up.
[00:22:20]  And folks in the Congo tended to be malnourished, in large part due to the fact that the Belgian colonialists who had owned them had starved the entirety of Central Africa for decades prior to this point.
[00:22:32]  And so people in the Congo tended to be smaller and white mercenaries tended to be very large.
[00:22:37]  Well, that's fucked up.
[00:22:38]  Jesus.
[00:22:39]  Yeah, it's not great.
[00:22:39]  It's not great.
[00:22:40]  I'm feeling really good about the world.
[00:22:42]  Yeah.
[00:22:43]  So the white giants or the wild geese, whatever you want to call them, killed a shitload of people.
[00:22:48]  Mike himself bragged to journalists, quote, killing communists is like killing vermin.
[00:22:53]  Killing African nationalists is as if one is killing an animal.
[00:22:57]  My men and I have killed between 5,000 and 10,000 Congo rebels in the 20 months that I've spent in the Congo.
[00:23:03]  But that's not enough.
[00:23:04]  There are 20 million Congolese, you know, and I assume that about half of them at one point or another were rebels whilst I was down there.
[00:23:10]  This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons.
[00:23:11]  One of them is that the generation prior to Mike, King Leopold of Belgium, had killed fully half of the population of the Congo.
[00:23:19]  And here you have another white guy generation later being like, if we just got rid of another half.
[00:23:24]  Yeah.
[00:23:25]  Pretty bad people.
[00:23:27]  Pretty bad.
[00:23:28]  And Mad Mike perfectly embodies the fact that a lot of the men who were responsible for fighting the Nazis would have been perfectly happy with Nazism if Hitler had just picked slightly different white people to fight.
[00:23:39]  Oh, yeah.
[00:23:41]  It's funny that you say this.
[00:23:42]  I feel like I have to like tell, like, admit something.
[00:23:44]  When I was young, I thought that there was just like white people.
[00:23:48]  I had no idea that there was like in like these white people don't like that white people.
[00:23:53]  I thought it was just white people.
[00:23:55]  And when I found that out, it was like a big sort of galaxy brain thing for me.
[00:24:00]  I didn't realize that white people could have problems with other white people.
[00:24:04]  That was like a whole new understanding of how white people function for me.
[00:24:10]  We're fascinating.
[00:24:11]  There's this thing going on.
[00:24:12]  I mean, it's been going on for a long time within like Nazi circles, but it's hitting the internet Nazis now.
[00:24:18]  Well, we're like in depictions of Mussolini, they'll depict him as a black man.
[00:24:22]  And the reason is because there's a chunk of white people who think that Italians are still who still think Italians aren't white.
[00:24:29]  Like it's pretty wild.
[00:24:32]  Start with the times.
[00:24:33]  Yeah.
[00:24:36]  Yeah.
[00:24:37]  That's like the racism equivalent of still using MySpace.
[00:24:40]  Like, we moved on.
[00:24:43]  Having like a hot mail email address.
[00:24:46]  Yeah.
[00:24:47]  Yeah.
[00:24:47]  That's hot mail for Nazis is calling like Italians non-white.
[00:24:54]  So yeah, yeah, Mike killed a lot of people.
[00:24:57]  Mike and his men were good enough at killing to ensure that the regime of Mabutu Seseku was established and allowed to persist for 30 brutal years.
[00:25:04]  Mabutu spent the time robbing the Congo blind, providing no social services, building no infrastructure, and torturing unknown numbers of Congolese people who complained about any of this.
[00:25:13]  The CIA was fine with all of it because again, Mabutu was not a communist.
[00:25:18]  Now, Mad Mike's success made him into a mini celebrity, and he was indeed a colorful character.
[00:25:24]  In one interview, he told a post reporter, I think I'd like to have been born in the time of Sir Francis Drake.
[00:25:29]  Yes, out sailing, robbing the Spaniards.
[00:25:31]  And when you brought the booty back to Queen Elizabeth, you knelt before her and she made you a knight.
[00:25:36]  You were respectable, even though you were a thief.
[00:25:38]  So, yep, yep, that's the guy he is.
[00:25:41]  So, unfortunately for Mad Mike and a lot of other people, it turns out that coups are kind of addictive.
[00:25:46]  In the early 1980s, 62-year-old Mad Mike Horry led 40 men in an attempt to overthrow the socialist regime of the Seychelles and reinstall an old pro-capitalist president.
[00:25:58]  The plan was comical.
[00:25:59]  Mike's men dressed as rugby players with a drinking club named Ye Ancient Order of Frothblowers.
[00:26:05]  They hid their AK-47s in fake bottom bags and posed as tourists.
[00:26:09]  Unfortunately, they all got fucking drunk as shit on the flight over, and so they were really drunk when they arrived at the arrivals call and they started a fight with customs.
[00:26:18]  And so the customs guys said, Fuck you, we're going to search your bags now.
[00:26:23]  And then they found the AK-47s, which sparked this massive gunfight in the customs hall at the airport in the Seychelles.
[00:26:30]  So again, Mike and his men had overwhelming firepower, but they were also hammered.
[00:26:34]  So they shot one of their own men to death and then killed one of the other soldiers in this like running, incompetent, running gun battle that ends when they hijack an Air India flight and force the crew at gunpoint to fly them to South Africa.
[00:26:51]  Oh my God.
[00:26:52]  I have to say though, part of me is a little sympathetic because who among us has not had big plans be derailed because you got too drunk, right?
[00:27:02]  Absolutely.
[00:27:02]  Look, look, they're racists and monsters, but they're still humans, right?
[00:27:07]  Like, yeah, yes, I too have had getting drunk on a plane interfere with a plan and lead to a fight at customs.
[00:27:17]  That leads to you killing someone.
[00:27:19]  Yeah, of course.
[00:27:20]  I mean, if I had an AK-47, I might have hijacked an Air India flight.
[00:27:23]  Like, there's no way to know.
[00:27:25]  You know, they don't stop you.
[00:27:26]  They never cut you off on Air Emirates when you're drinking.
[00:27:29]  So, yes, a lot of things can happen.
[00:27:33]  Shout out.
[00:27:34]  Shout out to Air Emirates.
[00:27:36]  Shout out.
[00:27:38]  The open bar in the sky.
[00:27:40]  So, yeah.
[00:27:43]  So they were all arrested as soon as they landed in South Africa.
[00:27:46]  And this is again, apartheid South Africa was like, you crossed a line, Mike.
[00:27:53]  Even we have to arrest you.
[00:27:55]  We're doing fucked up shit to people, but we even have fucking standards.
[00:27:59]  Like, come on.
[00:28:00]  Jesus, dude.
[00:28:03]  So he gets arrested.
[00:28:04]  And during his trial, Hori testified that the South African government had approved the coup and given him weapons.
[00:28:10]  And this was almost certainly true, although the government denied it, because obviously South Africa fucking loved coups, as long as they were, you know, the right kind of coups.
[00:28:20]  Yeah, the government denied it, though.
[00:28:22]  Mike was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but he was released after just three.
[00:28:26]  After he was freed, a journalist asked him if he planned to retire.
[00:28:29]  He responded, This is all a question of opportunity.
[00:28:32]  Mercenary opportunities now mainly exist in films and books.
[00:28:36]  And yeah, as I told you, inconceivably, Mad Mike survived until February of this year, which is fucking wild.
[00:28:43]  When you talk to the mercenaries that came after him, they'll generally say that Mike was one half of a holy duo of African mercenaries who kind of like inspired the whole modern field of mercenaridum.
[00:28:55]  And the other half, his other half, was a guy named Bob Dennard, a French imperialist who did a lot of the same kind of stuff as Mad Mike, but more quietly, competently, and on behalf of France.
[00:29:05]  In 1977, Bob Dennard led 80 mercenaries in an attempt to overthrow the communist government of Benin, which had recently nationalized all of their banks and their petroleum industry.
[00:29:15]  Unfortunately, Bob timed things badly.
[00:29:17]  The president wasn't home when Denard's mercenary army reached his palace.
[00:29:21]  A detachment of North Korean military advisors were home, and they had heavy machine guns.
[00:29:26]  So Bob's men were forced into a fighting retreat.
[00:29:28]  But as we saw with Mad Mike Hori, coups are addictive.
[00:29:32]  And the very next year, Bob Denard hired another army to overthrow the government of the Comoros, a small island nation off of Africa's east coast.
[00:29:39]  His 50 men brought saw-off shotguns and a case of Dom Perignon champagne.
[00:29:44]  They landed on the coast, attacked the president, the palace, murdered the president, and installed his rival.
[00:29:50]  Then they got drunk on champagne.
[00:29:52]  So, yeah, most of these mercenary coups don't work out well, but some of them do.
[00:29:57]  And they're very profitable when they do.
[00:30:00]  Also, shout out to the expensive, fancy champagne.
[00:30:04]  I mean, these guys knew how to party.
[00:30:06]  Look, yeah, I mean, again, that is a G move.
[00:30:09]  Like, yeah, bringing a case of champagne with you to the coup is, yeah, that's that's a G move.

=== Desperation on Cocoa Plantations (06:10) ===

[00:30:18]  Yep.
[00:30:19]  I don't want to interrupt Sophie.
[00:30:21]  I think your dog is like, is he, is she humping something?
[00:30:24]  She, she, she's not humping something.
[00:30:26]  She's licking something, and I don't.
[00:30:29]  And I will not disrupt her in interactions.
[00:30:33]  Leave her be.
[00:30:35]  I'm proud of her.
[00:30:36]  I like what's happening.
[00:30:37]  And it gives you a free show while we record this episode.
[00:30:41]  I know.
[00:30:42]  This is like a show within a show.
[00:30:43]  It is a show within a show.
[00:30:45]  Yes.
[00:30:45]  Anderson has just performed a coup on Behind the Bastards, taking over attention.
[00:30:52]  And spoilers, she also has a case of Dom Perignon champagne and a sawed-off shotgun.
[00:30:58]  She does.
[00:30:59]  Dom Perignon.
[00:31:00]  Yeah.
[00:31:01]  She knows you're talking about her.
[00:31:02]  It's so funny.
[00:31:03]  She's like, my brother's talking about me.
[00:31:05]  I hear him.
[00:31:06]  Oh, she thinks of you as her brother.
[00:31:11]  Probably.
[00:31:11]  Yeah.
[00:31:13]  Yeah.
[00:31:14]  So, yeah, this all builds to the point that there's a long history of small groups of mercenaries overthrowing tiny African nations, reinforced in both actual shit that happened and in fiction, like King Solomon's Mines.
[00:31:25]  In the real world cases, Western governments were generally involved, and almost always the South African government.
[00:31:32]  The people who lived in these nations were never ever consulted.
[00:31:35]  And all of this background brings me, Bridget, to the story of Fernando Poe.
[00:31:41]  Have you ever heard of Fernando Poe?
[00:31:43]  I have not.
[00:31:44]  So it's an island off the west coast of Africa, and it makes up the bulk of the nation we now call Equatorial Guinea.
[00:31:52]  And Fernando Poe was colonized by Spain prior to the Great Scramble for Africa, but they never really did anything with it.
[00:31:59]  Bastard pod alumni Henry Morton Stanley called the island the pearl of the Gulf of Guinea, but stated that he would not pay a penny for it as it was a jewel which Spain did not polish.
[00:32:10]  So basically the Spanish like owned this place, but they never really did anything for it because there wasn't really anything to do.
[00:32:14]  Like when white people went there, they always died because like they didn't have any immunity to the local diseases.
[00:32:19]  And there wasn't any gold or anything that was generally considered to be super value valuable by white people on Fernando Poe.
[00:32:25]  So it was kind of like a refueling station, but not much more for Spain for most of the time that they controlled it.
[00:32:33]  So I'm going to quote next from a book called The Wonga Coup by Adam Roberts for a picture of how Fernando Poe fared under colonialism.
[00:32:41]  Quote, in 1936, the British novelist Graham Greene, who was generally fond of West Africa, dismissed the dreadful little Spanish island where there existed a mild form of slavery that enabled a man to pawn his children.
[00:32:53]  Towards the end of its two centuries of rule, Spain did little to improve the lives of those it ruled.
[00:32:58]  The colonial powers set up an economy based on cocoa plantations and a reasonable school system.
[00:33:02]  Health campaigns reduced the impact of tropical diseases, at least on Fernando Poe.
[00:33:07]  By the second half of the 20th century, Equatorial Guineans were less poor than most Africans thanks to exports of cocoa.
[00:33:12]  But few Spaniards settled and native Africans were denied political rights and economic chances.
[00:33:17]  When independence loomed, the Spanish organized hasty polls to find a new government.
[00:33:21]  Spain, under its own dictator, General Franco, was hardly qualified to promote democracy, and Equatorial Guinea was ill-prepared when, in late 1968, it became the 126th member of the United Nations.
[00:33:33]  After independence, things really went wrong.
[00:33:35]  Its citizens were soon desperate to escape.
[00:33:37]  A sleepy-eyed man, Macias Nguema, won the elections.
[00:33:42]  A shy son of a reverend and a brutal witch doctor known as his saintly father, Macius did badly at Catholic mission schools, but took up jobs as a junior bureaucrat and a coffee farmer, then as a court interpreter, and subsequently as mayor of a small town.
[00:33:55]  He became an influential leader within an important subgroup of the Fang, the country's most populous ethnic group, and was groomed for office by a few Spaniards who believed he would serve their interests.
[00:34:04]  So this isn't a great start for independence for Equatorial Guinea.
[00:34:09]  And it's not going to be a great continuance.
[00:34:11]  So I found another book called Double Paradox by Andrew Weddeman that explains that Macius largely wound up in power due to his ability to charm Spanish colonial officers.
[00:34:20]  Weddeman notes that he impressed them with his willingness to treat other Guineans with contempt, which is kind of the same story as Idi Amin.
[00:34:28]  The British liked him because he was good at cracking down on other Africans who tried to get independence from England.
[00:34:35]  And they were like, okay, this guy we can probably trust.
[00:34:38]  But it turns out that Macius hated Spain too, due to having to lick their boots for years.
[00:34:43]  And as soon as he was in power, he like fucked them over and took every action he could to uproot any local industry that benefited Spanish companies.
[00:34:52]  He formed a children's militia and used it to harass all the remaining white people out of Equatorial Guinea.
[00:34:58]  And that doesn't necessarily sound too bad, with the exception, but the problem is that like, again, the whole economy of Equatorial Guinea had been based around these cocoa plantations, and he kicks out everyone who knows how to operate and run them.
[00:35:13]  And he nationalizes them, but rather than hire locals to run them, he brings in cheaper Nigerian workers to run the fields because he wants to make all of the profits from them.
[00:35:22]  And yeah, so it's like he completely uproots the entire economy overnight.
[00:35:28]  And that is not a great thing to do from an economics point of view.
[00:35:34]  Macius also ordered the entire nation's retail sector shut down and replaced it by a new network of state-run stores.
[00:35:41]  This left another 15,000 native retail workers out of a job.
[00:35:45]  The country each entered into a terrible recession, which was made worse by the fact that Macius gave his best friend a monopoly on all international trade.
[00:35:53]  Prices for food imports soared out of the budgets of most actual Guineans.
[00:35:57]  It became impossible to import the spare parts for the machinery that made the nation run and made its cocoa plantations function.
[00:36:03]  The electrical grid failed and the roads were eaten by the jungle.
[00:36:06]  So he just like what little the Spanish had done to set up, you know, infrastructure, he just bulldozes.
[00:36:14]  And suddenly everyone's out of a job.
[00:36:15]  No one has any money and no one can buy any food.
[00:36:19]  Which is not a great job, I would say.
[00:36:22]  I don't want to backseat dictator of Equatorial Guinea here.
[00:36:26]  Yeah, it's bad.

=== Bulldozing Spanish Infrastructure (04:13) ===

[00:36:28]  Do you want to know?
[00:36:29]  Yeah.
[00:36:29]  And I really need you to take an ad break, but I don't know how to do a witty transition after that.
[00:36:34]  So could you just like do an ad break, please?
[00:36:38]  You know who won't give their best friend a monopoly on all international trade that makes food import impossible and leads to widespread famine?
[00:36:48]  Our sponsors.
[00:36:50]  Yeah, our sponsors won't do that.
[00:36:52]  Maybe.
[00:36:53]  I mean, historically, we should probably just roll the ads.
[00:36:56]  Yay.
[00:37:01]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[00:37:08]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[00:37:13]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[00:37:16]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:37:20]  I doctored the test once.
[00:37:21]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[00:37:25]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[00:37:28]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[00:37:31]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:37:33]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:37:35]  Greg Olespi and Michael Marancine.
[00:37:38]  My mind was blown.
[00:37:39]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:37:41]  This is Love Trap.
[00:37:43]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:37:45]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:37:49]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[00:37:56]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[00:38:01]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:38:10]  10-10 shots fired.
[00:38:12]  City Hall building.
[00:38:13]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:38:18]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
[00:38:21]  This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
[00:38:24]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:38:26]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:38:26]  Jeffrey Hood did.
[00:38:28]  July 2003.
[00:38:30]  Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:38:35]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:38:38]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:38:46]  Everybody in the chamber's docks.
[00:38:49]  A shocking public murder.
[00:38:50]  I screamed, get down, get down.
[00:38:52]  Those are shots.
[00:38:53]  Those are shots.
[00:38:54]  Get down.
[00:38:54]  A charismatic politician.
[00:38:56]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
[00:38:58]  I still have a weapon.
[00:39:00]  And I could shoot you.
[00:39:04]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:39:05]  He alleged you a victim of flat down.
[00:39:08]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:39:10]  That may have been about sex.
[00:39:12]  Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:39:25]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:39:29]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:39:32]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:39:35]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:39:39]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:39:42]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:39:46]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:39:48]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:39:53]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:39:55]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:39:57]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:39:59]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:40:02]  They said, oh, hell no.
[00:40:03]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:40:06]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:40:10]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:40:12]  Trust me, babe.
[00:40:13]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:40:23]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:40:29]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:40:36]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.

=== Hiring Mercenaries for a Coup (15:15) ===

[00:40:42]  From power to parenthood.
[00:40:44]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:40:48]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:40:50]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:40:52]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:40:56]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:41:03]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:41:06]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:41:12]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:41:14]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:41:17]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:41:27]  We're back.
[00:41:28]  And yeah, we're talking about Equatorial Guinea and its first few years of independence, which don't go great.
[00:41:34]  So the people of Equatorial Guinea could clearly see that a calamity had been visited upon them by their new leader.
[00:41:40]  And Macius deflected blame for it by claiming his political opponents had attempted a coup.
[00:41:44]  He launched a vicious terror campaign against his own people, which fucked the economy up more and led to him confiscating the property of thousands upon thousands of citizens and putting it in the hands of himself.
[00:41:56]  One-third of the population was killed or fled the country in just a couple of years.
[00:42:02]  Which is a lot of the country.
[00:42:05]  Yeah.
[00:42:06]  So that's not great.
[00:42:08]  Macius instituted a new set of internal travel restrictions to try and stop people from fleeing the country.
[00:42:14]  But the only way he could think of to do this was to create a massive series of burdensome checkpoints.
[00:42:18]  And this made domestic trade impossible within the country itself.
[00:42:23]  Macius also ordered all ships, boats, and canoes impounded, which destroyed the fishing industry overnight and ended the population's access to protein.
[00:42:32]  Macius sold fishing rights to the Soviets instead and pocketed the money from this while his people starved.
[00:42:38]  By the early 1970s, Equatorial Guinea was a failed state by any reasonable definition of the term.
[00:42:44]  The people who had once enjoyed at least a decent standard of living were starving and forced into subsistence agriculture.
[00:42:49]  The state bureaucracy collapsed since there was no food to buy.
[00:42:52]  Government workers had to leave their posts in order to fill their bellies.
[00:42:55]  In order to stop the exodus, Macius ordered the only road out of the capital, Mind.
[00:43:00]  Yeah, he's not good at leading a country.
[00:43:04]  Not great.
[00:43:04]  And again, this is the guy, like, it's one of those things.
[00:43:08]  This is the guy who, this guy only comes to power because Spain puts him in power, because they're too lazy to do a proper job of giving up this colon.
[00:43:17]  So they just put the guy who's best at kissing ass in charge, and he turns out to be a monster, which happens repeatedly in Africa in the period as colonialism like departs it.
[00:43:28]  Like this is kind of what they all did.
[00:43:30]  I have a question.
[00:43:30]  I mean, I don't know if I ask this.
[00:43:32]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, please.
[00:43:33]  I guess I feel like when it comes to dictators, people, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong.
[00:43:38]  I am not a I'm not a dictatorship expert, but I feel like people are more willing to be okay with it if like the trains run on time, our roads are paid, we have food.
[00:43:49]  It seems like having someone who is this shitty like be like making these kinds of changes that really fuck over the average person.
[00:43:59]  Like that, that seems so different from what I have come to know and love about dictators.
[00:44:05]  I guess I feel like my understanding is that like, oh, when someone's a fucking shithead, people are willing to overlook it if they, if their lives are either made better or not significantly changed.
[00:44:16]  And it seems like in this case, their lives were made much worse.
[00:44:19]  This is what gets us into, like, the truth of that is that in almost all dictatorships, you know, you get the odd exception.
[00:44:25]  There's guys like Tito who'd like Tito was a monster, but I've spent a lot of time in former Yugoslavia and a lot of old people think back to Tito fondly because things went so shitty after his he died.
[00:44:38]  But like, as a general rule, particularly when you're talking about like dictators who like come into power with a lot of popular support, it's popular support from one specific group of people.
[00:44:47]  And it's one specific group of people who does well.
[00:44:49]  You know, in Germany's case, we all know what that specific group of people was.
[00:44:53]  And in Equatorial Guinea's case, there is a specific group of people.
[00:44:57]  The largest ethnic group in the country are the Fang, which is like the same tribe that he is a member of.
[00:45:02]  And they do pretty well under this because they get preferential treatment.
[00:45:07]  They're able to, like, they kick out like, like, he, they, like, he executes genocides against, like, the Igbo and a couple of other different tribal peoples in Equatorial Guinea, and all of their stuff gets given to, like, members of his tribe.
[00:45:19]  So, like, the largest, most Equatorial Guineans suffer, but the largest single group of them does pretty well because they're able to take shit from the other people who are suffering.
[00:45:28]  And that's kind of the story of dictatorships.
[00:45:31]  That's really what happens.
[00:45:32]  When we talk about, people talk about things going well.
[00:45:35]  It's more often that, like, no, no, your specific group was the group that things went pretty well for because the guy in charge stole things from everyone else to give to you.
[00:45:43]  Like, yeah.
[00:45:46]  And that's kind of what happens in Equatorial Guinea is like the Fang do all right.
[00:45:50]  At least at first, the Fang do all right, because he's just taking shit from everybody else and giving it to them.
[00:45:55]  One Swedish researcher who managed to sneak into Equatorial Guinea during this period called it the Dachau of Africa.
[00:46:02]  Everyone else just called it Death's Waiting Room, a name that became more relevant when Macius banned Western medicine, leading to a resurgence of leprosy, among other illnesses.
[00:46:11]  As his nation crumbled, Macius lost his mind.
[00:46:14]  He began seeing coup plotters in every corner, and he executed people almost as random in an attempt to keep them at bay.
[00:46:20]  During one Christmas mass execution at a sports stadium in the capital, Malabo, Palace Guards shot 150 people to death while the song, Those Were the Days, My Friend, played on an endless loop.
[00:46:32]  Which is one of the most nightmarish things I can imagine.
[00:46:36]  Yeah.
[00:46:38]  Jesus.
[00:46:39]  Yeah.
[00:46:41]  Yeah.
[00:46:42]  One survivor of the horror later wrote, quote, no food in the shops, no water, no electricity, no kerosene for the lamps.
[00:46:48]  At night we walked in blackness.
[00:46:50]  Yes, for 11 years we walked in blackness.
[00:46:53]  The Wanga coup by Adam Roberts goes on to note, quote, nightclubs and schools closed.
[00:46:58]  Missionaries were chased from the country.
[00:47:00]  Macius, like Pol Pot in Cambodia, launched a campaign against the educated and they began to disappear.
[00:47:05]  He banned the word intellectual, once finding a minister who used it at a cabinet meeting.
[00:47:10]  He called educated people the greatest problem facing Africa today.
[00:47:13]  They are polluting our climate with foreign culture.
[00:47:16]  He declared himself president for life, then renamed the island part of the country after himself.
[00:47:21]  He adopted new titles, each more eccentric than the last.
[00:47:23]  Major General of the Armed Forces, great maestro of popular education, science, and traditional culture.
[00:47:29]  The only miracle of Equatorial Guinea.
[00:47:32]  He ordered teachers and priests to promote his cult of personality.
[00:47:36]  Schoolchildren chanted that Macius alone had freed the country from imperial Spanish rule.
[00:47:40]  The sanctuary of every church was to show his portrait.
[00:47:42]  Priests read out messages venerating the insecure president, such as, God created Equatorial Guinea thanks to Macius.
[00:47:49]  Without Macius, Equatorial Guinea would not exist.
[00:47:51]  Some 80% of the people were nominally Christian, but he eventually forced churches shut.
[00:47:56]  So he's not great.
[00:47:59]  I keep making that point.
[00:48:01]  Not great.
[00:48:02]  Like, he had kids chanting this shit at school.
[00:48:04]  Yeah, it's bad.
[00:48:06]  It goes bad in Equatorial Guinea.
[00:48:07]  And Macius, for an example of how bad it goes, Macius was almost certainly a cannibal, but that's not even really worth talking about because the fact that he ate people was like one of the least shitty things about him.
[00:48:18]  Like he's these like...
[00:48:20]  Yeah.
[00:48:21]  You know shit is bad when it's like, well, he eats people, but there's so many other things going on that like, that's just a footnote.
[00:48:28]  We have so many other problems.
[00:48:33]  Yeah.
[00:48:35]  Yeah, so he was so good at killing basically everyone who didn't agree with him or like him that there was basically no organized society in Equatorial Guinea for a rebellion to even form in.
[00:48:48]  If there was ever a nation in desperate need of a foreign-backed coup, it was Equatorial Guinea.
[00:48:53]  And unfortunately, the coup they got was not the one they deserved.
[00:48:57]  And again, like, if you're talking about, like, as I think we've established, it's always problematic to talk about foreign coups to overthrow governments.
[00:49:05]  But this is the guy who it's like, yeah, if you're going to justify a coup, it's against a guy like this.
[00:49:10]  And it still doesn't work out.
[00:49:12]  So the man behind this coup was not a grizzled mercenary.
[00:49:16]  Instead, it was a former journalist and novelist named Frederick Forsyth.
[00:49:20]  Now, Frederick had reported for the BBC during the Nigerian Civil War, and he knew a number of mercenaries as a result of his reporting work in Africa.
[00:49:28]  By the early 1970s, he transitioned out of journalism and into a very successful career as a fiction author.
[00:49:34]  His most famous book was probably The Day of the Jackal, which made him wealthy.
[00:49:38]  And there's a movie made out of The Day of the Jackal.
[00:49:40]  There's a movie he's made out of a lot of his books, actually.
[00:49:43]  Flush with cash, Forsyth looked out at the sad case of Equatorial Guinea and decided he was in a position to do something about Macius.
[00:49:50]  He sat down with a mercenary friend of his, and from his flat in Camden, the two painstakingly plotted out a coup that would overthrow Macius from power.
[00:49:58]  The basic idea was to hire several dozen former soldiers from Nigeria and pay them to capture or kill the mad dictator and replace him with a Biafran politician who seemed amenable.
[00:50:08]  The whole thing took about five months to plan, and the affair was largely an excuse for the now wealthy Forsyth to live out his fantasies of being an international man of mystery.
[00:50:16]  In a later interview with Adam Roberts, he explained, quote, I originally postulated a question to myself, would it be possible for a group of paid and bought-for mercenaries to topple a republic?
[00:50:26]  I thought, if the republic were weak enough and power concentrated in one tyrant, then in theory, yes.
[00:50:31]  I looked around and saw Fernando Poe, and every story about the country was gruesome.
[00:50:35]  I didn't go there myself, but I met businessmen and others who had been there, and they told me this place was weird.
[00:50:40]  So I decided it could be done.
[00:50:41]  If you stormed the palace, well, it wasn't really a palace.
[00:50:43]  It was the old Spanish colonial governor's mansion.
[00:50:46]  Probably by sunrise you could take over, provided you have a substitute African president and announce it was an incolonel coup d'état.
[00:50:53]  I began to explore the world of black market arms.
[00:50:56]  Where do you get a shipload of black market arms?
[00:50:58]  I knew nothing about it, so I dug around.
[00:51:00]  I discovered the capital was either Prague, where Omnipol, the communist arms dealer, was, but for that, the client had to be cleared by Moscow.
[00:51:06]  Otherwise, it was Hamburg.
[00:51:08]  So off I went.
[00:51:08]  I penetrated under subterfuge using a South African name and developed my theme.
[00:51:12]  I attended conferences of black market freelance criminals and learned about the curious end-user certificates to identify those who are entitled to use and buy weapons, how they're forged or purchased from corrupt African diplomats.
[00:51:24]  So Forsyth will claim to this day, usually, that he was just writing a book about how to carry out a coup.
[00:51:32]  And the fact that someone attempted a coup in this country based on his book was completely separate from it.
[00:51:38]  But also, sometimes in interviews, he'll admit that, like, oh, yeah, I was carrying out a coup from the beginning, and I just wrote a book about it later.
[00:51:46]  Yeah.
[00:51:48]  So, let me ask you then: who is the bastard here?
[00:51:52]  Which one of these people is the bastard?
[00:51:54]  They're both bastards.
[00:51:56]  I do think in a way, Macius is like it's tough because, like, obviously, he's a monster who kills tens of thousands of people.
[00:52:08]  But also, there's something that's like almost a little bit more unsettling to me about a guy who's just like a rich novelist being like, I bet I could overthrow this country.
[00:52:17]  It seems easy enough.
[00:52:18]  Like, that that's his, that he's not, like, they always throw in some like little jibe about how, oh, it seems like the dictator's really bad there.
[00:52:27]  But when you get a chance to like read long interviews with them, like, that's a sentence.
[00:52:31]  And then the rest of it is like, yeah, that really seems easy and fun.
[00:52:34]  And I was interested in this and this and this.
[00:52:36]  Like, the whole, the fact that a terrible dictator was in charge of Equatorial Guinea was like 3% of why they did it.
[00:52:43]  97% was, it seemed fun.
[00:52:47]  So I have one more question in your life, in your, do you feel like, how, what percentage of shit like that do you feel like comes down to, oh, it was, it seemed fun.
[00:52:58]  I do feel like when you hear about all the terrible shit that goes on in our world, so often it comes down to like, oh, we wanted like, yeah, we wanted the money, we wanted control, whatever, whatever.
[00:53:07]  But also, wouldn't it be fucking fun?
[00:53:10]  Like, I do feel like a lot of these guys are doing this because they want the excitement and the fun.
[00:53:17]  Yeah.
[00:53:18]  No, no, no, not at all.
[00:53:19]  And like, one of the problems that we're going to have to tackle if we're ever going to have a more peaceful society is how to give young men in particular and really young white men in most particular, although it's all young men, like something to do that is exciting and feels meaningful and might kill them, but doesn't involve them fucking up other people's lives.
[00:53:43]  Because a lot of us need that.
[00:53:45]  It's not all of us, but like, I mean, I've bought multiple plane tickets to war zones, and I would be lying if I said that a part of it wasn't like, yeah, that sounds like fun.
[00:53:54]  Like, like going through that experience.
[00:53:55]  Now, I didn't try to overthrow no countries, but it is a thing you have to grapple with.
[00:54:00]  Yeah.
[00:54:01]  Well, if you lived in Washington, D.C., there's a very obvious avenue available to you, and that is join an illegal dirt bike gang because you don't wear a helmet, you don't have insurance, your head is so close to the pavement, it's dangerous, but it's not, you're not, you're not overthrowing anything, you know?
[00:54:20]  Yeah, we need to somehow make rugby more high stakes.
[00:54:24]  Yeah.
[00:54:25]  Or have one of those, yeah.
[00:54:27]  There's, there's, it's tough.
[00:54:29]  Like, maybe we could just pick like one of the states we don't like and let anyone who wants to go fight a war there.
[00:54:35]  Like, we just declare, I don't know, let's say here, um, Florida.
[00:54:40]  Iowa.
[00:54:40]  Florida.
[00:54:41]  Huh?
[00:54:42]  Florida.
[00:54:42]  Yeah, that's the state.
[00:54:43]  Florida.
[00:54:44]  Yeah.
[00:54:44]  Of course, Florida.
[00:54:46]  Florida is a war now.
[00:54:47]  And if you really need that in your life, you can go to Florida and you can have your war in Florida.
[00:54:52]  We'll call it Warida.
[00:54:53]  It'll be, it'll be fine.
[00:54:55]  Very little will actually change about daily life in most of that state.
[00:55:00]  Yeah, and Iowa, he didn't mean it.
[00:55:01]  He didn't mean it, Iowa.
[00:55:03]  He meant Florida.
[00:55:03]  Oh, I meant it.
[00:55:06]  We love your corn, Iowa.
[00:55:08]  We love your corn, Iowa.
[00:55:10]  We need a war state to get some of this energy out of people.
[00:55:13]  Paintball is not doing it for folks.
[00:55:19]  So yeah, yeah.
[00:55:21]  So this fucking fiction author, Frederick Forsyth, like starts quote unquote researching his book.
[00:55:28]  And at the same time, a group of mercenaries led by his friend that he planned this book with get hired.
[00:55:36]  And like they, they charter a boat and they like start sailing through like to Equatorial Guinea to carry out a coup.
[00:55:44]  Now, this doesn't work out.
[00:55:45]  They don't even get to land.
[00:55:47]  The British intelligence catches onto them in Gibraltar and tips off Spanish authorities who arrest them in the Canary Islands.
[00:55:53]  The coup gets called off and it never actually happens.

=== Frederick Forsyth's Fictional Cult (03:05) ===

[00:55:57]  But the very next year, Frederick Forsyth published another book called The Dogs of War about a group of European mercenaries who carry out a coup against a brutal island dictator.
[00:56:06]  And the book bore a striking resemblance to all of the planning for the failed 1973 coup.
[00:56:11]  And like very little of the book actually involved any action or fighting or the coup itself.
[00:56:16]  Almost all of it was just a detailed step-by-step guide to how to like, here's how we go about getting end-user certificates.
[00:56:24]  Here's how we go about buying weaponry.
[00:56:26]  Here's how we go about transporting that weaponry.
[00:56:28]  Here's how we chartered the boat.
[00:56:29]  Here's how we hired all these mercenaries.
[00:56:31]  Like it's famously still seen today as like a step-by-step guide for how to carry out a coup.
[00:56:38]  And rumors began to swirl after this that Frederick Forsyth had attempted to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea and then written a fictionalized account of his actions.
[00:56:47]  In 1980, the book was made into a movie with Christopher Walken.
[00:56:54]  In 2006, Frederick Forsyth all but admitted to an interviewer that he had, in fact, planned and failed to execute a coup to overthrow Macius.
[00:57:02]  His book became a hit among mercenaries in particular.
[00:57:04]  In Bob Denard's successful coup off of the coast of East Africa, all of the men he carried into battle had copies of the French translation of The Dogs of War in their back pocket.
[00:57:15]  So again, that's part of why I started this with like King Solomon's Minds is that like The Dogs of War is really like the modern retelling of that.
[00:57:24]  We're like, okay, we're just going to make this all about the coup.
[00:57:28]  That's the real money shot.
[00:57:30]  So yeah, that's cool.
[00:57:32]  That's coup.
[00:57:32]  Yeah, that's cool.
[00:57:34]  That's cool.
[00:57:35]  I like that.
[00:57:36]  I also think it just goes to show you like what like culture, like books and movies and all of that really makes a difference of like how things play out.
[00:57:46]  You know, I think you could, you could easily be like, oh, it was just a book.
[00:57:49]  It was just a book.
[00:57:50]  But clearly that's not the case.
[00:57:52]  I think that these things really matter and they can really make an imprint on how things go down in history.
[00:57:57]  Yeah, I think this has inspired me to write a book about how a fictional cult fends off the FDA in the mountains of Idaho and use the proceeds from that book to buy a compound in the mountains of Idaho and then launch a health and beauty network that gets the FDA brought down on us.
[00:58:14]  Aren't you currently trying to start a cult?
[00:58:17]  Am I misremembering this?
[00:58:18]  You know, most of the time, yeah.
[00:58:20]  That's yeah, yeah, more or less, you know.
[00:58:26]  I mean, I told him he could.
[00:58:27]  Like, it's fine.
[00:58:28]  Start a cult.
[00:58:29]  Why not?
[00:58:30]  Yeah.
[00:58:31]  Got so few sign-offs.
[00:58:32]  Yeah, why not?
[00:58:33]  As long as no dogs are harmed, it's fine.
[00:58:37]  Almost certainly not, probably.
[00:58:39]  And on that note, Robert, it's break time.
[00:58:43]  Oh, it is.
[00:58:43]  Yeah.
[00:58:44]  Well, speaking of coups, here's a product coup.
[00:58:51]  That was not your best work, but along with some services.
[00:58:55]  Yeah, that wasn't, that didn't work out great.

=== Clayton Eckard's Paternity Scandal (04:02) ===

[00:59:03]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[00:59:09]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[00:59:14]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[00:59:18]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:59:21]  I doctored the test once.
[00:59:23]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[00:59:26]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[00:59:30]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[00:59:33]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:59:35]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:59:37]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Maracini.
[00:59:39]  My mind was blown.
[00:59:41]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:59:43]  This is Love Trap.
[00:59:45]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:59:46]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:59:51]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[00:59:57]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[01:00:02]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:00:12]  10-10 shots fired.
[01:00:14]  City Hall building.
[01:00:15]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[01:00:19]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
[01:00:25]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[01:00:27]  Somebody tell me that!
[01:00:28]  Jeffrey Hood did.
[01:00:30]  July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[01:00:36]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[01:00:39]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[01:00:48]  Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
[01:00:50]  A shocking public murder.
[01:00:52]  I scream, get down, get down.
[01:00:54]  Those are shots.
[01:00:55]  Those are shots.
[01:00:55]  Get down.
[01:00:56]  A charismatic politician.
[01:00:57]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
[01:01:00]  I still have a weapon.
[01:01:02]  And I could shoot you.
[01:01:05]  And an outsider with a secret.
[01:01:07]  He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
[01:01:10]  That may or may not have been political.
[01:01:12]  That may have been about sex.
[01:01:14]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:01:27]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[01:01:31]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[01:01:34]  If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[01:01:37]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[01:01:40]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[01:01:44]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[01:01:45]  And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[01:01:48]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[01:01:50]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[01:01:55]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[01:01:57]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[01:01:58]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[01:02:00]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[01:02:03]  They said, oh, hell no.
[01:02:05]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:02:07]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:02:12]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:02:14]  Trust me, babe.
[01:02:15]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:02:25]  I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[01:02:30]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[01:02:37]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[01:02:44]  From power to parenthood.
[01:02:46]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[01:02:49]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[01:02:51]  From addiction to acceleration.
[01:02:54]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[01:02:58]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.

=== Obi-Yong and the Oil Boom (08:35) ===

[01:03:05]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[01:03:07]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[01:03:13]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[01:03:15]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world of AI.
[01:03:18]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[01:03:29]  We are back.
[01:03:31]  Okay, so, uh, yeah, Macius remained in power until August of 1979 when a coup finally unseated him.
[01:03:39]  No Europeans were involved.
[01:03:40]  Instead, the culprit was his nephew Obi-Yang, who Macius had put in charge of the notorious Black Beach Prison, where regime enemies and random people were tortured to death.
[01:03:49]  Obi-Yong was spurred into action when his uncle's mismanagement got so bad that the army could no longer pay wages.
[01:03:55]  When representatives of the military asked the president for money, Macius had them all executed, including some officers who were members of the royal family.
[01:04:03]  This spurred Obi-Yang into action, and a brief civil war was the result.
[01:04:07]  Obi-Yong obviously had the support of most of the military.
[01:04:10]  His uncle resisted for a time, thanks largely to Cuban and North Korean officers who backed up his forces, but eventually Macius was forced out of his palace and into a small jungle village named Mongomo.
[01:04:20]  There he hid the entire national treasury, somewhere between $60 and $150 million, in what is generally described as a wooden hut.
[01:04:28]  Obi-Yang attacked, and in the battle that followed, the hut was set on fire and the entire nation's foreign currency reserves were incinerated.
[01:04:34]  Macius fled again, but he was eventually arrested and brought back to the capital of Malabo.
[01:04:39]  Obi-Yong took over from his uncle and convened a court in Malabo's largest building, the old cinema.
[01:04:43]  The former dictator was hung from a cage attached to the ceiling.
[01:04:47]  He and a number of flunkies were charged with genocide, mass murder, treason, and a litany of other crimes.
[01:04:52]  It may have been the first time in history that a head of state was actually charged with genocide anywhere in the world.
[01:04:57]  Macius was quickly convicted and executed, and evidence that inconveniently implicated his nephew Obi-Yang in regime crimes was ignored by the court.
[01:05:05]  In a better world, this would have been the start of a period of healing for Equatorial Guinea.
[01:05:09]  But we live in this world, and things only went from bad to slightly less bad, but still more or less the same.
[01:05:14]  And I'm going to quote now from the book Double Paradox.
[01:05:17]  Quote, If anything, the plundering worsened.
[01:05:20]  As international aid started to flow in and efforts to rehabilitate the export sector began, Obi-Yang and his inner circle, most of whom were either members of his immediate family or fellow Klansmen, grabbed whatever they could.
[01:05:31]  Companies seeking government contracts and concessions were informed that they had to pay bribes and kickbacks to senior officials.
[01:05:37]  The amounts demanded were often so high that many would-be investors quit the country soon after arriving.
[01:05:42]  Obi-Yang privatized Macius' state farms, but then either took them over himself or gave them to his henchmen.
[01:05:47]  Petty corruption among street-level bureaucrats continued unabated.
[01:05:50]  The one-time thugs and killers of the Macius era thus morphed into a new regime of tropical gangsters under which the Equatorial Guinean economy remained a ruin.
[01:05:59]  According to one visitor, the economy is dead and corruption is the game.
[01:06:03]  By early 1993, things had become so bad that the IMF announced it was suspending all aid and would leave the country to its own crumbling devices.
[01:06:12]  And Equatorial Guinea might have continued to just kind of be a tiny dirt-poor kleptocracy, if not for a small Texas-based oil and gas company, Walter International.
[01:06:23]  In 1991, they struck oil off the coast of Equatorial Guinea, revealing a massive field of extremely high-quality crude.
[01:06:31]  In short order, the We Nation was producing 350,000 barrels of oil a day, worth more than $6 billion a year.
[01:06:38]  The fields in Equatorial Guinea actually produced enough oil to make it the highest per capita producer of fuel on the planet.
[01:06:44]  And this could have literally made every single person in the tiny country rich.
[01:06:48]  That is, of course, not what happened.
[01:06:50]  Obi-Yang and his family took all the profits.
[01:06:52]  They should not have been able to.
[01:06:55]  The 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act made it illegal for U.S. companies to make direct payments to foreign officials.
[01:07:01]  Instead, they had to pay royalties to official government accounts so the money could be used for the benefit of the people.
[01:07:06]  Obi-Yang got around this by having oil companies like ExxonMobil deposit their payments in a series of offshore accounts owned by himself and his family members.
[01:07:14]  This was at best on the verge of being illegal.
[01:07:16]  But ExxonMobil, Hess, and Marathon were happy to play along and risk congressional censure for the simple fact that Guinean oil was the cheapest on earth.
[01:07:25]  Obi-Yong charged them about half of what other governments in the area were paid for their oil.
[01:07:29]  This would have been a terrible deal for the people of his country, but none of the money was going to them anyway.
[01:07:35]  Now, on paper, the Guinean economy grew by leaps and bounds in the late 1990s, topping 60% per year, which is almost an impossible rate.
[01:07:43]  Very little of that growth, though, reached the normal people.
[01:07:45]  In 2002, Equatorial Guinea spent less money than any other country on Earth, save Iraq, on healthcare.
[01:07:51]  No country on the planet spent less money on education.
[01:07:54]  The average lifespan in Equatorial Guinea was 50 years.
[01:07:58]  On paper, Guinean should have been receiving at least about $6,000 a year per person in income, which would have put the country in line with Chile.
[01:08:05]  But all of that money went to Obi-Yong and his family instead.
[01:08:08]  A 2003 radio program declared him the country's God who can decide to kill anyone without being called to account and without going to hell because it is God himself with whom he is in permanent contact who gives him his strength.
[01:08:21]  So this guy's not really a big improvement from Maceus is kind of the point that I'm making.
[01:08:26]  Yeah, I think that's clear.
[01:08:28]  So by the early 2000s, though, Equatorial Guinea was what you might call a coup plotter's paradise.
[01:08:34]  It has this horrible, unpopular dictator who's a global pariah, and there's a huge amount of oil that's just been discovered there.
[01:08:40]  And best of all, the war on terror has just started, and the invasion of Iraq has caused a situation whereby it's suddenly really, really easy to justify overthrowing a foreign dictator in order to get at his oil.
[01:08:52]  The Spanish government very much wanted access to Equatorial Guinea's fuel because they were pissed off they'd given up this country and not known that it was filled with oil.
[01:09:00]  And they even had a ringer from Equatorial Guinea who they felt they could trust to replace Obi-Yong and give them access.
[01:09:06]  All that Spain needed was a mercenary ambitious enough to risk torture and execution in Black Beach prison for a chance at a massive payday.
[01:09:13]  And in part two, we're all going to meet this mercenary, South Africa's equivalent of Eric Prince, a fellow named Simon Mann.
[01:09:22]  Yeah.
[01:09:23]  Oh boy.
[01:09:24]  So that's where we end in part one.
[01:09:26]  I can't back.
[01:09:28]  I'm like gripped to my seat.
[01:09:30]  I can't wait to meet this new bastard.
[01:09:34]  Yeah, it's going to be exciting and everybody's going to have a fun time learning about him.
[01:09:39]  But first, people should have a fun time learning about you, Bridget Todd.
[01:09:44]  You have a new podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet, and that is about to launch on the iHeartRadio Network.
[01:09:50]  What's y'all's drop day?
[01:09:51]  Oh, it is July 7th.
[01:09:53]  So please subscribe, listen, all of that stuff.
[01:09:57]  Can we talk about that transition for a second, though?
[01:10:00]  It was flawless.
[01:10:02]  It was.
[01:10:03]  I was almost like in awe of it.
[01:10:06]  I really was.
[01:10:07]  I wonder, can I say one more thing before we move away from this?
[01:10:10]  Yes.
[01:10:11]  You can say as many things as you like, yeah.
[01:10:13]  I'm going to say the things.
[01:10:15]  I've spent a lot of time in South Africa, and I will say that like I will never pretend to be an expert on the history or the country or the people.
[01:10:25]  But the one thing that was very clear to me from spending a lot of time in South Africa was that I think that like the people there are like traumatized by how shitty all the shitty experiences they've had with a government and that I think it lasts today.
[01:10:41]  I was very, it was interesting to see how that shit like doesn't go away.
[01:10:46]  It just is kind of like passed on to generations.
[01:10:48]  And so as someone who has spent a lot of time in South Africa, all the shit you're saying, I'm like, oh shit.
[01:10:53]  Yeah, that makes sense.
[01:10:55]  People are fucking traumatized.
[01:10:57]  So I loved my time there, but it just was really a place where, you know, I just feel like even today, I see the reverberations of the people really deserved better.
[01:11:08]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:11:09]  That's kind of like the only real conclusion you can make because both sides in this, if you want to look at them as sides, are just so shitty.
[01:11:16]  Like the dictators of Equatorial Guinea are awful.
[01:11:18]  All the people who try to overthrow them are just trying to get rich and just equally shitty.
[01:11:23]  And there's at no point does anyone involved give a shit about the people who live in Equatorial Guinea.
[01:11:29]  And that's like, yeah, it's a bummer.
[01:11:31]  That's not good.
[01:11:32]  It's not.
[01:11:32]  It's really not.
[01:11:33]  Bad and not good.
[01:11:35]  So, speaking of things that are bad and not good, go back out into the world.

=== Fighting the FDA on a Mountaintop (03:51) ===

[01:11:41]  Or stay inside.
[01:11:43]  And you can go to our website to find our sources, which are under the episode description.
[01:11:49]  BehindtheBastards.com.
[01:11:51]  Or you could follow Robert on Twitter at iWriteOK.
[01:11:53]  Or you could follow us on Twitter and Instagram at BastardsPod.
[01:11:56]  Or you could buy a face mask or a t-shirt or a cell phone case or a mug or a thing or whatever they've decided to sell on TeePublic today.
[01:12:09]  Yeah, our these face masks cure COVID-19 face masks are going to be on sale soon.
[01:12:15]  FDA can help us.
[01:12:17]  FDA approved, written right on the front.
[01:12:21]  So yeah, help us thumb an eye in the FDA's face and get raided in a mountaintop compound in Idaho.
[01:12:32]  That's the dream.
[01:12:33]  That's my dream.
[01:12:34]  And it should be your dream too.
[01:12:37]  Is there information about how folks couldn't join the cult?
[01:12:42]  Not yet.
[01:12:44]  Yeah, the cult is in your heart.
[01:12:46]  The cult is in your heart.
[01:12:47]  You know, you'll find it in your heart as long as you, you know, want to fight the FDA on a mountaintop in Idaho.
[01:12:54]  That's really all it takes.
[01:12:55]  That's the episode.
[01:12:57]  I think that's the episode.
[01:13:12]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[01:13:19]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[01:13:22]  I doctored the test once.
[01:13:24]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[01:13:29]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[01:13:31]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Rancini.
[01:13:33]  My mind was blown.
[01:13:35]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[01:13:36]  This is Love Trapped.
[01:13:38]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[01:13:40]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[01:13:44]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:13:51]  10-10 shots five, city hall building.
[01:13:54]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[01:13:56]  Somebody tell me that.
[01:13:58]  A shocking public murder.
[01:13:59]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[01:14:06]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[01:14:08]  Those are shots.
[01:14:09]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[01:14:12]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
[01:14:14]  That may have been about sex.
[01:14:16]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:14:26]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:14:34]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:14:36]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:14:38]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:14:40]  We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
[01:14:45]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:14:46]  Trust me, babe.
[01:14:47]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:14:57]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[01:15:02]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[01:15:05]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
[01:15:12]  An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
[01:15:16]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[01:15:19]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[01:15:28]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:15:30]  Guaranteed human.