General Butt-Naked and the Liberian Civil War explore how U.S.-founded Liberia evolved into an oligarchy, culminating in Samuel Doe's 1980 coup that brutally executed President Tolbert amid witchcraft accusations. The hosts analyze how colonial extractivism fueled rituals like gaboyo, which Doe exploited while committing ethnic cleansing in Nimba County. Charles Taylor, allegedly aided by the CIA and trained by Gaddafi, ignited a civil war utilizing child soldiers armed with Soviet and U.S. weaponry. Ultimately, the episode frames these atrocities not as unique African failures, but as a direct continuum of American policy influence and colonial violence. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:19
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
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.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Jefferson Mix-Up00:15:40
Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here.
And for the last two years, Behind the Bastards listeners have funded the Portland Diaper Bank, which provides diapers for low-income families.
Last year, y'all raised more than $21,000, which was able to purchase 1.1 million diapers for children and families in need in 2021.
And this year, we're trying to get $25,000 raised for the Portland Diaper Bank, which is going to allow us to help even more kids.
So if you want to help, you can go to BTB Fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank at GoFundMe.
Just type in GoFundMe, BTB fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank.
Again, that's GoFundMe, BTB fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank, or find the link in the show notes.
Thank you all.
Oh, what is viciously executing and publicly torturing my son of God?
It's Good Friday.
Not when you listen to this.
You'll listen to this weeks after Good Friday.
Hi, Shireen.
Lana Eunice, how are you doing?
Hi, Robert Evans.
I'm okay.
Robert's your middle name, right?
Robert Robert.
I'm not going to confirm or deny what my name is or isn't.
I have a number of names, like most people.
Like Jesus, who also.
Like Allah.
Yeah, Allah has Allah.
Like Allah.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Like our Lord and our sovereign, Allah.
Exactly.
Like Ahura Mazda.
Like Buddha.
You know, there's all sorts of everybody's, this time of year, for whatever reason, all the religions are like, we should have a thing, you know?
Yeah, exactly.
We'll have us a Ramadan.
We'll have us a Passover.
We'll have us an Easter.
We're all, or at least all of the, all of the Abrahamic faiths.
I don't know if like, I don't think anything Hindu's going on right now.
I don't think anything Zoroastrian is going on.
Anything, anything Buddhist, probably not any Shinto stuff happening right now, but whatever.
Maybe there is.
It is like...
We've got a couple major ones up there.
Although it's also, I think it's like the dead of summer where a lot of those religions are.
Southeast Asia, this is kind of like the hottest point of the...
I don't know.
I don't know.
Anyway, religion.
Do you like religion, Shireen?
No, please don't hate me.
Internet.
No, I don't.
I actually.
That's fine.
I'm not a big fan myself.
My teenager self would say like I despise religion.
I loathe it.
It made me so angry.
I hated it.
And I think I've like eased up on that language recently because I don't want to offend anybody.
And like I realize for some people, it's like meditative.
And depending on the religion, it can really help people.
It's not for me.
I just, I don't, it's not, I don't like it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, like, that's completely where I am too, Shireen.
Because like when I was a kid, I was a really angry atheist.
Exactly.
You know, after, not when I was, like, when I was like 18, I guess like 17 is kind of when I decided I was an atheist.
But yeah, I started to get really angry about it as a young adult.
And I'm, I'm not angry about it anymore just because like I've realized that all of the things that are shitty about religion are shitty about a bunch of stuff and some people just choose to do shitty stuff.
Yeah.
And whether or not they use a religion to justify it, they'll find other things to justify it if it's not religion.
But that's really beside the point today.
Yeah.
Shireen.
It's not a religion that's shitty.
It's humans.
I get it.
Yeah.
It's not even that they're shitty.
It's just that shitty people will find reasons to do shitty things.
Yes, exactly.
Religion or not.
Yeah, religion or not.
It's just a thing that we do because we're cool.
Speaking of, actually, this does tie in a bit to what we're talking about.
A good segue from Robert Evans.
There's some religion.
There's definitely some religious stuff involved here.
It's going to be real uncomfortable.
Shireen, what do you know about Liberia?
Liberia.
Yeah.
Nothing.
I was going to say that.
You are more or less where most Americans are then.
Okay, great.
Yeah.
I know nothing about most things.
So I'm excited to learn about Liberia today.
You are aware that there's been a bunch of war there, right?
Yes.
Yeah, you've kind of been.
I'm aware at least that there's conflict and tragedy that my brain sometimes turns off because I can only handle so much trauma.
But that's my luxury of being a privileged asshole.
You know what I mean?
Well, yeah, it's very funny because there's a bunch of places in the world where horrible things are going on.
Places like Myanmar, places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Palestine, where people don't, Americans are able not to care because, and to some degree, it's like, yeah, man, the world's fucking big.
There's a lot of stuff going on.
No one can know about all of the bad things that are happening.
And you can't, you shouldn't be expected to be aware of every single terrible thing happening in the world.
There's a particular reason why Americans ought to know more about Liberia.
And it's because we made Liberia.
Now, I'm going to talk, Shireen, today, the main subject of our episode is a fellow who went by the name General Butt Naked.
That's a, that's a truth.
It's pretty fun.
It's a pretty fun name.
Not a fun guy.
Not a fun guy.
But he's one of those dudes.
The broad strokes is that he was this warlord, did a bunch of horrible stuff in the Liberian Civil War, fought naked, hence the name.
And then afterwards, repented.
And there's been a bunch of documentaries about how he's a Christian preacher now and he's apologizing to all his victims.
He's a grifter, in my opinion.
But in order to properly talk about this guy, because a lot of the shit he did, there's a lot of witchcraft and sacrificing babies and all sorts of fucked up shit.
Oh, yeah.
Well, but the thing is, like, that all sounds a lot more like...
You know, there's a problematic history of particularly white dudes like me talking about witchcraft and occult practices in different African countries and getting all like, oh my God, they did this and they did that.
None of it is exactly the way that it seems with like the casual description of what's going on.
So before we talk about General Butt Naked, we're going to have to spend an hour or so talking about the history of conflict in Liberia, where it came from, and how shit like human sacrifice wound up getting kind of ground into the mix there.
So you ready?
You ready for this?
Buckle in?
Yeah, let me click.
Get your sad pants on.
My what pants on?
Sad pants?
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Yeah, they're always on.
Do I ever take those off?
No.
Yeah.
So the first enslaved African people from North America landed at Jamestown on August 20th, 1619.
This is pretty famous because of that New York Times thing.
Now, most of these folks were Angolans who had been captured by Portuguese slavers.
In the centuries that followed, they and the Africans who followed them became an integral part of agriculture and economic viability in the colonies.
When the United States became a thing, a number of the founding fathers, chiefly Thomas Paine, denounced slavery as a terrible evil that would one day tear the new nation apart.
Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner himself, realized this when he wrote his notes on the state of Virginia in 1785.
Here's what he had to say: Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state and thus save the expense of supplying by importation of white settlers the vacancies they will leave?
Deep-rooted prejudices entertained by the whites, 10,000 recollections by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained, new provocations, the real distinctions which nature has made and many other circumstances will divide us into parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race.
So what he's he's talking about here is his idea that like if you're gonna end slavery, you should send the black people who were brought here back to Africa, right?
That's kind of Thomas because otherwise there will be inevitably be a race conflict, you know?
You can't just keep them here if you're going to free them.
That's Thomas Jefferson's attitude.
And there's a number he thinks that black people were probably inferior to white people.
And he thinks that, again, there's just too much anger and whatnot.
He also does note that white people are probably too bigoted for it.
It's a weird mix of things.
He's a strange man.
Now, others among his peers disagreed.
There was an attitude among kind of abolitionists in this early period.
Some felt that black people had just been temporarily degraded by slavery and they could be gradually uplifted to the point of social responsibility.
This is still problematic, right?
The idea that they need to be uplifted rather than just freed, but is generally better than the idea that they're, you know, genetically different.
So I don't know.
As the abolitionist movement picked up steam in the mid-1800s, advocates were often extremely racist themselves.
Many abolitionists believed that freed black people could not exist or keep up in white society.
Others like Jefferson just felt that there would be too much understandable anger over slavery for them to live alongside white people, which is not like an unreasonable attitude to be like, well, shit, why would they want to hang out here?
Like after all the fucked up shit they're going to be doing.
I mean, it's mostly just like they're fearful for their own lives, right?
Like, oh, the minute they are able to, they're going to come after us for us treating them like actual animals.
You know what I mean?
I think there's a mix of that.
I think there's some people who are honest abolitionists and for the time very racially progressive who just like can't imagine them wanting to.
And obviously, like one of the problems you'll hear again and again is a lot of people who are abolitionists are not great at actually listening to black people.
That's a problem the whole abolitionist movement has.
Some people are better at it than others, but it's like a thing that happens at periods of time.
So, yeah, all of these discussions are going on, late 1700s, early 1800s, as this abolitionist movement is building up steam.
And some of the people who are for abolition start to advocate for a sort of sponsored immigration program to send freed black slaves out of the United States and back to Africa.
And so this is not, they're advocating for abolition in the United States, but they're also saying we've got all these free black people.
We should create a colony in Africa for them to send them back to.
And that once we start freeing more slaves, those people can go to that colony, right?
One of these men was Pennsylvania reformer John Parrish.
He advocated manumitting, that means freeing slaves, and sending them back home where they could experience, quote, liberty and the rights of citizenship without being particularly near him.
His hope was that sending over a small number of black folks would convince other free black people to leave North America and that this would somehow inspire the better nature of slave owners to free their own people.
Quote, many persons of humanity who continue to hold slaves would be willing to liberate them on condition of their so removing.
You get what he's saying?
He's not, he's actually kind of saying the same thing Jefferson was because Jefferson was arguing like, well, you can't just free him and have them stay here, you know, otherwise it'll be a problem.
So Parrish is being like, well, obviously, maybe a lot of these slave owners are really good people.
They just see that it's too dangerous to let these people be free.
So we have to, it's very racist, again, but it's also not a kind of racism in America that we talk about a lot because a lot of this history has been kind of brushed over.
I mean, yeah, it's like kind of backwards because you're like, they're not saying like, oh my God, controlling another human is terrible because you're still controlling them.
You're still like, okay, let's shake them out.
You know, let's say they are saying that.
They're just saying it's not the worst thing.
Right, exactly.
Like that, like freeing them would be right.
Because they are saying it's bad to have slaves, but they're just saying it's worse to, you know.
Again, very racist, just kind of a type of racism we maybe don't talk about enough that existed in this period.
So he felt like a lot of slave owners didn't want slaves.
They just kind of inherited them and they were scared about what black people would do if they were free, which is a very silly thing to think.
In December of 1816, a mix of people with good, bad, racist, and only slightly racist intentions formed the American Colonization Society.
Now, part of this group, some of these people are very legitimately just like, again, if you're like a civil rights advocate, you're born into the mid-1800s, you see this nightmare system.
I can see ways that a decent person would be like, maybe this is the best thing.
Maybe providing these people, like, it's so racist here.
It's so hard for them.
Maybe if we tried to set them up with a place nice back in Africa, this would not be, this would be a more ethical situation than having to live with all these fucking horrible racists, right?
Some people in the American colonization society are like that.
However, it is primarily a dark money organization funded by slave owners.
And what's going on here is that powerful slave owners want to push the idea of an African colony for freed slaves because this will remove free black people out of the Americas.
And free black people they see as like competition for slave labor that they can profit from.
Wait, competition for slave repeats.
Yeah, they've got slaves, which is free labor.
Yeah.
But free black people, because they, you know, work for less than free white people because of racism, right?
That's competition for low-paying work that otherwise will go to their slaves that they just profit by.
Oh, I see.
Okay.
You know?
Wow.
Yes.
Yes.
I think they also see it as like a safety valve because again, they're really racist.
They understand that like some states, black people are going to get free, but they don't want them sticking around because as long as there are free black people in North America, that's a body of people who are going to organize to abolish slavery, right?
There's a few reasons, right?
Yes.
So there's a number of reasons why slave owners really like the idea of a colony in Africa for free slaves.
And their dark money is kind of funding the American Colonization Society.
Yeah, and again, this group, there are abolitionists in this group, but it's not committed to abolition.
I want to quote now from a write-up on the American, I want to quote now from a write-up on the African American Intellectual History Society's Black Perspectives blog by Nicholas Guyat.
Quote, its origins and trajectory always evinced a watery commitment to abolition.
Two facts made this commitment supremely insidious.
First, it placed the burden of ending slavery on the benevolent slaveholders themselves, who would supposedly free their slaves when provided with an outlet for doing so.
Second, it marked an epic endorsement of racial segregation, effectively denying the possibility of coexistence while promoting what would later be termed separate but equal.
So you can see the roots of a couple of really fucked up things in the American colonization society.
Now, before the souring of sectional relations in the 1830s and 1840s, colonization also supplied a bridge between mainstream anti-slavery sentiments in both North and South.
The ACS opened auxiliary societies from New England through North Carolina.
When upper southern legislatures engaged with the question of ending slavery, invariably they identified a black colony as the prerequisite for general emancipation.
Only the deep south became a no-go zone for colonization enthusiasts, with white politicians, editors, and businessmen mobilizing their considerable power against even a feather-light anti-slavery challenge.
In New England, by contrast, colonization retained a considerable appeal through the first years of the Civil War.
So colonization is proper in like these kind of progressive, you might say, like liberal chunks of the North where abolition is, and that's why slavery enthusiasts don't want any discussion of this in the South, right?
Because it's even a little bit of abolitionist tendency is too much for them.
But they love pushing this in the North because it's a lot.
If you can get people focusing on this, they're not focusing on abolishing slavery, which would actually hurt them, right?
Racism in Liberia00:10:05
Right, right.
You get what's going on here?
Yeah.
So the chief accomplishment of the American Colonization Society was the establishment of the colony of Liberia on Africa's west coast.
It was founded in 1821 by a group of roughly 10,000 free black migrants who took one look at the U.S. in the 1820s and figured, well, shit, anywhere's better than here, right?
Like from the point of view of these guys who are leaving and ladies who are leaving, it's like, yeah, of course.
Like, I get why you wouldn't want to stick around North America right about now.
It doesn't seem like that's a safe bet.
The first big wave of immigration to Liberia was, yeah, about 10,000 people.
And this occurs over a period of time from 1822 to 1841 in several successive waves.
And these migrants form several towns on the coast with names like Robertsport, Monrovia, Buchanan, and Greenville.
Although I think their initial Monrovia's first capital name is Christopolis.
Christopolis.
Yep.
That was the first name.
Very funny.
Very funny.
Although it's not going to be funny, actually, because spoilers, colonialism.
So because of racism, these black people who have gone to Liberia are not actually the masters of their own domain at first.
Liberia is a colony of the United States, and the new immigrants are ruled by a white governor who appoints white officials.
Wow.
Now, the new residents of the city did have a legislative council that they got to vote for and their own elected representatives who work with the governor, right?
So they do have representation, certainly more than they did in the United States at the time, right?
But final approval for all actions voted for by the council pended on approval by a board of managers for the colonization society who lived in Washington, D.C.
So if the black people living there voted for something, they had to send it back across the Atlantic to get ratified by this council who could also annul laws.
So they basically just like they leave these plantations that are enslaved in the states and they go to this just dry island plantation.
Oh boy, you have predicted some of where this is going.
Oh no.
But not for them actually.
But yeah, there is like this is obviously very fucked up.
It's in keeping though with their idea of some of these dudes that like they need to be trained up before they can run their own country, right?
That's why they're doing it this way.
That's why the white people are doing it this way.
Right.
Very common.
Now, it is the good news is that anytime they send a dude over there, a white dude over there to help govern the colony, that motherfucker dies immediately, right?
Because there's all sorts of bugs and shit that are biting white people.
There's all sorts of shit that kills white people in Africa in this period because we don't have good medicine.
They're just dropping like flies.
They can't handle a fucking mosquito by white-ass motherfuckers.
I got a sun.
No, it's so funny.
Yeah, so these guys keep dying, which is a real problem.
It makes it difficult for them to run the colony the way they want to.
It makes it hard for them to have white people to report back to D.C.
And beyond that, the society after the earliest years runs into a funding crunch.
So part of this is because they stop getting donations because abolitionists wake up to the fact that this is a dark money thing for slave owners.
Part of this is that the conflict over slavery gets nastier and slave owners stop putting, like they start putting money elsewhere, right?
So starting in the 1840s, white oversight of Liberia starts to peel away.
Liberians begin to agitate for total autonomy.
And when the last white governor dies in 1841, they get it.
The society appoints a black governor, Joseph Roberts, who became the first not white person to run things in Liberia.
Now, the colony then, at this point, you know, stops being a colony, not really a colony after this moment, and it becomes an independent nation in July of 1847.
And if that had been all that happened, Sherbine, this would be one of the less depressing stories in the history of slavery.
God damn it, Robert.
Here's the thing.
Now, you send 10,000 black people in America, pretty much all born in the United States as slaves.
Some of them born free, but you take these black Americans and you send them to the west coast of Africa to set up cities.
Now, are you seeing any potential problems here?
Well, I mean, are there already, I'm confused.
Were there already people on Liberia?
Oh, yes.
There sure were.
Am I in the right direction?
Absolutely were people there before.
Okay, yeah, I think I understand where it's going.
100% were people there.
I mean, I'm sounding like people that don't understand about Palestine.
Of course, there's people in Palestine.
There's a ton of people there.
Okay, and like, great.
Again, these dudes, these migrants are obviously these people were stolen from somewhere in Africa, or at least their ancestors were, right?
But they're from potentially all over, like certainly not Liberia in specific generally.
And also, they speak English.
They're Christian.
They dress like Americans.
They have been living free in U.S. cities.
Yeah, right.
So these are, this is not a case of like these people returning to their homeland.
These people are colonizing Liberia.
And if you know anything about colonization, it's not nice.
And this was not suddenly fine just because the guys doing the colonization in Africa were black.
It's still pretty messy.
And I'm going to quote now from an article by M.B. Akpan in the Canadian Journal of African Studies titled Black Imperialism.
Quote, The settlers constituted the rulers who ran the Liberian government in much the same way as the British and French constituted rulers in neighboring colonial territories like Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast.
However, actual power rested in the hands of prominent members of certain leading settler families or lineages in a manner that maintained some balance of power among the families.
The settlers on whom the government of Liberia thus evolved as from 1841 were essentially American rather than African in outlook and orientation.
They retained a strong sentimental attachment to America, which they regarded as their native land.
They wore the Western mode of dress which they had become accustomed in America, however unsuitable this dress was to Liberia's tropical weather.
A black silk topper and a long black frock coat for men and a Victorian silk gown for women.
They built themselves framed stone or brick porticoed houses of one and a half to two stories similar to those of the plantation owners in the southern states of America.
And they preferred American food like flour, cornmeal, butter, lard, pickled beef, bacon, and American grown rice, large quantities of which they imported annually, to African foodstuff like cassava, plantain, yams, palm oil, sweet potatoes, and country rice grown by Africans in the Liberian hinterland.
They were Christians, spoke English as their mother tongue, and practiced monogamy.
They held land individually in contrast with the communal ownership of the African population.
And their political institutions were modeled on those of America, with an elected president and a legislature made up of a Senate and a House of Representatives.
So that in spite of their color, they were, as a rule, as foreign and lacking in sentimental attachment to Africa, as were European colonialists elsewhere in Africa, like the British, the French, the Portuguese, and the Spaniards.
Yeah, that's a really stirring the pot here.
I mean, like, it just they're like conduits or like vessels for still like white agendas, it sounds like, even if they don't mean to be.
I mean, it's not so much white as like Western, because obviously they're not white.
For me, it's interchangeable.
I know that's a mistake, but yes.
Yeah, they are very much, they are Westerners, and they see to a large extent the people who had been living in Liberia as like backwards, devil-worshipping weirdos who don't deserve political rights, right?
So the indigenous Liberians don't get to vote in the same way that like, yeah, like they're all shut out to a significant extent at least from the franchise, right?
And if you're thinking, boy howdy, I bet this caused a problem somewhere down the line, then good news.
You're right on the money.
Over the next half century and change, the Americo-Liberians became an oligarchy, practicing what one historian called a, quote, sort of sub-imperialism at African expense.
By 1900, about 15,000 black American immigrants had settled in Liberia, along with around 300 immigrants from the West Indies.
Liberia is often claimed in 20th century history books as one of two African states that remained independent during the scramble for Africa, the other being Ethiopia.
But this is not quite accurate.
Ethiopia is for sure.
But Liberia was a colony that just became independent in 1847, like certainly a lot earlier than other colonies did, because most of Africa hadn't been colonized in 1847.
But the fact that it was not recolonized doesn't really mean anything because it was already a colony.
Right, right.
And the actual indigenous people in Liberia were a sub-class within their own homeland with very little economic or political power.
The Americo-Liberians held all of the power, and their Americo-Liberian Whig Party was essentially the only legal political party in the country from 1860 to 1980.
Despite the fact that immigrant-descended Liberians made up only 2% of the population, they effectively turned the rest of the country into a profit-making engine for themselves.
In 1931, an international commission found that several prominent Ameri-Co-Liberians had enslaved Indigenous Africans.
No.
So, yeah, the West is pretty virus.
It does work that way sometimes.
God, you know what else?
Is a virus, Shireen.
Wraithing on.
It is a virus.
It is a virus that keeps our democracy functioning in a healthy manner.
A Virus Spreads00:06:40
Like the Epstein-Barr virus, you know, you can't get enough of it.
Just nom-nom-nom.
Good and tasty.
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
That's what everyone says about the Epstein-Barr virus.
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I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Owespi and Michael Maracini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver 40-caliber handgun was recovered at the scene from iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber deducts a shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, we're back.
We're really enjoying that message from our sponsors, the Epstein Bar virus.
Catch it tomorrow.
Anyway, so if you want a good example of how like Sophie, Sophie, shake her head.
The good people at the Epstein Bar virus paid us serious money for that plug.
Whatever makes you happy, Robert.
That does make me happy.
I'd be happier if everybody went and got the Epstein bar virus.
Let's move on from the bit, I think.
I think, should we move on from the bit?
Is it not?
You think so?
I'm going to look up what the Epstein Bar virus does because I've forgotten.
After all that time.
Yeah, well, you know, I just remember the name.
I'm so lucky.
Or like, I'm not sure.
Oh, it's like, it's the herpes virus, I guess.
Oh, wait, no, it's mono.
Is it mono?
I don't know.
Let's, let's, let's ignore.
Yeah, I think it's mono.
Yeah, it's mono.
Say it for the 17th time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's, that's that good shit.
Um, yeah.
So get mono.
Everybody get mono.
Okay.
Yeah.
Sophie, how we doing?
You happy?
Are you happy with me as a podcaster?
No.
You glad you made this series of choices in your life that led to you sitting here while a guy talks about how everyone should get mono on a podcast about Liberia?
Kind of.
You psyched?
Kind of, actually.
I was going to say.
I was going to say, even though Sophie is like not, she's like, wasn't talking, like, I'm just so glad her camera's always on because I can just like, every time you say something, I can just look up.
And I know Sophie is like, we connect, you know, she shakes her head and I'm like, yes.
We connect.
And you know what?
Connecting is how people get mono.
Robert.
Anyway, what?
Move on from the bit.
Okay.
Try to make an example.
So we're talking about like mono.
Military Overthrow Plans00:14:30
Colonization spreads, like the colonial mindset and the imperial mindset spreads from the United States to Liberia.
That is impressive, actually.
As we noted, like some of these Americo-Liberians take slaves from the Native Africans for themselves.
They also create a plantation.
I mean, several, but there's one in particular we're going to talk about right now.
Because this really highlights how fucked up some of the stuff going on here is.
Starting in the 1920s, the Firestone Corporation starts a massive rubber plantation in Liberia, which profits, obviously, the 2% of people who are Americo-Liberian, that sprawls from the coast to like the hills of central Liberia.
It's this like massive thousands and thousands of acres with people like living on it, harvesting rubber for very little money and have very little control over their own lives, like indigenous people laboring day in and day out to harvest the rubber that makes the tires and like the cars that first start filling American streets.
It's pretty cool.
I'm going to quote from a write-up in ProPublica.
At the center of this kingdom was House 53, reserved for the plantation boss.
It stood on a hill overlooking the rest of the plantation, a two-story antebellum-style Georgian colonial mansion of pink brick.
It had a wide porch, six white Corinthian columns, and jalusi windows.
Other homes for expatriates featuring verandas and manicured gardens were scattered nearby in a section of the plantation known as Harbil Hills.
There was a nine-hole golf course, tennis courts, and a country club with a bar.
About three miles down the road was Harbil, Firestone's own company town, a portmanteau formed from the names of the business's founder, Harvey S. Firestone Sr., and his wife Idabel.
It held Firestone's central office, industrial garages, and a latex practicing plant redolent of ammonia and other chemicals.
The town itself was a collection of tin-roofed homes and shops, a grocery store, a bank, schools, and brick-and-cinder block bungalows for mid-level Liberian managers and domestic staff.
There were the homes of the Tappers, the Liberian workers who did the hard work of extracting the latex sap from the trees.
The camps were long, low rows of residences, almost like coops.
Units generally consisted of a single room.
The homes had waddle and daub walls and aluminum roofs.
There were no windows and no kitchens.
The work camps had communal pumps for water and outdoor kitchens for cooking.
There was no electricity.
Bathrooms were outhouses or the nearby bush.
This was the world of the Firestone operation, described in 1990 by one company executive as resembling an old southern plantation.
Wow.
So fucking George H.W. Bush is in the White House, and white people are running a plantation in Africa with the collusion of the Americo-Liberian government, where the workers there are just a couple of steps above being enslaved.
That was like yesterday.
Yeah, real recent.
And when the Civil War starts, Firestone's company representatives are going to make some cool choices about how to help.
Yeah, this is Firestone.
Tire rubber fire.
Yeah, this is where their rubber comes from.
A plantation in Africa.
So that's neat.
Now, you will not be surprised to hear that an awful lot of Liberians, and I mean like indigenous Liberians, were not jazzed with the status quo, right?
People have problems with it.
It was a pretty.
Yeah, not psyched.
It was, you have to give it though, a really effective system because Liberia kind of, if you treat the Americo-Liberian rule as a colonial project, it lasts longer than basically any other African colony.
Other than like South Africa, arguably, like that's right.
Yeah.
It's because like people are never taught about it.
Or like, you know what I mean?
It went under the radar because no one even knew it was there.
Well, I don't know.
I think there's ignorant.
I just think don't know enough about geography.
I mean, most, I think, I think very little of this history is known to Americans.
Like it's not something we really talk about.
I remember vaguely hearing that one of the like it I remember in like a textbook I had in high school that was talking about like abolition movement pre-Civil War.
There was like a little box in like one of the pages that summarized like the American colonization society and the colonizing of Liberia in like four paragraphs.
And like that was just kind of it that like, oh, some people went over there.
This was one thing that folks tried.
Like, I don't, I didn't, I didn't hear this.
I didn't learn anything about like the, again, like black imperialism is the title of one of the, and obviously it's not, I don't think it's, I think they're using that to kind of elicit a reaction.
This is still in a lot of ways white imperialism.
It's just using black people because there's a huge financial benefit and a military benefit, which we'll discuss later, to the United States because Liberia functions this way.
Yeah.
So, yeah, it's a pretty effective system.
The Americo-Liberians remain in charge until 1980, when things begin to go terribly wrong.
The last president that the oligarchy was able to successfully keep in power, well, install in power, I should say, was a guy named William Tolbert.
His administration was severely weakened early on due to a series of rice riots in the end of the 1970s.
And by early 1980, his ability to stay in power was teetering on the break.
Because you might guess there was a lot of hunger.
Poor people who are indigenous Liberians generally are starving.
They riot because they want food.
The government cracks down on it brutally.
They arrest a bunch of organizers.
But, you know, they beat this down, but their hold on power is not secure.
Tolbert does not seem to have been a very bright dude because he's not entirely aware of how shaky his position is.
He and his fellow oligarchs felt like they had control mostly locked down because all of the officers in the Liberian military were Ameri-Liberian.
You could not be an indigenous Liberian and be an officer.
Now, here's what's interesting.
All of the enlisted men are indigenous.
And so all of like the sergeants and corporals are indigenous men.
This is exactly the same way.
We talked about years ago, I did an episode on Idi Amin, who becomes the dictator of Uganda, which is a British colony after the British come out.
And Idi Amin was like the highest ranking native African military officer in the military in Uganda when the British left.
And he was a sergeant because the way the British military worked in Africa, all of your officers are white dudes.
All of the enlisted men are black Africans.
Right.
So the people that could die are usually not white.
Yes.
But also the officers are the ones who are supposed to be able to do the coordinating and the actual like executing of military operations.
So that's part of why you don't want indigenous people to be officers because then they'll have sergeants are never supposed to have command over big units of guys, right?
Like that's a thing for captains and majors and colonels and whatnot.
So you can see that the Liberian military is organized the same way that like the British and the French organize their colonial militaries.
And because, again, Idi Amin was a sergeant before he became dictator.
When Liberia has its civil war and the government gets overthrown, it's going to be sergeants who do the overthrowing because that's as high as you can rise in the military as an indigenous person.
So Tolbert was so convinced that he was in a secure position that he started doing the one thing an oligarchic leader of what is effectively a U.S.-backed dictatorship should never do.
He starts to fuck with the U.S. See, the U.S. Department of Defense had come to expect we liked Liberia in part because there's a bunch of benefits, financial benefits.
U.S. companies make a lot of money, cheap labor, get rubber and shit from Liberia.
But also, the U.S. has a bunch of fuckery we get up to in Africa, right?
We got a ton of shit going on in Africa, especially in this period.
And Liberia, we say, hey, we need to land some fucking planes.
We got to keep some Marines there.
We need to keep like a rapid deployment force or whatever.
In the past, Liberia has always like, absolutely, send as many troops as you want.
Like, land your planes here.
Fly out of here.
You're good to go.
We're buddies, you know?
Because intelligent people who are part of this oligarchy recognize that the United States being in your pocket is basically the best thing you can do in terms of staying in power.
What does he think is the benefit of that?
I don't think he's a very bright dude.
I'm going to admit I'm not the most knowledgeable on this, but it's generally regarded as kind of a baffling decision.
But he's also like, you know, the U.S. is kind of like, I think, withholding some aid funding and stuff out of civil rights concerns.
So there's like, there's some pressure being put on his regime, I think, by the U.S., and he decides to like push back in this way.
This proves to be a really bad call because when basically DC decides we want a new U.S. rapid deployment force in Liberia, and they ask permission, and Tolbert is like, no.
So then the CIA and the Department of Defense are like, well, why do we want this guy in power now?
This doesn't benefit us at all.
Well, they try to.
It's kind of debatable as to how much of an impact they really have on this, but they certainly start thinking about it and they start going through some names of like what sergeants and whatnot in the in the Liberian military do we think could like overthrow the government.
It was generally assumed Liberia doesn't have much in the way of other political parties yet, so there's not really an established opposition.
So it was assumed the army is the best place to actually get some kind of revolutionary leader.
They're not really able to move forward unless the situation changes though.
And that change starts to come courtesy of the Progressive Alliance of Liberia, an advocacy group which decides to become a political party in 1980.
They start holding events and talk spread that Tolbert's regime was planning to execute a bunch of the organizers of the riots who were still imprisoned on the one year anniversary of the Rice riots to like kind of solidify power, threaten these people.
So this inspires a lot of local Liberians to do something ahead of that date.
And it's very likely that the CIA had some sort of, I don't think we know exactly what, they were certainly talking about overthrowing Tolbert.
And then it happens.
It's again, I can't tell you exactly their role here, but what happens is that a group of 17 soldiers, mostly sergeants, which is the highest rank that Liberians could hold, attempt to launch a coup ahead of that anniversary.
And I'm going to quote now from the Liberian Civil Wars by Charles River Editors.
The senior ranking member of the coup party, although not its leader, was Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, an almost entirely unknown figure.
The decision was rather spontaneous and aided by alcohol.
The party set off on the evening of the 11th, fully armed, and made its way to the foot of the Barclay Training Center towards Capitol Hill and the executive mansion.
The streets were unlit, and entry to the grounds of the mansion was gained without challenge.
At about 0100 hours on the morning of the 12th, the coup party broke into the basement, also without encountering any challenge, and cautiously entered the upstairs section.
Now, purely by chance, it turns out that President Tolbert had been out at a Baptist convention.
He was a preacher, so he had been preaching at this convention.
And instead of going back to his compound, he decides to go back and sleep at the Capitol building that night.
So he's in his bathroom in his pajamas when he hears gunfire, which is the coup members assaulting his guards.
The whole thing is very messy.
It ends with Tolbert, his teenage nephew, and a bunch of guards all executed brutally.
These are very violent killings.
When Tolbert's body is discovered the next day, his corpse was found mutilated.
As best as anyone can tell, a corporal named Harrison Pinnow had shot him in the head after Tolbert attempted to bribe him.
For more detail, I'm going to turn again to the quote from that book, The Liberian Civil Wars.
Quote, After the shooting, Corporal Pinno was asked what he thought he was doing, and his reply was that he wanted to see Tolbert die in order to debunk a generally held belief that the president was a witch doctor.
The idea of leadership allied to sorcery remains common enough in Africa, and most Liberian leaders tended to allow mythology of that nature to pass since it added to the mystique of their rule.
Tolbert habitually carried a short ivory-tipped cane, and the belief was that it was carved from the femur of a human leg bone.
It was remarked by one soldier that if Tolbert had laid the cane down, he would not have been killed.
But it is unlikely that he was carrying any ceremonial accoutrements at that particular moment.
Regardless, three more bullets were put in his head just to ensure the job was done.
And with that, the 19th president of the Liberian Republic lay dead on the floor of his bedroom in a pool of blood.
Fascinating.
He gets disemboweled after this.
At some point after he's killed, his guts get removed, which is, again, seen as like the best way to kill a witch doctor.
It is hard to say who did this because after the coup proved successful, these 17 initial dudes are joined by like 100 other soldiers.
They find the president's liquor cabinet and they all just get shithouse drunk and go on a killing spree.
They just start murdering like anybody associated with the old government, right?
Wow.
Yeah.
So this is gnarly.
It's also like you're part of an oppressed class.
You're used as cannon fodder by the government.
Like you have no rights and you get a chance to murder them all.
Historically, you murder them all.
Right.
This is not the only place something like this has happened.
So we're going to talk a lot more about disembowelment, cannibalism, and other similar subjects, but we should probably discuss what those things mean in a Liberian context.
Because again, a lot of this stuff gets like over like focused on by foreigners talking about like this conflict and being like, oh my God, there's cannibals and witch doctors.
Talk about why that exists and what that means.
Are we going to talk about witchy stuff?
A little bit.
Yeah.
We are going to talk about the particular part of West Africa where the Liberian colony is established has a history of a practice called gaboyo.
And gaboyo is a practice whereby people are killed so that their body parts can be used as sacrifices to magically obtain certain benefits.
Now, one like local news source, kind of like a West African news source, described this as an ancient practice and notes that Liberian elites, which generally means the Americo-Liberians, never really attempted to find ways to stop this and never really worked on a good way for how to do it.
Colonial Body Practices00:04:33
And since they tended to be Christian and kind of dicks, indigenous practices developed a degree of gravity as like acts of resistance to the oligarchy.
A version of this happens in Haiti, right?
Where a lot of these traditional practices become associated with resistance to the colonial regime.
Now, also, that local source I found, scholars will quibble with aspects of that because again, as was noted above, Tolbert, who's Americo-Liberian, and other presidents would definitely like signpost to some of these kind of beliefs about the-make them a little bit invincible or like the mystify.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So anyway, the fact that a lot of these, these kind of traditional, like Gaboyo, this traditional practice is seen as kind of a resistance practice to the Christian and like very Western regime.
This seems to have caused what had been very fairly uncommon practices, spiritual practices before colonization to grow and mutate.
University, yeah, because this is what happens in Liberia.
All of the shit we're going to be talking about that happens in the Civil War, all these really fucked up practices, these are a lot of people will argue, did not really exist in the same fashion prior to colonization.
Yeah, they were like in response to being colonized and oppressed.
They were like, we should latch onto these things that are becoming this form of resistance.
Yeah.
And they're also, they're going to change over time.
So University of Wisconsin professor Florence Berneau writes that, quote, public rumors depict human sacrifice and often related sorceries as the most common way to achieve personal success, wealth, and prestige in times of economic shortage and declining social opportunities.
Political leaders are widely believed to perform ritual murder to ensure electoral success and power, and many skillfully use these perceptions to build visibility and deference.
So people like a lot of these rulers in this period like aren't necessarily doing these things, but they are kind of signaling that they do, which leads to an increased belief that there's some efficacy to this.
And Berneau notes that rather being a truly ancient practice, Gaboyo and other similar practices have roots in the past, but are influenced in their modern forms by the extractive nature of colonialism.
Quote, the colonial situation reveals significant contradictions in the Western fiction of a modern disconnect between body and power.
The series of political and moral transgressions triggered by the conquest made apparent how Europeans themselves envisioned political survival as a form of positive exchange revolving around the body fetish.
In the colony, black and white bodies became re-sacralized as political resources.
Think about how in the body fetish?
Like, like, are you saying that?
Fetish is kind of like a religious term for like an object of sort of like worship or at least of spiritual focus.
That's like needed to, okay, I understand that, but like, that's so.
Think about one of so one of the things people talk about, like cannibalism in the Congo, and one thing they'll point out is that a lot of these practices were influenced or even have their origin in what the Belgians were doing and taking the hands of people who did not like harvest enough rubber.
Because like, what they're pointing out is that like, well, from the perspective of these people living in this region, Europeans are engaging in the same act.
They're taking pieces of human bodies and they are using them to gain power in some way.
Why wouldn't that work?
Well, it's like you get power by taking somebody's hand from them, right?
You get power over the whole community, you know, as this threat.
How is that any meaningfully different than like you kill somebody and you take a part of their body part and like eat it or whatever?
Like you can see a relation between those two things.
And you can see how like the extractive nature of colonial capitalism on these people influences these ideas of like sacrificing and taking pieces of the body in order to gain power.
You know, it's not, this is not evolving in a point that these scholars, this doesn't, these practices aren't, they're not novel.
It's not just people doing what they've been doing for thousands of years.
They have evolved and changed over the period of colonization as much as everyone has.
And so have these practices.
And these practices cannot be extricated from capitalism or from colonization, right?
So by the time Sgt Doe and his allies overthrow the government, these practices had become, quote, not a marginal, but a central dimension of the nature of public authority, leadership, and popular identities.
And this is going to cause a lot of real nasty problems.
But you know what else is going to cause some real nasty problems, Shireen?
Evolving Resistance Rituals00:05:03
Epstein bar virus?
Oh boy, howdy.
Let me tell you, the Epstein bar.
Sorry, Sersei.
I shouldn't have brought it back.
I'm sorry.
Causes the problem of having a good time.
Look, everybody loves a little bit of mono.
Smooch, smooch.
It was very popular in my high school.
Me too, actually.
All the kids loved it.
All right.
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In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
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My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon and I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
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Ah, we're back.
And continue to be the only podcast with the courage to be supported by mono nucleos.
Savage Political Murders00:16:13
Oh my god.
Yeah, that was my moment.
That's on me, Sophie.
It's on me.
It's on responsibility.
It is.
It is.
Look, fucking NPRs, whatever thing they do, the daily, that New York Times podcast, those fucking cowards would never be sponsored by the Epstein Barr virus.
Cowards.
Cowards, all of them.
I will say, though, like, there's an impulse that I won't entertain.
Like, this, this fascination with physical body and power and like what that means, like on a philosophical level.
Like, I'm so fascinated by that.
And I, I, I said this before on other podcasts, but there's always a tendency I have in any podcast I guess on to just become philosophizy.
And I won't do that this time, but I will say I have the impulse to, because it's very fascinating when you think about that overlap and that connection because it's like so, I don't know what it is.
It's, it's just fucking wild.
I don't know.
I don't know what the word is.
I would really encourage people to read some of what Bruno has written on Florence Bruneau, B-E-R-N-A-U-L-T, I think that's how it's pronounced, from the University of Wisconsin.
Because there's a lot of like writing on this, not just in Liberia, because like versions of this are recognized in other colonies, but it is really, we talked about it a bit in some of our Congo episodes.
It is a really fascinating dimension.
And it also, you often get from, not, not just from racists, because obviously racists be racisting, but from like people who don't, who are racist, but don't want to frame themselves that way talking about like problems in Africa as like, well, you do have this problem of like, you've got this ancient and culture that has some really savage dimensions.
And, you know, this is a problem in like Liberia of like attaining any kind of peace.
And it's like, well, actually, those practices aren't, they are evolved from ancient practices, but they're very much rooted in the shit that like was done to these people to make them a productive rubber plantation.
You know?
Yeah.
No, no.
It's that part does not get glossed over.
You know what I mean?
Really, it's like savage practices.
Should be discussed.
Like, they are not any more savage than slavery and then colonialism.
You know, like they're just nastier looking because there's a lot of value put in kind of like making the plantations.
That's why people have weddings at plantations, right?
Because you're a slave owner, you dress it up more.
It is so embarrassing how many like friends of friends or whatever, just the photos of like having a wedding on a plantation makes me want to vomit.
But like, why, why is it glossed over that like lynching happened and all these things?
And like, it's still, it still fucking happens.
You know what I mean?
Like these violent acts that are so disgusting.
I will say it right here.
I think killing a dude in battle and eating his heart is a thousand times less gross than forcing a man to labor for you until he dies.
100% agree.
Yes.
Way less gross.
Yeah.
God, that's, I don't know.
I fucking people, man.
I don't know.
Like also like body power, all this stuff.
It's also in every culture, not every culture.
I can like think of a few cultures that still incorporate this like fascination with like someone like taking a part of someone's body to demonstrate your power over them.
Like look at, look at Samurai.
You know what I mean?
Like it's just like there's like, and I can, I want to deep dive into this off-air.
There's somebody, there's, I mean, a lot has been written.
This is really a fascinating thing to read into.
We're not going to, I don't, I don't want to pretend we're doing anything but scratching the surface, but it is important to scratch the surface because when we read these lurid stories of like child sacrifice and cannibalism, you need to know that it's more complicated than just like, look at this fucked up thing they do in Liberia, right?
Look at this fucked up thing these non-white people have done for all this time because they're uncivilized or whatever.
It's like it's important to understand that it's like, it's part of a continuum of violence and it's not the, it's, it's an ugly, it's certainly bad, but it's not like, it's not the start of it.
And it's not the part that has caused the most harm at scale.
Yeah, agree.
Okay.
By the time Sergeant Doe and his allies overthrew the government, these practices had become, again, like central to the nature of public authority.
And guys like Tolbert probably maybe aren't actually doing anything.
Certainly not aren't doing some of the stuff that other people will do.
But when these indigenous folks come into power, they have this expectation that like, this is what you do when you're in power.
These practices are both how you submit your power publicly and also how you ensure that you won't lose it.
Right.
So Doe founds a new military junta government with himself at the head.
Most of the people that he let run the country are members of the Kron ethnic group because Doe is cron.
They had been traditionally a fairly minor group in terms of their like numbers and power in the country, but Doe puts them at the center of a building shit show.
The government he headed was at least as brutal and violent as the one he'd replaced.
And by the way, the Firestone Plantation keeps right on chugging along.
Because Doe comes in in part to be pro-U.S., right?
He's very, he doesn't want, he doesn't want to fuck up things for business, you know?
Like, because I think that U.S. alliance is beneficial to him.
Yeah, exactly.
He's all about that.
So, yeah, they're nasty as shit.
One of the one of the most infamous moments, like right after taking power, when everyone's still kind of like, because again, Liberia prior to this had been, they were very integrated into African, the continent.
Like there's all these different economic and political organizations that are for different, that all of these multiple African states will be a part of, right?
So even before they're integrated in Africa, yeah.
But even as a colonized state, it was still like not, it wasn't like shitty.
Like before they became like before it was black imperialized, it was still a colony, right?
No, no, no.
It was established by the U.S. Like it had just been people living in Africa.
Like no, I'm sorry.
I'm talking about the government Doe overthrows, right?
The Tolbert government, the Americo-Liberian government, they're integrated into the political Anderson.
Yeah.
So all of these, when he overthrows the government, all of these, he arrests all of these government officials who have, who are like friends with the people running Nigeria and like Kenya and all of these other countries, right?
They're in political organizations together.
They're like managing trade deals.
They're going on vacation.
They're like there are, they are buds with the other people who are in power in Africa.
And now they're in prison.
And Doe, in a surprise moment, has them all executed by drunken soldiers on television.
Holy shit.
Oh my God, television.
I forgot how modern this was.
Fucking hell.
This is like the 80s, baby.
Oh, my God.
So this really pisses off a lot of other people and like a lot of other African governmental leaders, right?
Because like, that's my fucking buddy you just shot in the street.
Like, what the fuck, dude?
Yeah.
Jesus Christ, man.
So this causes a lot of folks in the international community to support his ouster.
Still, though, the Reagan administration is like, hey, you're willing to let us land planes there.
Like, we'll play ball, you know?
They, they invite Doe to the White House.
He meets with the president where Ronald Reagan, in what might be an early senior moment, refers to him as Chairman Mo instead of Chairman Doe.
And Doe just kind of like goes with it, you know?
Oh my God.
We have to have, we have to stop having these.
We have to be ageist, but there has to be a lot of people who are going to be fucking country.
Look, there's things we, we're all fine with the idea that you can be too young to do certain things.
Okay.
Maybe you can be too old to do certain things.
You're right.
Exactly.
Even now, I mean, that's whatever.
There are so many moments where like be in Congress.
Look.
Yeah.
Just, oh my God, we're being governed by people that are slowly fading away.
And not confident.
Can't be president until 35, which is an implicit acknowledgement that the age you are impacts your ability to do the job property.
Anyway, this is a rant for elsewhere.
Yeah, another conversation the other day.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Mo, which is what Reagan calls him, assures the Reagan administration that Liberia is totally going to return to democracy.
December of 1985, right?
Need a couple of years to get stuff into shape, right?
Get purge the government of all these bad people.
You know, I'm going to fix stuff up and then I'm going to stop being dictator, right?
1985.
We're a democracy, baby.
So Mo knows he does have to hold, or Doe knows he just does have to hold an election.
Sorry, the baby left.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
He knows he's got to hold an election, but he also knows that, like, I'm not going to have a real election.
So he does the kind of shit dictators do, right?
You know, and he cracks down every time political parties will rise up.
He'll find excuses to arrest them.
He's constantly arresting and purging people, including other folks he'd carried out the coup with.
And obviously, a lot of resistance starts to bubble up to his regime.
And the nexus of anti-Doe sentiment forms around a woman named Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
She's an economist who'd been educated in the U.S. and had worked as an executive for Citibank.
She decided to run for election alongside Jackson F. Doe, who is not related to Sergeant Doe, right?
Separate Does.
She's in the state.
She comes back.
She comes back.
That's one of the things she gets a lot of like early kind of respect as she leaves the U.S. to go back to Liberia to run.
So they run for president with the Liberian Action Party.
The election is held largely so the bad Doe.
I'm going to call him Good Doe and Bad Doe from this point on because it's going to get too confusing anyways.
I like it.
And Doe's doing this because there's like $93 million in U.S. aid funds that he wants, but he has to do an election first.
Election, right?
He wins the election, but like immediately in every independent observer is like, well, that was completely fraudulent.
The U.S. decides to work with bad doe anyway, because again, he's smarter than Tolbert.
He's not going to like say no to the U.S. military establishment.
So Doe sets to work carrying out, happily carrying out an ethnic cleansing in Nimba County, where Jackson Doe had called home because he gets to see where people are voting against him.
He burns their ballots and then he sends his soldiers to massacre them.
He actually was awaiting just to see where he's hated the most.
Yep.
Yep.
Fucking hell, man.
So his, you know, again, the troops carrying out these massacres are mostly cron, like him, right?
Because again, he's very much, and there's other ethnic groups that are kind of allied with the cron, right?
This does really break down on like racial lines, tribal lines, kind of whatever you want to call it.
But so he sends his cron soldiers into this region, which is inhabited by other peoples, and he massacres a shitload of them because he sees them as like enemies of the regime.
And whenever he captures men who had been like political leaders agitating against him, he'll have them mutilated and have their corpses paraded through the streets so soldiers can cut off pieces to eat or keep as souvenirs.
This isn't good for the economy, Shireen.
Now, I'm not an economic expert, but I'm not surprised to hear that this was like bad for money.
Right.
You might not want to invest in a country where this is going on quite as much, you know?
And televisions exist, remember?
So this is able to be documented.
People are looking at this and like, well, maybe I'm going to pause on some of those developed those building funds for a moment.
Might want to wait until this parading corpses thing is over.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
See how it shakes out.
So further economic problems are caused by the fact that the minister of procurement, shoe designer Charles Taylor, had embezzled something like a million dollars.
Shoe designer?
Yeah, Chuck Taylor's.
He's the what of what?
He's the guy who designed the Chuck Taylor.
No, no, what was his?
Charles Taylor.
Well, he's the he's the minister of procurement for Liberia.
Yeah, why'd you say that as if it was like duh?
Like, well, how is that a thing?
You know, you've heard of Chuck Taylor.
I know, I've heard, yeah, but like, I didn't know the inventor of fucking Converse was.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's a Liberian warlord.
Oh, like, don't look that up.
Is that something everyone knows again?
I just like.
Yeah, definitely common knowledge.
I'm willfully ignorant so much of my time, so much of my life.
I just can't handle this.
That was a lie, Shireen.
I'm sorry.
I can't do this to you anymore.
Yeah, I was lying.
It was just a joke.
Well, no, there's a Charles Taylor and he embezzles a million dollars from the Liberian government because of warlords.
The world is so fucked up and crazy.
I don't believe anything you say.
Like, Dr. It was going to burn my fucking converse after this fucking episode.
I can't believe it.
It was just a joke because again, like Chuck Taylor's Charles Taylor, I thought it was funny.
I'm way too gullible when I come to the point.
I know, I know.
I'm going to get roasted on the internet.
I don't fucking care.
Whatever.
No, I mean, Shireen, this is why I tell everybody one lie.
You should never trust me.
Never trust Robert.
Never trust you.
I mean, yeah, maybe, maybe there's a level of me that trusts you.
This isn't on you.
This is on me, Shireen.
Firestone.
Like, Firestone is already like.
No, that's all real.
That's why we provide sources.
Look.
Okay, that's the thing.
I know the Firestone thing is real, but it doesn't mean it's so far out that another fucking big American brand is rooted in the world.
I know, because like shoes and rubber.
I mean, again, I could have just gone through with this and just waited for people on Twitter to get really angry or on Reddit.
You would have bad shows.
You wouldn't do that to me.
I felt bad at that show.
That shows growth.
I felt bad.
Good job.
I felt bad.
I felt that.
Don't worry.
He's lied to me too.
I lied to everybody once.
I mean, I.
Well, now I haven't lied to you yet, Shireen, but I'll figure one out.
Lying is the most human quality you could have.
So it's fine.
I understand.
I'm so excited for Reddit.
I'm just going to go.
Don't have to.
No, it's okay.
Shireen, trust me, I'm the one who's going to look bad as a result.
Why?
No.
Because you were so earnest about being angry about the Converse guy being the warlord.
That's okay.
This is to all my gullible people out there.
I represent you.
I hear you.
I see you.
I have to say, it would have been really funny if the actual Chuck Taylor guy had been a Liberian warlord.
Like, that would have been hilarious.
So Taylor had been born in Liberia, but his dad was an Americo-Liberian.
His mom, though, he's mixed kind of between Americo-Liberian and his mom is a member of the indigenous Gola tribe.
Now, that said, he is raised as an Americo-Liberian, right?
Like, the fact that his dad is means that there's obviously one of the things you have to say about Liberia, like kind of the racial caste system is not nearly what it is in like colonies that are run by white people.
So Taylor benefits, even though his mom is indigenous and his dad is Americo-Liberian.
He's raised Americo-Liberian.
He attends college in the United States, Bentley College in Massachusetts.
Somebody else will have gone there and be like, holy shit, once we talk about this guy, holy shit, this dude went to my alma mater.
But the point is, his early life, he's thoroughly Americanized.
He speaks English very like, I mean, obviously, actually, I should note here, they all speak English.
English is the official language of Liberia.
If you go to Liberia, like you don't need to learn and now, some of the, like, there's a patois, like, accents are kind of different, like, sort of like it is in parts of Louisiana, but it's English.
Like, you listen to these, like, interviews with warlords and shit there.
They're all speaking in English and stuff.
Because, again, it's a colony of the United States, right?
But he is, he's not just like, he's incredibly Americanized.
His previous political experience came from rising through the ranks of a Liberian expat organization in Philadelphia.
And when he flies back, or so he goes back to Liberia after Doe's revolution and gets a job in the government.
And then he embezzles a bunch of money and he gets kicked out.
Warlord English Interviews00:11:14
So he flees to the U.S. because he doesn't want to get executed and paraded through the streets.
Doe tries to extradite him because he had almost certainly actually committed the crimes he was being accused of.
Charles Taylor is initially arrested by the United States and we keep him in a correctional facility for two years while we're trying to decide what to do to the man.
But then, and I'm going to quote again from the Liberian Civil Wars, the story grows rather murky.
Taylor escaped from Plymouth House on the evening of September 15th, 1985, apparently with the help of the CIA, responding to an obvious reluctance on the part of the government to extradite Taylor to face almost certain execution at the moment he landed.
It is also possible that the CIA felt Taylor might be useful because if someone replaced or toppled Doe, Taylor certainly seemed the most likely to do so.
Either way, the popular version of the story has it that Taylor and three fellow escapees cut through prison bars with hacksaws before lowering themselves to the ground outside on knotted bedsheets.
More realistically, perhaps, arrangements were made for his cell to be left unlocked one night, and he simply walked out.
He was picked up by his wife, Jewel, at a local freeway exit, after which he dropped out of sight.
For a few months later, he reappeared in Ghana, having traveled to Africa via Mexico.
In Ghana, he was arrested immediately on suspicion that he was somehow involved with the CIA, which tends to lean credence to the latter version of his escape.
Taylor's lawyer at the time was Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. Attorney General.
So certainly there was money and influence floating around somewhere.
No charges were ever brought against Taylor in America for his escape.
So he gets over to Ghana.
And while he's in the U.S., he spends two years in custody, right?
He gets the CIA kind of smuggles him out.
While all this is happening, Doe is in power in Liberia, but there are constant coup attempts, right?
Or at least attempts at coup attempts that Doe cracks down on.
And every time there's a threat to his reign, he does the same thing.
He sends his soldiers to that region of the country and he massacres all of the men that he can find, you know?
And often, like, you know, rapes the women, kills baby.
Like, it's ugly shit.
It's ethnic cleansing, kind of.
It's really nasty.
So by 1987, Doe has murdered a lot of people.
And he has repeatedly purged ethnic groups.
So that's around the time when Charles Taylor makes his way to the Ivory Coast.
And he meets a guy who's like a friend of the Avorian president who decides to back him in his plans to overthrow Doe.
Now, by this point, Doe has made the major mistake of pissing off Muamar Gaddafi.
Because he, again, he's on the side of the United States, right?
And he, the United States, I don't know if you're aware of this, not big fans of Muamm Qaddafi.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
So Doe expels Libyan diplomats from his capital.
Now, this is a problem because not only is Gaddafi kind of a petty dude, he also runs a gigantic pan-ideological training camp for insurgents, right?
If you are an insurgent and you want to learn how to build bombs and shoot people, Muamar Qaddafi's got you.
You're the IRA, you're the Palestinian organization.
He doesn't give a shit.
Like, Muamar will take, as long as you're like, cool with Muamar, he'll train you dudes, you know?
Yeah.
1-800 Muammar for all.
Yeah, 1-800 Muammar for all of your insurgent needs.
So he and he and Taylor, so Muamar Qaddafi, Doe pisses him off.
And so Qaddafi's like, well, I'm going to fucking get back at that son of a bitch.
And he hears there's this motherfucker named Taylor who's got connections to the government of, you know, in the Ivory Coast and shit.
And so he and Taylor get into contact.
And in very short order, a number of militants who are like on Taylor's side, these are like generally like Liberians who've had to flee the country because they were also associated with some sort of rebellion or another, that Taylor's gathering to him.
These folks go over and get trained in Libya, right?
And again, good chance there's some CIA involvement here.
It's very murky.
I assume they're everywhere.
Yeah, they're always doing some shit.
I mean, they certainly seem to have like helped Taylor get out, right?
Qaddafi's maybe more a bigger part of like how he actually gets to carry out his, whatever.
On December 24th, 1989, Charles Taylor and 168 insurgents enter Liberia through the Ivory, or yeah, the Ivory Coast.
Chuck makes an announcement through the BBC using a satellite phone he'd been given by somebody.
Again, who knows where he gets this kind of shit, that he has no personal ambitions for higher office.
He just wants to liberate his people from President Doe.
Open civil war results, resulting in breaking out in kind of bits and pieces here and there.
And gradually, like Taylor's forces start to make progress.
They're pretty well organized.
They're competent.
They expand quickly.
And more and more of the country starts to fall out of Doe's ability to control because he's not really popular because of all the massacres.
So he starts having his security forces round up hundreds and hundreds of residents of the capital from ethnic groups he viewed as rebellious.
And these people just disappear.
Some of them do show back up headless on the streets.
So citizens of the capital start greeting each other with the phrase, glad to see you've still got your head.
Members of very, yeah, and members of the ethnic groups targeted by Doe's purges start flooding into Taylor's growing army, right?
They get away from wherever the president controls, and a lot of them pick up guns.
As they won victories, they replace the initial weapons that they invade with.
The army's mostly equipped with these old Soviet, Soviet, like World War II-era submachine guns, PPSHs.
And they gradually replace these with US M16s from Doe's dead U.S.-backed fighters.
And once his regular forces start to get real rifles, he hands these submachine guns off to little kids.
And he uses them to form what he calls his small boy units.
Oh, God.
Quote, from the Liberian Civil Wars.
The bulk of advancing forces were locally recruited youth, handed guns and fortified by alcohol and cheaply sourced Chinese amphetamines, known colloquially as bubbles.
And of course, a great deal of local marijuana.
In much the same way as the Kron-dominated AFL, that's Doe's party, took excruciatingly violent revenge against Geo and Mano, these are other ethnic groups, roving bands of armed youth singled out Kron and Mandingo for similar treatment.
Newsreel images of the Liberian Civil War, as the initial coup inevitably became, came to be characterized by images of children and young people, both male and female, dressed in civilian clothes, often in wigs and bizarre fancy dress, enacting scenes that might have been extracted from Lord of the Flies.
These were the first high-profile displays of child soldiers at work in the African context of war, and the spectacle was utterly terrifying.
Wow.
So that's where we're going to end for today.
What a high note to just leave me on.
The vibes.
Well, I was hoping.
I mean, I was hoping there was going to be more witchy stuff, to be honest.
That stuff is interesting to me.
There will be next episode.
This is not going to be an interesting, or it'll be interesting.
It's not going to be much of a, you'll want to go elsewhere to learn in detail some more discussion of that, but we will talk about kind of one expression of these things from people who are like power-hungry grifters.
You're not going to get a great sense of what the actual religious practices were among these people.
But you will see some folks doing fucked up shit and then deciding to be born again Christians.
Yeah, at this point, I'm not At a certain point, when this is just me theorizing and not don't take any of these blanket statements seriously, but I would imagine that at a certain point when like a religion or a practice is just used to gain power, it's more used for the violence versus the belief.
You know, I'm not like I'm not convinced so many people believe it.
I'm just convinced they're using it to benefit themselves or like, you know, so that's just like well, it's one of those things.
Like there's, you know, you talk about cannibalism and other kind of beliefs that involve taking pieces of the body.
Certainly thousands of years ago, there were groups doing that in Africa, as there were in many other parts of the world for different reasons.
But the kind what you're going to see during the Liberian Civil War has about as much is related to those indigenous belief practices in the same way that like a modern Baptist revival meeting is related to a Christian church meeting in like 850 AD, you know, to like a church service in 850 AD.
Yeah, there is like a line of descendants from one to the other, but it's changed tremendously over time for a variety of reasons.
And someone partaking in the 850 AD church service might look at a modern one and be like, well, I don't really know what the fuck's going on here, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anyway, any plugs at the end here, Shireen?
I'm Shireen.
Allegedly.
Allegedly.
I'm on Twitter, Shirohero666.
Instagram is just Shirohero.
I'm honestly like, I'm not really on the internet much these days.
I'm trying, I have an impulse to delete everything all the time, but I think I just need it just for this kind of stuff.
But follow me if you want.
I'm posting less, but the stuff I post, gold, you know, so just stick around for that.
Yeah.
But I will say, I was thinking about this as you were teaching me all these terrible things.
It's like, like sometimes I get frustrated, for example, that no one knows the history of Palestine or Syria or whatever.
And there's like selective things, as you said, like people can, there's so many, there's so much bullshit and violence and terrible things in the world.
You can only learn so much about it.
You can only handle so much of it.
So I, for one, am happy I know about this terrible thing because I maybe was ignorant before.
And I hope people feel that way when they learn about other terrible things that they should do.
Context is important, not because it mitigates bad things, but it's like it would be fucked up to just get angry about the IRA bombing a bar and not recognize that that act of terrorism was directly influenced by the genocide of half of the Irish population, right?
That would be fucked up.
Likewise, yes, it's bad to, it's certainly bad to like shoot missiles into cities like Hamas does, but also that's not happening in a vacuum.
Exactly.
And it's happening in response to missiles being shot into there and a bunch of other fucked up shit.
There's history of like really horrible things.
And likewise, it is bad to recruit child soldiers and carry out human sacrifices.
It's not, they didn't just decide to do that because Liberians are brutal.
All of this occurred as part of a continuum of things that is heavily influenced by U.S. policy and is heavily influenced by colonialism.
Yeah.
Again, it's just, it's not a matter of like saying, well, this isn't bad because of this bad thing.
It's a matter of you don't understand what's happening if you if you're only focused on one part of this picture.
And the thing is, the information we all receive is usually funneled through a white supremacist fucking colonial, you know what I mean?
Like it's all funneled through a different, a certain lens to make us think certain people are good, certain people are bad.
Media Lenses on History00:05:06
So I don't know.
Use your brains, I suppose.
I will also try to use mine to, I don't think fucking converse are evil.
Yeah, yeah.
Destroy your Converse shoes.
Light their headquarters on fire.
No!
Hunt down their corporate representatives in the street.
No vengeance can be enough for Converse.
Robert, on another note, we should probably plug two new podcasts on CoolZone Media that are recently out, shouldn't we?
We have...
Now, Sophie, real quick, sidebar.
What is a podcast?
All right.
So this does not know where that was going.
I was like, is he actually doing this?
Is it like an edit note?
No, okay.
No, no, no.
This is a bit, but also this is why I'm in charge.
We have two.
Sophie, this is like 10% of why you're in charge.
We have two new podcasts on CoolZone Media that you should check out if you haven't checked them out already.
We have Ghost Church by Jamie Loftus, which is a fascinating podcast about American spiritualism.
Jay Loft!
Yes.
And we also have Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff hosted by Margaret Killjoy that is in fact about cool people who did cool stuff.
It's like it's like the allegedly.
It's the uplifting version of whatever the fuck this podcast is.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
It's great.
Shireen, there's some really cool people who do some really cool stuff in this next video.
Allegedly.
Are you familiar with the story of Liz Estrada?
Stop talking, Robert.
Okay.
But yeah, check those podcasts out.
Shireen actually works on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff and she and both Robert and Shireen are guests or upcoming guests depending on when this drops on the show.
So check it out.
I'm so happy.
Shireen, working with Margaret has taught you the most important thing about being an anarchist.
Which is saying allegedly before almost any statement.
Yep.
Yep, in my vocab forever.
And that is the episode.
Behind the
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