Cold Open: General Butt Naked. AKA Joshua Blahyi. AKA just one of the many, MANY warlords that would form child armies and battle for power during the tumultuous and bloody First Liberian Civil War, which lasted from 1989 to 1997. During the nineties, most of Liberia was controlled by numerous and incredibly violent rival militias. In the bush, they battled for control of diamond fields and gold mines; in Monrovia, they fought gun battles in the streets. Some of these warring factions were led by - or at least assisted by - brutal warriors and warlords who adopted outlandish names like Chuck Norris, One-Foot Devil, General Mosquito and his nemesis, General Mosquito Spray. And of course - there was General Butt Naked. Perhaps the most brutal of them all. Butt Naked was active for about three years, and he led several dozen soldiers—the Naked Base Commandos—who fought mostly in Monrovia. Many of his soldiers were children - child soldiers fed a steady diet of cocaine and American action movies. Kids forced to kill - and also eat - other kids. Today’s story is so, SO crazy. Liberia in the 90s was so crazy. General Butt Naked said he had a vision when he was eleven years old where he was told by a tribal god that he would become a great warrior and that he should practice human sacrifice and cannibalism to increase his power and become impossible to kill. And he seems to have taken this vision VERY seriously. Or - maybe he made it to try and rationalize and justify all the atrocities he committed to others. About ten after his first major vision - Blayhi claims to have experienced another vision - a divine Christian vision that transformed him from a mass murderer into a man of God. And ever since that event, he’s committed his life to trying to right the wrongs he made in the past. But is he really a man of god? Or his is just a con man doing whatever he feels he needs to do in order to thrive in an extremely difficult place for someone with almost no formal education to just survive? During times of war - he became a warlord. During times of peace - he’s become a man of god. Something about it all feels very convenient. General Butt Naked is a complicated man. And Liberia is a complicated nation. And we explore the man, the country he comes from, and more on today’s warmongering, death-defying, eye-opening, so much insane shit packed into this one, edition of Timesuck. PAUSE TIMESUCK INTRO I. Welcome! A.Happy Monday Meatsacks! WELCOME to the cult of the curious. Work can Wait for this tale. HAIL Nimrod, Hail Lucifina, Praise Bojangles, and Glory Be to Triple M. I’m Dan Cummins, Suck Nasty, Optimus Suck, Suck Norris, and you are listening to Timesuck. How do you all feel about skipping announcements today and getting right into SO MUCH SHOW??? All in favor say Hail Nimrod? Let’s do it. Holy shit I got sucked in hard to this topic this week. Let’s head to Liberia, on the west coast of Africa, to suck a Civil War - two of them in fact - the founding of a nation, and the life of brutal warlord who once went by the name of General Butt Naked, a man who claimed that fighting naked made him immune to bullets. Pretty sure that’s not totally true. But maybe KIND OF true. Seeing a wild-eyed, naked dude - carrying a machine gun or a machete - running at you in an urban war zone might give a lot of people pause and throw their shot off. Before we get to know Mr. Butt Naked - we first will familiarize ourselves with Liberia, where our story takes place - an extremely unique and fascinating and oftentimes completely horrific African nation. A nation that has been a living Hell for far too many of its people to live in. Then, we’ll take a look at Liberia’s culture of warlords and how they operate - how the concept of warlords is not an African thing - it’s a world wide thing - before we then examine the interesting spiritual beliefs that gave Blayhi has said pushed him towards human sacrifice. THEN - we’ll jump into this week’s Timesuck Timeline, following Liberia’s two Civil Wars - both were fought in the past thirty years - and we’ll also follow Joshua Blahyi’s life and get to know some other brutal military leaders. I hope you find all this as interesting as I do today. Yip, yip, yaw! PAUSE TIMESUCK INTERLUDE II. Intro/Establish Premiss: A. Liberia This week’s info is going to take us across the Atlantic to a continent we don’t visit nearly as often as we probably should here on the Suck — Antarctica. Kidding. We’re visiting Africa, of course. We don’t visit Antarctica often and we never will! It is a frozen, barren wasteland - and I don’t care enough about Penguins and seals to talk about them for over two hours. We don’t visit Africa enough! Lots of good stories in Africa. Loads of interesting people and history. Specifically today, we head to Liberia, a smaller African nation along the continent’s west Atlantic coast - just south of Sierra Leone, just North of the Ivory Coast. Liberia is perhaps the most unique nation on the entire continent in terms of its modern origin story. It’s the only Black State in Africa never to have been subjected to colonial rule. It’s also Africa’s oldest republic. And the troubled nation has such a strange origin story. B.Liberian Settlement and the ACS: Liberia was established on land acquired for freed U.S. slaves by the American Colonization Society, which founded a colony at Cape Mesurado [mez uh rah doh] in 1822 - this Cape is located where the capital city of Monrovia sits today. This Society - the ACS - also known as The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, was founded in 1816 in Washington DC, by one Robert Finley. A Princeton grad - Finley was a Presbyterian minister who worked as a pastor for two decades in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, also teaching at a boys’ academy before becoming the president of the University of Georgia shortly before his death in 1817. And Finley founded - along with Samuel John Mills - a Congregational minister from Connecticut and a Christian Missionary - the ACS in order to relocate free American blacks to a colony in West Africa. The Society quickly gained support from some abolitionists and also from most slaveholders - for very different reasons. Some white abolitionists truly seemed to have noble intentions when it came to African colonization. They believed that African Americans - due to both slavery in the South and discrimination in the North - would never find the happiness, freedom, and fulfillment in America that they could find in their own, new nation in West Africa. Other, much less noble Americans in the North - and slaveholders in the South - just wanted free black Americans to get…. the fuck… out. They feared them. They were worried that - if left to their own devices in America - they might lead slavery rebellions and revolts. OR, they would want equal rights - to vote and own their own land - OR - heaven forbid - black men might want to romantically pursue white women! The horror! Oh my HECK! This notion of the racially motivated exportation of free black people to Africa was actually NOT a new idea. America took a page out of the playbook of its own former colonial masters - the British - for this one. In 1787, Britain had founded the colony of Freetown in Sierra Leone. They sent the “black poor” of London there. The organization that led relocation efforts was called the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor. Only 38 initial “settlers” were originally shipped off. A few years later, in 1792, 1,100 former American slaves living in then British-controlled Nova Scotia - tired of both the weather and racial discrimination - sailed in 15 ships to Free town. Then, in 1815 - Paul Cuffee, a successful American Quaker ship owner and activist based in Boston financed taking 38 American free blacks to head to Freetown as well. He’s the man who laid the foundation for the American Colonization Society. And until 1961, Sierra Leone would be a British colony. Despite similar beginnings, Liberia’s settlement history has been very different than Sierra Leone’s. It was never REALLY a colony of the US. It received some grant money from the US to get started - but it was never a proper “colony.” More of an experiment, really run by the ACS. The initial American settlement was named Christopolis in 1822. Then, in 1824, the colony around Christopolis was named Liberia - as in Liberty - and the initial settlement was renamed Monrovia after James Monroe - the President of the United States at the time, who was a big supporter of the colony. Monroe was all about sending freed Black Slaves and ex-Caribbean slaves to Liberia. He saw this as preferable to emancipation. So - kind of fucked up that the city is named after him. And that it still is. It’s named after a guy who did NOT want to have freed African slaves living in America - he wanted to ship them out of the States, and back across the Atlantic. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/liberia (Monroe) “Thanks for all the help in building our economy and making our nation strong enough to never have to worry about being brought to heel by the British my black brothers and sisters! Now - with all due respect - PLEASSSEEEE….