Jan 21 2008
General Butt Naked
Sometimes I read about stuff that is just so bizzare it is hard to believe. But I read an article today in CNN that brought one of these weird chapters back to life. I’m talking about the Liberian General Butt Naked. No, I’m not making this up. The guy is really Joshua Milton Blahy who gained fame in the 1990s as a rebel leader in Liberia. I remember in the 1970s we used to crack jokes in the barracks about the Dutch Army and their ear-ringed, openly homosexual soldiers. But, Butt Naked, excuse me, General Butt Naked, really takes the cake, so to speak.
The civil war, which killed an estimated 250,000 people in this nation of 3 million, was characterized by the eating of human hearts and soccer matches played with human skulls. Drugged fighters waltzed into battle wearing women’s wigs, flowing gowns and carrying dainty purses stolen from civilians.
Before he led his fighters into battle, wearing only a pair of lace-up boots, Blahyi said he made a human sacrifice to the devil.
The sacrifice was typically “the killing of an innocent child and plucking out the heart which was divided into pieces for us to eat,” he told The Associated Press on Saturday. He appeared before the commission Jan. 15.
Between the time he made a pact with the devil circa 1980 and began his rampage and the time he stopped fighting in 1996, he said “more than 20,000 people fell victim (to me and my men). They were killed.” (Source: CNN)
Now the General is worried. He is going before the Truth Commission and telling his story. He says talking about it makes him feel good. He wants to get it all off his chest now. He is a born again Christian and trying to get right with the Lord.
He became a born-again Christian and for a while, traversed the war-wracked streets of Monrovia selling cassettes of his sermons. (Source: CNN)
So now General Butt Naked wants to set the record straight, (smirk,) and let the world know that he is not really a bad guy. What he was doing is completely accepted in African society. What? And I thought we had it bad in basic training. My DI never asked any of us to dress up like prom queens and strut into battle.
The cross-dressing combatants blipped onto the Western press’s radar screen right around the time the Liberian Civil War started on Christmas Eve in 1989. During Taylor’s rebel siege on Monrovia in the ’90s, his band of dolled-up marauders—aka the National Patriotic Front of Liberia—put on one of the most disturbing horror shows the planet has ever seen. Between 1989 and 1997, 150,000 Liberians were murdered, countless others were mutilated, and 25,000 women and girls were raped. The NPFL’s shock-and-awe antics were apparent from the very start of the conflict. In an essay in Liberian Studies Journal, an administrator at Cuttington University College tells a story of Taylor’s forces storming the rural campus during the initial stages of the war in “wedding [dresses], wigs, commencement gowns from high schools and several forms of ‘voodoo’ regalia. … [They] believed they could not be killed in battle.” (Source: The Slate)
I wonder why human beings put up with this kind of activity. They should just take this psycho piece of garbage out and hang him. But, then again, he is born again. I guess some people can forgive anything. Those must be some damn good sermons he’s hawking. What do you think?
