THE HEART OF DARKNESS
Monrovia, Liberia. This is a horror story – far grimmer than anything Joseph Conrad ever imagined, much less experienced when he captained a steamboat on the Congo River in the Belgian Congo in 1889. Conrad’s famous novel, Heart of Darkness, was fiction and only very loosely based on fact. This story is true – and it’s not from the 19th century, it’s contemporary.
Steel yourself, because we’re in for a stomach-turning rough ride. How human beings can be capable of such evil seems inexplicable. It is not true that all of us are so capable – Conrad was wrong about that. Very wrong. Yet enough people are to make this a cautionary tale, as the odds of a maelstrom in our land mount along with those of Zero’s reelection. It was such a maelstrom that recently engulfed West Africa.
The country of Liberia is unique in Africa, founded in the 1820s by American freed slaves under the auspices of the American Colonization Society. This was a group of philanthropists such as Henry Clay and Charles Mercer, who offered to repatriate freed slaves back to Africa if they desired. The support of President James Monroe enabled the settlement of several thousand freed slaves, who formally founded The Republic of Liberia 1847, with a constitution and government structure based on America’s, and the capital named in honor of President Monroe – Monrovia.
The colonists called themselves Americo-Liberians, immensely proud of their American heritage, with an Antebellum South lifestyle that included wearing top hats and morning coats, and living in homes with columned porches. Their party, the True Whig Party, ruled Liberia for over 130 years. Then, in 1980, the descent into madness began.
Liberia was flourishing in the 1970s under President William Tolbert, the grandson of a freed slave from Charleston, South Carolina. Firestone Tire’s enormous rubber plantation plus massive high-grade iron ore exports from the Bomi Hills had the place booming. But on the night of April 12, 1980, 17 soldiers led by a 28 year-old master sergeant, Samuel Doe, broke into the Executive Mansion, grabbed President Tolbert out of bed, shot him in the head, gouged out his right eye, and disemboweled him.
Doe was an uneducated bumpkin with a two-digit IQ from Liberia’s most primitive tribe, the Krahn. He had no ideology. All he cared for was power and money. He had anyone who criticized him killed. When the US offered him $80 million in aid to stand against the Soviets, he happily accepted – and was honored with a visit to the White House to meet President Reagan in 1982. Doe continued slaughtering opponents and engaging in massive corruption. No complaints from Washington.
On Christmas Eve in 1989, an Americo-Liberian with a degree in economics from Bentley College in Boston, Charles Taylor, snuck into Liberia from the Ivory Coast with 100 armed men. Taylor had been schooled in guerrilla warfare at Muamar Ghaddafi’s World Revolutionary Center in Libya, the "Harvard for Tyrants" responsible for training and placing a number of African despots in power.
Taylor had plenty of money and weapons from Gaddafi to recruit followers. His contribution to the history of bloody insurgency was to recruit children – illiterate kids from the bush as young as eight years old – into "the Kalashnikov lifestyle" of getting high on a mix of amphetamines, cane alcohol, and marijuana, to become psychopaths killing anyone they were ordered to without the slightest hesitation or remorse. The more heads they cut off, the greater the atrocities they committed, the more they were promoted in Taylor’s growing insurgent army.
As Taylor conquered more territory, one of his commanders, Prince Johnson (Prince being a boy’s name in Liberia, not a title) formed his own group to attack Monrovia. On September 9, 1990, his forces captured Samuel Doe. Johnson had Doe’s torture interrogation and execution videotaped (it’s on YouTube). As Johnson sips on a Budweiser beer, he calmly orders, "Cut off one ear." A knife slices it off as Doe screams. Then the other ear is sliced off. The next day, Doe’s mutilated body was paraded around Monrovia in a wheelbarrow.
Liberia disintegrated into all-out factional-tribal civil war. A group of West African countries formed a "peacekeeping" force led by Nigerians called Ecomog – which, thanks to Nigerian soldiers’ looting and pillaging, was dubbed by Liberians as Every Car Or Moving Object Gone. They kept Monrovia. Taylor seized the Bomi mines and the iron ore port of Buchanan, with British mining companies paying him $10 million a month to get the stockpiled ore out, while French companies paid him millions for timber. The rest of the country was murderously anarchic.
Taylor quickly became the richest warlord in Africa. Yet that wasn’t enough. Right across the border in Sierra Leone lay the fabulous alluvial diamond fields of Kono. Taylor went to see his buddy Gaddafi in Tripoli to support, with money, weapons, and men an effort to seize them. Gaddafi said he had just the guy: a cashiered corporal in the Sierra Leone army whom Taylor knew from guerrilla training at the World Revolutionary Center, Foday Sankoh.
Sierra Leone was a British colony the Brits had turned over to a Big Man autocrat named Siaka Stevens who, by the time he left the scene at age 85 had amassed a fortune of $500 million and left the country completely bankrupt. As the government collapsed, it was ripe for the taking. On March 23, 1991, Sankoh led a group of several dozen fighters from Liberia, armed and financed by Taylor and Gaddafi. They called themselves the RUF, Revolutionary United Front.
Within weeks, by slaughtering anyone in authority, from chiefs and village elders to traders and teachers, Sankoh’s RUF seized the Kono diamond fields. Taylor proclaimed Sankoh to be the "governor of Sierra Leone." To maintain control, Sankoh also abducted and forcibly recruited children, who as part of their drugged indoctrination, were often required to kill their own parents. Half of RUF fighters were 8 to 14 years old, girls and boys.
As recounted in Harvard for Tyrants above, together, Taylor and Sankoh "pioneered their signature atrocity in the 1990s — the amputation of the arms and legs of men, women, and children… Their atrocities were backed by Gaddafi, who routinely met with Taylor and his closest associates to review the progress of the conflicts and supply weapons."
Sankoh had no political strategy whatever, just brute terror and force. After gaining control of the $300 million traffic in diamonds – which, because of the mass slaughter, became known as Blood Diamonds – in 1994 his RUF seized the bauxite (aluminum ore) mines, the world’s largest (Sierra Leone has close to half the world’s bauxite reserves). To keep them, he ordered his child fighters to indiscriminately chop off the hands, arms, and feet of villagers in the region.
When the RUF marched into Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, in March of 1997 the Nigerians invaded and captured Sankoh. The RUF launched "Operation No Living Thing," hacking to death anyone in Freetown they could find. The savagery went on for over two years, until the Nigerians gave up and offered a peace deal in July 1999, with Sankoh made vice-president and keeping the Kono diamond mines.
When the RUF refused to cease its atrocities, Britain finally moved in with full-on military force in May, 2000. Sankoh was imprisoned, and the RUF disintegrated. Sankoh had been responsible for over 75,000 murdered, countless thousands mutilated, and some 70% of the entire population homeless. While awaiting trial for war crimes, he died in a Freetown prison in July 2003 – supposedly of a stroke.
As monstrous as Foday Sankoh was, Charles Taylor was worse. The civil war he conducted went on for seven years. Of Liberia’s population of 2.5 million, 200,000 were killed and over one million made refugees with their homes and villages burned to the ground. When Taylor came out on top, the UN capitulated and under its auspices held presidential elections in July 1997.
Believe it or not, Taylor’s actual campaign slogan was, "He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will still vote for him." He was elected president with 75% of the vote.
Taylor had threatened to renew his campaign of wholesale slaughter if he wasn’t elected. From being the richest warlord in Africa, he now was the president of his own country. And a second civil war in Liberia promptly began. A collection of anti-Taylor factions sponsored by neighboring Guinea, advanced on Monrovia raping and looting on the way.
Taylor steadily lost ground, with the forces against him now supported by Britain and the US. When the Marines from the 26th MEU landed in August 2003, Taylor resigned the presidency and was sent to luxury confinement in Nigeria. Other rebel factions were kicked out. The UN launched a massive operation to stabilize the country.
Elections were held in 2005, with a remarkable woman, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, becoming the first female head of state in Africa. For her efforts to put Liberia back on its feet, by 2010 Newsweek magazine designated her as one of "ten best leaders in the world." In 2011, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She was reelected president late last year.
Charles Taylor is today in prison in The Hague, Netherlands, for a war crimes trial. The verdict is scheduled to be announced next month (April 26). Prince Johnson not only remains at large, but is an elected member of the Liberian Parliament.
So – what does this horror story of the depths of depravity to which human beings can sink have to do with us? Surely, Americans, no matter what their ethnicity or ideology are not capable of such evil, yes?
Although it was a century and a half ago, it’s worth recalling that Americans slaughtered each other by the hundreds of thousands in the Civil War. More specifically, Sherman’s March to the Sea was directed at civilians, and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was designed to spark freed slave attacks on Southern white women whose husbands were off fighting the war (the Governor of New York, Horatio Seymour, denounced it as "a proposal for the butchery of women and children").
Today, we hear much talk of a "Second American Revolution." Our freedoms are being systematically stolen from us by an increasingly fascist government that recognizes no constitutional limits to its power. Our economy and livelihoods are being destroyed, with beyond-astronomical debt about to create hyper-inflation wiping us out.
And there is a new massive division between Americans. It was North-South in the Civil War. Now it is Producer-Parasite, Maker-Moocher, taxpayers who work and produce vs. those who get government subsidies and paychecks. On the one side of this divide are gun owners with hundreds of millions of guns and billions of rounds of ammo.
On the other side are those who advocate and engage in violence – with the Demagogue Media, the Demagogue-Democrat Party, and demagogue race hustlers egging them on. The black racist media frenzy regarding Trayvon Martin is the latest example. Race-baiting, guilt-mongering, demagoguery, and threats of violence are all the Democrats and their moocher allies have left.
We are well aware of what will happen to our country if Zero wins in November – the disaster will be catastrophic. Yet we must also be aware of what might happen if Zero loses. What Heart of Darkness might emerge?
Zero’s defeat would signal that a majority of voters don’t care about the Race Card anymore – and that’s the Dems’ only card. It will also signal the end (or at least the start of the end) of the Moochers’ Gravy Train and the Entitlement Society. The odds are high that violence in "inner cities" and by public union workers will explode.
We can say, well, we have the guns. George Zimmerman had a gun, and used it when he was viciously attacked by Trayvon Martin. Which one is being demonized, which one sanctified?
America is not Africa, however much Zero is trying to Africanize it. It is not Liberia or Sierra Leone. Yet history teaches that a Heart of Darkness may lie within most any society. Ask the Germans. Normally, it is dormant. One sure way to awaken it is to deny its existence, to ignore any sign it may be aroused from its slumber.
Zero’s defeat in November is not enough. It will only be the end of the beginning of America’s rebirth. Hearts of Darkness will do their best to abort that rebirth. We must make sure they fail.