General Butt Naked
Joshua Milton Blahyi (born September 30, 1971), better known as General Butt Naked, is an ex-warlord from Liberia who is now an Evangelical Christian preacher.
Early life
[change | change source]Blahyi is a member of the Sarpo tribe in Liberia. Blahyi has said that when he was 11 years old he became a tribal priest.[1]
Career as a Warlord
[change | change source]In 1980, when Joshua Milton Blahyi was 9 years old, a man named Samuel Doe led a rebellion against president William Tolbert and had him killed. At some point after 1982, when Blahyi became a tribal priest, Doe hired Blahyi to use black magic so that Doe could win the election in 1985. In 1989, when Blahyi was 18, a man named Charles Taylor rebelled against Doe and started a civil war. Taylor and his men killed Doe in 1990. Then the 19 year old Blahyi joined a militia called the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy and fought against Taylor’s army in the civil war. Blahyi then recruited an army of child soldiers to fight for him wearing nothing except for shoes and amulets while being naked himself and because of their nudity, they were called The Naked Base Commandos and Blahyi got the nickname “General Butt Naked”. Blahyi gave his child soldiers drugs so that they would be easier to control and would massacre villages that he attacked and he would wikt:celebrate each victory by eating the heart of a human child and by killing a child for a human sacrifice. He would also torture people. Blahyi also fought against other militias for control of diamond mines so that he could sell diamonds to drug cartels in Mexico for weapons and cocaine. In 1996, Blahyi and the Naked Base Commandos fought a battle in Monrovia against people on Charles Taylor’s side who were trying to arrest Blahyi’s commander Roosevelt Johnson. And Blahyi cut off a man’s testicles and held them in his hand while shooting people with a gun in battle.
Religious Conversion
[change | change source]According to Blahyi, after killing a little girl and cutting out her heart through her back, a man appeared to him who was glowing “brighter than the sun” and told him “repent and live or refuse and die.” Blahyi then decided to stop fighting and leave his child soldiers to fight for themselves. But then went near to a Church to sleep and heard a pastor pray to God to make Blahyi lose the power of evil devil’s magic. Then Blahyi decided to go to his commander and tell him that he wasn’t a warlord anymore because “my new commander is Jesus Christ.” Blahyi then became an Evangelical Christian preacher and told a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the Liberian Civil War that he had killed at least 20,000 people as a warlord but that he wished that he hadn’t. Blahyi is still a pastor now.
In popular culture
[change | change source]In 2011 a documentary film called The Redemption of General Butt Naked was released. Matt Stone and Trey Parker based the character "Butt Fucking Naked" in their musical The Book of Mormon (musical) on General Butt Naked.[2]
References
[change | change source]- ↑ "I ate children's hearts, ex-rebel says". 22 January 2008 – via news.bbc.co.uk.
- ↑ "HitFix".