The Cannibal Generals of Liberia

[Deicide]

Some fucked up shit right here. Vice makes some crazy documentaries.


Cannibalism, murder and rape are just a part of everyday life in certain regions of Liberia. Despite the United Nation's eventual intervention, most of this country's young people continue to live in abject poverty, surrounded by filth, drug addiction, and teenage prostitution. In 2009, we went to Liberia to rummage through the messy remains of a country ravaged by 14 years of civil war.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRuSS0iiFyo&list=PL2D3293A17F068F02&index=1&feature=plpp_video

[Hiero]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOR-TECGbpc

Here is older footage from apparently the end of the first civil war in Liberea, 1996.

[ed miliband]

yeah, this is my favourite vice doc i think.

my friend, who seems to think i have some sort of wild dream to be a vice journo (which she thinks is ridiculous, so i deny, but it's probably true...), showed me this:

92JCleCaCj4

i mean, the david carr guy seems pretty cool (jus cos he's such a dickhead), but i don't get all the hate vice gets. they produce some great stuff, and this is testament to that.

[Hiero]

i mean, the david carr guy seems pretty cool (jus cos he's such a dickhead), but i don't get all the hate vice gets. they produce some great stuff, and this is testament to that. I made some criticisms in my head while watching it.

It mixes personal experience of the filmaker or presenter with the subject content a style of gonza journalism for the MTV generation. While we are meant to be shock and suprised at the situation on the ground we are also meant to be shocked and surprised that a White Anglo American is supposedly putting himself in danger. It is meant to come across as unique, but this is what field journalist do in warzones. Infact some will spend years in the one place reporting and recording, like anthropologists. So this style of documentory comes across as a bit corny and arrogant. I am not sure if it was the case, but it had the implication that he had to get in and out of the country, rather then spend some significant time there.

That is why I posted the other video, which is edited in a different way. That Vice documentory overlaps alot of events and things happen at once to make it more exciting and chaotic. Then it also lacks a criticial element in people's stories, it takes them at face value. The doco really wanted to show Liberia as a crazy place, rather then to explore any of the meaning behind it all.

You can probably find better academic work in warzones in Africa. For instance check out Christopher Taylor's piece, which is referenced her on his bio:

http://clg.portalxm.com/library/author.cfm?author_id=85

[brigadista]

no context =just sensationalism

[Robocommie]

Any charge of cannibalism in Africa is going to take extraordinary evidence for me, because of the context of centuries of racist bullshit about Africans being savages.

[ed miliband]

no context =just sensationalism

lol. not really. but what's wrong with that anyway? sensationalism is enjoyable. after i watched the documentary i wanted to find out as much as i could about liberia so did my own research. some on the left seem to assume that people are so dumb they can't watch anything vaguely entertaining or shocking without being brainwashed into have 'bad politics' or some bullshit.


Any charge of cannibalism in Africa is going to take extraordinary evidence for me, because of the context of centuries of racist bullshit about Africans being savages.

so do you reckon they got the people admitting to cannibalism to just lie? hmmm.

[brigadista]

lol. not really. but what's wrong with that anyway? sensationalism is enjoyable. after i watched the documentary i wanted to find out as much as i could about liberia so did my own research. some on the left seem to assume that people are so dumb they can't watch anything vaguely entertaining or shocking without being brainwashed into have 'bad politics' or some bullshit.



so do you reckon they got the people admitting to cannibalism to just lie? hmmm.

racist stereotypes - see robocommie above

[Robocommie]

lol. not really. but what's wrong with that anyway? sensationalism is enjoyable.

Alright, that tells me all I need to know.

As to the dubiousness of the claims, it's been openly stated that fear and striking terror in the hearts of one's enemies is a major weapon in Liberia. Doesn't it strike you as more than a little likely that some war leader might propagate stories about him murdering innocent children and drinking their blood, and eating their enemies' flesh raw, and doing all kinds of fucked up things, to build up a fearsome reputation?

In any case, but call me fucking crazy, but it's going to take a FUCK of a lot more evidence than a sensationalist documentary put out by a bunch of western "journalists" who are more well known for their guides to drugs and rock and roll than for objective anthropology, to convince me that "all those crazy Africans are out there EATING people!"

I mean come the fuck on.

[erupt]

Alright, that tells me all I need to know.

As to the dubiousness of the claims, it's been openly stated that fear and striking terror in the hearts of one's enemies is a major weapon in Liberia. Doesn't it strike you as more than a little likely that some war leader might propagate stories about him murdering innocent children and drinking their blood, and eating their enemies' flesh raw, and doing all kinds of fucked up things, to build up a fearsome reputation?

In any case, but call me fucking crazy, but it's going to take a FUCK of a lot more evidence than a sensationalist documentary put out by a bunch of western "journalists" who are more well known for their guides to drugs and rock and roll than for objective anthropology, to convince me that "all those crazy Africans are out there EATING people!"

I mean come the fuck on.
Whether cannibalism occured, or not, this is why I'm very happy Charles Taylor is locked in a steel cage. It's nice to see a bourgeois prick rot instead of some unlucky proletarian who got caught with marijuana. Especially when the guy profits from people mining diamonds when their's a child-soldier with a gun to their backs.

[brigadista]

Whether cannibalism occured, or not, this is why I'm very happy Charles Taylor is locked in a steel cage. It's nice to see a bourgeois prick rot instead of some unlucky proletarian who got caught with marijuana. Especially when the guy profits from people digging diamonds when their's a child-soldier with a gun to their backs.

with respect its not that simple my friend -are you a stop Kony campaign supporter because your political analysis sounds the same as that campaign?

much worse you think than the western powers who keep african countries in a constant state of neo post colonialism and make huge profits from african conflicts and fund the likes of charles taylor?

Charles taylor convicted at the African Court in the Hague [only exceptions to African show trials there are yugoslavian show trials]-

Liberia is just a huge rubber plantation for the firestone rubber company -


as i said context.....

[erupt]

Is not that simple my friend -are you a stop Kony campaign supporter because your political analysis sounds the same as that campaign?

much worse you think than the western powers who keep african countries in a constant state of neo post colonialism and make huge profits from african conflicts and fund the likes of charles taylor?

Charles taylor convicted at the African Court in the Hague [only exceptions to African trials there are yugoslavian trials]-

Liberia is just a huge rubber plantation for the firestone rubber company -


as i said context.....
No, I understand neo-colonialism by way of the West are the real profiteers. For example, look at Belgium; they were in the Congo for rubber and a few other natural resources in the 19th century.

However, no one will convince me that anyone involved in the Lord's Resistance Army is any good, in particular Joseph Kony. If he was killed, I would not give a flying fuck. The same goes for Taylor going to prison; he profited off the diamond trade plenty.

Fuck them, they're both oppressors of the working poor and different ethnic groups in West Africa. Just because I don't care what the Western powers do to Taylor, or if Kony get's killed, does not mean I condone U.S. intervention. I believe there was a similar discussion concerning some sort of intervention in Syria against Assad and his ultra-repressive regime.

[EDIT]And I apologize if that came off a little belligerent. I meant my reply with respect, just as you stated yourself. I'm just passionate about this because it seems to be an issue that Leftists sometimes disagree on, and solidarity is of the utmost importance.

[Hiero]

Alright, that tells me all I need to know.

As to the dubiousness of the claims, it's been openly stated that fear and striking terror in the hearts of one's enemies is a major weapon in Liberia. Doesn't it strike you as more than a little likely that some war leader might propagate stories about him murdering innocent children and drinking their blood, and eating their enemies' flesh raw, and doing all kinds of fucked up things, to build up a fearsome reputation?

In any case, but call me fucking crazy, but it's going to take a FUCK of a lot more evidence than a sensationalist documentary put out by a bunch of western "journalists" who are more well known for their guides to drugs and rock and roll than for objective anthropology, to convince me that "all those crazy Africans are out there EATING people!"

I mean come the fuck on.

I have not read alot about Liberia or Krahn people (who are a focus of the vice documentory), but what I got from thoose documentories (the vice one and the other one I posted) was that "generals" and other ranked people eat specific parts of their enemies rather then a frenzied all you can ate human flesh. In the second documentory I found that a boy was talking about how much human flesh he had eaten, I took this as exaggeration aimed at boasting masculine qualities or tricking the camera man. Also in the first documentory one man mentions that cutting off of genitals and carry them aroudn will protect the bearer against bullets. What assumption I can make is that specific body parts hold spefic powers and when possed or consumed protect the bearer (from bullets and enemy magic). But I imagine there would be a hierarchy to who is allowed the spoils of victory. Many of these questions aren't really answered in those documentory.

The vice documentory makes it seem more "post-apocalyptic" situation (words he actually uses), which masks the political-ethnic conflict and the cultural background of Liberian people (spread amogst 16 ethnic groups) that is enacted in a war context.

[Robocommie]

I have not read alot about Liberia or Krahn people (who are a focus of the vice documentory), but what I got from thoose documentories (the vice one and the other one I posted) was that "generals" and other ranked people eat specific parts of their enemies rather then a frenzied all you can ate human flesh. In the second documentory I found that a boy was talking about how much human flesh he had eaten, I took this as exaggeration aimed at boasting masculine qualities or tricking the camera man.

It seems to me very likely that the whole thing could be part of an elaborate ritual of psyching out one's opponents by making increasingly outrageous claims of the fucked up things you do to your opponent - like you said, boasting masculine qualities. And frankly, there's also the possibility that some of these stories being shown on this documentary are complete and utter fabrications made up for the benefit of the camera. I mean hey, is it that hard to believe the Vice crew might offer $50 to someone, which would be an enormous windfall in parts of Monrovia, to make up outlandish stories? I don't think it is, if we're going to be honest with ourselves.



Also in the first documentory one man mentions that cutting off of genitals and carry them aroudn will protect the bearer against bullets. What assumption I can make is that specific body parts hold spefic powers and when possed or consumed protect the bearer (from bullets and enemy magic). But I imagine there would be a hierarchy to who is allowed the spoils of victory. Many of these questions aren't really answered in those documentory.

The vice documentory makes it seem more "post-apocalyptic" situation (words he actually uses), which masks the political-ethnic conflict and the cultural background of Liberian people (spread amogst 16 ethnic groups) that is enacted in a war context.

That's actually my biggest problem with this. Because none of those questions are really answered, and practically not even raised, we're just kind of left with this picture in isolation of a horrible, fucked up society in Africa where people apparently do horrible things to each other for no truly good reason - it's frankly great if you want to leave people with a Stormfront-friendly view of Africa, honestly. Without context to any of this, it's just a gratuitous tour of human misery and horror.

[Hiero]

It seems to me very likely that the whole thing could be part of an elaborate ritual of psyching out one's opponents by making increasingly outrageous claims of the fucked up things you do to your opponent - like you said, boasting masculine qualities. And frankly, there's also the possibility that some of these stories being shown on this documentary are complete and utter fabrications made up for the benefit of the camera. I mean hey, is it that hard to believe the Vice crew might offer $50 to someone, which would be an enormous windfall in parts of Monrovia, to make up outlandish stories? I don't think it is, if we're going to be honest with ourselves.



That's actually my biggest problem with this. Because none of those questions are really answered, and practically not even raised, we're just kind of left with this picture in isolation of a horrible, fucked up society in Africa where people apparently do horrible things to each other for no truly good reason - it's frankly great if you want to leave people with a Stormfront-friendly view of Africa, honestly. Without context to any of this, it's just a gratuitous tour of human misery and horror.

Check out this work: Utas, Mats. Sweet Battlefields: Youth and the Liberian Civil War. 2003

It is a dissertation from Uppsala University, , Faculty of Arts, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Cultural Anthropology.

The full text is available here. http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:163000

On the question of ''cannabilism'' i don't doubt it existed, but it guess that is probably more routinesed. That eating of human flesh and organs is specific to body parts that hold magical power/s and is reserved for higher ranked men in th militias and that young boys brag about what humans they have eaten.

[brigadista]

some context-


http://gunpointrelaxation.tumblr.com/


IS WEST AFRICA AS DANGEROUS AS VICE WANTS US TO THINK?



Skulls. Cannibalism. Violent orphans without regard for life, stumbling amidst crowds of hostile, dangerous natives. Psychotic villains from prehistoric jungle tribes who rape, torture, and kill without conscience. The pervasive acridity of lawlessness and apathy; horrifying poverty punctuated by a murderer’s sincerity. Above such a hell, the imposing visage of a brutal African merchant of death, whose avariciousness and cruelty shocks the Western conscience and demands a justice that can only be dispensed in a European courtroom. While one can easily imagine such representations of Africa displayed in an anthropological photo-exhibit in Victorian London, they are in fact images of the small country of Liberia that have appeared over the past two years in Western press outlets.

Without question, Liberia’s recent history has been tortured and painful. Nearly two decades of civil war left hundreds of thousands dead, wrecked the country’s economy, and precipitated a United Nations peacekeeping mission that has cost the world nearly US$500 million dollars per year since its deployment in 2003. It is not difficult for a journalist or documentary filmmaker to find tales of horror and suffering in Liberia. Undoubtedly, these images are potent and ravenously consumed by a Western public that often seems eager to hear stories of barbarism in Africa.

Yet, by strengthening ugly discourses of the continent as a savage, dangerous locale with limited social self-awareness, manipulated by homegrown mafia-style warlords and in need of enlightened Western administration, these irresponsible and shallow narratives can be profoundly harmful. By selectively interpreting history, media reports about countries like Liberia can construct a reality in the Western mind that has real consequences for their future and the lives of their citizens.



Roger Silverstone, a media critic, observed that media frameworks “define the moral space within which the other appears to us, and invite an equivalent moral response from us.” The way we see others on the myriad of screens we spend our lives staring at matters; it determines how we perceive difference and familiarity, and hence our feelings of empathy. In helping to establish popular discourses about the world beyond our borders, documentaries like Vice’s can have real world effects, particularly when the subject is a small, relatively powerless country, rich in natural resources, reconstituting its society after years of war.

The “Vice Travel Guide to Liberia” opens with the documentary’s protagonist, an American man in his early 30s, wading barefoot through a swamp with a stocky Liberian man. He asks his guide, “So they call you General Butt Naked?” The man affirms this, telling the journalist of a ritual he often performed during the country’s civil war that involved killing a child and drinking its blood. The shot cuts to stock footage of a young Liberian holding a human heart; next, another young man fires an automatic rifle and a group of children dance with a skull in their hands. The title screen flashes, and the journalist launches into a brief – and highly inaccurate – narrative of the country’s history. He describes the civil war as a “post-apocalyptic Armageddon, with child soldiers smoking heroin, cross-dressing cannibals, and systematic rape. Total hell on earth.” In the background, African drums play at a fast tempo and images of battle and atrocity careen across the screen. Less than five minutes into the documentary, the filmmakers have draped their arm around the viewer and transmitted a very clear message: This place is not like home in a very, very bad way.

Owing in large part to its sensationalized depiction of the country as a ticking time-bomb on the edge of a slide back to atrocity, the “Vice Guide” is almost certainly the most widely viewed documentary on Liberia in the Western world. Produced in 2010, it is the first result in a Google search of “Liberia documentary,” and has nearly 500,000 views on YouTube – far more than any other piece of reporting or commentary on the country. It is an installment in a larger series where journalists from Vice Magazine online – an outlet that caters to a young Western crowd – travel the Global South in search of oddities and the extreme.

The Liberia episode was widely acclaimed, winning a “Webby” award and garnering favorable reviews from CNN and other mainstream outlets. It also traffics in some of the ugliest stereotypes of Africa that one can imagine, drawing from discourses of the continent’s savagery and backwardness to such a pervasive extent that one wonders if its producers were at all cognizant of the colonialist lineage in which such portrayals are firmly planted.



In the course of the documentary, the filmmakers bribe a prison official on camera to release a former rebel commander for an interview, film a 14-year-old boy smoking cocaine in Monrovia’s notorious West Point slum, and are forced to flee after they anger a group of sex workers during an interview in a brothel. In one particularly revealing moment, the journalist and his crew cut an interview short after noticing “heavy duty vibes” by “sketchy dudes” in the neighborhood where they are filming. A shot of the offenders, however, appears to show no more than a crowd of curious bystanders, no doubt interested in the foreign film crew interviewing a notorious war criminal next door. In the absence of a clear explanation for the crew’s reaction, the viewer is asked to assume this crowd is “sketchy” simply because they are black and African and poor.

The implied purpose of the documentary is entertainment – Vice’s coverage of the West is typically limited to fashion, party culture, and music. From one point of view, a piece of vapid travel journalism from an outlet widely known for publishing sarcastic articles about Anglo-American pop culture might not deserve serious analysis and critique. “Real” news, after all, comes from more serious outlets. The problem is that this view ignores the way we’ve come to consume information in the internet age. In the United States, entertainment-as-political-commentary has rapidly gained popularity, with programs such as “The Daily Show” and cable talk shows toeing the edge between informing and amusing. For a generation immersed in social media, instant entertainment availability, and overwhelming choice of news content, production value can often determine how widely a broadcast is watched. Viral videos like “Kony2012” and the “Vice Guide” may represent the only moment that a country like Uganda or Liberia crosses our consciousness.

However, just because the presentation is new doesn’t mean the ideas are as well, and in the case of the “Vice Guide,” the discourse at play is far too familiar; African savagery, tribalism, and the absence of civilized values are ideas that first emerged partly as a means of establishing progressive modernism and whiteness as the standard of normalcy in the European mind. Ideologically, such discourses find their most comfortable home in the belief that the world’s poorer nations do not inherently possess the qualities needed to build a stable modern state, and must thus be guided through the process in a form of paternalism that in its purest form once manifested as colonialism.

This is not to say that much of what Vice covers in its documentary is inaccurate. The Liberian civil war was indeed a horrific event, and practices such as cannibalism and human sacrifice have been well-documented as true. Child soldiers did use drugs, rape was extensive, and the periods where fighting took place in the country’s capital were certainly terrifying episodes of violence and horror. The issue is this: most of that fighting took place over seven years before Vice became interested in the country; thus, the purpose is not to inform viewers of current events, but to point, wide-eyed and gawking, at the spectacle of an alien culture’s manifestation of group violence. How does Gettysburg or Hiroshima appear to a Liberian?

The argument that “it’s just entertainment!” doesn’t fly. The Liberia I spent time in had its share of amputees and ex-combatants, but it also had expansive beach vistas, raucous nightclubs, and bright, charming people struggling to rebuild their society. Yes, poverty is extreme and overwhelming, but there are also lawyers, journalists, schoolteachers, and taxi drivers in Monrovia. How is it that the Vice team could only find former warlords and child prostitutes? Of course, they are there, situated firmly in the complex society that is modern Liberia, but there is something crass and irresponsible about using them as a spectacle to entertain people.



For someone lightly versed in Liberian history, just as troubling as the “Vice Guide”s revelry in ugly stereotypes is their butchering of the country’s past. The mono-narrative repeated not just by Vice, but by most media outlets goes something like this: the Americo-Liberians, freed from slavery in the United States, promptly “enslaved” the country’s indigenous population, a state of affairs that ended when Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe staged a coup in 1980. (Vice erroneously refers to his “election,” when in fact he executed the country’s President in his bedroom and then shot 13 members of his cabinet). The war in Liberia began, according to most accounts, at the hands of Charles Taylor and his rebel army a decade later.

While Taylor’s invasion was undoubtedly the catalyst that began Liberia’s unraveling, the fractured social dynamics in the country have a deep history, intimately influenced by geopolitical and trade concerns in the West. The country was administered for the first two decades of its existence by white Americans; the city of Monrovia was founded on land that was obtained from a local chief at gunpoint. Later, Britain threatened to annex the country unless it “pacified” rural indigenous tribes and established control over its borders; to help, they created and trained a paramilitary force called the “Liberia Frontier Force.” This unit was told to obtain its salaries through looting, and it eventually became the Armed Forces of Liberia — allies of the faction that General Butt Naked himself fought for.



Later, the Firestone Rubber Company was implicated in a scandal involving the AFL’s forced conscription of laborers for its plantation — a stretch of land spanning tens of thousands of acres which still exists today. The country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission described a culture of theft and excess in government, with American and British companies profiting highly from lucrative natural resource contracts, paying kickbacks to government officials while the countryside languished in poverty. By the time Doe took power, the country was a tinderbox waiting to burn.

In the late 1980s, Charles Taylor mysteriously escaped in broad daylight from a Massachusetts prison and made his way to Libya to purchase weapons and training. The United States government admitted earlier this year that he was a paid CIA informant during this period, confirming what Liberians had long suspected to be true. The issue of Taylor’s backing is a sensitive one; many in Liberia believe he often acted at the behest of foreigners. Whether or not the US was ever in a position to dissuade Taylor from his invasion, it is difficult to assign blame for the wars in either Liberia or Sierra Leone entirely to him. Both countries were ruled by corrupt governments benefiting from Western backing, and political dissatisfaction among their citizens was widespread.

What is puzzling, given such context, is why the international media has assigned blame so directly to Taylor for the region’s wars. Whether the explanation can be found in a press corps too disinterested in the country and its history to conduct thorough research, or in a pattern of ideologically edited content is unclear. What is not unclear, however, is that the impact of telling such a simplistic story is unfair to Liberians, who appear to the outsider to be a dangerous, volatile people who are quick to jump to war. Refusing to acknowledge the impact that foreign money and power has had in the country’s development is a disservice to historical clarity, and reinforces the quality of inexplicability that permeates Western thinking about Africa.



In the midst of these questionable and incomplete representations, however, there has also been humanizing and well-crafted coverage. The common thread in these portrayals of life in Liberia is that they offer real historical context and avoid the sensational in service of the humane. Media representation is a fact of modern life, and thoughtful treatment of faraway subjects is likely to become even trickier in a globalized age of fluid identities and shifting cultural allegiances. Journalists from the Western world will continue to write about Liberia, Africa, and the global south, so the question becomes one of responsibility in both intention and execution. For us as media consumers, there is a need to be critical with what we encounter and, if possible, beware of safari-hat journalists looking to confirm our fears about the terrifying world we sometimes appear to think we live in.