Of cannibalism, society and man:

General Butt Naked confesses to killing some 20,000 people before finding himself standing nude in battle on a bridge outside Monrovia and hearing the voice of God tell him he was Satan's slave and should repent immediately. Since when he's been an evangelical preacher in Ghana.

And we shrug and move on. Hey, it's Liberia. Back in 2000, the country's Ministry of Information had hailed President Charles Taylor for the ease of access he offered to his people "so that everyone will at least have the opportunity to have the ears of the Chief Executive, instead of a select few." By contrast, only a select few got the opportunity to have the ears of the previous Chief Executive, Samuel Doe. He'd fallen into the hands of Prince Johnson, one of Charles Taylor's allies in the battle to unseat him. "That man won't talk!" barked Johnson. "Bring me his ear!" So the boys sliced off his left ear, and then the right, and made the president eat them.

But the lads kept the best bits for themselves. They removed His Excellency's genitals and chowed down in the belief that the "powers" and "manhood" of the person whose parts you're eating are transferred to the eater. A New York returned to a Hobbesian state of nature is a delicious fantasy because it's so remote, but in Liberia who needs the movies? They're living it — right down to the whole Quentin Tarantino "Stuck In The Middle With You" menu options. And when it turns up on page 37 of the newspaper we give it nary a thought because who expects anything of West Africa anyway?

Liberia's not a "victim" of European colonization. Founded by freed American slaves, its first republic lasted from 1847 until Samuel Doe's coup in 1980. In the seventies, before nude warlords came a-rampaging, Monrovian bigwigs didn't merely pull their pants on before swaggering forth, they favoured morning dress of an anachronistic gentility reminiscent of the antebellum South.

In other words, Liberia went backwards.

Read the whole Mark Steyn article.

Tags: western civilization multiculturalism political correctnes barbarism