Perhaps you thought General Butt Naked in "Book of Mormon" was a fictional character? You thought wrong.

In Vanity Fair, Tom Freston profiles the former Liberian warlord turned evangelical minister whose alias many Americans know only through a character in Matt Stone and Trey Parker's Broadway hit, Book of Mormon. Snip:

Today known as Joshua Blahyi, he devotes himself to running a ministry, making amends, and rehabilitating former child soldiers. In his former life he ran the Butt Naked Brigade, a militia aligned with Samuel Doe. There were countless militias in those days, led by men who adopted noms de guerre such as General Bin Laden and General Mosquito. Butt Naked’s soldiers were particularly ruthless—killers and rapists who fought naked except for guns and shoes. Their nakedness was meant to instill fear and, they also thought, to protect them. By their own admission, before battle they often sacrificed young children, ate their hearts, and drank their blood. “The hearts were roasted,” Blahyi told me, as if that were a mitigating detail. In 2008, in front of Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he claimed that he and his followers had killed more than 20,000 people.

Freston's June 2012 trip to Liberia was with the One Campaign, Bono's anti-poverty advocacy group. Freston is board chair.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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…and since he is a Christian now, all of those murders are forgiven, correct? Because I mean if so, then just…..wow.
- http://twitter.com/McGrude Michael Hogsett
  
  Isn’t that the take away from all those bible study sessions?
- AsteriskCGY
  
  Meh better a live guy that can care for those in a similar situation than a dead one that just makes us feel better.
  - http://www.xeni.net/ Xeni Jardin
    
    Not buying it. By that logic, I suppose America should release Charles Manson and let him run therapy programs for the likes of James Holmes?
    - Mitchell Glaser
      
      You might find this interesting, it’s a new musical called Manson’s Girls that deals with how regular people get caught up in cults and become murderers:
      
      http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/video?id=8757242&pid=8757241
    - http://twitter.com/itmaybejj jj
      
      There is more than one reason to lock a person up. If Manson could be guaranteed to be reformed, 100%, not a threat to anybody, and asked for the right to spend his days serving soup in a soup kitchen instead of sitting in jail, that would be a challenging hypothetical. That is to say: is prison about justice, reform or societal separation/safety? On a justice argument, Manson should be crucified. On reform and safety…nobody would trust him. But other murderers have been reformed, and for them…well…it is much more complicated then, and is why we have the parole system.
      
      If Liberia has chosen to say “no justice is enough, and attempting justice would be a bloodbath, so we won’t even try” and is attempting to find forgiveness for anybody who is deemed reformed…well…I wish them well. This guy is presumably spending his days unarmed surrounded by his victims. They’ll forgive him or murder him. And if people are honestly able to forgive him, justice might not be served out on earth, but those victims will find a certain freedom stronger than revenge. Corrie ten Boom talked a LOT about that from a holocaust victim’s perspective over the years: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/voices/boom.html
      - Gilbert Wham
        
        Probably the most reasoned, dispassionate and sensible respons e to anything that I’ll read see or hear today, and I only just woke up. Damn.
    - davidasposted
      
      The conditions in post-war Liberia are entirely different than those in the U.S.
    - http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
      
      If he were reformed in a way that he wouldn’t be a danger to others and that he could actually help reform others, then yes, of course – why not?
      
      That is the point of the prison system, to reform people and keep them away from the public while doing so. Being in the US I appreciate that it’s easy to forget that though.
    - IamInnocent
      
      Madame X, American soldiers have killed way more than 20 000 persons, soldiers and civilians, babies and elders, with pretty much the same barbarity in their heart, hidden under a high tech varnish. Such is war. Do you suggest that there is that much of a difference, that the US succeeded in killing and mutilating and raping ethically ? Of course not, you don’t.
      
      If letting that man undo some of his worse is what it takes to break the cycle… sometimes the real choices are tougher than anything we can imagine or anticipate.
    - scatterfingers
      
      Change is a valuable thing. There are not many among the living who cannot be rehabilitated.
  - Mitchell Glaser
    
    I say no. This kind of thing tears up my heart like nothing else. There are a ton of the worst people in the world (no exaggeration) like this guy, or similar filth in South Africa after apartheid for example, who are given a free pass when the big bell rings that announces the fight is over. I’m talking about the actual perpetrators of horrors that would make Stephen King dry up and blow away.
    
    And then there are the people like Werner Von Braun, the slave driver and designer of WMD’s who is not only given a pass after the war, but provided by our government with every possible kind of support to allow him to fulfill his goals. What kind of fucked up world do we live in that allows this?
    - Gunker
      
      The South African people decided that as they had suffered enough division during apartheid, and that as there were atrocities committed by both sides, it would not help reconcilliation by having criminal trials. If you showed remorse and you confessed fully to the TRC in public, then in effect you would be free from future prosecution. Yes, some very bad people (on both sides) did not get the punishment they deserve, but the divisiveness of having trials would have ripped the fragile democracy apart.
  - http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
    
    Consistent prosecution of war crimes is more about establishing precedent to prevent future actions of others.
    
    Certainly one monster may become a saint.
    
    But if that description of his past is true, then in my mind St. Dracula still deserves a fucking stake through the heart.
    - IamInnocent
      
      Yep. Still, what he deserves and what’s possible or better for most in Liberia today…
    - thao
      
      He lives and works among his victims. If he is to be staked, they will stake him and no one would stop them. Let him do what good he can. They will know immediately if he is sincere or not.
- http://twitter.com/itmaybejj jj
  
  Well…sort of. The Christian belief is that, in God’s eyes, he HAS been sentenced to death for what he’s done. I think we can all get behind that.
  
  The uniquely Christian belief is that Jesus can sit in the proverbial chair FOR him if he asks.
  
  But that doesn’t absolve him of secular punishment or atonement.
  - marilove
    
    The Christian belief is that, in God’s eyes, he HAS been sentenced to death for what he’s done. I think we can all get behind that
    
    I … don’t get this. EVERYONE dies. We’re already all “sentenced to death”. How is he … sentenced to death in God’s eyes? I mean, really? No, I can’t get behind that, because it’s a bunch of gobbly gook bullshit that doesn’t mean anything.
    - Petzl
      
      Amen.
- davidasposted
  
  Blahyi has not been formally tried for his crimes, but not because he is a Christian. He and many other participants in the war testified in front of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Liberia, which determined that because he willingly participated in the process and was confronted by some of his victims and the families of others that he should not face prosecution. Liberia suffered from more than a decade of fractious civil war; the TRC recognized that, during an exceptionally fragile post-war period, it would be dangerous to jail or sanction willing participants in the peace process.Is this decision problematic? Certainly. But although the civil war has ended the country is by no means united, especially following Johnson-Sirleaf’s contentious re-election last year (note that the TRC wanted her banned from electoral office for funding Charles Taylor’s NPFL). Many victims of the civil war simply want to move on and continue rebuilding their lives. Given the nature of the war, I cannot blame them.
http://www.geekforce.com Hugh Johnson

An excellent profile of this guy can be found in the Vice guide to Travel:Liberia

http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-travel/the-vice-guide-to-liberia-full-length
- http://goodsharer.com/ Aloisius
  
  Warning: It is pretty disturbing.
- Petzl
  
  Wow. This is an amazing documentary. Uh, wow.
- mcheshire
  
  That was a fascinating documentary. Thank you.
Pope Ratzo

Is there any thing you can do that is so bad you can’t ever be rehabilitated?

I think so.

If God’s going to forgive this guy and send a homosexual to Hell, then you can have Him.
- http://twitter.com/itmaybejj jj
  
  I think it’s worth separating “rehabilitated” from “trusted.” Serial killers and slave ship captains have been rehabilitated, in the sense that they became quite different people who spent the rest of their lives atoning and done wonderful things. But that’s different from saying you should be trusted, or ever again allowed near a gun/child/the-outside-of-a-prison, etc.
  
  And regarding your postscript…since it’s not really a tangent on this article…the Christian belief is that, short of forgiveness, we’re all in trouble before God — we’re all guilty of something. When Jesus was asked which bits of all the rules needed to be fulfilled to live with God (like, say, not mass-murdering versus not-having-homosexual-sex), he responded with “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
  
  To any honest Christian believer — that’s insurmountable. Not-being-a-murderer or not-having-that-kind-of-sex doesn’t get you any closer to that standard. That’s the point: Jesus was preaching that we all need to be forgiven, and the standard is “do you submit to that,” not “how much have messed up today?” The windbags on TV tend to gloss over that.
  
  So…regarding this guy? I’m not saying I, as a Christian, think its easy to forgive him, or that it’s a good thing he’s running around free. I just think that I’m not in a much better place in God’s eyes, since I fail to love my neighbor every day by watching TV instead of working to stop poverty, mass rape and genocides, and/or buying products made/grown by near-slave-labor. While he was running around killing people, our country was managing our oil supply half a continent away. Go us. So if God can forgive this guy, I think that’s freaking awesome, because it means there’s hope for the rest of us too.
  - IamInnocent
    
    Liked even so I am not a religious person overall.
rocketpjs

I sincerely doubt there is a God, but if he is remotely as judgmental about sins as the evangelicals seem to think, this guy is going to roast forever.

Sadly, I doubt we reach the awareness threshold of any such celestial being, and so this guy will carry on ‘making amends’ until he dies and rots in a grave, just like the rest of us. Justice is a human concept and will only happen if enacted by humans. But I know the price of going after these guys would be for the war to start up again and them to go back into the jungle and start killing, so I have no idea what the solution might be.
- http://twitter.com/Noddy93 Noddy Ninetythree
  
  “I sincerely doubt there is a God, but if he is remotely as judgmental about sins as the evangelicals seem to think, this guy is going to roast forever.”
  
  what makes you say that? the children who hosted the hearts he roasted and ate were carried full term.
- atimoshenko
  
  Unless my understanding is incorrect, the only sin most gods are judgemental about is the failure to genuinely grovel before them. Provided there is at least one genuine moment of grovelling, repeated from then onwards until death, all other sins can be forgiven. The only ethics omnipotent beings apparently care about is being worshipped by those much less powerful than them.
  
  No such grovelling? Eternal fires for you! So, if the Judeo-Christian God exists, heart-eating General Butt Naked >> Gandhi, for instance. Hell, out of the ten apparently most important instructions that this God ever gave, fully the first four-five (depending on how one counts) are concerned about how one should worship him.
  - http://redesigned.com redesigned
    
    it’s true. the judeo christian god will sentence you to eternal damnation, torture, and suffering, for simply not believing in him. you can do stuff like this and still supposedly go to heaven so long as you simply believe in him. basically he is the biggest narcissistic prick in the universe with a huge ego and self esteem problem.
    - Wreckrob8
      
      Which is why he created us in the first place. Sing halle-fucking-lujah!
solitaire

Thanks to the wonder of the internet, you can be friends with this human-sacrificing, blood-drinking, ex-warlord turned evangelical Christian on Facebook(tm):
https://www.facebook.com/joshua.m.blahyi
Petzl

Practiced cannibalism? Now heads a ministry? I’m sure he won’t run into a problem unless he does something objectionable like advocating birth control.
- davidasposted
  
  Note: in Liberia, it would be advocating homosexuality.
CSBD

My favorite anecdote from Gen. Butt Naked is when he was on vacation in another country (Nigeria), he stopped for food at a roadside BBQ stand. He immediately realized he was eating human meat and went to the authorities.

The local police would not believe him about the shop selling human meat, so he said “I know what I am talking about with human meat, google me”. After the police googled “General Butt Naked” they believed him and arrested the BBQ owners.
scatterfingers

Weird, I just heard about this guy the other day on an old Caustic Soda episode.