CZM Rewind: The British Super-Soldier Who Killed A Nation

Original Air Date: July 17th, 2018

Robert is joined by comedian Brodie Reed to discuss Idi Amin, a highly skilled soldier who murdered an estimated 300,000 or more of his own people, and his rise to power in Uganda.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Alz Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everyone, Robert Evans here. Earlier this week, we had
a one partner on Dracula. Could have been long enough
actually for a two part, but I just felt it
ran better as a one parter. But this is a
holiday week, the most sacred day on my calendar, Halloween,
so I'm taking the rest of the week off. So
we've decided on Thursday, we're giving you a blast from
the past. We're doing a rewind episode and this is

(00:25):
our episode on Ediamine from like almost five years ago,
I think something like that. It's really a fascinating story.
If you're a newer listener, you might have missed it,
so check it out. Hello friends, and welcome back to
Behind the Bastards. I'm Robert Evans, and this is the

(00:45):
show that tells you everything you don't know about the
very worst people in all of history. Today. My guest
who I will be who's coming in cold with this
tale and who I'll be reading a story to is
Brody Reid, comedian.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
Hello, Hey, esteemed guest.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
I think steamed guest, Yes, yeah, Esquire. Brodie read Esquire.
I think means you're the editor for Esquire magazine.

Speaker 3 (01:07):
Right, I'm a lawyer, and I'm also the headed editor
of Esquire magazine. Those are my credits, yea, and I
won't change them.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
That's what that means. Now, we're doing a little bit
different today. Normally we're pretty upfront about who the subject
of the podcast is, but there's a lot of background
to get to before we can really properly introduce this guy. Okay,
So I'm kind of curious as to when you figure
out who we're talking about, and I also kind of
want it to be a little bit of a surprise
for the audience. So okay, if you're good, I'm just
going to get into it.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
Okay. I mean, I'm kind of like an amateur private investigator,
so I might get it real off the bat, and
I want to ruin your flow or anything. But let's
let's try.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
All right, let's se let's let's see how this goes.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
Time on the clock.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Maybe this will be you know, my, my, my great disaster, but.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
I think it'll be fun.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Yeah, all right, so today you know, right now twenty eighteen,
Britain is a tiny, adorable nation filled with wizards and
a conspicuously broad definition of the word pudding. It's easy.

Speaker 3 (01:59):
I'm going to guess Valdemort.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
No, no, no, I'm just getting it that it's easy
for us to forget today considering how docile the British
people are, that for a while they ruled the entire world.
The British Empire was the largest empire in human history.
The Mongol Empire at its height held about twenty four
million kilometers in area, sixteen percent of the world's population.
The British Empire was over thirty five million kilometers in
area and ruled nearly a quarter of the planets.

Speaker 3 (02:25):
Trust me, I did not forget that they colonized everything.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Yeah, and they I think what's most shocking to me
when I read about this is that they controlled that
huge chunk of the planet with probably the smallest army
than any empire has ever had. You know, the Roman
Empire at its height was about seven hundred and fifty
thousand regular soldiers. The British Empire at its you know
height before the World War started, was about one hundred

(02:49):
and twenty thousand British soldiers. They never spent more than
about two and a half percent of their GDP on defense.

Speaker 3 (02:54):
Wow, which is as a regular soldiers were like super
serum like Captain America soldier.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
So you have predicted a little bit where this is going. Now,
these soldiers are regular soldiers. They're volunteers, which is different
from most Most militaries in this period are not volunteer,
permanent standing military. So the British are a little bit
different there. But they're just normal, you know, soldiers. They
have machine guns, which certainly helps with the whole colonizing thing,
or they have machine guns for a chunk of this.

(03:21):
But you know, it does beg the question when you've
only got one hundred and twenty thousand guys and for
most of the British Empire they don't have machine guns,
how do you hold a quarter of the planet in
bondage for two hundred years with the whole army that's
a little larger than the modern Coast Guard in the
United States nukes?

Speaker 3 (03:39):
Is that not the correct? No?

Speaker 2 (03:40):
No, no, I mean you get the locals to oppress themselves.

Speaker 3 (03:43):
Oh yeah, that's my second guy. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
So Michael Codner, who was the head of Military science
for the Royal United Services Institute, described the British Empire's
military is essentially quote the Royal Navy and a system
of indigenous constabularies overseen by a small but professional British army.
Now I found that quote in the BBC article from
back in twenty eleven. The article also quoted a military
historian named doctor Hugh Davies, who noted that all of

(04:07):
British India was controlled by just thirty thousand British troops
supervising hundreds of thousands of local Indian soldiers or sepoys.
He was quoted as saying, the empire had to pay
for itself, and it had to be profitable, and if
you put too much into building up the army, the
empire is no longer a profitable enterprise.

Speaker 3 (04:24):
He sounds like the a rap mogul. Yeah, so that
sentence sounds and has a build itself.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
In his defense, I don't think he's justifying imperialism. I
think he's just explained this was the attitude that the
imperialists had is we can't spend too much money on
the army. Otherwise. Yeah, everything is for profits exact, And
British India was conquered in the first place by a
for profit corporation, the East India Trading Company. The East
India Company had a private army of over a quarter
of a million men.

Speaker 3 (04:53):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
Most of those were indigenous soldiers. So you know, local Indians,
people from Burma, whatever.

Speaker 3 (04:58):
That's great local jobs.

Speaker 2 (04:59):
Yeah no, yeah, exactly by local, very ethical with our
modern as a job creator.

Speaker 3 (05:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
Yeah. So the East India companies started taking over India
in the sixteen hundreds and by eighteen oh three they
controlled most of what's now India, Pakistan, and Burma. In
eighteen fourteen, this giant multinational corporation declared war on Nepal,
which was at that point known as the Kingdom of Gorka.
They fought for two brutal years before the kingdom seated
a third of its territory to the company in exchange

(05:28):
for peace. The British won, but the Gorkas had put
up a really vicious fight, and the East India Company
was impressed by their warriors, so they started recruiting these
men into their army. At first, these Gurkhas were used
to keep the peace in ever rebellious India, but the
Gurkhas quickly proved themselves to be very capable warriors. In
eighteen fifty eight, when the Queen formally took control of
India away from the company, Gurkhas were integrated into the

(05:49):
Greater British Army. They served as elite shock troops in
World War One and two. The British Army today still
fields battalions of Gurkis recruited basically as mercenaries from Nepal
and paid far less than their British citizens counterpart.

Speaker 3 (06:00):
This sounds like Game of the rounds. This sounds like
some unsullied.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
It's a little bit like that.

Speaker 3 (06:06):
Now.

Speaker 2 (06:07):
The British like the Gurkhas because they were loyal and
just incredibly deadly. They carry these big knives called kukries
in there. There's a lot of if you go online,
you can find threads today where British veterans talk about
the stories their NCOs told about Gurkhas and like there's
a common one where you have to tie your shoes
a certain way, okay, because the Gurkhas cut your foot off. Well. No,

(06:28):
when they're doing espionage missions in the night, they'll tell
who they want to kill by feeling their bootlaces. They
could tell like in World War Two they knew what
German bootlaces felt like, and so if an Allied soldier
took boots off of a dead German he might get
cut by a Girka like that. It's a possibly apocryphal story,
the variants of it are still told today.

Speaker 3 (06:45):
So they'll kill you if you tie your shoes.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
Wrong, essentially, if you tie your shoes like the enemy.

Speaker 3 (06:50):
Yeah I heard that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
So the Gurkhas were like super soldiers of the British
Empire of what you were getting at.

Speaker 3 (06:56):
Yeah, they sound like sword guys to me. Yeah, the
knives equally.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
Yeah, they're scary and they weren't the only super soldiers
in the British Empire. Over their period of time conquering
huge chunks of the world, the British encountered a number
of warrior peoples. Some of these peoples, like the Gurkhas,
had their own well developed warrior culture already when the
British arrived, and the British just exploited it. But in
other parts of the world the process occurred less naturally.

(07:22):
Take the tribes of the West Nile region of Africa.
Their first contact with more technologically advanced peoples came in
the early eighteen hundreds, when successive groups of Arab slavers
started preying on them. Certain tribes who were the best
fighters were enslaved by these Arab slavers and used as
soldiers to capture other Africans who were then sent off
to markets in North Africa and the Middle East.

Speaker 3 (07:41):
Sad.

Speaker 2 (07:42):
Yeah, yeah, it's a bumber. This whole story is going
to be kind of a bomber. Oh great, when you're
talking colonialism, it's never not a heartbreak.

Speaker 3 (07:51):
I mean, when aren't you talking colonialism? If we want
to get real.

Speaker 2 (07:56):
Well, I mean, and that's one of the point, Like
when you start talking about dictators, especially from the seventies, eighties, nineties,
you can trace nearly all of them back to colonialism.

Speaker 3 (08:05):
Oh yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
Yeah, that's that's more or less this story. So by
the eighteen seventies, the British had become abolitionists in a
big way, perhaps because they felt kind of bad about,
you know, the whole Atlantic slave trade thing, but mostly
because it was a way to justify conquering colonies in Africa,
saying we're going to stop the Arab slave traders, but
we have to conquer this whole chunk of Africa in

(08:26):
order to stop the slave trade. Right way to do it.

Speaker 3 (08:28):
They're a good guy with the gun mm hmm, with
a lot with all the with a lot of mascots. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
So the British took over a huge chunk of North Africa,
including the Sudan, and with public pressure behind them, they
sent armies down to stop the slave traders. These armies,
like all British armies, were made mostly of locals. Many
of those locals were recently freed slave soldiers that the
British were happy to induct into their army. So they
would free these slave soldiers from the Arab slave traders

(08:56):
and then they would induct them into a colonial military
and use them to fight slave traders.

Speaker 3 (09:00):
Yeah sounds like college sounds like the job market.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
I thought you were going to compare this like college football,
but well, yeah, that's too absolutely.

Speaker 3 (09:11):
So.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
One such army of former slaves was headed by a
German doctor and a Muslim convert named Emin Pasha. In
the eighteen eighties, m and Pasha and his army were
besieged by an Islamic army during the Modest Insurrection. They
were eventually freed by a guy named Henry Morton Stanley,
who regular listeners of the podcast will recognize as the
guy who mapped the Congo for King Leopold of Belgium.
Stanley took Pasha with him when he left, and Pasha's

(09:33):
men stayed behind in the West Nile region on garrison
duty for a few years until they were picked up
by agents for the Imperial British East Africa Company. Now
the company representatives were always alert for new warrior people
to enlist, and they considered these men to be quote
the best material for soldiery in Africa. These tribes came
to be called Nubi or Nubians and became the British

(09:54):
Empire's shock troopers in Africa. The East Africa Company used
their Nubians to carve an empire out of the continent
heart They named their new colony Uganda. As the British
Empire grew, the Nubians were inducted into their regular British
army and became the elite fourth Battalion of the King's
African Rifles. They were Muslims, which differentiated them from most
of the peoples they were sent to suppress in Central

(10:15):
and West Africa. The British basically turned the Nubian people
into a living, breathing factory for the production of the
deadliest colonial soldiers in Africa and yes being bred for
war had a negative impact on the Nubians themselves. Here's
what one former commanding officer of the King's African Rifles
wrote about them. Quote, the Nubians became the most feared
and influential ethnic group in Uganda, mercilessly suppressing uprisings and

(10:37):
tribal sippruts at the behest of their British masters. It
was the success of these early operations that gave them
contempt for all pagan and Christian tribes in the country.
In nineteen seventy four, a journalist named David martinek of
this sentiment. Quote. Among their fellow countrymen, they enjoyed an
unenviable reputation of having one of the world's highest homicide rates.
The Nubians were renowned for their statistic brutality, lack of

(10:58):
formal education for poor enemies, and for the refusal to
integrate even in the urban centers. Martin was in Uganda
to write about one Nubian in particular, one of the
deadliest warriors to ever serve in the King's African Rifles,
a man named Idiot.

Speaker 3 (11:11):
I mean, okay, wow, okay, So that's these guys sound
like black Republicans. To me, guys are on the wrong team.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
I mean they're like did they ever have a choice,
Like no, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (11:23):
You're right.

Speaker 2 (11:27):
If you recruited people as soldiers for one hundred years
and don't really give them any other options for anything
to do, it's it's not going to be pretty.

Speaker 3 (11:35):
Yeah, I hear that. I mean I grew up in
a bad neighborhood also, but I didn't become a tough warrior.
I just became a comedian with a smart mouth.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
I'm sure there were a few Nubian comedians and that
like part of the difficulty here is like all these
stories about how brutal they are coming from like British
and American white guys.

Speaker 3 (11:54):
Yeah, totally, they're probably just like pretty cool. They're probably
just like, I don't know, trying to event whatever a
sports game that they had. I'm trying to play some
football and they were like, well, these guys are brutal.
They're kicking our ass.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
Well, I mean it's like British football, so yeah, for sure,
can it be?

Speaker 3 (12:12):
I mean I feel like if Colinizers came over to
Africa and then the Africans just like dunked a basketball,
they'd be like, whoa, he's brutal power.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
It's a shame of basketball. Get over there first, now
I know. So Idiomine was born sometime between nineteen twenty
five and nineteen twenty eight. We don't really know for sure.
He was probably born in the village of Koboco in
northwest Uganda. He was for sure a Kakwaw, which were
one of the Nubian tribes that British considered to be
a warrior people. Now Iddy's father served with the British Army,

(12:44):
the King's African Rifles, and was generally out of the picture.
His mother is usually described as a witch or a
self proclaimed sorceress. I watched a documentary when I was
sort of prepping for this thing that was called, I mean,
The Rise and Fall, and it was it was a
terrible documentary, one of those like nineties made for TV
movies where all the acting's bad and it's very sensational,

(13:07):
super biased, and it leans into the stuff that I
think what most people have heard about Idiomine, which was
like witchcraft, cannibalism, that sort of thing, which we'll be
we'll be talking about a little bit later.

Speaker 3 (13:18):
But is uh, I mean that just sounds like Los
Angeles culture, witchcraft, astrology, and the veganism not much, not
so much cannibalism.

Speaker 2 (13:29):
Yeah yeah, yeah, veganisms. Yeah, a better ism than day.
But we're we're going to get into, uh sort of
how a lot of these facts are unreliable about Iddie.
But the way that this terrible documentary summed up Idy's
childhood I found humorous, which is the child grew up
by the river learning the ways of manhood and the
spells of witchcraft, which that sort of sums up I

(13:52):
think the general common popular perception of who this guy was.
It sounds like a fished a lot boy. Yeah, there's
all there's gonna be a lot of dark stories about rivers.
Whenever you read about.

Speaker 3 (14:03):
The scary Yeah, how did the ocean get to the
land that way?

Speaker 2 (14:09):
Yeah, it's one of those Like anytime you read about
a place with that's like famous for its rivers and
they have some sort of like horrible butchery happen, there's
just always tons of stories about kids finding heads in
the rivers. We were just in the Cambodia when it
was the same thing.

Speaker 3 (14:21):
Just like I mean, you find all kinds of weird
stuff in there.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
Yeah tbh. So, yeah, the witchcraft stuffed is almost certainly
racist bullshit. What witchcraft was and is still common in
parts of Uganda, I mean, was a practicing Muslim. You
Gandan Muslims had their own kind of witchcrafty tradition where
people would use the Koran to foretell the future, and
he certainly used that, but he wasn't doing like pagan
blood magic or anything like that.

Speaker 3 (14:46):
Yeah, all of this sounds like astrology so far.

Speaker 2 (14:48):
What was the sign?

Speaker 3 (14:49):
Doesn't it say?

Speaker 2 (14:50):
Well, it was like in the Islamic version of astrology, Okay,
but I don't know, probably Aquarius. Yeah, witchcraft was less
of a factor in his regime than the tradition and
rituals of his beloved British Army, so Itdy was eventually
abandoned by his father and by some accounts his mother too.
It's kind of hard to tell what happened there. He
got as far as the fourth grade before he dropped
out of school. When he was at most seventeen, a

(15:12):
British Colonial Army officer noted his tremendous size and recruited
him into the King's African Rifles. He started his service
as a cook's assistant literally peeling potatoes, which is like
the stereotypical bottom of the wrong Army.

Speaker 3 (15:23):
John. But it seems like if you're big that you
shouldn't be a rifleman. We're gonna make you target. Go ahead.

Speaker 2 (15:34):
You're a pragmatic man, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (15:36):
I mean, I would only recruit the little guys, the
most beard army.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
Ever, he didn't stay at the bottom long it. He
was gigantic. He was like six foot four, well over
two hundred pounds, and he was in his younger days.
He gets kind of heavier as an older guy, but
like you go get picturement and he's young. He is
solid muscle. He's just a mountain of a man. Yeah,
me too.

Speaker 3 (15:56):
He's got about three inches and that's about it.

Speaker 2 (15:59):
So he was perfect candidate to become a heavyweight boxer,
which is exactly what happened. According to Robert Keeley, deputy
chief of the US Mission in Campaula, quote, his advancements
came essentially through boxing. He was very tall, with a
tremendous reach in big hands. He was big and strong
and tough. In general. You could picture him in any
culture as a heavyweight champion, and that's what he was.
The Ugandans are very fine boxers. They still prove it

(16:20):
to this day in the Olympics. They have a strong
boxing tradition which the British encouraged. The main avenue for
advancement in the army was boxing, so Amin eventually became
the heavyweight champion of the Army and in nineteen fifty
one to fifty two the heavyweight champion of all Uganda.
His ability to punch people proved useful in maintaining discipline
among other soldiers in his unit. Here's another quote from Keighley.

(16:41):
Idiomin became prominent as the link between the two. The
officers sitting around sipping their tea or their brandy or
their port, upon hearing some noises and disruptions outside, would
call in Sergeant Amine and tell him to take care
of the problem. I mean, goes out. There are some
shouts and screams as he knocks him heads together and
kicks some butt, and then silence. The officers resume their
sipping and a very appreciate performance. They eventually made him

(17:03):
the top sergeant. Wow okay, because of course sergeant was
as high as an actual African could raise in the
King's African Rifles. We're not allowed to have any Africans
be officers in any of the British colonial armies the world,
or I think in India for that matter, which is
you know, if you're a racist colonial power, you don't

(17:23):
want anybody in your army. You can't have like you've
got to recruit soldiers from the locals, but you don't
want them learning about supply lines and logistics and stuff.

Speaker 3 (17:33):
Yeah, good point.

Speaker 2 (17:34):
Yeah, then they'll know how to you know, overthrow the
seven guys that you have there.

Speaker 3 (17:38):
Yeah, that's why I haven't been promoted to any officer ranks.

Speaker 2 (17:42):
I mean, how's your boxing?

Speaker 3 (17:44):
I mean very very, very bad. But if we're talking
about a wee game, then still very bad.

Speaker 2 (17:53):
So we need an army where yet where we as
the product? I mean with drones nowadays, that's that's the future.
I feel like that's the future drone box.

Speaker 3 (18:03):
Yeah, I hear you.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
So he was the perfect soldier for the British Empire.
Everyone who served with him in those days was impressed
both by his toughness and by his almost superhuman strength.
His commanding officer, Ian Graham, said that his body was
quote like that of a Grecian sculpture during one terrible march,
when all of the other men could barely continue. Quote,
one man was an example and an inspiration to us all.

(18:26):
As we finally passed the finishing post, Idioman was marching
beside me at the head of the column, head held
high and still singing for all he was worth. Across
one shoulder were two brin guns, And a brin is
like a machine gun. It's like a twenty two pound
like machine gun that you put on a tripod on
the ground. So he with two of those in one
hand and over the other was a crippled ascari. And

(18:46):
the askari was a British word for like a local soldier.
So he had one of his wounded comrades on one
arm and two machine guns on the other. That's like
the kind of soldier he made. He was just he
was like he was a super so man.

Speaker 3 (19:00):
He invented CrossFit. Apparently this guy's some Joe Rogan alpha
brim kind of guy.

Speaker 2 (19:05):
Now. Ian Graham said that seeing this reminded him of
a translation of another of a King's African Rifles marching song.
I'm about to read you the song, which is explained
sort of how the British viewed men no singing. Oh boy,
that's I think I can do a good British accent here,
but I don't know that I can sing again. It

(19:28):
does pressed, It definitely rhymes, and it's a bit racist.
Now for this, you know, you need to understand the
word Sudi is another word for Nubian, like it's like
a local term for like people who are from his
group of Ugandans. So here's the British fighting song that
this guy thought of when he saw idiot mean marching.
It's the Sudi, my boy, it's the Sudi with his

(19:50):
grim set, ugly face, but he looks like a man,
and he fights like a man, for he comes of
a fighting race. Which that's exactly what these people were
to the British. Is the whole art. So I assumed
there was more, But this was the lion that this
guy recalled, which is like it shows you exactly what
the British thought of these guys. Is that they are soldiers.
That's why, and that's what they were bred for and

(20:10):
encouraged for. And they didn't have to do people of
like the coquit tribe didn't have to do anything other
than send their sons to fight for the British army
and the British would take care of them.

Speaker 3 (20:19):
And did they respond with their own distract or?

Speaker 2 (20:22):
I know how these people press as a distrack at
that point, that's too bad, Yeah it is, and it
gets yeah, it gets better. So young a Man was
sent to war several times on behalf of the British Empire.
In nineteen forty nine he went to Somalia to suppress
the shift of rebellion. In nineteen fifty two he sent
to Kenya to suppress the Mau Mau uprising. We don't
talk about the Mau Mau uprising a lot these days,

(20:44):
but it basically started as a bunch of Kenyan rebels
who were angry because the British were whipping people half
to death, which that's how British kept discipline and all
their African colonies. Was just horrific amounts of whipping. So
these guys rose up and they killed some British people,
and the British sin an army and brutally suppressed it.
They put more than one and a half million kenyons
and concentration camps, they hanged thousands of them. Edie probably

(21:07):
would have been doing a good amount of the hanging,
and he also killed a number of warriors and vicious
battles in places like Kenyoma and Kangheema. So he's been
raised just as a soldier and now he's been brutalized
suppressing multiple colonial wars very violently.

Speaker 3 (21:24):
Man, successful black man, and then he just turned around
and betrays his culture. Classic story.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
I mean, he kind of starts with the betrayal. Right,
yea many later, Well we'll get to later right now.

Speaker 3 (21:38):
Actually, oh ma'am is more okay, correct, there's a lot.

Speaker 2 (21:41):
So by the late nineteen fifties, Idy had risen as
high as an African could and the King's African Rifles,
which is sergeant. The British, yeah, as I said, didn't
let their locals be officers in their armies. This policy
came back to bite them in the ass in the
late fifties because by that point it had become clear
that colonialism was on its way out. The British were
preparing to release Uganda as an independent nation. Unfortunately, the

(22:01):
British hadn't governed any of their colonies as countries. They
basically just treated them as money making enterprises, corporations. Essentially
with all the business of state craft kept out of
the hands of the locals. The British were required by
international the international community to leave Uganda with an army
so it could defend itself, but they hadn't trained any
sort of officer corps into Uganda, which is an important

(22:23):
thing to have, which is why every military in the
world has an officer corps. You know, you train people
to do certain jobs. But the Ugandans just didn't have that,
and rather than spend more money in time to build
an officer corps for there soon to be country, the
British just randomly promoted the sergeants they liked best. One
of those sergeants was a boxer with a fourth grade
education named Idi.

Speaker 3 (22:42):
I mean, is it okay? Cool?

Speaker 2 (22:44):
Yeah? He was commissioned in nineteen sixty two, right before
uganda independence. He found himself in charge of a platoon
in northwest Kenya, captured a bunch of prisoners and ordered
them to be executed. The British governor of Uganda, Sir
Walter Coates, vetoed the possibility of Idy being charged for
this war crime. Was one of the few African soldiers
in the entire officers in the entire army and prosecuting
him right before independence was deemed politically undesirable. No one

(23:07):
stopped to consider whether or not it might be bad
for Uganda if one of their high ranking military leaders
was a war criminal. Okay, So when we get back,
we're going to get into how Idiomine rose to power
and to be the president of Uganda and what happened next,
which it's going to be a dark story, but we

(23:28):
have we have some ads first off, and before we
get into some ads, you know, I've been talking a
lot about the Dorito's people. We're trying to get Doritos
to sponsor the podcast.

Speaker 3 (23:37):
Oh I hear you. I love that crunchy crown show
that the Rito's.

Speaker 2 (23:41):
Chip nothing washes the horrible taste of colonialism out of
your mouth like a cool ranch. I was gonna say
nacho cheese. But that's what's great about Dorito's is freedom,
the freedom to cleanse your palate with whatever exciting flavor
combination you want.

Speaker 3 (23:59):
How are they not as sponsor yet?

Speaker 2 (24:00):
I well, maybe they will be after this video. Let's
hear from some other sponsors and we're back. Sorry was
that so? Yeah? I did want to get into before

(24:21):
we dig into the rest of the story. What you
recall about idiomin before we get into his career. Not much.

Speaker 3 (24:27):
I have heard the name before. I've heard that he
was a president of Uganda, who's a bad guy. I
don't know the details. I mean already, I've learned way
more than I thought. Yeah, before you know, it was
even it even became an independent nation. I didn't realize that.
You know, they killed so many people.

Speaker 2 (24:48):
Yeah, well, it was one of those things I had.
I had vaguely heard yet he was president of Uganda.
There were these rumors of witchcraft and cannibalism. I hadn't
known any of this stuff about sort of how the
British military worked at the time, and the fact that
he was basically bred to suppress insurgencies, Like that's what
the British used his people for, was controlling populations through brutality,

(25:13):
which I think is an important thing to get into here,
because otherwise it's just a story of like this dictator.
But he didn't rise up out of anything. He was
like and I think he went up the system. He
paid his dues, and he was also trained, like you're
going to when we get into the things he did
in Uganda that were brutal. They're all echoes of things
he was doing for the British, like they like, it's

(25:35):
it's not just a story of like some horrible dictator
rose up and did terrible things. It's the British trained
this guy to do terrible things on their behalf and
then abandoned the country of Uganda to him.

Speaker 3 (25:48):
Yeah, this is basically this guy's completely might meets right
and yeah, that's dangerous.

Speaker 2 (25:53):
It's really dangerous, and it's dangerous if you don't like.
People like that exist in every culture. We've got more
than our fair share of them in the United States.
We have a we have structures built up to like
make sure that those people don't wind up in charge
of the military or whatever. Like, yeah, at least not
to the extent where it's like, there's a reason we've

(26:16):
never had the army seize power like it's in our country. Yeah,
we've definitely.

Speaker 3 (26:22):
Well it's because we give them so much money.

Speaker 2 (26:26):
Okay, so not just cool cool ranch. Fuck, let's get
back to idiot. I mean all right, but seriously, Derido's
people send us a drop us on We're at bastards
pot on Twitter. Yeah, Idiomine has just committed a war
crime right before you've got an independence, and the British
governor of Uganda has sort of hushed up the whole

(26:46):
thing because he's one of the only officers and they
didn't want to, you know, they just they just didn't
want any complications. They said it would be politically undesirable
if this came up right before independence. So idioman now
in off Serve, rises again rapidly through the ranks. According
to Robert Keeley, he advanced by eliminating his rivals in
one fashion or another, either physically or by discrediting them,

(27:08):
or by scaring them or some way or another. His
promotions came frequently, so he's good at working the system.
He understands how the British military works.

Speaker 3 (27:17):
In respect the hustle.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
Yeah, and if there's one man who knows how to hustle,
it's Idiomine. Now. On October ninth, nineteen sixty two, Uganda
gains its independence from Great Britain. You got his first
prime minister was a guy named Milton Obote, and the
president was a guy named Edward Mutessa. Mutessa was also
the king of the Baganda, who were a southern tribe
in Uganda, he was better known as King Freddie. For

(27:39):
a little while, Mutessa and a Bote co existed and
things were all right in Uganda. Milton Obote, like Idiomine,
came from northern Uganda. He advocated for a great African awakening.
He was a socialist, although not a very dogmatic one.
The West generally disliked him. But he was also super corrupt,
which is going to be a theme in this story.
So by nineteen sixty four, Idiomine had been named deputy

(28:01):
army commander under a dude with the really cool name
Shaban Appelat, which is one of my favorite names that
I've encountered in this podcast research. He saw action again,
fighting alongside Katanga rebels who were battling the government of
zaiir It. He took gold and diamonds from the rebels
and gave them guns from the Ugandan army in exchange.
He then sold the loot for cash. A Bote, the President,

(28:23):
got in on the racket. There was a brief parliamentary inquiry,
but a Bote had all the other people in this
scheme arrested and so he and he and Idie were fine. Now,
in nineteen sixty six, a Bote got tired of sharing
power and suspended the constitution. He sent Colonel Idiamine to
attack the palace and bring the king back dead or alive.
The king managed to flee the country, but the coup
succeeded and a Bote was left as the sole power

(28:45):
in Uganda. Now this did not make the British happy.
The Baganda were their favorite tribe in Uganda. Winston Churchill,
under Secretary of State for the Colonies from nineteen oh
five to nineteen three eight. Yeah, super good guy. Never
caused a famine that four and a half million Yeah,
not even well once. But let he among us who

(29:05):
has not starved for four and a half millionaire. Yeah,
we all cause a couple of famines, you know. He
considered the Baganda to be civilized, which means basically that
they'd all converted to Christianity easily. Their territory was just
where the British wound up putting the railroad and their
administration buildings. So the Begandans were the people the British
had spent the most time within Uganda. They considered them

(29:26):
civilized because they acted like British people are the good
ones yeah, exactly. Now. The Ugandan people, most of whom
weren't Begondans, supported a Botes kicking down the king. They
saw him as casting down a British backed monarch. They
saw this as a true break from the past and
chance at a new beginning. It was an exciting time,
but the excitement soon faded in the reality of a

(29:47):
botes ridiculous corruption. People protested, of course, and by nineteen
sixty nine the government could only stay in power with
the military's backing. Edie had been popular with the British
because he was a great soldier and because he spoke
English with just the right a accent that made them
think he was cute and dumb because they were racist
as fuck. But Idy was not dumb. Well, the government
had grown more dependent on his military. He started recruiting

(30:08):
hundreds of his relatives and fellow Nubians into the army
and putting them in the positions he would want them
in when it was time to take power. This was
disrupted in nineteen seventy when an assassin tried to kill
President a Bote and shot him through the mouth. American
diplomat Beavou, now recalled the army, went a muck in
for about twelve hours. It was a pretty horrifying situation.

(30:28):
Itdy appears to have gotten confused and thought the attempt
was a coup against both him and a Bote, so
he ran he quote jumped out the back window of
his house and his pajamas and disappeared, which really mystified
us all because they were expecting that this assassination attempt
was him seizing power, but it was just somebody else.
So he was mocked for weeks in the wake of
the attack because he'd ran out in the night in
his pajamas, and a number of people counted him out

(30:50):
as a force and new gund in politics at this point.
But Idy embarked on a redemption tour. Part of that
was having a bunch of people clandestinely executed in the night.
Part of it was showing up in public within a
bunch of his armed friends and just scaring people. Nall
was there for part of that too. He was out
at a bar one night and he quote, you know,
he saw Idio. Quote I walked out of the bar
and there was a mean, a huge man, an enormous

(31:12):
fellow with his officers and their weapons sitting in the
main lounge, sitting at attention, not talking, just looking around.
I thought, Jesus, what's going to happen. They sat there
for about half an hour and then Amen said something
in one of the local languages, and they all got
up and walked out of there. What it was, I'm
convinced to this day was a threat on the part
of a mean about re establishing his position. He knew
that he was laughed at because he ran away. This

(31:34):
was his reprisal, his counter threat, and it worked. People
were scared to death. So they might have been more
scared by the fact that Idi had had a number
of people killed.

Speaker 3 (31:43):
Yeah, and the fact that he just sat there for
a half hour for his heave. That's crazy.

Speaker 2 (31:46):
Yeah, it was a little bit like some guy just
sits in the bar staring at you with like his
friends and all their guns. You know, that's intimidating. So yeah.
In nineteen seventy one, President of BOTE went to Singapore
for a conference. Before he left, he put out the
order that idiom In was to be arrested for massive
corruption and murder, which Idiot was guilty of, but which
a Bote was guilty of. Two before the warrant could

(32:09):
be served, Idiomin launched his coup. The killing started right away.
At least a thousand soldiers from tribes that Idie didn't
trust were massacred. The river filled with corpses, which is
you know.

Speaker 3 (32:21):
So when you tell the story, like when I hear
stories like this, I'm like, I don't even know where
all these people. How many people are are they going
to kill before they just completely run out of people?
You know, it's like Jesuise.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
Yeah, they really go pretty far. And by the time
this is all over, Idio will have killed something like
one in fifty seven of the people in Uganda. And
he's not the worst of them, which we'll get to
as well. Oh my god, he's just the one that
everyone focuses on because there's rumors that he ate people.

Speaker 3 (32:49):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (32:51):
So Nall was the American diplomatic officer in Uganda, so
he had responsibility for all of the eight hundred Dish
American citizens and country. He told those people to hold
fast and chill at home, and that went fine. But
there was also a tourist group in town who were
furious that this coup got in the way of their vacation.
So I want to read this story just because it's
a levity. It's just America. Help. It's rich Americans acting

(33:12):
like rich Americans in the middle of a coup that's
life and death for their people. In Uganda.

Speaker 3 (33:16):
We just wanted to go on a nice vacation on
some endangered animals.

Speaker 2 (33:22):
I said to them, look, the airport is closed. And
later the tour leader turned to me and said, well, mister, now,
these are important people. They haven't got time to wait around.
They're going to miss their connections in Nairobi. I said,
you're damn right. They're going to miss their connections in Nairobi,
and they're going to get hungry, they're going to get tired,
they're going to get dirty, and they're going to want
to get their laundry done. And it's not going to
be done because I don't see any chance of these

(33:43):
folks leaving for four or five days. And that was
just the case. They were furious. One guy, the president
of this big liquor distributing company in Hartford, Connecticut, High
Blood or Hugh Mind or something. He beat me about
that on the head and shoulders. He said he had
to get back to sign a contract. I said, you
can't do it. There are soldiers at the airport who
will kill you, which I just love. Like, there's people

(34:07):
getting murdered in the street and you're like, I've got
a contract to get back to.

Speaker 3 (34:11):
Yeah. That sounds like every screenplay where a businessman is inconvenience.

Speaker 2 (34:18):
Yeah, it's like that. Yeah, there's a terrorist hijacking the
airplane and he's like, I'm gonna miss the account.

Speaker 3 (34:22):
I gotta get home for Christmas.

Speaker 2 (34:27):
So okay, that was a nice little interlude. So in
short order, Idiomine is the new president of Uganda. That's
a position he would hold for more than eight years.
The Western powers, mainly the British and the Americans, were
hopeful at first. They hated a Bote because he was
a socialist and because he was even more corrupt than
they were prepared to forgive. Idiomine had a good reputation
among the British. He trained as a paratrooper in Israel,

(34:47):
so Israel really liked the guy too. So yeah, at first,
it seems like this new dictator is going to be
great for white people. You know Lady Listowell, who was
a hungary noblewoman and a journalist who became Idio's first biographer,
I met him around this time, and here's how she
described meeting him for the first time, to give you
an idea of like how this guy comes across quote.

(35:10):
I looked into the smiling face of a tall, muscular
officer with shrewd eyes who invited me to a cup
of coffee. He was a hooking figure of a man,
and I was fascinated by his hands. Beautiful, slim hands
with long, tapering fingers.

Speaker 3 (35:22):
We got your horny, we gotta.

Speaker 2 (35:25):
I just love. We did a podcast on King Leopold
of Belgium, the guy who massacred fifteen million people in
the Congo, and in his biography there was like a
whole paragraph talking about how beautiful his hands were. So
I just that's apparently that's now if I can find
one more that's officially trains beautiful hands. I'm just always
shocked that apparently some people are really staring at hands

(35:48):
a lot.

Speaker 3 (35:48):
Yeah, I know, and you never hear about like, you know,
his cuticles weren't not well manicured. Yeah, his piranos were
a little long.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
It was really yeah, yeah, there were actually reasons that
a reasonable person and who wasn't you know, purely looking
at this from like the British point of view, might
have thought Idiomine had a shot at being a good president.
For one thing, he was a fun guy. Everybody who
met him really spoke highly of him, Like everybody, like
even people who later were like, oh yeah, he definitely
committed atrocities. He was charming. It was a fun guy

(36:18):
to be around.

Speaker 3 (36:19):
Yeah. I met him and I was so scared. I
was like, this guy is gonna kill me. So I
was like, ha haha, nice guy, great guy.

Speaker 2 (36:27):
He was obsessed with Scotland, which is one of the
famous things about idioman Yeah. All of the officers in
the African Rifles. Yeah, and he had he loved people
playing bagpipes. Time's weird. Yeah, all of the officers in
the King's African Rifles had been Scottish, and so Edie
just really loved Scottish culture. He had huge He had
a whole plane.

Speaker 3 (36:48):
Do you remember seeing him in like clothing and he's
wearing like plaid and stuff.

Speaker 2 (36:53):
And there's a movie about him that's not super accurate,
but it's called The Last King of Scotland, right, Yeah, yeah, Yeah,
And he had a whole plane dedicated to just bringing
Scottish whiskey into uh Uganda. Like there was like a
presidential plane. That's just the Whiskey Express, which is a
cool thing to desert. Yeah no, that's that's that's legitimately fine.

Speaker 3 (37:16):
Here you cool of flying.

Speaker 2 (37:18):
Yeah, I'm fine. No, we have a vodka guy fly
the Whiskey Express. He's fine until he gets home. Uh
Idio adopted a number of British military traditions for his
own military. He sent a musician to Scotland for a
year to learn the bagpipes. He also established a state

(37:38):
military jazz band with perhaps the best name of for
a band I've ever heard, the Revolutionary Suicide Jazz Band,
also known as the Revolutionary Suicide Mechanized Regiment Band or
the Suicide Mechanized Jazz Band. And here's there.

Speaker 3 (37:52):
Were they like a punk band.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
No, they were just a jazz band. They should have
been a punk bandide they were there. This is a
really great picture. They were the regimental band. They were
a military band. And the band they were a Unit
four was one of the elite mechanized regiments in the
Ugandan army. That was a suicide mechanized regiment. So it
was like to try to make them sound scary, because
guys don't care if they die. They're the suicide regiment

(38:15):
for And this amazing picture, with several others, will be
up on our website behind the Bastards dot com. You
owe it to yourself to check it out. Yeah, So
it also seems I should note that from reports at
the time, most of the musicians and the Suicide Revolutionary
Jazz Band were sort of press ganged and forced to
play Yeah, they don't look exactly happy, they don't look

(38:38):
jazz wow. So Iddy's reign was brutal by all measures,
and got increasingly brutal as time went on. There are
a number of theories as to why Robert Keey thinks
he was just promoted out of his depth, like Michael Scott.
Basically he was a fine sergeant, but he never should
have been an officer, let alone running the nation, which
is one way or another probably fair Keeley says quote

(39:01):
he had learned to use his fists and translated that
into how you hold your position, how you protect yourself.
He applied all of the brutal boxing lessons he had
learned against his rivals. Lady Listowel also thought that this
poor guy had just been forced to jump into a
position too complex for his mind. Quote. The Kakwa have
a great respect for personalities, but not for rank or position.
They never had chiefs or recognized clan leaders. I mean

(39:21):
was brought up to believe that all Kaqwa tribesmen are equal.
Some of his recent measures illustrate all too well that
he had to leap from a peasant background into the
complicated politics of the modern world without any intermediate feudal preparation.
I think this attitude that Idy was just a guy
that who got promoted beyond his talents is inaccurate and
based pretty heavily in racism. It shifts the brain the
blame over to Uganda for letting such a man rise

(39:42):
that high, and I think the real blame lies with
the British. Again, there's guys like Idio in every country,
violent authoritarians who seek to impose their will on others.
Established nations, build antibodies, up checks and balances and legal systems,
and established bureaucracies to stop men with fourth grade educations
and histories of head injuries from heading the army.

Speaker 3 (40:00):
Sounds nice, Rabo.

Speaker 2 (40:01):
Now well, clearly ours aren't perfect, so but you know,
Uganda didn't have any any of that. The British didn't
put any of that in place before. They just abandoned them.
M Like. It's one of those things where if you
look at what was set up when the Uganda was freed,

(40:21):
I don't see someone like idiot was bound to at
least try to take control.

Speaker 3 (40:25):
Yeah, it sounds like they set up the country like
a reality show.

Speaker 2 (40:29):
Yeah, yeah, it is almost like that.

Speaker 3 (40:31):
Yeah, they were like, here you guys, go hear some
sticks survive.

Speaker 2 (40:34):
And they didn't. They didn't consider any of the ways
it could go badly, and they didn't like they know,
like the British have never had a military coup and
they have an officer cadre for a reason. They like
set like they know how you set up a military
so it doesn't destroy the country. And they didn't do
any of that in Uganda because they were lazy and
they didn't care. So fuck the British.

Speaker 3 (40:58):
Yeah, fucked and Flint, Michigan still doesn't have clean water.

Speaker 2 (41:01):
Yeah, and fuck us too, for sure, for sure, for sure.
This one is actually this one sort of our bad too,
because we're we supported the Idiomine regime for a while.
We being the United States, Fuck us, fuck everybody, Fuck
everybody except for Uganda. They didn't deserve any except for now.
Dorito's had nothing to do with this. Okay, that's that's fair.

(41:24):
And you could argue that Dorito's has stopped similar monsters
from arising in other countries by filling them with nacho goodness.

Speaker 3 (41:31):
Yeah, that's right, stop the monster of hunger.

Speaker 2 (41:33):
As far as we know, Idiomine never got to experience
extreme nacho flavor, and that might be the secret of
his madness.

Speaker 3 (41:40):
Yeah, the only extremism he should have been into is
not choke cheesy crunch.

Speaker 2 (41:50):
So yeah. When the British first started the Ugandan Colony,
they had carried out a policy of bringing in South Asians,
mostly from India, to Uganda to quote service a buffer
between Europeans and Africans in the middle rungs of commerce
and administration. This had started when the British brought thirty
thousand Indians over to build railways in Uganda. These folks
had a lot more experience with Western style capitalism than

(42:10):
the average Ugandan, and as a result, they saw great
success setting up businesses in the new colony. By the
early nineteen seventies, Ugandan Asians owned ninety percent of the
country's businesses and contributed ninety percent of its tax revenue,
despite making up a small minority of the actual population.
This had obviously caused a lot of unrest between native
ethnic Ugandans and the Ugandan Asians. President de Bote had

(42:33):
pursued a policy called Africanization, which attacked Ugandan Asians with
laws aimed at reducing their economic dominance it. He expanded
on that policy and added in a healthy dollop of
straight up racism. He announced that the government would be
reviewing the status of Ugandan Asians who'd been given citizenship.
So basically they were looking at naturalized Ugandan citizens and
finding excuses to take away their citizenship.

Speaker 3 (42:54):
Yeah, that's what's happening right now.

Speaker 2 (42:56):
Yes, it's exactly what's happening right now to naturalized American citizens,
which is a.

Speaker 3 (43:02):
Huge bummer, huge bummer.

Speaker 2 (43:04):
Weird how these shitty guys have the same playbook in
a lot of cases. Yeah, I mean, also canceled all
in progress citizenship applications from Asians, and then in August
of nineteen seventy two, he gave all Asians in Uganda
ninety days to vacate the country. So we're going to
get into how that policy went and what a clusterfuck

(43:24):
ensued afterwards, and what happened once the West finally decided
that Idiomine wasn't their man. But first we've got some
capitalism to get into. Oh, yay, yay, capitalism, the thing
that has nothing to do with the tens of millions
of death to colonialism. Not a thing, not a thing.

(43:44):
Here's some ads and we're back. So as the story
has come up here, Idiomine has seized power, He's executed
a bunch of people, and he has decided to expel
all of the Asians in Uganda. He's given him ninety
days to vacate the country. This policy affected eighty five

(44:07):
thousand people, twenty three thousand of whom are already citizens
of Uganda. I'm going to play a clip of idiomy
In talking to the press to hear how he justified
the policy. And I think what's interesting about this is
how friendly the foreign press is to him, which sort
of gives you an idea of how charming this guy
was in person. So even though he's introduced, he's talking
about something pretty awful, like people are they?

Speaker 4 (44:28):
Yeah, I'll play it decision for the economy of Uganda,
and I must make sure that ever Ugandans get a
fruit of independent since independent actually Uganda is not yet independent.
I will say that even when the British handed over
on the ninth of October nineteen sixty two, the Uganda

(44:51):
is still not yet independent. Uganda will be independent after
this my decision. After I want to see that the
whole Campala street is not full of Indians. It must
be proper black and the administration in those shops is
run by the Ugandans.

Speaker 2 (45:10):
Would you like to get all Asians out of really?

Speaker 4 (45:13):
Yes, they must go to their country.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
Even on nationals of Uganda.

Speaker 4 (45:17):
If they want to go, they're they're, they're they're, They're
welcome to go.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
What's what happened to these people?

Speaker 4 (45:23):
If they don't go, by the time, I think they
will be sitting like they're sitting on the fire. I
will tell you this.

Speaker 2 (45:31):
You just wait.

Speaker 4 (45:32):
After three months, what will you do to them? Okay,
you will see. I think they will not a city
comfortable here in Uganda. I will tell you this. I
must actually tell you the truth. Take camp for them.

Speaker 1 (45:48):
If you're not.

Speaker 4 (45:49):
Doing I am not responsible for building them transity camp.
Have you asked the British to take them away?

Speaker 2 (45:58):
Yes?

Speaker 4 (45:58):
It is a British high mission is here. He's a responsibility.
I have told him. You've said you wanted to teach
Britain a lesson President, Why is that? And that is
now listen, I'm teaching the British. I am teaching now
the listen because I am correcting them from the mystic
they had admit if they had to think before Elia
that that as the African here, who can even work

(46:23):
and building the railway with the instruction given to them
by the British, this problem will not happen.

Speaker 3 (46:32):
Wow, that was like a Monty Python.

Speaker 2 (46:34):
Yeah, it's remarkable that he's like talking about like these
twenty thousand people, terrible things will happen and they don't leave,
and then all of these guys laugh like just because
it's disgusting. It's yeah, and it's so I mean, he
has a point at the end there when he says
like it was fucked up to the British to bring
these people in the build railroads and not just have

(46:55):
us build railroads because it's our fucking country, which is
you know, a fair point. But at this point, the
guys are like third generation Ugandans, Like, it's messed up
to kick people out of your country and take their businesses.
It's just weird to me. How friendly the press was
to him still at this point.

Speaker 3 (47:11):
Well, they were all British guys and they didn't really
give a FuG about brown people either way. They were
just there because they had to.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
Being yeah, and they thought he was fun and they liked, yeah,
it's yeah. So Iddy's main defense of his policy was
that he was trying to give you guanna back to Ugandans.
He also said that God had told him in a
dream that South Asians were to blame for Ugandis economic
woes and corruption. It's probable that this policy had a
lot to do with the fact that Great Britain had
just refused to sell them guns so he could invade Tanzania.

(47:39):
So he was basically just being like, Okay, Great Britain,
you have to deal with eighty thousand refugees now because
you wouldn't give me the weapons I needed to fund
with my neighbor. Idy was brutal to the Ugandan Asians,
but he was equally brutal to ethnic Ugandans. His particular
targets were a Choli and Langhi tribesman. In the first
few days of his regime, he executed more than a
thousand members of these tribes in the army. As his

(48:00):
reign wore on, the purchase spread from the military to
the general population. Bullets were in short supply in the
country and desperately needed for all the wars id he
planned to start, so the murder squads he dispatched had
to find other ways of doing their work. Their preferred
tools were sledgehammers, crowbars, and sometimes crocodiles. Oh my god, yeah, yeah,
I mean, if you have crocodiles, every problem looks like crocodile.

Speaker 3 (48:22):
No one has ever wielded a crocodile. It's been a
good guy.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
It's never a tool of the good guy. No, what
about Yeah, So, the most feared government agency, sort of
the idiomine equivalent of the German SS, was the State
Research Bureau, which is maybe my favorite name for like
a secret police organization. Sounds so like seems like the

(48:47):
guys who should be like, oh, yeah, your soils pH
is off. But yeah, these are the murder police, as
opposed to you know, countries where all of the police
are the murder police anyway. Apollo Lawalco survived one hundred
ninety six days in the pink stucco building where they
tortured and executed their captives. He gives us our clearest
picture of what life was like for people deemed by

(49:08):
Idioman to be enemies of the state. Quote, when the
prisoner's name was called out, the guards would go and
grab him. We were all in handcuffs already. We were
in handcuffs twenty four hours a day. But they would
change the position when they called a man, putting them
on and back, and then they would place a long
rope with a loop around his neck. Then someone would
drag him by the rope along the staircase going up
to the ground floor, and people would beating him on

(49:30):
all parts of his body. Then his head would be
beaten in. By the time he reached the top of
the stairs, he was dead. So Looko claims the guards
made sure the prisoners saw every execution. That was part
of the point. He claims that between one hundred and
fifty and two hundred people were executed every night while
he was there in nineteen seventy seven. Looko believes he
saw more than fifteen thousand Ugandans clubbed and beaten to

(49:50):
death over just five months. At least two hundred and
fifty thousand Ugandans perished during Idiomin's terror. In the real
number maybe more like half a million. Roughly every fifty
seven were to die over the next eight years. So
Idy himself has said to have participated in a number
of these murders. Luoko claims to remember seeing him beat
men to death with sledgehammers while wearing a gas mask. Quote,

(50:12):
I mean was actually participating. He turned to us at
one point and told us to relax. The state research
buomen were mostly Nubians like Idy, former super soldiers of
the British Empire, doing what they'd always done, just for themselves.
Now and again, this is not savagery that he's executing
suddenly now that he's in charge. This is exactly what
he was doing on British orders in Kenya. You know,

(50:34):
I'm going to go ahead and guess that when he
was president is not the first time he had people
killed with sledgehammers.

Speaker 3 (50:39):
Like it never ceases to amaze me, just the capability
of brutality of some people.

Speaker 2 (50:48):
No, and these all, all these deaths, Like, obviously these
deaths aren't idiot mean, but they're also on colonialism, which is.

Speaker 3 (50:55):
Well, yeah, for sure, I blame everything on colonialism, just
so restraight.

Speaker 2 (50:59):
And that you can it's totally fair. It's like being
being a white kid who was educated in the South,
I did not hear very much about colonialism growing up,
and so it's once I've started researching a lot of
these guys in the show and learning about King Leopold
and the fifteen million who died in the Belgian Congo,
which is probably the worst single crime of colonialism that

(51:20):
I've come across. But like it's I think it would
probably be fair to say that, like if you add
together the Nazis and the Stalinist and Maoist communists and
all the people they killed, it doesn't come close to
the deaths to colonialism. Yeah, absolutely, And you know, in
a shorter time, you know, the Nazis were great at
killing people fast, but there's I will never know most

(51:44):
of what was done on behalf of the British Empire.

Speaker 3 (51:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:47):
Anyway, so while most secret police organizations were you know,
wear leather trench coats and dress in all black and
like you know, like your cat. You're in central casting.
You're trying to like cast a secret police a Like
they're all in black. They look like the Matrix guys.

Speaker 3 (52:03):
Yeah, were turtlenecks.

Speaker 2 (52:08):
Not the men of the Research Bureau. They wore wore
flowered Hawaiian shirts, platform shoes and sunglasses. Oh no, they're
dressed real cool like me. Oh, I appreciate someone doing
it different. If you're if you're gonna massacre hundreds of
thousands of people, at least try a new You know,
there's no arm bands here, it's it's.

Speaker 3 (52:29):
Yeah style, dressed like parroteads. I guess we're sandals.

Speaker 2 (52:35):
If if Jimmy Buffett carried out a massacre, it would
look like this.

Speaker 3 (52:41):
Every time you killed somebody, get a lay Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:44):
Well, and you know they're all drunk. They've got a
whiskey plane. Yeah yeah. Uh So. The Research Brio headquarters
was connected to president a Means Home by an underground tunnel,
so we could show up and participate in the executions
when he wanted to. Most of the work was headed
by a man named Major faruquin Men. He was sort
of the Laventi Barria type figure, and Barria was the
head of the KGB for a while under Stalin. So

(53:07):
he's the kind of guy who could murder his own
friends after a night of drinking and hanging out with them.
At one point, he had his wife and three daughters executed.

Speaker 3 (53:14):
Fuck dude, that guy should have waited till a grand
the photo came out.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
Just didn't get it out of his system.

Speaker 3 (53:20):
I think so.

Speaker 2 (53:22):
He suspected his wife and daughters were helping gun and
rebels because they were Bagandas, which is like the tribe
one of the tribes that ID he hated. So yeah,
It's important to understand that all the oppression apparatus id
he created was very decentralized, So most of the deaths
during this period were not idiomins signing someone's death warrant.

(53:43):
It was as a result of the fact that all
soldiers and intelligence officers in his country were allowed to
arrest or kill any person they considered dangerous to peace
and good order. Man so Idy gave his men a
legal excuse to pursue their personal grudges and steal from people.

Speaker 3 (53:58):
Wow, abolish ice, you guys just dropping out in there.

Speaker 2 (54:02):
No, And that is the official line of the podcast
is Abolish Ice.

Speaker 3 (54:06):
Bid ritas a ball of science. I'm drinking all water
lukewarm until ice is abolished.

Speaker 2 (54:14):
It is funny that, like our Gestapo equivalent is is ice,
because if.

Speaker 3 (54:19):
They had known fifteen years ago, they probably would have
named it something cooler.

Speaker 2 (54:22):
Ice is. Yeah, it's not cool. It's not that cool.

Speaker 3 (54:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:28):
Amen gave his men excuses, yeah, to pursue personal grudges
and steal from people. One survivor recalled, quote, everything you
have seen in Wild West movies was everyday life. Here
someone bumping off the husband and publicly taking the wife,
or someone bumping you off and openly driving off with
your car. So I hope we presented kind of a
picture of how brutal Amin's regime was. Let's dig a
little deeper into the man himself. You can't understand idiomine

(54:51):
without understanding that he was great at fucking Who wrote that? Well,
at least he needed everyone to believe that he was great,
So one way or the other, it's it's important to
understand that was a part of his public image. That's
how he knew his bad ladies, No and and almost
all like the only person, the only famous person I'm

(55:12):
convinced who is ever actually good at fucking. I was
gonna say Marlon Brando, but oh.

Speaker 3 (55:18):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, well Marlon Brando makes sense.

Speaker 2 (55:21):
Yeah yeah, he was method. So he was method anyway.
Yeah so, I mean was it was important to him
that there be a public image that he was virile
and good at sex. His former Minister for Health, Henry Kimba,
said this, besides his five wives. Also, he had five wives.

Speaker 3 (55:41):
That's kind of low honestly for what I thought.

Speaker 2 (55:44):
Yeah, No, he's he's he's he's a conservative fellow. Besides
his five wives, Amine has had countless other women, many
of whom have borne him children. His sex life is
truly extraordinary. He regards his sexual energy as a sign
of his power and authority. He never tries to hide
his lust, his eyes locked onto any beautiful woman. His
reputation for sexual performance is so startling that women often

(56:04):
deliberately make themselves available, and his love affairs have included
women of all colors in many nations, from schoolgirls to
mature women, from street girls to university lecturers, which is
who knows how true that is.

Speaker 3 (56:18):
It sounds like a lot of rape.

Speaker 2 (56:20):
Definitely, definitely a lot, because there's a ton of stories
of him having husbands executed so he could fuck their way.
Oh my gosh, but this is you know, his former
minister of health giving what is This is what idiot
men wanted people to hear about him, that he's because
this was important, of course. Yeah, I'm great at fighting
and I'm great at fucking.

Speaker 3 (56:37):
Yeah. He sounds like Wilt Chamberlain.

Speaker 2 (56:39):
There's just something about authoritarian assholes and needing people to
believe they're tough and good at fucking.

Speaker 3 (56:44):
Mm hmm. I want everyone to know I am bad
at sex, which means good sex over there. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:58):
I'm trying to think about which of our presidents were
definitely the bit because I hear JFK was terrible. Really yeah,
I've heard LBJ said JFK was terrible.

Speaker 3 (57:07):
Well, you can't trust that guy.

Speaker 2 (57:08):
You can't trust that guy.

Speaker 3 (57:09):
He was he was jealous.

Speaker 2 (57:12):
And he called his dick jumbo, which means he did.

Speaker 3 (57:16):
Well, maybe that's true. Then I don't know. Nixon seems
pretty bad.

Speaker 2 (57:20):
Nixon can't have been good, right, no way, No, I
feel like Teddy Roosevelt.

Speaker 3 (57:27):
Well he was in a wheelchair. No, it was FDR
never mind.

Speaker 2 (57:31):
Well he was a big stick guy, right, Yeah, it
was a big stick guy.

Speaker 3 (57:34):
Yeah, that guy could fuck.

Speaker 2 (57:35):
That guy could fuck. And I feel like FDR was
probably pretty good, but like he would have been like
a hands an oral man. That's my guess for FDR.
I think he leaves them satisfied. As what I'm saying,
I don't think I agree. Yeah yeah, so idiot mean
Again had five wives. His favorite wife was a lady
named Sarah. He met her when she was eighteen and

(57:57):
a go go dancer for the Revolutionary Suicide jazz band. Okay,
story as oldest time Idy fell in love, but tragically,
Sarah already had a fiance and she was pregnant. So
when she gave birth on Christmas Day nineteen seventy four,
oh god it he just told everyone that the kid
was his and had the birth announced on state television.

Speaker 3 (58:16):
Oh what the fuck.

Speaker 2 (58:17):
Sarah's fiance was not happy with this, but he died
in a car crash immediately after this, so it worked out.

Speaker 3 (58:22):
No suspicion, no but then at all.

Speaker 2 (58:24):
Nope, just a random car crash the like the day
that he complains.

Speaker 3 (58:27):
Oh poor guy.

Speaker 2 (58:28):
Yeah yeah, yeah, I shouldn't laughed there. I may be
getting a little callous with all these stories.

Speaker 3 (58:36):
I mean, it's hard not to disassociate a little bit.
I mean, so far in the last hour, I've learned
of many millions of people died.

Speaker 2 (58:44):
Yeah, it's it's horrific. So Idy, I mean married Sarah
in nineteen seventy five was a small private ceremony, but
Iddy was concerned that having a small private ceremony might
be portrayed or might be seen as excluding the people
of Uganda, so he remarried her in a gigantic televised ceremony. Yes,
Sir Arafat was his best man. The banquet cost two

(59:04):
million dollars, the banquet, not the whole wedding, just that,
which I would kind of want to check out a TOI.

Speaker 3 (59:10):
I mean, I've seen Super sixteen, you know whatever it's called.

Speaker 2 (59:15):
So President Amine cut the rudding wedding cake with a sword.
Knowing his history, there's no chance he didn't also use
that sword to stab people.

Speaker 3 (59:24):
Obviously. This sword guy is a sort of guy.

Speaker 2 (59:26):
Fucking sword guy to the problem. That's how you know
someone's trusted if they're a fucking sword guy. M hmm.
Machete is a people's weapon.

Speaker 3 (59:37):
While you were learning about colonialism, I was studying a Blockchaine.

Speaker 2 (59:47):
So Idy had five wives and something like forty or
fifty children. He married his first two wives in the
same year, nineteen sixty six, when he was twenty eight.
One of those marriages went all right and produced several children,
but his second wife Ka divorced. He murdered the best
man and then murdered k Her arms and legs were
found in a sack in the trunk of a car.
So Idy had her body sewn back together and marched

(01:00:08):
around in front of his children and other wives, or
he didn't. So this is again where we get into
some controversy because his kids are still around and talking
today and do speeches, and like several of them, they
don't like necessarily doubt the crimes that were committed in
their dad's reign. But they are all pretty consistent about
the fact that no, he was a good dad and

(01:00:29):
very normal around us. So it's possible this is a
this story is a lie, like the Witchcraft stuff. Hard
to tell because again, his kids even today, are all
pretty much he was fun, So he might not have
brought it home. I really don't know. I wasn't there. Yeah, Okay,
it's one of those things. It's impossible to know the truth.

(01:00:50):
There's stories that he was brutal to his kids and
fucking had corpses creating around them, and then his kids
say stuff like, here's a quote from his son, it
was fun with my dad. All the time was on
His daughter Maimuna Amin said, he was such a lovely man,
so good, so lovely. He never beats any children when
he's at home. He just wanted us all to be
on him. He's like a mother, a father, a sister,

(01:01:10):
a brother in one. He loved music and he's always
on his accordion singing.

Speaker 3 (01:01:14):
Wow, what are revisionist history this jickass?

Speaker 2 (01:01:17):
Yeah, I mean it's also possible that he was a
brutal monster everywhere outside of the home and was fine
with his kids.

Speaker 3 (01:01:24):
Yeah, and they just never heard about the other stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:01:26):
No, they heard about it, but again they know a
lot of them don't deny the brutality of the regime.
They're just like at home, he was a normal guy.
That's fucked which that happens, like, you can find plenty
of stories about people hanging out with Hitler and being
like he was super nice and he was like my uncle, and.

Speaker 3 (01:01:41):
Yeah, people always say dictators are charismanic and stuff. I mean,
even if we I feel this same thing with celebrities,
I don't really know.

Speaker 2 (01:01:49):
But yeah, and I can't know what we do know,
and what we do know for certain is that Idiomine
played the accordion fucking constantly. He was apparently if you're
an accordion guy, he was apparently good at playing the accordion.
And here is here's a picture of him doing the
weird al thing.

Speaker 3 (01:02:04):
Oh my god, right, it's weird that dorks are truly
the worst people in the world because this guy's in
the swords, accordions, bagpipes.

Speaker 2 (01:02:13):
This guy has bad taste. Everyone with bad tish needs
to be called no. And if he had grown up now, like, yeah,
he would still play the accordion and have a bunch
of swords, but he would also be able to talk
to you about anime for sixteen hours. Oh yeah, absolutely,
m yeah, I'm sorry anime fans.

Speaker 3 (01:02:29):
I mean, anime is pretty cool. Yeah, sagoy some of it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:35):
So the stuff idi Amine is probably most famous for
is again cannibalism, witchcraft, and his obsession with Scotland, because
that's like the sensational stuff or you can.

Speaker 3 (01:02:43):
Do so he's for sure eight people we don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:02:46):
Okay again, that's one of those Yeah, we're about to
get into that. So it's an arguably true that he
loved Scotland. There's a shitload of documented evidence of that.

Speaker 3 (01:02:55):
Yeah. Maybe he just was eating some hagas and people
thought it was like a human intestine.

Speaker 2 (01:02:59):
Or they just wished it. Yeah exactly, Oh please eat
some people. Stop with that shit. It is very much
up for debate as to whether or not he was
really into black magic and cannibalism. The rumors that he
was in the magic and eating people started with the Begondans,
and the Begondans were the people from South Uganda and
they did not like the people from North Uganda. A

(01:03:20):
lot of these rumors originate from one Begondan who served
in Idioman's cabinet. He wrote in his book, which was
one of the major sources for the Last King of Scotland,
quote A means bizarre behavior derives partly from his tribal background.
Like many other warrior societies, the kakua Amans tribe are
known to have practiced blood rituals on slain enemies. These
involve cutting a piece of flesh from the body to

(01:03:40):
subdue the dead man's spirit, or tasting the victim's blood
to render the spirit harmless. Such rituals still exist among
the Coaqua. If they kill a man, it is their
practice to insert a knife in the body and touch
the bloody blade to their lips. I have reason to
believe that it means practices do not stop at tasting blood.
On several occasions, he has boasted to me and others
that he has eaten human flesh. On to say that
eating human flesh is not uncommon in his home area.

(01:04:03):
It's possible that this is true. The British noted that
the Kaqua engaged in quote sacrifices of humans and animals,
but it's also worth noting that most of the claims
about cannibalism came from Iddy's enemies. A major source for
this podcast was an article from the University of Groningen
in the Netherlands titled idiamin Icon of Evil. This article
notes that the witchcraft and cannibalism myths may have started

(01:04:24):
as a result of local racism within Uganda, so racism
from southern Ugandans towards northern Ugandans. Quote the Southern Ugandans
are particularly contemptuous of the southern Sudanese and Nubies, not
of other northern tribes as wild and uncivilized. It is
from them that we have reports of Amen and his
nubies tasting the blood of their victims and eating their livers,

(01:04:45):
and the explanation that such a custom is either a
nubie or Kakua one.

Speaker 3 (01:04:49):
So we don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:04:50):
It's possible he licked blood. It's possible he ate flesh.
It's also possible that's just racism from people in the South.

Speaker 3 (01:04:57):
Hey, I mean I would argue, you know, you kill
thousands of people, that is worse anyway. I mean, like,
I wouldn't be completely surprised if you know, he got
into desecrating some bodies at all.

Speaker 2 (01:05:10):
It wouldn't be beyond the pale to assume. But it's
also I think this is something that happens in Western
media a lot with these dictators where if you can
get like that, there's a bunch of stories about the
North Korean regime that are bullshit that have no basis
in reality about like and it's always like the kooky
ones about like ridiculous claims that Kim's made and like

(01:05:32):
the stuff that sounds really funny, like that you can
laugh at. And some of those are true because like
any authoritarian regime is going to have some silly stuff
around it, huh, because it's a silly thing. But a
lot of it's just lies, and it's the same thing.
It's lies that make it seem like something other than
what it is, which is a brutal dictatorship as opposed

(01:05:54):
to like, no, it's this crazy cannibal madman who ruled
the country, and it's like, well, no, there's nothing really crazy.
He's just a monster like all of the other.

Speaker 3 (01:06:01):
That's less scary to me than just a person who
knows exactly what they're doing and does it anyway. That's
like an oil tycoon or something. And then there was
a rumor they're like, did you hear that he litters? Yeah,
he's running the environment.

Speaker 2 (01:06:16):
Yeah. And that's kind of why I wanted to dig
into these myths about him a lot, because that's what
most people know about idiot mean, which I think is
less I think the fact that the idea that, oh,
maybe this guy was a cannibal and a dictator is
less interesting than like, this guy was trained to be
a brutal dictator in the British army who raised him
to be a soldier and then abandon him and his

(01:06:37):
country to whatever was going to happen next, which I
think is a more accurate story, But that one isn't
fun for Americans because it implicates all of Western civilization
as opposed to some cannibal gotten in charge over there
in Africa. Anyway, that's my thinking on the man. So

(01:07:03):
obviously by this time, and you know, by the middle
of his reign, kind of the bloom was off the rose.
The British were no longer fans of idiomin What if
his atrocities had filtered out to the world. Europe turned
away and idiot did what he always did when someone
questioned him. He flipped out and attacked. He declared himself
conquer of the British Empire. He had T shirts printed

(01:07:24):
up with his face on it and Conquer of the
British Empire printed beneath, which is a pretty pro move.
He developed a love for having white guys, particularly British guys,
bow to him. So there's a bunch of pictures like
this of British businessmen, like I mean wearing oaths to him.

Speaker 3 (01:07:39):
Now, this is the first cool thing that you showed me.

Speaker 2 (01:07:41):
Oh, just wait, because it's about to get fucking better.
Because at one point he made a bunch of British
businessmen carry him around on a sedan chair while a
crowd cheered, which is that's a solid move.

Speaker 3 (01:07:54):
Yeah, I do like that.

Speaker 2 (01:07:56):
It's hard not to support that.

Speaker 3 (01:07:58):
For sure. He's got a little he's got Okay, someone's
holding an umbrella for him.

Speaker 2 (01:08:02):
Yeah, And that's the kind of wackiness that we know
went down. And again he's not all wrong, Like the
whiskey plane was a solid idea. Yeah. Yeah, So Edie
desperately wanted to be a major player on the global stage.
He wasted no opportunity to wade into any global conflict
that he could. When the Watergate scandal broke, he sent

(01:08:23):
a letter to Richard Nixon and gave him advice on
how to handle Watergate. Nice quote. When the stability of
a nation is in danger, the only solution is, unfortunately,
to imprison the leaders of the opposition. Yeah. The longer
he was in power, the more unhinged and braggy he
became president, I mean, started to inflate the stories of

(01:08:44):
his military service, claiming he'd fought in Burma during World
War Two. He offered to marry Princess Anne of Great Britain.
He also offered to become King of Scotland and lead
the Scots to independence from Britain. Britain for the most part,
the international response to Eddiemine was laughter. The same kind
of laugh do you find a day when people talk
about ridiculous smith Korean propaganda. Alan Coren, a British comedian,

(01:09:05):
had a popular column in Punch magazine where he'd write
out fake Idioman speeches that were very racist. If you've
got Spotify, you can find the album that was made
based on these columns with a white guy doing Idie's voice,
and it is it was. I mean, this was like
in the mid seventies. Okay, if you look up Idiomin
on Spotify, you'll find the album and it's like infuriating wow,

(01:09:26):
because it's just it's joking about what was in reality
a horrific, crime filled regime, making fun of the fact
that Idioman talks funny, which he doesn't even talk that funny.
He speaks better English than I do, fucking Ugandan. So yeah,
but this is again that's the international reaction is they're
laughing at this guy, They're making fun of him. He's like,

(01:09:48):
this horror show is playing out in Africa and it's
being treated as kind of like a freak show to
the rest of the world. So yeah, the caricature of
Idioman is based a lot in white European racism, but
it's also based in some local Ugandan regional racism. So
they're north. North of Uganda is basically the social equivalent

(01:10:11):
of the American South, and the well educated, well to
do Southern Ugandans considered Idiomin to be like a hillbilly.
They thought his accent when he spoke in Uganda, they
thought his accent was painful. So it's basically he was
like to a lot of people in southern Uganda, he
was like if we had a president who came from
the dirty South and talked like he was grew up
on the box, ye president. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That That

(01:10:34):
is the attitude that like the Southerners have towards him.
In reality, Idioman was a pretty smart guy. He wasn't
educated obviously, but he was. He had a lot of
intelligence because you don't carry out a regime like this
and keep it going for eight years without that. Most
of his actions were pretty logical. Mass murder is a
time honored way to stay in power. Exiling the Asians

(01:10:55):
tank Uganda's economy, but it provided idiot with a host
of businesses that he could give away to his porters
in exchange for their loyalty. And for a while his
tactics worked pretty well. But he made more mistakes as
time went on. One of those was alienating Israel. He
had initially been friendly to the country he'd trained there
again as a paratrooper, but he wound up switching around
and backing the Palestinian cause, which is fine, but he

(01:11:17):
also descended into horrific anti Semitism. In nineteen seventy two,
he told the UN Secretary General that Hitler had been
quote right to burn six million Jews, and he promised
to build a monument to Hitler in Campala. He was
eventually convinced to cancel this plan because everyone around him
was like, that's fucking bad idea idiot mean, but he

(01:11:37):
continued pissing off Israel as the years rolled by. On
June twenty seventh, nineteen seventy six, an Air France flight
with two hundred and forty eight passengers was hijacked by
two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Now,
this was back in the day when terrorist plane hijackers
didn't kill people as a general rule. They just kind
of have the plane flow to an airport and hold
everyone hostage until their comrades were released from prison or

(01:11:59):
they got a bunch of money or whatever. This was
like a common thing. There's a period of time in
the seventies where every week there'd be a new fucking hijacking.
So these particular hijackers and this plane, most of the
passengers or Israeli. So these particular hijackers land first in
Libya and then at Intebbe Airport in Uganda. President I
mean welcome them enthusiastically. This proved to be a mistake

(01:12:20):
when one week later Israeli commandos raided the airport, liberated
the captives, and destroyed a sizable chunk of the Ugandan
air Force while it was sitting on the tarmac. Oh wow, Yeah,
there's a movie called raid On in Tebbi about it.
It's a very famous like commando raid thing. So it
he flipped out of this, he'd already switched from ming
pro is Reel to pro Palestine, of course, but he

(01:12:41):
went over the deep end. He had a seventy three
year old Jewish woman in a yuguand in hospital named
Dora Block, pretty brutally murdered, and then he went on
kind of a world insult tour. So this is kind
of a little bit, and there's growing local resistance to
him at this point too, so he starts to in
the late seven hees go off the rails a bit.

(01:13:02):
He called the President of Tanzania a coward, an old
woman in a prostitute. He called the President of Zambia
an imperialist puppet and boot liquor. He called Henry Kissinger
a murderer and a spy, which was pretty fair. He
also said that Queen Elizabeth should send him her twenty
five year old knickers to celebrate her silver Juwilee. So
he was like se year old underwear Queen of England. Yeah,

(01:13:23):
which is I appreciate a good diss. Yeah, that's a solid.
He steadily expanded his list of titles over the years.
In nineteen seventy seven, he announced that he must now
be addressed as quote his Excellency Field Marshal Alhaji doctor
idi Amin Dada, life President of Uganda, Conqueror of the
British Empire, Distinguished Service Order of the Military Cross, Victoria Cross,

(01:13:46):
and Professor of Geography.

Speaker 3 (01:13:49):
What a good tag at the end, this guy is funny.

Speaker 2 (01:13:52):
Yeah, that professor of geography thing is really what sets
it off. On October thirtieth night, seventy eight, he made
the biggest mistake of his dictator career. He invaded Tanzania.
This was over a pretty useless piece of land, like
there was no good reason to attack the spot that
he did. Tanzania counterattacked, and since their military was much

(01:14:14):
more functional than the Ugandan military, the Ugandans were quickly
thrown back. Next, Tanzania marched on Uganda. Aided by Begandan
Ugandan exiles. They moved to unseat idy from power. For
his part, Idiomine announced that he now loved the Tanzanian
president and quote would have married him if he had
been a woman. This didn't work and did not turn
back the Tanzanian army, so Idiomine had to flee from power,

(01:14:37):
first to Libya and then to Saudi Arabia, where he
spent the rest of his life. In exile. Somehow, not
being a warlord anymore seemed to calm him down. He
lived a quiet life, regularly visiting Mecca and living with
just one wife and several of his children. Oooh yeah, yeah,
he's one of the ones who got away with it.

Speaker 3 (01:14:53):
Ugh itd.

Speaker 2 (01:14:54):
He explained in a rare nineteen ninety three interview that quote,
when I am no longer president, some of them say
they don't want I accept it. Frankly, I have had
one wife since and have found also to have one
wife as better. So Idiomine lapsed into a coma on
July nineteenth, two thousand and three. He was put on
life support at a hospital in Jedda. His family had
begged the New Yugan and government to let him return

(01:15:15):
home to die. They were told he'd have to stand
trial if he returned. So I mean he didn't go back,
and on August sixteenth, two thousand and three, Idiomine died
peacefully in a hospital bed in Saudi Arabia. And that's
unfortunately not the end of the story or ugandas problems. Oh,
because President of the ghosts ghost do this is going
to happen. President of Bote returned after idiot was ousted.

(01:15:39):
A Bote was not outwardly ridiculous. He didn't make crazy
claims about the Holocaust or randomly insult foreign leaders. He
didn't have a wacky title. What he did do was
vastly expand the purges that Idiomine had begun. While Amine
had mostly targeted certain tribe members in the military and government,
a Bote targeted huge chunks of civilians based on their tribe.
He probably killed more people in his second term than

(01:16:01):
died during the entirety of Idea means reign Jesus. A
Bote was eventually overthrown by a general named Bazzello Olaro Okello,
who was violently overthrown by Yoweri Musevenni's National Resistance Army
in nineteen eighty six. Mussevenni is still the president of
Uganda today. He had term limits abolished in two thousand
and five and removed the presidential aid limit in twenty seventeen.

(01:16:25):
Uganda has to this day never seen a peaceful transition
of power.

Speaker 3 (01:16:29):
Wow, so.

Speaker 2 (01:16:32):
That's the story.

Speaker 3 (01:16:34):
Oh, that's a heartwarming tale.

Speaker 2 (01:16:35):
It is it is, and it's a tale where like
I mean, Idiomine is the organ through which all of
this repression and violence was executed, But the real bastard
of this is the British Empire, in my opinion at least.

Speaker 3 (01:16:52):
Yeah, for sure, I mean I'll trace all the blame
back to white people at any time, for sure. But man,
I really just can't imagine living in a country or
so much bloodshed is like happening constantly all the time. Yeah, politically, yeah,
I would move away so fast.

Speaker 2 (01:17:13):
Well, and that's it's one of those things that.

Speaker 3 (01:17:16):
How are you Ghanna?

Speaker 2 (01:17:17):
But yeah, how are you Ghana? And it's you get
all these people in Europe and the United States now,
because most of the people who like flee parts of
Africa are going to wind ap heading to Europe because
it's very it's easier to get there than it is
to get to the US. And you know, get this,
like what is our We can't take care of all
these people. It's like, well you could steal their shit
for two hundred years, like and then leave them without

(01:17:38):
because Uganda there at no point in prior history there
were like kingdoms and states and whatnot all over Africa,
but there was there never been a Uganda. Like all
of these groups of people had never been forced together
before the British did that, and if you're going to
do that, you shouldn't do that in the first place.
But if you're going to do that, if you're going
to force these people into a state, you owe it

(01:18:01):
to them to like create a functional state before you leave. Yeah, which, yeah,
it's fucked up, it's real fucked up. Well, I hope
you learned something today.

Speaker 3 (01:18:14):
I did. I somehow left more grim than I came in.

Speaker 2 (01:18:21):
That's the fun of colonialism.

Speaker 3 (01:18:23):
But that's okay. I mean, like sometimes you got to
know the monstrous capabilities of what you know, what we
can do as human beings to prevent it. Yeah, jeez,
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:18:38):
Yeah, it's hard to take a good lesson out of
this other than don't be a colonialist and don't take
a people and train them to be soldiers and nothing
else for a century.

Speaker 3 (01:18:47):
Yeah, don't What are some of the things? Don't play bagpipes,
sim play the accordion?

Speaker 2 (01:18:52):
Well, that's okay, let's not attack.

Speaker 3 (01:18:57):
Let's attack.

Speaker 2 (01:18:58):
The bagpipes aren't the problem here.

Speaker 3 (01:19:03):
Yeah, I don't know what else to learn.

Speaker 2 (01:19:04):
I'll meet with you about accordions.

Speaker 3 (01:19:06):
Yeah, I mean I haven't watched what's it called Lasking
of Scotland. Have you watched it?

Speaker 2 (01:19:11):
Yeah, it's I don't. I didn't enjoy it very much.

Speaker 3 (01:19:13):
Is it too, Is it sympathetic or no?

Speaker 2 (01:19:17):
It's it plays into the brutality of it. One thing
that does a decent job of is showing you how
he might have charmed people early huh. But I think
it leans more into the sensational side of.

Speaker 3 (01:19:31):
Things, which eating people and stuff and it.

Speaker 2 (01:19:34):
Yeah, and it doesn't. It doesn't talk at all about
a means past in a meaningful way. And that's why
I led this by talking about British military policy in
their colonies, because I don't think you can understand, I mean,
without understanding where he and his people came from.

Speaker 3 (01:19:50):
Yeah, I mean that alone is interesting by itself as
a story, I mean, not a not a fun story, but.

Speaker 2 (01:19:57):
It's definitely not a fun story. But it's an important one. Uh.
And I will say, uh, if you are starting a
punk band in the near future, the Suicide Revolutionary Jazz Band,
it's a pretty fucking name.

Speaker 3 (01:20:12):
They honestly sound like a ska band and look like one.

Speaker 2 (01:20:16):
They do look like a ska band. They're all dressed nice,
they got their shirts tucked in ah man, I could
go for some suicide revolutionary ska music.

Speaker 3 (01:20:26):
Yeah. I think the worst part of that story was
that he died peacefully.

Speaker 2 (01:20:30):
That is, it's always a bummer when that happens, because,
like we're I think Kadafi is going to be running
shortly before this podcast comes out, and that's a story
where the monster gets like, that's what you want to
see happen to these guys is they get dragged out
into the street and murdered by their own people. Yeaeople
they fucked over.

Speaker 3 (01:20:48):
Yeah. I can think of a couple of people I'd
like to see that happen to.

Speaker 2 (01:20:50):
Yeah, yeah, whose names we won't give because there are
laws against that sort of thing. But yeah, there's it's
hard not to want certain people dragged out into the
street and at least, like, you know, maybe not even killed,
just pete on by dozens of people. Well, I guess
there's nothing left for us to do but for me
to ask you to plug. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:21:11):
Cool, you could you know, uh, maybe get some laughs
from looking at some videos. I don't know how to
transition this either. I have some videos on my website
britdiread dot com. You can follow me on Twitter at
ao bro Bro, where I just usually complain about people

(01:21:34):
getting casts in Hollywood and making some jokes and you
can see me perform with jokes all around La. And
you know, if you have any more questions, I will
refer you to this guy because I don't know anything.

Speaker 2 (01:21:48):
Well, if you like complaining about casting, they did just
cast a new idiom in movie. Uh did that? Yes,
Scarlett Johansson's gonna play him. Fuck, you got me? You
got me? I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on
Twitter at I write okay, just the two letters there.
I get a book on Amazon called A Brief History
of Vice. You can find that on Amazon. You can

(01:22:10):
find this podcast at behind the Bastards dot com, where
we will have pictures of the incredible Suicide Revolutionary Jazz
Band and some other pictures from Amine's Rain, as well
as links to all the sources for this podcast. I
really do recommend reading that University of gron Again article.
It's a fascinating analysis of why idiots seen sort of
the way he is today and where he came from.

(01:22:32):
So you can also find us on Twitter and Instagram
social media at Bastards pod, So look us up. Check
us out. This has been Behind the Bastards for the
week I've been Robert Evans. Check back in next Tuesday,
when we will be talking about someone else who is
also terrible.

Speaker 1 (01:22:53):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 (01:23:07):
M hm, m h m hm