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July 17, 2018 82 mins

He was a highly skilled soldier who murdered an estimated 300,000 or more of his own people. In Episode 12, Robert is joined by comedian Brodie Reed and they discuss Idi Amin's rise to power and rule in Uganda. 

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mmm, hello friends, and welcome back to Behind the Bastards.
I'm Robert Evans, and this is the 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 too, is Brodie Reid, comedian. Hello,

(00:23):
Hey Steamed Steamed guest, Yes, yes, Esquire. Brodie read Esquire.
I think means you're the editor for Esquire magazine. Right,
I'm a lawyer and I'm also the head editor of
Esquire Magazine. Those are my credits and I won't change them.
That's what that means. Uh. Now, we're doing a little
bit different today. Normally we're pretty upfront about who the

(00:43):
subject of the podcast is, but there's a lot of
background to get to before we can really properly introduce
this guy. So I'm kind of curious as to when
you figure out who we're talking about. And I also
kind of wanted to be a little bit of a
surprise for the audience. So if you're good, I'm just
going to get into it. 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

(01:04):
your flow or anything. But um, let's let's try. All right,
let's let's let's see how this goes. I'm on o'clock.
Maybe this will be you know, my, my, my, great disaster,
but I think it'll be fun. Yeah, alright, So today,
you know, right now two eighteen, Britain is a tiny,
adorable nation filled with wizards and a conspicuously broad definition
of the word pudding. It's easy, I'm going to guess Baltimore. No, no, no,

(01:28):
I'm just 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 that's height, held about twenty four
million kilometers in area, six 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. Trust me,

(01:50):
I did not forget that they polonize everything. Yeah, yeah, um,
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 height was about seven hundred and fifty thousand regular soldiers. Um.
The British Empire at its height before the World War

(02:13):
started was about a hundred and twenty thousand British soldiers.
They never spent more than about two and a half
percent of their GDP on defense, which is a regular
soldiers were like super serium, like Captain America. 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,

(02:33):
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.
Um or they have machine guns for a chunk of this,
but um, you know, it does beg the question. We've
only got a hundred and twenty thousand guys and from
most of the British Empire they don't have machine guns.
How do you hold a quarter of the planet in

(02:54):
bondage for two hundred years. But the whole army that's
a little larger than the modern Coast Guard in the
United States nukes? Is that the correct? No? No, I
mean you you get the locals to oppress themselves. Yeah, yeah, so.
Michael Codner, who was the head of Military Science for
the Royal United Services Institute, described the British Empire's military

(03:17):
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 a BBC article from back
in two thousand and eleven. The article also quoted a
military historian named Dr Hugh Davies who noted that all
of British in Bia was controlled by just thirty thousand
British troops supervising hundreds of thousands of local Indian soldiers

(03:38):
or set boys. 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. He sounds
like the rap mogul, so that sentence sounds in his defense,
I don't think he's justifying imperial realism. I think he's

(04:00):
just explained this was the attitude that the imperialists had
is we can't spend too much money on the army,
otherwise everything is for profit. Um. 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.
Most of those were indigenous soldiers. So you know, local Indians,

(04:21):
people from Burma, whatever, local job. Yeah, no, yeah, exactly
by local very very ethical with our modern yeah. Um.
So the East India Company started taking over India in
the sixteen hundreds, and by eighteen o three they controlled
most of what's now India, Pakistan and Burma. In eighteen fourteen,

(04:42):
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 for peace.
The British one, but the Gorkas had put up a
really vicious fight in 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

(05:03):
the peace and ever rebellious India, but the gurk Has
quickly proved themselves to be very capable warriors. In eighteen
fifty eight, when the Queen formally took control of India
away from the Company, Gurkas were integrated into the Greater
British Army. They served as elite shock troops in World
War One and two. The British Army today still fields
battalions of Gurkhas recruited basically as mercenaries from Nepal and
paid far less than their British citizen counterparts. Sound that

(05:27):
sounds like some unsolid It's a little bit like that.
Now 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 n c o S told about Gurkhas
and like there's a common one where you have to

(05:47):
tie your shoes a certain way because the Gurkhas cut
your foot off, well, know that. They 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 Gurkha
like this. It's a possibly apocryphal story, but variants of

(06:09):
it are still told today. So they'll kill you if
you tied your shoes wrong, essentially, if you tied your
shoes like the enemy. Yeah I heard that. Yeah, So
the Gurkhas were like super soldiers of the British Empire
what you were getting in Yeah, they sound like sword
guys to me. Yeah, yeah, they're they're they're scary um.
And they weren't the only super soldiers in the British Empire. Um.

(06:30):
Over their period of time conquering huge chunks of the world,
the British encountered a number of warrior people's. Some of
these people's, 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. Take the tribes of the
West Nile region of Africa. Their first contact with more

(06:50):
technologically advanced people's came in the early eighteen hundreds when
successive groups of Arab slavers started praying on them. Certain
tribes who were the best fighters were enslaved by these
Arab slavers and used the soldiers to capture other Africans
who were then sent off to markets in North Africa
in the Middle East. Yeah. Yeah, it's a bomber. This
whole story is going to be a kind of a bomber.

(07:10):
Oh great, Yeah, when you're talking colonialism, it's it's never
not a heartbreak. I mean, when aren't you talking colonialism?
If we if people want to get real, well, I mean,
and that's that's one of the points. Like when you
start talking about dictators, especially from the seventies, eighties, nineties,
you can trace nearly all of them back to colonialism.
Yeah for sure. Yeah, that's that's that's more or less

(07:32):
this story. Um 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 order to stop the
slave trade. Right way to do it. They're a good

(07:53):
guy with a gun with a lot with all the yeah,
um 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

(08:15):
British were happy to induct into their army. So they
would free these slave soldiers from the Arab slave traders,
and then they would induct them into a colonial military
and use them to fight slave traders. Sounds like college,
sounds like the job market. I thought you were going
to compare this slight college football, but I was, well,
yeah's absolutely um so. One such army of former slaves

(08:37):
was headed by a German doctor and a Muslim convert
named Emin Pasha. In the eighteen eighties, Immin 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 men stayed behind in the West Nile region

(09:00):
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 empires shock troopers in Africa. The East Africa Company

(09:22):
used their Nubians to carve an empire out of the
continent's heart. They named their new colony Uganda. As the
British Empire grew, the Nubians were inducted into the 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 and West Africa. The British basically turned the Nubian

(09:43):
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, and you Ganda mercilessly suppressing
uprisings and tribal supproots at the behest of their British masters.

(10:04):
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 Martin echo
the sentiment quote. Among their fellow countrymen, they enjoyed an
unenviable reputation of having one of the world's highest homicide rates.
The Dubians were renowned for their statistic brutality, lack of
formal education, for poisoning enemies and for the refusal to

(10:26):
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 Idy. I mean, okay, wow, okay, so
that's this guy. Sounds like Black Republicans to me are
on the wrong team. I mean they're like, did they
ever have a choice? Like, yeah, exactly, you're right, highlights.

(10:52):
If you recruited people as soldiers for a hundred years
and don't really give them any other options for anything
to do, it's it's it's not going to be pretty. 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. I'm
sure there were a few Nubian comedians and that like

(11:13):
part of the difficulty here is like all these stories
about how brutal they are coming from like British and
American white guys. Yeah, totally, they're probably just like pretty cool.
They're probably just like I don't know, trying to invent
whatever sports game that they had trying to play some
football and they were like, well, these guys are brutal,
they're kicking our ass. Well, I mean it's like British football,

(11:35):
So yeah, for sure, can it be? I mean, I
feel like if colonizers came over to Africa and then
the Africans just like dunk to basketball, they'll be like, wow,
these brutal power. It's a shame of basketballers over there. Um.
So Idi Amine was born sometimes between n we don't

(11:56):
really know for sure. Um he was probably born in
the village of Cococa in northwest Uganda. He was for
sure a Kakwa, which were one of the Nubian tribes
that British considered to be a warrior people. Now. Eddie's
father served with the British Army and 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. Um.

(12:16):
I watched the 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.
It's one of those like nineties made for TV movies
where all the actings bad and it's very sensational, super biased,
and it leans into this stuff that I think most
people have heard about idi amine, which was like witchcraft, cannibalism,

(12:39):
that sort of thing, which will be we'll be talking
about a little bit later. But is uh, I mean
that just sounds like Los Angeles culture, witchcraft, astrology, and
the veganism not much, not so much cannibalism. Yeah, yeah, yeah, veganisms. Yeah,
a better ism than CA's. But we're we're going to

(13:01):
get into, uh sort of how a lot of these
facts are unreliable about Ittie. But the way that this
terrible documentary summed up Ittie'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 think the general common popular
perception of who this guy was. It sounds like a
fished a lot boy. Yeah, And there's always there's gonna

(13:25):
be a lot of dark stories about rivers. Whenever you
read about the scary Yeah, how did the ocean get
to the land that way? 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 happened. 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, just like,

(13:47):
I mean, you find all kinds of weird stuff in there. Yeah,
so yeah, the witchcraft stuffed is almost certainly racist bullshit.
What witchcraft wasn't is still common in parts of Uganda.
I mean, was it practicing Muslim? You on? And 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

(14:09):
or anything like that. Yeah, all of this sounds like
astrology so far. What was the sign doesn't say? Well,
it was like the Islamic version of astrology, but I
don't know, probably queries yea um Witchcraft was less of
a factor in his regime than the traditions and rituals
of his beloved British army. Um so it he was
eventually abandoned by his father and by some accounts his

(14:30):
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 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 job. But
he seems like if you're big, that you shouldn't be

(14:51):
a rifleman. We're gonna make you target. You're a pragmat man. Yeah,
I mean, I would only recruit the little guys, the
most weird army ever. Um, he didn't stay at the
bottom long it. He was gigantic. He was like six
ft four, well over two hundred pounds, and he was

(15:11):
in his younger days. He gets kind of heavier as
an older guy, but like you could get picture him
and he's young, he is solid muscle, like he is
just a mountain of a man. Yeah, me too. He's
got about three inches and that's about it. So he
was a perfect candidate to become a heavyweight boxer, which
is exactly what happened. According to Robert Keeley, Deputy chief
of the US Mission in Kempoala quote. His advancements came

(15:33):
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 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. Um So I mean eventually became

(15:53):
the heavyweight champion of the Army and in nineteen 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 Keiley.
Uh Idi Amine 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,

(16:14):
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 kick some butt and then silence. The officers resumed
their sipping in a very appreciative of performance. They eventually
made him the top sergeant o um, because of course
sergeant was as high as an actual African could raise

(16:35):
in the King's African Rifles. And we're not allowed to
have any Africans be officers in any of the British
colonial armies out of the world, or I think in
India for that matter, which is, you know, if you're
a racist colonial power, you don't 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

(16:56):
lines and logistics and stuff. Yeah good, Yeah, then they'll
know how to, you know, overthrow the seven guys that
you have there. Yeah, that's why I'm I haven't been
promoted to any officer ranks. I mean, how's your boxing?
I mean very very, very bad. But if we're talking
about a wee game, then still very bad. So we

(17:18):
need an army where yeah, where we as the product
I mean with drones nowadays, that's that's the future. I
feel like that's the future. I hear you. Um. 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

(17:38):
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.
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

(17:58):
one shoulder were two in guns, and a brin is
a like a machine gun. It's like a twenty two
pound like machine gun that you you know, put on
a tripod on the ground. So two of those in
one hand and over the other was a crippled a scari,
And the ascari 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.

(18:19):
That's like the kind of soldier he made. He was
just he was. He was like he was. He was
a super soldier. Man He invented CrossFit, apparently some Joe
Rogan alpha brain kind of guy. Now. Ian Graham said
that seeing this reminded him of a translation of another
of a King's African Rifles marching song that I'm about
to read you the song, which is explained sort of

(18:40):
how the British viewed men sing Oh boy, that's I
think I can do a good British accent here, but
I don't know that I can sing it rhyme. It does.
It definitely rhymes, and it's a bit racist. Now for this,
you know, you need to understand the word suity is

(19:00):
another word for Nubian, like it's like a local term
for like people who are from his group of of Uganda's.
So here's the British fighting song that this guy thought
of when he saw Idio I mean marching. It's the Suiti,
My boy, it's the Suiti with his grim set, ugly face.
But he looks like a man and he fights like
a man, for he comes of a fighting race, which

(19:21):
that's exactly what these people were to the British. I
assume 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 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

(19:41):
British army and the British would take care of them.
And then they respond with their own distract or. Um,
this is a distract at that point, bad, Yeah it is,
and it gets yeah, it gets better. Um. So young
Aman was sent to war several times on behalf of
the British Empire. In he went to Malia to suppress
the Shift of Rebellion. In nine fifty two he went

(20:03):
sent to Kenya to suppress the Mau Mau uprising. We
don't talk about the Mau Mau uprising a lot these days,
but it basically started as a bunch of Kenyan rebels
who were angry, angry because the British were whipping people
half to death, which is that's how British kept discipline
and all their African colonies was just horrific amounts of whipping. Um.
So these guys rose up and they killed some British
people in the British sent an army and brutally suppressed it.

(20:26):
They put more than one and a half million Kenyans
in concentration camps. They hanged thousands of them. Eat probably
would have been doing a good amount of the hanging um.
And he also killed the number of warriors in vicious
battles in places like Kenyoma and Kenema. So he's been
raised just as a soldier and now he's been brutalized
suppressing multiple colonial wars very violently. Man, successful black man.

(20:50):
And then he just turned around betrays culture. Classic story.
I mean, he kind of starts with the betrayal, right
and later well we'll get too later right now. Actually,
oh man, there's more. There's a lot. So by the
late nineteen fifties, Iddy had risen as high as an
African could in the King's African Rifles, which is sergeant.

(21:11):
The British, yeah, as I said, didn't let their locals
be officers in their armies. Uh. 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 British hadn't
governed any of their colonies as countries. They basically just
treated them as money making enterprises corporations, essentially, with all

(21:33):
the business of statecraft kept out of the hands of
the locals. The British were required by international you know,
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, um, which is an important
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,

(21:56):
and rather than spend more money in time to build
an officer corps for their 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 Idie I mean 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

(22:19):
British governor of Uganda. Sir Walter Coates vetoed the possibility
of Ittie being charged for this war crime. I mean,
was one of the few African soldiers in the entire
officers in the entire army, and prosecuting him right before
independence was named politically undesirable. No one 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

(22:41):
how Idi Amine 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 we have we
have some ads first off, and before we get into
some ads. Uh, you know, I've been talking a lot
about the Rito's people. We're trying to get der Ritos
to sponsor the pot oh I hear you. I love

(23:03):
that crunchy crunch that the Rito's 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 der Rito's is freedom. That the freedom
to cleanse your palette with whatever exciting flavor combination you want.

(23:23):
How are they not a sponsor yet? I will maybe
they will be after this video. Let's hear from some
other sponsors and we're back. Sorry. So, um yeah, I

(23:44):
did want to get into before we dig into the
rest of the story, what you recall about Idiomine before
we get into his career. Not much. I have heard
the name before. I've heard there was a president. If
you're going to who's a bad guy. I don't know
the details. I mean already I've learned way more than
I thought. Uh yeah, before you know, it was even

(24:06):
it even became an independent nation. I didn't realize that.
You know, they killed so many people. Yeah, well, it
was one of those things I hadn't I had vaguely
heard yet. As president of Uganda, there were these rumors
of witchcraft and cannibalism. Um. 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

(24:28):
bred to suppress insurgencies, like that's what the British used
his people for, was controlling populations through brutality. Um, 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 to the system.

(24:48):
He paid his dues, and he was also trained, like
you're going to where 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
it's 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

(25:10):
and then abandoned the country if you gone to him. Yeah,
this is basically this guy is completely might meets right
and um, yeah, that's dangerous. 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

(25:32):
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 never had the army sees power like
it's it's in our country. Yeah, we've definitely, well, it's
it's because we give them so much money. Um. Okay,
so not just cool cool ranch, let's get back to Idio.

(25:57):
I mean, um, but seriously, Dorito's people send us a drop,
us a home. We're at Bastard's pot on Twitter. Yeah,
Idi Amine has just committed a war crime right before
you got an independence, and the British governor of Uganda
has sort of hushed up the whole 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

(26:20):
up right before independence. So uh, Idi Amine, now an officer,
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, or by scaring them
or somewhere or another. His promotions came frequently, so he's
good at working the system. Um, he understands how the

(26:40):
British military works. And yeah, and if there's one man
who knows how to hustle, it's Idi Amine. Now. On
October nine, ninety two, Uganda gains its independence from Great Britain. Uh,
you got His first prime minister was a guy named
Milton Aboute, and the president was a guy named Edward Mutessa.
Mutessa was also the king of the Wanda, who were
a southern tribe in Uganda. He was better known as

(27:03):
King Freddie. Uh. For a little while, Mutessa and a
Bote co existed and things were all right in Uganda. Um.
Milton Aboute, like idi Amine, 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. Um.
But he was also super corrupt, which is going to
be a theme in this story. So by nineteen sixty four,

(27:24):
idi Amine had been named deputy army commander under a
dude with the really cool name shaban ap a Lot,
which is one of my favorite names that I've encountered
in this podcast research. Um. He saw action again, fighting
alongside Katanga rebels who were battling the government of Zi
year It. He took gold and diamonds from the rebels
and gave them guns from the Uganda Army in exchange.

(27:45):
He then sold the lute for cash. A Botte, the
president got it on the racket. There was a brief
parliamentary inquiry, but Abote had all the other people in
the scheme arrested and so he and he and Ittie
were fine. Um. Now, nineteen sixty six, a Bote got
tired of sharing power and susp end at the constitution.
He sent Colonel Idi Amine to attack the palace and
bring the king back dead or alive. The king managed

(28:06):
to flee the country, but the coup succeeded in a
vote was left as the sole power in Uganda. Now,
this did not make the British happy. Um. The Baganda
where their favorite tribe in Uganda. Winston Churchill, under Secretary
of State for the Colonies from nineteen o five to
nineteen Yeah, super good guy. Never caused a famine half
million people. Yeah, not not even well once. But led

(28:29):
he among us who was not starved, we all cause
a couple of famines, you know. Uh. He considered the
Baganda to be civilized, um, 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 begun is where the people. The British had
spent the most time within Uganda. They considered them civilized

(28:51):
because they acted like British people are the good Yeah, exactly. Um. Now,
the Ugandan people, most of whom weren't begun and supported
aboutees kicking down the king Um. 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 about his ridiculous corruption.

(29:14):
People protested, of course, in by nineteen sixty nine, the
government could only stay in power with the military's backing.
Uh Edi had been popular with the British because he
was a great soldier and because he spoke English with
just the right accent that made them think he was
cute and dumb because they were racist as fuck. But
Iddy was not dumb. While the government had grown more
dependent on his military, he started recruiting hundreds of his
relatives and fellow Nubians into the army and putting them

(29:35):
in the positions he would want them in when it
was time to take power. UM. This was disrupted in
nineteen seventy when an assassin tried to kill President Aboute
and shot him through the mouth. American diplomat Bovu now
recalled the army went a muck and for about twelve hours.
It was a pretty horrifying situation. It appears to have
gotten confused and thought the attempt was a coup against
both him and a Bote, so he ran uh he

(29:58):
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
ran out in the night in his pajamas, and a
number of people counted him out as a force in
Ugandan politics at this point. But Idio embarked on a

(30:18):
redemption tour. Part of that was having a bunch of
people clandestinely executed in the night. Part of it was
showing up in public with a bunch of his armed
friends and just scaring people. Uh. No, All was there
for part of that too. He was at at a
bar one night and he quote you know, he saw
he saw it quote I walked out of the bar
and there was a mean, a huge man, an enormous fellow,
with his officers and their weapons, sitting in the main lounge,

(30:40):
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 Aman 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 part on the part of a
mean about re establishing his position. He knew that he
was laughed at because he ran away. This was his reprisal,
his counter threat, and it worked. People were scared to death.

(31:02):
So they might have been more scared by the fact
that Diddie had had a number of people killed. Yeah,
and the fact that he just sat there for half hour. 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.
And Ieen seventy one, president of BOTE, went to Singapore

(31:22):
for a conference. Before he left, he put out the
order that Idioman was to be arrested for massive corruption
and murder, which Iddie was guilty of, but which Abote
was guilty of too. Before the warrant could be served,
idi Amine launched launched his coup. The killing started right away.
At least a thousand soldiers from tribes that it he
didn't trust were massacred. The river filled with corpses um,

(31:44):
which is you know, 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, yeah, they really
go pretty far. And by the time this is all
over it, he will have killed at there's something like
one in fifty seven of the people in Uganda. Um

(32:07):
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.
Um Sonal was the American diplomatic officer in Uganda, so
he had responsibility for all of the eight hundred Dish
American citizens in country. Uh. 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

(32:28):
were furious that this coup got in the way of
their vacation. So I want to read this story just
because it's a little levity. It's just American. It's rich
Americans acting like rich Americans in the middle of a coup.
That's life and death for the people in Uganda. We
just wanted to go on a nice vacation on some
endangered animals. I said to them, look, the airport is closed.

(32:49):
And later the tour leader turned to me and said, well, Mr, 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 nections 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
folks leaving for four or five days. And that was

(33:10):
just the case. They were furious. One guy, the president
of this big liquor distributing company in Hartford, Connecticut, High
Blood or Hue 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. Um, which I just love. Like, there's

(33:31):
people getting murdered in the street and you're like, I've
got a contract to get back to. Yeah. That sounds
like every screenplay or a businessman is inconvenience. Yeah, it's
like that. Yeah, there's a terrorist hijacking the airplane and
he's like, I'm gonna miss the account. I gotta get
home for Christmas. Um So, Okay, that was a nice

(33:53):
little interlude. So in short order, idi Amine is the
new president of Uganda. That's a position he would hold
for more than eight years. The West Stern powers, mainly
the British and the Americans, were hopeful. At first. They
hated a Botte 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, so Israel really liked the

(34:13):
guy too. Um So, yeah, at first, it seems like
this new dictator is going to be great for white people. Um.
You know, Lady Listowell, who was a Hungarian noblewoman and
a journalist who became Adie's first biographer, 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. I looked into the

(34:35):
smiling face of a tall, muscular officer with shrewd eyes
who invited me to a cup of coffee. He was
a hoaking figure of a man, and I was fascinated
by his hands. Beautiful, slim hands with long, tapering fingers.
We gotta your horny gotta, 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

(34:56):
biography there's like a whole paragraph talking about how beautiful
his hands work. So I just that's apparently that's now.
If I can find one more that's officially hands were
beautiful hands. I'm just always shocked that apparently some people
are really staring at hands a lot. Yeah, I know,
and you never hear about like, you know, his cuticles
weren't not well manicured, his figures were a little long.

(35:20):
It was really Yeah. Yeah, there were actually reasons that
a reasonable person who wasn't you know, purely looking at
this from like the British point of view, might have
thought Idiom and had a shot at being a good president. Uh.
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

(35:43):
to be around. Yeah. I met him and I was
so scared. I was like, this guy is going to
kill me. And so I was like, nice guy, great guy. Um.
He was obsessed with Scotland, which is one of the
famous things about Idiom. Yeah, all of the officers and
um yeah, and he had he loved people playing bagpipe weird.

(36:05):
All of the officers in the King's African Rifles have
been Scottish and so Dye just really loved Scottish culture.
He had huge He had a whole plane. Do you
remember seeing him in like clothing and he's wearing like
plaid and stuff. And there's a movie about him that's
not super accurate. It's called The Last King of Scotland. Yeah, yeah. Um.
And he had a whole plane dedicated just bringing Scottish

(36:27):
whiskey into uh Uganda, Like there was like a presidential plane.
That's it's just the Whiskey Express, which is a cool
thing to differ. Yeah no, that's that's that's legitimately fine.
Um yeah no, we have a vodka guy, fly the

(36:49):
Whiskey Express. He's fine until he gets home. Uh Idy
adopted a number of British military traditions for his own military.
He sent a musician to Scotland for year to learn
the bagpipes. He also established a state military jazz band
with perhaps the best name of for a band I've
ever heard, the Revolutionary Suicide Jazz Band, also known as

(37:10):
the Revolutionary Suicide Mechanized Regiment Band or the Suicide Mechanized
Jazz Band. And here's there a punk band. No, they
were just a jazz band. They should have been a
punk band. Suicide they were. This is a really great picture.
They were the regimental band. They were a military band,
and the band they were a unit for was one
of the elite mechanized regiments in the Ugandan Army that

(37:33):
was a suicide mechanized regiment. So it was like to
try to make them sound scary. These guys don't care
if they die. They're a suicide regiment for sure. Uh.
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. Um. Yeah, So
it also seems I should know that from from reports
at the time, most of the musicians in the Suicide

(37:55):
Revolutionary Jazz Band were sort of press ganged and forced
to play. Um. They don't look exactly happy, but they
don't look jazz wow. Um. Sotty's rain was brutal by
all measures, uh, and got increasingly brutal ass time went on.
There are a number of theories as to why Robert
Keeley thinks he was just promoted out of his depth.

(38:16):
Like Michael Scott. Basically 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. Keely says
quote 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. Uh. Lady Listowell also thought that
this poor guy had just been forced to jump into

(38:37):
a position too complex for his mind. Quote the Kakua
have a great respect for personalities, but not for rank
or position. They never had chiefs or recognized clan leaders.
I mean was brought up to believe that all Cowqua
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 Eddy

(38:58):
was just a guy that who got promoted to be
on 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 that high, and I think
the real blame lies with the British. Again, there's guys
like Idy in every country. Violent authoritarians who seek to
impose their will on others. Established nation's build antibodies, up
checks and balances and legal systems, and established bureaucracies to

(39:20):
stop men with fourth grade educations and histories of head
injuries from heading the army. Well that sounds nice right
about now. Well, clearly ours aren't perfect. Um 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. Um. I Like it's one of those

(39:41):
things where if you look at what was set up
when the Uganda was freed, I don't see someone like
idy was bound to at least try to take control. Yeah,
it sounds like they set up the country like a
reality show. Yeah, yeah, it is almost like that. Yeah,
they were like here, you guys, go here, some sticks
survive and they didn't. They didn't consider any of the
ways it could go badly. Um and they didn't like

(40:04):
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. Uh So, fun the fun
the British and Flint Michigan still doesn't have clean water. Yeah,

(40:26):
fun us too, for sure, for sure, for sure this
one is actually this one's sort of are bad too,
because we're we we we supported the Idiomine regime for
a while, we being the United States, fuck everybody, funck
everybody except for Uganda. They didn't deserve for Dorrito's. Now,
Derrito's had nothing to do with this good That's that's fair.

(40:49):
And and you could argue that Derritos has stopped similar
monsters from arising in other countries by filling them with
nachio goodness. Yeah, that's right, you stop the monster of hunger.
As far as we know, Idiomane never got to experience
extreme nacho flavor, and that might be the secret of
his madness. The only extremism he should have been into

(41:09):
is na jesu. So yeah. When the British first started
the Ugandan colony, they had carried out a policy of
ringing in South Asians, mostly from India, to Uganda to
quote service a buffer between Europeans and Africans in the
middle runs of commerce and administration. This had started when
the British brought thirty Indians over to build railways in Uganda.

(41:32):
Uh these folks had a lot more experience with Western
style capitalism in 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 nine of
the country's businesses and contributed of its tax revenue, despite
making up a small minority of the actual population. UH.
This has obviously caused a lot of unrest between native

(41:54):
ethnic Ugandans and the Ugandan Asians. President de Boute had
pursued a policy called Corchanization, 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 raisism. He announced that the government would be
reviewing the status of Ugandan Asians who'd been given citizenship.
So basically they're looking at naturalized Yuganan citizens and finding

(42:17):
excuses to take away their citizenship. Yeah, that's what's happening
right now. Yes, it's exactly what's happening right now to
naturalized American citizens. UM, which is uh, huge bummer, huge
bumber weird. How these shitty guys have the same playbook
in a lot of cases. UM. I mean also canceled
all in progress citizenship applications from Asians UH. And then

(42:40):
in August of nineteen seventy two, who gave all Asians
in Uganda ninety days to vacate the country. So we're
gonna get into how that policy went and what a
cluster fuck ensued afterwards, and what happened once the West
finally decided that Idi Amine wasn't their man. But first
we've got some some capitalism to get into. Yeah, capitalism,

(43:02):
the thing that has nothing to do with the tens
of millions of death STI colonialism not a thing. Not
a thing. Here's some ants and we're back. So as
the story has has come up here, Idioman has seized power.
He's executed a bunch of people, and he has decided

(43:24):
to expel all of the Asians in Uganda. He's given
him ninety days to vacate the country. This policy affected
eighty five thousand people, twenty three thousand of whom were
already citizens of Uganda. I'm gonna play a clip of
Idi Amine 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

(43:45):
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 just yeah,
I'll play decision for the economy of Uganda, and I'm
he makes you that every Ugandans get a fruit of
independent since independent actually Uganda is not yet independent. I

(44:08):
will say that even when the British handed over on
the ninth of October nineteen sixty two, the Uganda still
not yet independent. Uganda will be independent after this my decision.
After I want to see that the whole Kampala street
is not full of Indians. It must be proper black

(44:30):
under administration in those shops is run by the Ugandans.
Would you like to get all actions out of Really? Yes,
they must go to their country, even nationals of Uganda.
If they want to go there, they're they're they're They're
welcome to go. Also happened to these people If they
don't go over the time, I think they will be

(44:52):
sitting like they're sitting on the fire. I will tell
you this. You just wait. After three months, okay, you
will see. I think they will not city comfortable here
in Uganda. I will tell you this. I must actually
tell you the truth to take for them. If they're

(45:13):
not doing I am not responsible for building them plans
to camp. Have you asked the British to take the way. Yes,
it is a British High commission is here his responsibility.
I have told him. You've said you wanted to teach
Britain a lesson? President, why is that? And that is
now a lesson I'm teaching the British. I am teaching

(45:36):
now the lesson because I am correcting them from the
mistake they had made. If they had to think before
earlier that that as the African here who can even work,
and the building the railway with the instruction given to
them by the British, this problem will not happen. Well,

(45:57):
I was like a MOUNTI python. Yeah, it's remarkable that
he's like talking about like people, terrible things will happen
in that they don't leave. And then all of these
guys laugh like just because it's 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 the British
to bring these people into build railroads and not just

(46:19):
have us build railroads because it's our fucking country, which
is you know, a fair point. But at this point
these guys are like third generation Uganda's 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, Well, they
were all British guys and they didn't really give a
funk about brown people either way. They were just there

(46:40):
because they had to be yeah, and they thought he was.
He was fun and they liked yeah, it's yeah, so
Itdi's main defense of his policy was that he was
trying to give you guna back to Ugandans. He also
said that God had told him in a dream that
South Asians were to blame for Uganda's economic woes and corruption.
It's probably that this policy had a lot to do
with the fact that Great Britain had just refused to

(47:01):
sell him guns so he could invade hands and Ea.
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. Itty was brutal to the Ugandan Asians,
but he was equally brutal to ethnic Ugandans. His particular
targets were a Cholly and Langi tribesman. In the first
few days of his regime, he executed more than a

(47:22):
thousand members of these tribes in the army as his
rain war 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 Itty 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. Yeah yeah, I mean,

(47:43):
if you have crocodiles, every problem looks like crocodiles. No
one he's ever wielded a crocodile has been a good guy.
It's never a tool of the good guy. What about Yeah?
Uh So, the most feared government agency, sort of the
Idioman equivalent of the German SS, was the State Research Bureau,

(48:05):
which is maybe my favorite name for like a secret
police organization. Just sounds so like it seems like the
guys who should be like, oh yeah, your soils pH
is off. But these are the murder police, as opposed
to you know, countries where all of the police and
the murder police. Um. Anyway, Apollo Lo Walco survived a
hundred ninety six days in the pink stucco building where

(48:27):
they tortured and executed their captives. He gives us our
clearest picture of what life was like for people deemed
by 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 in back, and then they would place a
long rope with a loop around his neck. Then someone

(48:50):
would drag him by the rope along the staircase going
up to the ground floor, and people would be beating
him on 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 Looco claims
the guards made sure the prisoners saw every execution. That
was part of the point. He claims that between a
hundred and fifty and two hundred people were executed every
night while he was there in nineteen seventy seven. Looco

(49:12):
believes he saw more than fifteen thousand Ugandans clubbed and
beaten to death over just five months, at least two
hundred fifty thousand Ugandans perished during an idiot means terror.
In the real number maybe more like half a million,
roughly one in every fifty seven where to die over
the next eight years. So Itty himself is said to
have participated in a number of these murders. Looco claims

(49:32):
to remember seeing him beat men to death with sledgehammers
while wearing a gas mask. Quote, I mean was actually participating.
He turned to us at one point and told us
to relax. The state research bowmen were mostly Nubians, like Itti,
former super soldiers of the British Empire, doing what they'd
always done, just for themselves now. Um, and again, this
is not savagery that he's executing suddenly now that he's

(49:53):
in charge. This is exactly what he was doing on
British orders in Kenya. You know, I'm gonna go ahead
and get us that when he was president. Is not
the first time he had people killed with sledgehammers, like
it's it never sees this to amaze me, Just the
capability of brutality of some people. Know, and these all

(50:14):
all these deaths, like obviously these deaths are an idioman,
but they're also on colonialism, which is well, yeah, for sure,
I blame everything on colonialism, just so straight and that
you can it's totally fair. Um, 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

(50:35):
so it's once I've started researching a lot of these
guys in the show and learning about King Leopold in
the fifteen million who died in the Belgian Congo, which
is probably the worst single crime of colonialism that 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

(50:56):
the people they killed, it doesn't come close to the
deaths to colonialism 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 of what was
done in behalf of the British Empire. Yeah. Anyway, so
all most secret police organizations wore you know, wear leather

(51:19):
trench coats and dressing all black, like you know, like
a c your cat. You're in central casting, you're trying
to like cast its secret police. Like they're all in black.
They look like the Matrix guys. Yeah, they were in turtlenecks,
not the men of the Research Bureau. They wore wore
flowered Hawaiian shirts, platform shoes, and sunglasses. Oh no, they're

(51:39):
dressed real cool like me. Oh I, I appreciate someone
doing it different. If you're if you're gonna massacre hundreds
of thousands of people, at least trying new. You know,
there's no arm bands here, it's it's yeah, dresses, we're sandals.

(52:00):
If m if Jimmy Bufett carried out a massacre, it
would look like this, yeah every time. Y Yeah, well
you know they're all drunk. They've got a whiskey plane.
Yeah yeah. Uh So. The Research Brea headquarters was connected
to president a Means Home by an underground tunnel, so
we could show up and participate in the executions when

(52:20):
he wanted to. Most of the work was headed by
a man named Major Farouquin Minawa. He was sort of
the Lavernty Barrier type figure, and Barrier was the head
of the KGB for a while under Stalin. Uh So,
he's the kind of guy who could murder his own
friends after a night of drinking and hanging out with him.
At one point he had his wife and three daughters executed.
That guy should have waited till a grand theF Ato

(52:42):
came out, just to get it out of his system.
I think so. Um he suspected his wife and daughters
were helping guns and rebels because they were Baganda Baganda's
which is like the tribe, one of the tribes that
he hated. Um. So yeah, It's important to understand that
all the oppression apparatus ITDDI created was very decentralized, so

(53:03):
most of the deaths during this period were not idio
means signing someone's death warrant. 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. So Iddie
gave his men a legal excuse to pursue their personal
grudges and steal from people. Polished. You guys just dropping

(53:26):
out in their no and that is the official line
of the podcast is abolish ice, bider ritos. I'm drinking
all water lukewarm until ice is a bolish It is
funny that like our Gestapo equivalent is ice, because if
they had known fifteen years ago, they probably would have
named it something cooler. Ice is. Yeah, it's not that cool. Yeah,

(53:52):
I mean gave his men excuses yet 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 a means regime was. Let's dig
a little deeper into the man himself. You can't understand

(54:15):
Idioman without understanding that he was great at fucking great
that well, at least he needed everyone to believe that
he was great at fun So one way or the other,
it's important understand that that was a part of his
public image that was bad. Ladies now and and almost
all like the only person, the only famous person I'm

(54:36):
convinced who was ever actually good at fucking I was
gonna say Marlon Brandon, but oh yeah, yeah, well Marlon
Brandon makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was method so
he was method Um anyway, Yeah, so uh, I mean
was it was important to him that there'd be a
public image that he was virile and good at sex.

(55:00):
His former Minister for Health, Henry Kimba, said this besides
his five wives. Also, he had five wives, honestly for
what I thought. Yeah, No, he's he's he's he's a
conservative fellow. Besides his five wives, I mean, 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

(55:21):
never tries to hide his lust. His eyes lock onto
any beautiful woman. His reputation for sexual performance is so
startling that women often 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? It sounds

(55:43):
like a lot of it. Definitely, definitely a lot, because
there's a ton of stories from having husbands executed so
we could suck their wife. Um, but this is you know,
his former minister of health giving what is this is
what Idioman 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. Yeah, he sounds like
World Chamberlain. There's just something about authoritarian assholes and needing

(56:07):
people to believe they're tough and good at fucking. I
want everyone to know I am bad at sex, which
means very ladies, good sex over there. Yeah, 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.

(56:29):
I've heard lb J said JFK was terrible. Well, you
can't trust that guy. You can't trust that guy was
jealous and he called his dick jumbo, which means he
did well, maybe that's true. Then I don't know. Nixon
seems pretty bad. Nixon can't have been good, right, No, Um,

(56:50):
I feel like Teddy Roosevelt. Well he was in a wheelchair.
That was FDR. Never mind, Well he was a big
stick guy, right, it was a big stick guy. Yeah,
that guy can suck. That guy could fun. And I
feel like FDR was probably pretty good, but like he
would have been like a hands and oral man. That's
my guest for FDR. I think he leaves them satisfied.

(57:11):
As what I'm saying, I don't think. Yeah yeah, um
so idi Amin again had five wives. His favorite wife
was a lady named Sarah. He met her when she
was eighteen and a go go dancer for the Revolutionary
Suicide jazz band Um stories. All this time Eddie fell
in love, but tragically, Sarah already had a fiance and

(57:33):
she was pregnant, so when she gave birth on Christmas
Day nineteen seventy four, it he just told everyone the
kid was his and had the birth announced on state television.
Sarah's fiance was not happy with this, but he died
in our car crash immediately after this, so it worked out.
No suspicion but then at all Nope, just a random
car crash, the like the day that he complains, Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(57:55):
I shouldn't laugh there. I may be getting a little
callous of all these stories. 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. Yeah,
it's it's it's horrific. Um so Idy I mean married
Sarah Knight was a small private ceremony, but Idy was

(58:16):
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
or Era Fat was his best man. The banquet cost
two million dollars, the banquet, not the whole wedding, just
that which I would kind of want to check out it.
I mean, I've seen Super sixteen, you know whatever it's called.

(58:40):
So President, I mean cut the red and wedding cake
with a sword. Knowing his history, there's no chance he
didn't also use that sword to stab people. Obviously, sword
guys sort of the problem. That's how you know someone's
trusted if they're a fucking sword guy. Machine eddie is

(59:00):
a people's weapon. While you were learning about colonialism, I
was studying a block change. Uh. So Idy had five
wives and something like forty or fifty children. Uh. He
married his first two wives in the same year, nineteen
sixty six, when he was twenty eight. One of those

(59:21):
marriages went all right and produced several children, but his
second wife, Kay, divorced him, and he murdered the best
man and then murdered Kay. Her arms and legs were
found in a sack in the trunk of a car,
so Idi had her body sewn back together and marched
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

(59:42):
today and do speeches and like several of them have
have they don't 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 very normal around us. So it's possible this is
this story is a lie, like the witchcraft stuff. Hard
to tell because again, his kids even today, are all

(01:00:03):
pretty much he was He was fun um, so he
might not have brought it home. I really don't know.
I wasn't there. Yeah, okay, there's it's It's one of
those things. It's impossible to know the truth their stories
that he was brutal to his kids and fucking had
corpses training 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. It was fun. His daughter,

(01:00:26):
my muna 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,
a brother in one. He loved music and he's always
on his accordion singing. Wow, what a revisionist history. Yeah,
I mean, it's also possible that he was a brutal
monster everywhere outside of the home and was fine with

(01:00:48):
his kids. Yeah, and they just never heard about They
heard about it, but again they don't. A lot of
them don't deny that brutality of the regime. They're just
like at home, he was a normal guy, 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 yeah, people always say
dictators are charismatic and stuff. I mean, even if we

(01:01:11):
feel the same thing with celebrities. I don't really know,
but yeah, I I and I can't know. What we
do know, and what we do know for certain is
that Idi Amine played the accordion fucking constantly. He was
apparently if you're an accordion guy, he was apparently good
at playing the accordion and here's here's a picture of
him doing the weird ol thing o. God right, it's

(01:01:31):
weird that dorks are truly the worst people in the
world because that guy's in the swords, accordions, bagpipes. This
guy has a bad taste. Everyone with bad tish needs
to be called. 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, Yeah,

(01:01:52):
I'm sorry anime fans, I mean, enemy is pretty cool, yeah,
some of it. So the stuff Idie I mean is
probably most famous for is again cannibalism, witchcraft in his
obsession with Scotland, because that's like the sensational stuff for sure.
People we don't know again, that's one of those Yeah,

(01:02:13):
we're about to get into that. Um. So it's an
arguably true that he loved Scotland. There's a shipload of
documented evidence of that. And maybe he just was eating
some haggas and or they just wished it was exactly
oh please eat some people stuff with that ship. It
is very much up for debate as to whether or
not he was really into black magic and cannibalism. The

(01:02:34):
rumors that he was in the magic and eating people
started with the Begundans Uh and the Begundans where the
people from South Uganda and they did not like the
people from North Uganda Um. A lot of these rumors
originate from one begund And who served in Idia Means 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

(01:02:57):
many other warrior societies, the Kakwa Means tribe are known
to have practiced blood rituals on slain enemies. These involved
cutting a piece of flesh from the body to subdue
the dead man's spirit, or tasting the victim's blood to
render the spirit harmless. Such rituals still exist among the Kakwa.
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

(01:03:18):
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. He went on to say
that eating human flesh is not uncommon in his home area.
It's possible that this is true. The British noted that
the Kaqwa engaged in quote sacrifices of humans and animals,
but it's also worth noting that most of the claims
about cannibalism came from Idye's enemies. A major source for

(01:03:39):
this podcast was an article from the University of Graneingen
in the Netherlands titled idi Amine Icon of Evil. This
article notes that the witchcraft and cannibalism myths may have
started as a result of local racism within Uganda, so
racism from southern Ugandans towards no Northern Ugandans quote. The
southern Ugandans are particularly contemptuous of the Southern Sudanese and Newbies,

(01:04:01):
not of other northern tribes as wild and uncivilized. It
is from them that we have reports, if I mean
and his Newbies tasting the blood of their victims and
eating their livers. And the explanation that's such a custom
is either a nubie or coqua one, So we don't know.
It's possible he licked blood it's possible he ate flesh.
It's also possible that's just racism from people in the

(01:04:21):
sun would argue, you know, you kill thousands of people,
that is worse anyway. I mean, like, I'm wouldn't be
completely surprised if you know, he got into desecrating some
bodies at all, 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

(01:04:45):
you can get like that, there's a bunch of stories
about the North Korean regime that are are bullshit that
that have no basis in reality about like and it's
always like the cookie ones about like ridiculous claims the
Kim's made, and like the stuff that that sounds really funny,
like that you can laugh at. And some of those
are true because like any authoritarian regime is going to

(01:05:05):
have some silly stuff around it because it's a silly thing, um.
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 to like, no, it's this crazy cannibal man
man 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 That's less scary to me than just

(01:05:27):
a person who knows exactly what they're doing and does
it anyway. That's like if an oil tycoon or something.
And then there was a rumor though, like did you
hear that he litters? Yeah, he's running the environment. Yeah.
And I that's kind of why I wanted to dig
into these myths about him a lot, because that's what
most people know about Idio mean, which I think is

(01:05:48):
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 abandoned him and his
country to whatever was going to happen next, which I
think is a more accurate story. Um. And but that

(01:06:09):
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. Um. Anyway, that's that's you know,
my thinking on the matter. Um, so obviously by this time,

(01:06:29):
uh and you know, by the middle of his reign,
kind of the bloom was off the rose. The British
were no longer fans of idi Amin word if his
atrocities had filtered out to the world. Europe turned away,
and idi 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 up with
his face on it and Conquer of the British Empire

(01:06:51):
printed beneath, which is a pretty pretty pro move. He
developed a love for having white guys, particularly British guys,
bow to him. So there's a bunch of picture is
like this of British businessmen like I'm wearing oaths to him. Now,
this is the first thing that oh, just away because
it's about to get fucking better. Because at one point
he made a bunch of British businessmen carry him around

(01:07:13):
on a sedan chair while a crowd cheered, which is
that's a solid move. Yeah, I do like that. Sorry
not to support that. He's got a little he's got Okay,
someone's holding an umbrella for him. Yeah, and that's the
kind of wackiness that we know went down. And again

(01:07:33):
he's not all wrong, like the whiskey plane was a
solid idea. Yeah yeah, um. So Eddie 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 a letter to
Richard Nixon and gave him advice on how to handle Watergate.

(01:07:54):
Nice quote. When the stability of a nation is in danger,
the only solution is, unfortunately, to imprison the leaders of
the opposition. Yea. The longer he was in power, the
more unhinged in braggy he became president. I mean, started
to inflate the stories of 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

(01:08:16):
become King of Scotland and lead the Scots to independence
from Britainin Britain, for the most part, the international response
to Idi Amine was laughter, the same kind of laughter
you find today when people talk about ridiculous with Korean propaganda.
Alan coren A British comedian had a popular column in
Punch magazine where he'd write out fake idi Amine speeches
that were very racist. If you've got Spotify, you can

(01:08:37):
find the album that was made based on these columns
with a white guy doing IDE's voice. It is it was.
I mean, this was like in the mid seventies. Um
if you look up Idiomine on Spotify, you'll find the
album and it's like infuriating 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

(01:08:59):
he doesn't even talk that funny. He speaks better English
than I do fucking Uganda. Um so uh 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,
this horror show is playing out in Africa and it's
being treated as kind of like a freak show to

(01:09:19):
the rest of the world. Um so yeah. The caricature
of idi Amine Um 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 of the American South and the well educated,
well to do Southern Uganda's considered idi Amine to be

(01:09:41):
like a hillbilly. They thought his accent when he spoke
in Yugan and they thought his accent was painful. Um.
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 body. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
That That is the attitude that like the Southerners have
towards him. Um. In reality, Idioman was a pretty smart guy.

(01:10:05):
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. Uh. Mass murder
is a time honored way to stay in power. Exiling
the Asians tank Ugana's economy, but it provided itdie with
a host of businesses that he could give away to
his supporters in exchange for their loyalty. And for a

(01:10:27):
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 also descended into horrific anti Semitism. In nineteen seventy two,
the he told the UN Secretary General that Hitler had

(01:10:49):
been quote right to burn six million Jews, and he
promised to build a monument to Hitler in kampala Uh.
He was eventually convinced to cancel this plan because everyone
around him was like, that's bad idea, idio mean, but
he continued pissing off Israel as the years rolled by.
On June nine, six and Air France flight with two
forty eight passengers was hijacked by two members of the

(01:11:11):
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 flown to an airport and hold everyone hostage
until their comrades were released from prison or 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. Um So,

(01:11:32):
these particular hijackers and this plane most of the passengers
there is Rali. So these particular hijackers land first in
Libya and then at Entebbi Airport in Uganda. President I
mean welcomed them enthusiastically. This proved to be a mistake
when one week later Israeli commandos raided the airport, liberated
the captives, and destroyed a sizeable chunk of the Ugandan
air force while it was sitting on the tarmac. Yeah,

(01:11:54):
there's a movie called Raid on Entebbi about it. It's
a very famous like commando raid thing. Um So, Itty
flipped out of this. He'd already switched from ing pro
is Real to pro Palestine, of course, but he went
over the deep end. He had a seventy three year
old Jewish woman and a you gun in hospital named
Dora block Uh, pretty brutally murdered, and then he went
on kind of a world insult tour. Um So, this

(01:12:17):
is kind of a little bit and and there's growing
local resistance to him at this point too. So he's
he starts to in the late seventies go off the
rails a bit. Uh. 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

(01:12:37):
was pretty fair. Uh. He also said that Queen Elizabeth
should send him her twenty five year old knickers to
celebrate her silver jubilee. So he was like the semi
year old underwear Queen of England, which is I appreciate this. Yeah,
that's that's solid. Uh. 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 excellent

(01:13:00):
see Field Marshal Al Haji Dr Idi Amine data life,
President of Uganda, Conqueror of the British Empire, Distinguished Service
Order of the Military Cross, Victoria Cross, and Professor of Geography.
What a good tag at the end. This guy is funny. Yeah.
That professor of geography thing is really what sets it off. UM.

(01:13:23):
On October thirty made the biggest mistake of his dictator career.
He invaded Tanzania. Um. 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 more functional than the Ugandan military,
the Ugandans were quickly thrown back. Next, Tanzania marched on Uganda.

(01:13:44):
Aided by the Gandan Ugandan exiles, they moved to unseat
Ittie from power. For his part, Idi Amine 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
Idi Amine had to flee from power, first to Libya
and then to Saudi Arabia, where he spent the rest

(01:14:05):
of his life in exile. Uh 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. Yeah. Yeah, he's one
of the ones who got away with it. Um Idi
explained in a rare nineteen interview that quote, when I
am no longer president, some of them say they don't
want me. I accept it. Frankly. I have had one

(01:14:26):
wife since and have found also to have one life
is better. So idi Amine lapsed into a coma on
July nineteenth, two thousand three. He was put on life
support at a hospital in Jetta. His family had begged
the new ugun And government to let him return home
to die. They were told he'd have to stand trial
if he returned, So I mean he didn't go back,
and in August sixteen, two thousand and three, Idi Amine

(01:14:47):
died peacefully in a hospital bed in Saudi Arabia. And
that's unfortunately not the end of the story or Uganda's problems,
because President of the Ghosts is going to happen um.
President of Bote returned after Iddie was ousted. Aboute was
not outwardly ridiculous. He didn't make crazy claims about the

(01:15:08):
Holocaust or randomly insult foreign leaders. He didn't have a
wacky title. What he did do was vastly expand the
purges that Idi Amine 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
died during the entirety of Idi Amine's reign. Jesus A.

(01:15:29):
Bote was eventually overthrown by a general named Bazello olauo Okello,
who was violently overthrown by Yoweri Musaveni's Natural National Resistance
Army in nineteen six. Musaveni is still the president of
Uganda today. He had term limits abolished in two thousand
five and removed the presidential aid limit in two thousand seventeen.

(01:15:49):
Uganda has to this day never seen a peaceful transition
of power. Wow. So that's the story. That's a heartwarming time.
It is it is uh And it's a tale where
like I mean, Idiomine is the the organ through which
all of this repression and violence was executed. But the

(01:16:13):
real bastard of this is the British Empire in my
opinion at least, Yeah, for sure. I mean, 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. Politically, Um, yeah, I

(01:16:35):
would move away so fast. Well, And that's it's one
of those things that how are you gonna? But yeah,
how are you gonna? 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 wade 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

(01:16:55):
our We can't take all care of all these people.
It's like, well, you could steal the ship for two
hundred years, like and then leave them without because Uganda
there at no point in prior history they 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

(01:17:17):
British did that. And if you're going to do 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 to them to
like create a functional state before you leave. Which, yeah,
it's up, it's real fucked up. Well, I hope you

(01:17:38):
learned something today. I did somehow left more grim than
than it came in. Um that's the fun of colonialism.
But that's okay. I mean, like sometimes you got to
know the monstrous capabilities of um what you know what
we can do as human beings to prevent it. Yeah, Um, jeez,

(01:18:01):
I don't know. 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. Yeah, don't. Um,
what are some other things? Don't play bagpipes and play
the accordions? Well that's okay, let's not attempt the swords.

(01:18:21):
Let's attack the bagpipes aren't the problem here. Yeah, I
don't know what else to learn. I mean with you
about accordions? Yeah, I mean I haven't watched Um, what's
it called Last King of Scotland? Have you watched? Yeah,
it's I don't. I didn't enjoy it very much. Is
it too? Is it sympathetic or no? It's it plays

(01:18:44):
into the brutality of one thing that does a decent
job of this, showing you how he might have charmed
people earlier. But I think it leans more into the
sensational side of things, which eating people and stuff and
it Yeah, and it does, isn't. It doesn't talk at
all about a means past in a meaningful way. And

(01:19:04):
that's why I lead this by talking about British military
policy and their colonies, because I don't think you can understand,
I mean, without understanding where he and his people came from. Yeah,
I mean that alone is interesting by itself. Is a story,
I mean, not a not a fun story, but it's
definitely not a fun story, but it's an important one. Uh.

(01:19:27):
And I will say, if you are starting a punk
band in the near future, the Suicide Revolutionary Jazz band,
it's pretty fucking they honestly sound like a scar bandy
and look like one. They do look like a scar band.
They're all dressed nice, they got their shirts tucked in.
Ah man, I could go for some suicide revolutionary SCA music. Yeah. Um.

(01:19:52):
I think the worst part of that story was that
he died peacefully. That is, it's always a bummer when
that happens, because like we're I think a daffi 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 as
they get dragged out into the street and murdered by
their own people. They sucked over. Yeah, I can think

(01:20:13):
of a couple of people would like to see that
happened to Yeah, yeah, whose names we won't give because
there are laws against that sort of thing. But 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 cool. You could uh,

(01:20:39):
you know, uh, maybe get some laughs from looking at
some videos. I don't know how to transition this either
that hasn't videos on my website Bertti Rida com. You
can follow me on Twitter at ao bro bro um,
where I just usually complain about um. People can cat

(01:21:00):
us in Hollywood and making some jokes and you can
see me performs with jokes all around l A and um.
You know, if you have any more questions, I will
refer you to this guy because I don't know anything.
You know, if you like complaining about casting, they did
just cast a new Idioman movie. Uh yes, Scarlett Johansson's
gonna play him. You got me, you got me? Um.

(01:21:25):
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 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 A Means Rain, as well as
links to all the sources for this podcast. I really

(01:21:47):
do recommend reading that University of Gronigan article. It's a
fascinating analysis of why Idi has seen sort of the
way he is today and where he came from. Um
so uh. You can also find us on Twitter and
Instagram social media at Bastards pods, so so look us up,
check us out. This has been behind the Bastards for

(01:22:08):
the week I've been Robert Evans. Check back in next Tuesday,
when we will be talking about someone else who is
also terrible. H

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