by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The other PBS program I watched last night was in some ways
even more interesting: it was called Firestone and the Warlord and was about the succession of coups, revolutions
and civil wars that afflicted Liberia in the 1980’s and 1990’s and how those
affected the giant rubber plantation the Firestone company built there in 1926
(archive footage of the company’s founder, Harvey Firestone, announcing it was
accompanied by the Bix Beiderbecke-Frank Trumbauer recording of “Way Down
Yonder in New Orleans”). The focus was on Firestone’s determination, once the
plant was taken over and trashed by revolutionary warlord Charles Taylor in
1989, to get the place reopened no matter how much money they had to pay Taylor
to support his revolution and how many scummy deals they had to make with him
and his henchmen. The show also goes into the fascinating history of Liberia —
a topic briefly touched on in the last book I read, Forrest Church’s So
Help Me God, which was mostly about the
religious conflicts between the Founding Fathers (and in particular between the
established Congregationalist and Unitarian churches in New England and the
Baptists, Catholics and Jews — with the Baptists in particular emerging as the
staunchest defenders of the separation of church and state, a quite different
picture from what one would think based on their current views!) but also touched on the two elephants in the
room to any consideration of the U.S. as a country founded on freedom and
justice: the foul treatment of the Native population and the existence of
slavery. There were plenty of racists even among the early Abolitionists, and
many people of varying views about slavery were convinced that the U.S. should
not have an African-descended population at all — so they formed the American
Colonization Society, whose objective was to buy the freedom of as many slaves
as possible, send them back to Africa and create a settlement for them on
African soil.
The result was the foundation of Liberia in 1847 (its capital,
Monrovia, was named after President James Monroe, a strong supporter of the
American Colonization Society who was convinced it would solve the problem of
slavery and eliminate the African-American population) and the domination, for
over a century, of Liberian politics of so called “Americo-Liberians” — the
descendants of freed slaves, who lorded it over the native Liberians the way
their former slavemasters had lorded over them. (It’s yet another example of W. H. Auden’s
statement that “Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return” — like the
example Auden was writing about, the German people responding to the injustices
of the treaty of Versailles by putting Hitler in power; and the policies of
Israel towards the Palestinians.) When Firestone built their rubber plantation
— which ended up supplying 40 percent of their entire supply of raw latex —
they ran it like a colonial outpost, creating their own community with lavish
housing for the whites sent to run it, golf courses and the compound’s own
Coca-Cola bottling plant. Things continued like that, with the Americo-Liberian
elite giving Firestone free rein and Firestone operating like colonials in the
African countries that had been
taken over by European powers, until 1980, when the last Americo-Liberian
President, William Tolbert, was killed in a coup by a soldier named Samuel K. Doe — who took over the
country until he himself was overthrown and killed by Charles Taylor, a
bloodthirsty creep who seems to have anticipated many of the tactics of the
Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, including
forcibly recruiting child soldiers and training them to be his bodyguards, and
murdering (today we’d call it “ethnic cleansing”) just about anyone his people
captured who was part of any tribe other than his (most notably Doe’s tribe,
the Krahn).
When Taylor was on the march he captured the Firestone plantation,
drove off the whites who worked there — who fled and abandoned the Black
workforce to their fates (one woman talks matter-of-factly about being
gang-raped by the Taylor soldiers who had just killed her husband in front of
her) — and looted the place before using it as a headquarters, because it had
access both to a seaport (the town of Harbel — named for Harvey Firestone and
his wife Idabelle — which Firestone had built to export its product) and an
airport (Roberts International). Later, in the early 1990’s, with the civil war
between Taylor’s army, Doe’s and a United Nations “peacekeeping” force that
itself ended up bombing innocent civilians raging and the outcome uncertain,
Firestone cut a deal with Taylor to reopen the plant and pay “taxes” that
Taylor would use to finance his revolution and set up the final takeover of Monrovia.
(He never captured the capital, but in 1997, in control of the rest of the
country, he ran for president — and won overwhelmingly, courtesy of an
intimidated populace that realized their choices were Taylor as a
quasi-legitimate president or Taylor as a berserk warlord murdering people
willy-nilly.) The show’s main point was that Firestone was only interested in
getting the plantation up and running and didn’t care who they had to deal with to get it, and it was only
exposed by a lawsuit filed years later by the Cigna insurance company (of all
entities) against Firestone. It would have been nice to have an explanation of
how that suit came about and what its outcome was, and overall the show has an
air of “I’m shocked — shocked! —
to find that capitalists will do deals with mass murderers just to make money,”
but it’s still a fascinating story even narrated in the matter-of-fact tones of
Frontline’s usual narrator, Will
Lyman, who when he isn’t working for PBS is also the voice of BMW in its
commercials.
