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General Butt Naked

Liberian warlord and general

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 23, 2026
Entity authorityQ861952 ↗
Source-derived summary

Joshua Milton Blahyi (born 30 September 1971), better known by his nom de guerre General Butt Naked, is a Liberian preacher and philanthropist best known for being a warlord during the First Liberian Civil War. Born in Monrovia into a Krahn family, Blahyi claims that at the age of seven he was inducted as a high priest into a secret society and participated in child sacrifices along with assisting the regime of President Samuel Doe. Such claims have been disputed by Blahyi's relatives, who instead claim he dropped out of school after the third grade and worked at a local market in Monrovia before turning to crime. In 1989, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) sparked the civil war when they invaded Liberia to topple Doe, who was murdered in 1990.

In c. 1993, Blahyi joined the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy (ULIMO), which had been formed in 1991 and fought against the NPFL. He raised his own militia of mostly child fighters known as the "Naked Base Commandos", and became known for going into combat wearing no clothing, which led to him adopting his nom de guerre. In c. 1994, ULIMO split into the rival ULIMO-K and ULIMO-J, and Blahyi backed the latter faction, resisting an attempt by the NPFL and ULIMO-K to arrest its leader Roosevelt Johnson in April 1996. Blahyi claimed to have experienced a vision of Jesus in July 1996 and abandoned his fighters, instead turning to street preaching. The war ended in 1997, and the NPFL's leader, Charles Taylor, was elected as president.

Blahyi, who was subject to political persecution by Taylor's administration, fled to a refugee camp in Ghana in 1999. There, Blahyi learned to read and write and began delivering sermons, founding a ministry and rehabilitation programme.

Editorial summary

“General Butt Naked” enters the record as liberian warlord and general. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what General, Butt and Naked can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1971, 1989, 1990, 1993—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1971-09-30. Its strongest next move is a source search built around General, Butt and Naked.
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“General Butt Naked” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, General, Butt and Naked provides the most credible route into that argument.

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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q861952. VIAF identifies the subject as 282153564. The Library of Congress control number is no2009139223. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1971, 1989, 1990 and 1993.

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This entry incorporates text from “General Butt Naked” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.