Deposed Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo, and wife Simone, sitting in a hotel room in Abidjan after their arrest.
According to the Daily Mail (gore warning on source page):
Former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo has today been charged with murder, rape, persecution and inhuman acts by the International Criminal Court.
The crimes were allegedly committed as his backers fought to keep him in power last year.
If found guilty, Mr. Gbagbo could be sentenced to remain with his wife for another twenty years. I would be downcast too.
Here we see Gbagbo in happier days, wearing his customary bling:
I’ve often wondered where African strong men get their bling. Do they sell it at Walmart over there? Do they order it from a special online catalog for dictators and tyrants? Perhaps the father of African bling was the infamous Idi Amin
Some of those look like they could have been police badges at one point. Others could have come from cereal boxes or perhaps they were trinkets given away by airlines. What do they symbolize? It’s possible that each one represents an enemy that Amin had eaten. It’s also possible that their primary purpose was to deflect the bullets of would-be assassins.
Former Central African dictator Jean Bedel Bokassa was known for running his poverty-stricken nation into the ground through his excesses and corruption. Here he is in all his glory:
Is there an inverse relationship between the amount of shiny ornaments on an African dictator’s clothing and his morality? This would be an interesting field of study for African dictatoroligists.
Is there an inverse relationship between the amount of shiny ornaments on an African dictator’s clothing and his morality?
Is there a direct relationship between the size of the diamond earrings an NFL or NBA player wears and his morality?
Here is some half-formed racism.
Clearly black people — and this obviously has something to do with low intelligence — are obsessed with shiny things and other obvious, and therefore tacky (to us), signs of wealth. They seem to think the best way of establishing that you have access to money is by (a) carrying around a lot of gold and (b) literally throwing money around. Best of all, I suppose, is wearing gold and diamond jewelry that’s actually shaped like dollar signs.
Bling. Grills. Rims. Pimpin’ — ugh. Names, too, with “Dr.” Goliath Davis III being one of my favorite American examples. It’s all ludicrous, but nobody’s laughing at them. Nobody’s saying, “You look like a fucking idiot! NICE JEWELRY, ASSHOLE!”
So African dictators have more access to this crap, but they’re not really different from other black people.
You have no historical awareness of gold and its influence in this world. Please research deeper instead of making a bigoted comment to patte your race in back.
It’s all ludicrous, but nobody’s laughing at them. Nobody’s saying, “You look like a fucking idiot! NICE JEWELRY, ASSHOLE!”
Unamused, you should know that we are all laughing at them, behind their backs. You can’t tell a black the truth lest you wish to start a war where you stand. They have no shame — which is probably the reason for the high incarceration rate, that and lack of self-control.
A lot of it is status. The various decorations represent military or diplomatic prowess. Note that Idi Amin has Israeli paratrooper “wings.” But what have they done to deserve these awards? It’s one thing to be a Red Army field marshal who by 1945 had fought from Moscow to Berlin, but these guys?
I liked that line that Idi Amin wore one for everyone he ate. Perhaps it is true that he was a cannibal.
It’s one thing for self-important blacks to flash all this bling when they live in a first world country, where everyone else smirks at them or laughs at them. But these African “kings” and “emperors” are flashing their bling around at people who have nothing and are on the vestibule of starvation. Not the best PR maneuver.