Idi Amin

From TSL Encyclopedia
Idi Amin, August 1973

Idi Amin was a commander in the Ugandan army who ousted President Milton Obote in 1971, abolishing parliament and declaring himself president for life. As many as 300,000 Ugandans are said to have died during his eight-year reign, another 250,000 fled to Kenya, and many others lived in exile in Britain.

“Big Daddy,” as he liked to call himself, a 270-pound former military boxing champion, drew worldwide attention by his flamboyant eccentricity in foreign policy, outspoken belligerence toward other nations and their leaders (particularly Israel and neighboring Tanzania), and his ruthless purges. These included the periodic liquidation of prominent Ugandans and several thousand Lango and Acholi tribesmen who had supported Obote. “On any given day it was not unusual for 100 to 150 Ugandans to be killed,” Reader’s Digest reported in January 1980. “Entire villages were wiped out. Bodies floated down the Nile by the hundreds.”

Described as a man who could turn in a moment from gentle and charming to demonic, Amin’s bizarre conduct led to persistent rumors about his mental stability. In a blatant show of racism, Amin expelled the 50,000 Asians living in Uganda in 1972, only to strip the country of the trained personnel vital to its economy. When Britain cut off all aid following renewed reports of torture and brutality, Amin confiscated British businesses in Uganda without compensation—later claiming that relations with Britain went awry because he would not marry an Englishwoman.

In 1977, Anglican archbishop of Uganda Janani Luwum and two of Amin’s cabinet ministers were killed, beginning the persecution and slaughter of many Christians and non-Muslims (Amin was a convert to Islam).

Amin’s downfall came when he invaded Tanzania in October 1978 in an attempt to draw attention away from internal problems. In April 1979 Tanzanian troops with Ugandan exiles and rebels took the capital of Kampala, welcomed by its residents. Amin fled to Libya, leaving the nation once dubbed the “pearl of Africa” with bitter tribal divisions, a bankrupt economy, and a population demoralized by his reign of terror. He eventually went to Saudi Arabia, where he died in 2003.

The insanity of the fallen ones

In 1979, the messenger spoke of Idi Amin as an example of someone who had rejected Christ and enthroned the carnal mind within him.

When you are slaying that carnal mind, you lose the ability to know the difference between the carnal mind and the Christ mind. The carnal mind is so loud in declaring itself to the living Christ within you, that unless you can lean upon the arm of the Lord, unless you have that one to lean upon, you’ll go mad. There is a madness and an insanity.

You see that in Idi Amin in Uganda, in Africa. You see the madness, the insanity of the carnal mind that has enthroned itself as the Christ and has gotten the soul to believe it is the Christ, who can murder and destroy and completely wreck a nation. When the initiation and opportunity came for the slaying of the carnal mind, the individual did not have the person of the Christ and did not assent to the guru-chela relationship in order for the process to take place.

“Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”[1] The gods are the fallen ones who have enthroned the carnal mind in themselves. They’re all insane by that very act of having enthroned the carnal mind.[2]

Sources

Archangel Gabriel, Mysteries of the Holy Grail, chapter 4, endnotes.

  1. This phrase has been used widely in English literature, including in the poem “The Masque of Pandora,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Its origins can be traced back to antiquity. Sophocles’ play Antigone includes the line “evil appears as good in the minds of those whom god leads to destruction.”
  2. Elizabeth Clare Prophet, January 8, 1979.