Gotham Magazine Interview Tyger Bantu
Recently, the prize-winning journalist, Vickie Vale, was given unprecedented access to Tyger Bantu, CEO of TYGER Security International. Perhaps the most controversial CEO on the planet, Bantu allowed a collective 48 hours of his time over a six month period, as his firm helped to establish security for the Super-Max prison city, Arkham. The following excerpt is from the Gotham Magazine four-part articles written from those interviews.
GM- First, I'd like to thank you for your time, as you know I've been seeking an interview with you for about five years now. Thank you for finally consenting.
TB- You're welcome. And, nothing personal. I'm simply not one who enjoys speaking to reporters.
GM- Yes, you're notorious for your media adversion. Why is that?
TB- I think because people of your profession often get things wrong. The facts, the quotes, even the correct angle of a story.
GM- So, you don't like journalists?
TB- I neither like nor dislike the profession, but I do think you people need more true professionals among your ranks.
GM- Fair enough. And, what about your profession, mercenaries? Would you say the world has enough private armies to go around? TYGER has 100,000 men and women under arms, I believe.
TB- About that, yes.
GM- Why so many?
TB- Because they're in demand. There's a constant need, you'd be surprised.
GM- But, 100,000? With such an army you could occupy most any single nation on Earth.
TB- That's the point.
GM- They you'd agree with your critics that you are a warmonger.
B- I'm a warrior. I go where the wars already are. I don't start them. My job is to win them.
GM- Let's talk about Arkham City.
TB- [Laughs] I was wondering when we'd get to that.
GM- There are several lawsuits making their way up through the courts challenging the legitimacy of establishing the prison city. How do you justify your participation on moral grounds.
TB- I'm not a moral man.
GM- You're admitting to a personal immorality?
TB- If you want to put it like that. Look, morals to me are slippery things, much like a barrel full of eels. Just when you think you've got one in your hands so you can take a good look at it, it slips away. They are of the moment, philosophical fads.
GM- Can you clarify that?
TB- Certainly. Up unitl the mid-19th Century, here in America, it was moral for slave-labor camp owners to be accomplises to mass kidnapping and so-called plantation enslavement. In the mid-20th Century it was considered moral to drop atomic weapons on civililans. This was done by people who considered themselves moral.
I have no morals. I have my ethics. It's wrong to kidnap people and force them to work without pay and to sell them as property. It's wrong to kill unarmed civilians with particle weapons. I've never done either of those things, my ethics don't allow for it. Your Thomas Jefferson enslaved his own children. If someone were caught doing that now he'd be looked at as a monster, and rightfully so. Yet, here in the U.S. Jefferson is a secular deity. A moral man.
GM- Okay then, let me ask you, do you consider it ethical to participate in such an extra-legal project such as Arkham City.
TB- Absolutely.
GM- How do your ethics allow for that?
TB- TYGER didn't bring this project into fruitation. The citizens of Gotham voted for it. Your mayor mandated it and your local construction firms are building the perimeters. I am simply a security contractor.
GM- So, like Pilate, you wash your hands.
TB- [Laughs] No, my hands were never dirty.
GM- Many disagree, they call you a facist.
TB- Then they, whoever they are, do not know the definition of fascism. This is a captialistic endeavor on my part. It's all about the Benjamins, as the saying goes.
GM- The argument might be made that such single-minded capitalism is facism.
TB- And some argue that the World is flat. We live among fools.
-end excerpt