Speaker 1: Also media, who did it?
Speaker 2: I did it?
Speaker 3: I pressed, oh you did it? You did it? I
Speaker 3: also did it. I have also pressed the buttons that
Speaker 3: I have to start to start my job in the
Speaker 3: podcast which you're listening to right now, the podcast that
Speaker 3: I do for a job. You know who else does
Speaker 3: podcasts my job?
Speaker 1: This is why people ask you to do the atonal
Speaker 1: shrieking because what was that?
Speaker 3: You happy?
Speaker 1: Now? Beautiful?
Speaker 3: You get enough? Andrew T Welcome to the program.
Speaker 2: What up? How's it going?
Speaker 1: Give us one shriek? Andrew? Just one time?
Speaker 3: Yeah? That was tonal.
Speaker 1: There was.
Speaker 3: Subreddit's going to be livid. People are going to be
Speaker 3: letting you up, Andrew.
Speaker 2: Get the get the get the music theory people on here.
Speaker 3: I want to go, Yeah, somebody make an e d
Speaker 3: M track from all of our all my various a
Speaker 3: tonal openings. But also you know who's not a tonal.
Speaker 3: Dolly Parton and the Federalists Twitter account just win for
Speaker 3: her evil take on Christianity, which is I don't actually know,
Speaker 3: but I'm assuming it's be nice to everybody, because most
Speaker 3: of what Dolly Parton says is be nice to everybody
Speaker 3: and give children free books. That's been my general experience. Oh,
Speaker 3: also have incredible chemistry with Burt Reynolds.
Speaker 2: Is it possible that the federal society is like, if
Speaker 2: you give children free books, that's actually doing violence to
Speaker 2: them because they haven't I've gotten a job and earned
Speaker 2: money to buy books.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they think there's a good chance that's what's going
Speaker 3: on there. I also think this is this is like
Speaker 3: this is like a case of pick, like a like
Speaker 3: a naked caveman picking a fistfight with a mastodon. Like
Speaker 3: you really do not want to want to throw down
Speaker 3: against Dolly Parton.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she's like in top ten of most likable people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she is probably the most liked person in this
Speaker 3: entire country. Yeah, by people in this country at least,
Speaker 3: you know who's not liked in this country or most
Speaker 3: other countries. Ooh, the Department of Defense controversial.
Speaker 2: You know that's true.
Speaker 3: People like soldiers Andrew. But even so, if you want
Speaker 3: to talk, if you talk to soldiers, the number one
Speaker 3: thing they complain about is the DoD Right. One of
Speaker 3: the funny things about the Chagos case is that it
Speaker 3: involves what I would describe as incomprehensible evil from two empires,
Speaker 3: one fading into obscurity, and the other rising to the
Speaker 3: precipitous heights from which we will all spend the rest
Speaker 3: of our lives watching it fall. That's what we're going
Speaker 3: to talk about.
Speaker 2: This really is like a relay race, like a.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's yeah, it's it's beautiful. It's just like
Speaker 3: two sides of the graph meeting for one brief shining
Speaker 3: moment and before.
Speaker 1: We end this cold open, I just just one more,
Speaker 1: one more, a tonal shriek.
Speaker 3: You So I'm not a I'm not a wind up doll,
Speaker 3: all right, you know I'm a person.
Speaker 1: Two three, Ah, beautiful.
Speaker 3: We're back. So from where I stand, both the British
Speaker 3: Empire and the United States have pretty equal levels of
Speaker 3: guilt over Chagos, right. I wouldn't say either Americans or
Speaker 3: Brits have more to feel ashamed of here, but of
Speaker 3: course officials from both governments have a vested interest in
Speaker 3: making the other into the bad guy. And you get
Speaker 3: a hint of this in an article I found in
Speaker 3: a French journal at two Days Ocean Indian by Julian Darup,
Speaker 3: who writes Britain was forced on her own by its
Speaker 3: former colony, the USA, to depopulate Chagos of its indigenous
Speaker 3: population of British subjects and force them into exile in
Speaker 3: a foreign country, against all the principle of the United Nations,
Speaker 3: the principles of human rights, and the Magna Carta. A
Speaker 3: unique case perhaps about precedent in British colonial history. Like
Speaker 3: they didn't get forced. They wanted some nukes for cheaper.
Speaker 2: It's not forced, you can say a lot, but without
Speaker 2: precedent is the wiest lie.
Speaker 3: This would be like, this would be like back when
Speaker 3: I did drugs, if I was like, well, my drug
Speaker 3: dealer forced me to buy that cocaine with all that
Speaker 3: weed because it was just too cheap. You know, when
Speaker 3: I did drugs, I only do gas station drugs now, Sophie,
Speaker 3: I'm gas station sober. I keep saying this just kratom,
Speaker 3: Trucker pills, and beer. Sure, Robert, sometimes some of that
Speaker 3: Delta eight stuff while it's still legal. Please don't talk
Speaker 3: about it. My god, those weird mushroom gummies that are
Speaker 3: apparently legal in gas stations in Texas now glorious gas
Speaker 3: stations in a lot of states now sell all of
Speaker 3: the drugs that you used to have to spend like
Speaker 3: twenty five minutes listening to Romstein videos with a weirdo
Speaker 3: in his apartment to get it's wonderful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now you watch them with just like a kid
Speaker 2: who's there. We're here for minimum.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No longer do I have to sit through an
Speaker 3: entire bass Nectar album to get mushrooms. I just go
Speaker 3: to what should have been a seven to eleven in
Speaker 3: a civilized nation. That nectar, I don't know, he's probably
Speaker 3: base nectar. I don't care. I don't care.
Speaker 1: I'm going to guess you're wrong, and that's fine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, bass nectar is a worm or like a little fly.
Speaker 3: I'm thinking I'm fishing pilled these days, Andrew. I got
Speaker 3: my hunting license in hand and everything, and I'm gonna go.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna go fish. So not for bass, because I
Speaker 3: don't think they're up here, but I'm thinking of bass
Speaker 3: because I used to fish for bass. I consider fish oil.
Speaker 3: I call it bass nectar, Andrew. It's not made from baths.
Speaker 2: But y'all, y'all can y'all can just get dungeonus crabs
Speaker 2: from the ocean at times of the year, right.
Speaker 3: You sure can at times of the year. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: you could get muscles. But all of our muscles are
Speaker 3: poisoned right now, so we are not doing that.
Speaker 2: This.
Speaker 1: It's like a huge, huge shame because uh, I used
Speaker 1: to go to muscle Monday every week.
Speaker 3: Oh glorious, Oh my god.
Speaker 2: And then also the food was good.
Speaker 3: I have two great muscle memories. One time me and
Speaker 3: me and a very good friend.
Speaker 1: Like how great Andrews joke just was?
Speaker 3: I'm sorry? Did I What did I miss? Not ship?
Speaker 3: What did I miss?
Speaker 1: Okay, you'll listen to it when you listen to the edit,
Speaker 1: and I just watch you to know Andrew deserved his flowers.
Speaker 1: Here you go, Andrew, Nice to you, and I.
Speaker 3: Will be proud of you in the future. When I
Speaker 3: listened to this episode, Andrew. But now I got to
Speaker 3: talk my muscle stories because I got two really good
Speaker 3: muscles stories. One is me and a very good friend
Speaker 3: of mine spent like a week in Baja and we
Speaker 3: went like clambering down the side of this cliff side
Speaker 3: that was filled with like tidal pools, and there were
Speaker 3: all of these muscles that we like picked and then
Speaker 3: climbed up the rockside and like they were alive until
Speaker 3: the second we threw them into the fucking past. It
Speaker 3: was amazing, glorious, one of the best things I've ever eaten.
Speaker 3: And then a year or two later, with that same friend,
Speaker 3: I was in the UH. I was in the all
Speaker 3: you can eat buffet at the Bellaccio, having an eating
Speaker 3: contest that we had decided ahead of time would be muscles,
Speaker 3: And unfortunately, as soon as we arrived, we called ahead
Speaker 3: to make sure the bilacio had muscles, and they were like,
Speaker 3: oh yeah, we got them. And as soon as we
Speaker 3: arrived we realized the muscles have been rancid, and the
Speaker 3: biloaggio's staff had decided to cover them with thousand island
Speaker 3: dressing in order to disguise the fact that they were
Speaker 3: no longer fit for consumption. Now, this friend and I
Speaker 3: are both the kind of people that, when we realize
Speaker 3: a plan we have made is untenable, our only thought
Speaker 3: is to just kind of fight through it, right, you know,
Speaker 3: it's it's battle of the bulge logic. We're Americans, you know,
Speaker 3: when it all costs, and in this case, that meant
Speaker 3: we each consumed several pounds of ransom muscles. I won
Speaker 3: it fourteen plates.
Speaker 1: By the way, I'm really too I'm trying to guess
Speaker 1: which friend of.
Speaker 3: Yours is we were dizzy. He'll listen to the show.
Speaker 3: At some point we got disastrously ill, and in my
Speaker 3: case it was after I drove home, and in his
Speaker 3: case it was on a Greyhound bus back to Elm.
Speaker 2: No, Lord, I can I just say, I will just
Speaker 2: throw this out there. If you're having an eating contest,
Speaker 2: you can't go with muscles bro at the Lago Buffet.
Speaker 3: We did, My man, we did.
Speaker 2: It's like, no, not because of the danger, it's just
Speaker 2: you gotta go with high, high margin foods.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I know.
Speaker 3: It was a bad decision because we The Blagio buffet
Speaker 3: has a bunch of like really good looking food in it,
Speaker 3: and we walked past it for fourteen plates. It was
Speaker 3: a horrible decision.
Speaker 1: Did you at least did you at least still a bathroom?
Speaker 3: Uh? No, not from the Belagio?
Speaker 1: Damn it?
Speaker 2: Robert can I and I tell my muscle story, which
Speaker 2: for sure, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're allegedly allegedly Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well I'm not positive. Yeah, I guess I will just say.
Speaker 2: This still narrows it down too much, so it'll be
Speaker 2: pretty clear who this is. And because you can only
Speaker 2: have two neighbors, really, it's pretty I guess if you
Speaker 2: are really sleuth and you could figure this out. But
Speaker 2: in college, I was friends with this guy who had
Speaker 2: you know what, actually this is? This is this could
Speaker 2: be a couple of different people. Anyway, his stepdad owned
Speaker 2: a house next door to a beachside presidential compound, and
Speaker 2: we went and visited, and we were we were just
Speaker 2: digging muscles on the on the on their what we
Speaker 2: thought was their beach, and you know, the lines are
Speaker 2: not very clearly drawn. And we came back I can't
Speaker 2: remember it was the mom or the dad was like,
Speaker 2: you guys didn't go past this, did you. Uh? And
Speaker 2: it turned out we possibly had poached some of the
Speaker 2: king's muscles.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, I'm surprised they didn't black bag you
Speaker 3: and send you to Chagos, which, by the way, is
Speaker 3: where this story ends.
Speaker 2: Is this is where they would have It was a
Speaker 2: president at a time when that very well could have happened.
Speaker 2: And I guess I'll just leave it at that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all well done.
Speaker 3: Anyway, that was quite a long digression about muscles. I guess, sorry,
Speaker 3: but I thought it was. Yeah, so that's quote I
Speaker 3: read from those British clod From that from that French
Speaker 3: article where they were like, ah, the poor British forced
Speaker 3: to forced to ethnically cleanse their island by the Americans.
Speaker 2: Something done before.
Speaker 3: I will say this is our fault equally with the British,
Speaker 3: but I consider that a silly way to look at
Speaker 3: this entire situation. Right. Yeah, So from the end of
Speaker 3: the British Empire, the decision they're making here is that
Speaker 3: their best case scenario is they is to keep having
Speaker 3: an empire on paper, but also like not have to
Speaker 3: do anything there, just kind of let the Americans do it, right,
Speaker 3: So they consider this a pretty good deal. Yeah. Now
Speaker 3: for our part, the Americans, we are equally responsible, but
Speaker 3: we deny our responsibility in a different way.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: The British like to play out were put upon by
Speaker 3: those American bullies and the Americans and our attempt to
Speaker 3: ignore our complicity in this. We do the thing we
Speaker 3: do best, which is we be we pretend to be
Speaker 3: big dumb tourists, like, well, no, we didn't know. I'm
Speaker 3: just a poor, simple bar from Corns. You know, I
Speaker 3: didn't know there was people on this island when I
Speaker 3: built my navy base. That was not a Kansas accent
Speaker 3: born Leghorn was like, what are we doing? Yeah, I
Speaker 3: don't know why. I don't know why I said Kansas,
Speaker 3: but there you go sort of like, well.
Speaker 2: You'd imagine like a real good LBJ Paradise, Yeah, I
Speaker 2: would have done yeah, yeah, like and it is exactly
Speaker 2: that kind of attitude of just like, well, well shucks,
Speaker 2: I didn't realize there were people there.
Speaker 3: Nobody told us, you know, and that was like, you
Speaker 3: can we have paperwork from Navy officers being up being like,
Speaker 3: we need to have the British kick these people out
Speaker 3: for us, because otherwise we're gonna look like shit when
Speaker 3: people find out that we had them do this, you know.
Speaker 3: And it is very clear that American officers were well
Speaker 3: aware of what had to be done to ready Chagos
Speaker 3: for them act. They demanded it in nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 3: Admiral and this is one of the most ridiculous names
Speaker 3: in Navy history, Elmo zoomweight Zoomwalt told his British counterparts,
Speaker 3: fucking Elmo and Elmo is this is a genocide done
Speaker 3: in part by an Elmo, you know, just tragic. My
Speaker 3: own personal desire is to have no indigenous laborers on
Speaker 3: the island because I can foresee the kind of political
Speaker 3: complication that the Soviets always make when you have that
Speaker 3: kind of indigenous population. Therefore, I strongly advocate that there'll
Speaker 3: be none there when that we take over and establish
Speaker 3: the base. And it's such a such a navy man
Speaker 3: in the fucking sixties thing to be like, Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: those damned communists making all these people angry that we
Speaker 3: have turned their sparkling beaches into diesel fuel. Yeah, coons
Speaker 3: for some reason.
Speaker 2: The only way to make sure we don't look bad
Speaker 2: is to you know, like exile all of them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, kick them all out. The Communists can't take advantage
Speaker 3: of this situation. Amazing stuff. When one reads the correspondence
Speaker 3: of US Navy officials who first laid eyes on Diego Garcil,
Speaker 3: you can almost feel their hunger, right. They ride about
Speaker 3: like a toolls lagoon could shelter like massive numbers of ships,
Speaker 3: huge fleets of them. And it's also one of those
Speaker 3: things because of their location, storms don't really hit Chagos
Speaker 3: like they get like rainstorms and stuff, but cyclones very
Speaker 3: rarely get close enough to Chago's for it to be
Speaker 3: a problem. Admiral John McCain described the islands as the
Speaker 3: Malta of the Indian Ocean. The other John McCain, not
Speaker 3: the one who didn't quite get plane flying down his
Speaker 3: dad though. So I gave Julian a little bit of
Speaker 3: shit there for in my eyes spreading some propaganda. But
Speaker 3: I will say his paper has a lot of good
Speaker 3: stuff in it, and it actually did inform me of
Speaker 3: an added dimension to this horror that my earlier reading
Speaker 3: had not presented to me. Robin Cook, then a Minister
Speaker 3: of Parliament Labor, later claimed that the initial base site
Speaker 3: that the United Kingdom planned to offer to the United
Speaker 3: States was a different island, and not the heavily inhabited
Speaker 3: Diego Garcia. This island, Aldabra was rejected because giant tortoises
Speaker 3: nested nested there, and neither great military power wanted to
Speaker 3: risk the bad pr of hurting tortoises. Now, Jesus Christ,
Speaker 3: I will say, I think tortoises and human beings have
Speaker 3: an equal right to keep living in their homes. That
Speaker 3: considerably outweighed the British desire for better nukes or the
Speaker 3: American desire from an easier place from which to bomb
Speaker 3: the Middle East. But it is pretty fucked up that
Speaker 3: They were like, well, we can't can't kick those tortoises
Speaker 3: out of their home. Better kick the people out.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, that's so uniquely awful. It is.
Speaker 3: It's like a fascinating and like almost yeah almost, yeah,
Speaker 3: yeah yeah yeah, it's kind of evil. You can only
Speaker 3: do while wearing a specific sort of khaki suit.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, amazing scat I have.
Speaker 2: This would looks terrible. Yeah.
Speaker 3: You can see the hat on the military officer, you know,
Speaker 3: one of those beautiful peaked ones. The question left to
Speaker 3: both the British and the Americans then was this, how
Speaker 3: do you clear an entire culture of people off of
Speaker 3: their home? And the answer is slowly soon after creating
Speaker 3: the Biot, and again the Biot is this political fiction.
Speaker 3: The British have lassoed some islands together on a map
Speaker 3: and said, we're giving the other islands we had previously
Speaker 3: owned up to be independent countries. We get to keep
Speaker 3: this chunk of them, right, So they make this and
Speaker 3: they inc a deal with the US in nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 3: and after this point Great Britain begins, which you might
Speaker 3: describe as a slow motion exile of the Chegosian people.
Speaker 3: At first, this took the form of encouraging migration away
Speaker 3: from Diego, Garcia to Mauritius. Free tickets on quarterly steamship
Speaker 3: were offered to Islanders who simply wanted to explore their neighborhood.
Speaker 3: But bit by bit they started restricting the ability of
Speaker 3: locals on vacation or who had moved away temporarily. You know,
Speaker 3: you get someone who like, well, I want to make
Speaker 3: some money, I want to acquire a couple of things
Speaker 3: that I can't get on Chiagos. I'm going to move
Speaker 3: to Meridias for like five years, right, and then I'll
Speaker 3: go back home, you know. So some of these people
Speaker 3: start to find out when they try to book routes
Speaker 3: back home that there's no such route any longer. There's
Speaker 3: no more steamships going to Chagos now. Because Chagos is
Speaker 3: so isolated, they don't have a way of messaging back home.
Speaker 3: There's no way for them to warn their families or
Speaker 3: to explain what has happened to them to the people.
Speaker 3: Like from the perspective of people living on Chagos, their
Speaker 3: family members are leaving on like short trips, like I'm
Speaker 3: gonna go be on vacation for three months, and then
Speaker 3: they just don't have her come home and you never
Speaker 3: find out why. Right, this is the British plan.
Speaker 2: Yeah sounds about right, I guess, Yeah, sounds about right.
Speaker 3: I guess. The biot was in British law, British territory
Speaker 3: and all legal precedent makes it clear that the Chagosians
Speaker 3: should have been treated as citizens of the crown. That
Speaker 3: would have created a problem though. If you tell these
Speaker 3: people you can never go home, but hey, you have
Speaker 3: UK citizenship now, they might like go to London and
Speaker 3: find a journalist or a lawyer and start being like
Speaker 3: our culture's being annihilated for some reason, you know, and
Speaker 3: that's a real issue. You can't have them doing that.
Speaker 3: So the British they decide like, well, if these people
Speaker 3: figure out that they have the right to be citizens,
Speaker 3: we can't stop them. But what we can do is
Speaker 3: just never say anything.
Speaker 2: Jesus.
Speaker 3: It's amazing stuff. A Foreign Office memo from nineteen seventy wrote.
Speaker 2: This is some mister beanship, by the way, this is crazy.
Speaker 2: It's bean esque.
Speaker 3: Yeah. A Foreign Office memo from nineteen seventy writes this
Speaker 3: out directly, quote, we would not wish it to become
Speaker 3: general knowledge that some of the inhabitants have lived on
Speaker 3: Diego Garcia for at least two generations, and could therefore
Speaker 3: be regarded as belongers. We shall therefore advise ministers in
Speaker 3: handling supplementary questions about whether Diego Garcia is inhabited, to
Speaker 3: say that there is only a small number of contract
Speaker 3: laborers from the Seychelles and Mauritius engaged in work that
Speaker 3: is being economical with the truth. That's how they describe it.
Speaker 3: We're not lying, we're economizing with our fact.
Speaker 2: True, that's true. The truth is in recession and yeah,
Speaker 2: what can you do?
Speaker 3: What can you do? There's gotta be some austerity. Hey,
Speaker 3: we're the UK. There's one thing we can still do,
Speaker 3: and it's austerity. If the memo continued, a member of
Speaker 3: the House of Commons were to ask about the welfare
Speaker 3: of these contract laborers in the wake of the US
Speaker 3: base being set up on the island, they were to
Speaker 3: be brushed off and the matter noted as hypothetical until
Speaker 3: construction actually began. A nineteen sixty eight memo from a
Speaker 3: Foreign Office legal observer legal observer had been even more blunt, bragging,
Speaker 3: we are able to make up the rules as we
Speaker 3: go along. And treat inhabitants of biote as not belonging
Speaker 3: to it in any sense. Why not? Yeah, well, what
Speaker 3: if we just decide to fuck these people over and
Speaker 3: never explain it. That seems easier for us. I love
Speaker 3: the rules based international orator Andrew t. It's dope.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know it is. It's true that it has
Speaker 2: always been this way, but yeah, the fiction that this
Speaker 2: is laws is crazy.
Speaker 3: It is like, you know, if you want to, progress
Speaker 3: can be defined I guess as being like one empire
Speaker 3: being like it is fine to depopulate vast numbers of
Speaker 3: white people from their homes and even kill huge numbers
Speaker 3: of them to the next empire is going like, no, no, no,
Speaker 3: you just make them live in another country, never tell
Speaker 3: them why, and lie about it and make sure they're
Speaker 3: not white. That's number one, right, And yeah that's progress, baby, Yeah,
Speaker 3: great stuff. So under this logic, no explanation was needed
Speaker 3: as to why Chegosians weren't allowed to return home to
Speaker 3: their loved ones, their houses, and the graves of their ancestors.
Speaker 3: They were just guest workers. The government had brought bought
Speaker 3: out their old employer. It owned the plantations, and they
Speaker 3: were no longer needed to work them. One of the
Speaker 3: first wave of exiles for an idea of how this
Speaker 3: works in practice for a lot of like the first
Speaker 3: chunk of Chagosians who get forced out, is Rita Bankole.
Speaker 3: She had been born in June nineteen twenty eight on
Speaker 3: an island called Peros Banjos, about one hundred and fifty
Speaker 3: miles north of Diego, Garcia. Her great great grandmother had
Speaker 3: been enslaved and taken from Madagascar, and ever since Chagos
Speaker 3: had been where her family belonged. She joins the vast
Speaker 3: majority of Chagos exiles in recalling her life on the
Speaker 3: island as quite good. Quote. You had your house, you
Speaker 3: didn't even have rent to pay. With my ration, I
Speaker 3: got ten and a half pounds of rice each week.
Speaker 3: I got ten and a half pounds of flour. I
Speaker 3: got my oil, I got my salt, I got my beans.
Speaker 3: It was only butter beans and red beans that we
Speaker 3: needed to buy. And to be clear, for you libertarian
Speaker 3: minded folks out there, they're not being given these rations
Speaker 3: because the British Empire is like taking care of them.
Speaker 3: This is pay for the work that they do.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: They are laboring and they're being paid in rice because
Speaker 3: there's really not a lot to buy with money. Right.
Speaker 3: These people use money occasionally to buy like liquor or
Speaker 3: special kinds of beans and spices, but like, they get
Speaker 3: paid a lot in food because it's more useful to
Speaker 3: them often than cash.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: But this is not like a gift they're being given.
Speaker 3: They are laboring for this, right. Rita also recalls having
Speaker 3: a dog named Cators who would dive into the sea
Speaker 3: and bring fish back to her, which sounds pretty cool
Speaker 3: to me, Right, that's kind of dope. Yeah, that's adorable. Now, Andrew,
Speaker 3: I'm going to have some real sad stuff about all
Speaker 3: the dogs in this island to tell you in a
Speaker 3: little bit. So I wanted to. I wanted to give
Speaker 3: you one happy dog story about Catorus the fishing dogs.
Speaker 1: You didn't tell us that there was sad.
Speaker 3: Oh this is this is gonna be a real bad
Speaker 3: So I picked.
Speaker 1: Up I picked up Anderson because she wanted to be
Speaker 1: picked up. And now I want her out of your show.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I just don't let any officials of the British
Speaker 3: Foreign Office near Anderson.
Speaker 2: Actually that's a rule.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was gonna say that's that's never gonna Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: So, Rita told author David Vine in an interview for
Speaker 3: his book Island of Shame. Life there paid little money,
Speaker 3: a very little, but it was the sweet life. And
Speaker 3: again that's basically everybody who lived there is what they
Speaker 3: say is like, yeah, you know, we worked hard and
Speaker 3: we didn't have money, but like you didn't need much money,
Speaker 3: and we were all pretty It was pretty rad. We
Speaker 3: were pretty happy on Jagos. One of the few downsides
Speaker 3: of life there, as I've noted, was a lack of
Speaker 3: good access to hospitals. The only regular passage to Meridius
Speaker 3: was a quarterly steamship. In nineteen sixty seven, Rita's three
Speaker 3: year old girl, Noelli, had her foot run over by
Speaker 3: a mule drawn cart. The nurse and their tiny local
Speaker 3: clinic told Rita Noelli needed an operation at a real
Speaker 3: hospital in Mauritius. They still had to wait two months
Speaker 3: for this. By the time the boat arrived, Neelli was
Speaker 3: sick with gangreen Still, Rita piled her whole family onto
Speaker 3: her boat, her husband Julian, and their five uninjured children,
Speaker 3: planning to spend three months recovering with Noelli in the
Speaker 3: capital of Meridius, Port Louis. Tragically Noelli's gangreen was too
Speaker 3: severe for the medicine at the time. She died a
Speaker 3: month after they arrived in Meritius. Rita and her family
Speaker 3: waited and grieved for two months until they could book
Speaker 3: passage to return home, because again the steamships were quarterly
Speaker 3: wine rights. With the departure date approaching, Rita walked to
Speaker 3: the office of the steamship company to arrange for the
Speaker 3: family's return. There, the steamship company representative told her your
Speaker 3: island has been sold. You will never go there again,
Speaker 3: leaving Rita to return to her family speechless and in tears.
Speaker 3: When Julian finally heard his wife's news, he collapsed backwards,
Speaker 3: arms splayed wide, unable to utter a word. Prevented from
Speaker 3: returning home, Rita, Julian, and their five surviving children found
Speaker 3: themselves in a foreign land, separated from their home, their land,
Speaker 3: their animals, their possessions, their jobs, their community, and the
Speaker 3: graves of their ancestors. The Bancos had been as Chegosians
Speaker 3: came to say, de racine, deracinated, uprooted, torn from their
Speaker 3: natal lands. They have a couple words that they have
Speaker 3: created in their language for the specific trauma of being
Speaker 3: raised in paradise and being ripped away from it and
Speaker 3: not really told even why it's happening. De Rassine Now
Speaker 3: to hear, Rita tells it being deracinated is what killed
Speaker 3: her husband shortly after their daughter died, and they get
Speaker 3: this news, Julian suffers a stroke, his body shuts down
Speaker 3: on him, and he dies five years later. Rita gives
Speaker 3: his cause of death as sogrin, which is another Chegosian
Speaker 3: word and it means deep sadness. It is specifically the
Speaker 3: kind of sadness of being separated from Chagos. So he
Speaker 3: dies of sogrin, and a lot of her family, her
Speaker 3: kids are going to follow in a similar path. Nobody
Speaker 3: from the British government ever explains to reader why this
Speaker 3: is happening. No paper trail exists. She is just stuck
Speaker 3: one day in a foreign land with nothing as her
Speaker 3: family dies around her. The next to perish was her
Speaker 3: son Alex, who passed at thirty eight after years of
Speaker 3: addiction to drugs and alcohol. Their son Eddie overdosed on
Speaker 3: heroin at thirty six. Their little boy Raynald died at
Speaker 3: age eleven while begging for money. For reasons the family
Speaker 3: will never know the way. She describes it as like
Speaker 3: he just his body just gave up. He was too sad.
Speaker 2: Oh god, yeah, that's like that so wild to just
Speaker 2: be like, yeah, your island, you can't go home.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're out one sold. No one will ever explain
Speaker 3: this to you. Buy Yeah, yeah, I will just say.
Speaker 2: In traditional Western literature, the person that rips you from
Speaker 2: paradise is typically Satan, just.
Speaker 3: Right, right, the devil. Yes, And I do like that
Speaker 3: term sagrin is so evocative, right, This like sadness that
Speaker 3: literally kills you because you have been separated from the
Speaker 3: place where your heart is. Rita's story is one small
Speaker 3: example of the horror enacted by the British to serve
Speaker 3: the needs of the US Empire. She told David Vine,
Speaker 3: my life has been buried. It is as if I
Speaker 3: was pulled from my paradise to put me in hell.
Speaker 3: Everything here you need to buy, I don't have the
Speaker 3: means to buy them. My children go without eating. How
Speaker 3: am I supposed to bear this life? Part of the
Speaker 3: horror here is that these people, I mean they worked
Speaker 3: for a company, so technically they existed within capitalism, but
Speaker 3: on a day to day basis, money was like a
Speaker 3: thing you occasionally used for stuff you didn't need. You
Speaker 3: got everything you needed from the island, right, But now
Speaker 3: they have to pay rent, they have to buy food,
Speaker 3: they have to light work and factories and shit. It's this,
Speaker 3: it's this totally alien existence for them and it's horrible.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, and it's also like if you have to
Speaker 2: live in capitalism, like, yes, starting when you have a
Speaker 2: family is right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: You've got your husband's strokes out and you have five
Speaker 3: kids to support. Like a fucking nightmare.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The year after Rita's lifelong Nightmare began nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 3: Michael Stewart, the Baron Stewart a Fulham, a British Labor
Speaker 3: Party politician and Foreign secretary, wrote in yet another secret document,
Speaker 3: and I'm reading from Mark Curtis's Web of deceit. Here,
Speaker 3: by any structure of the English language, there was an
Speaker 3: indigenous population and the Foreign Office knew it. A Foreign
Speaker 3: Office minute from nineteen sixty five recognizes policy as to
Speaker 3: certify the Chagosians, more or less fraudulently as belonging somewhere else.
Speaker 3: Another Whitehall document was entitled Maintaining the Fiction. The Foreign
Speaker 3: Office Legal adviser wrote in January nineteen seventy that it
Speaker 3: was important to maintain the fiction that the inhabitants of
Speaker 3: Chagos are not a permanent or semi permanent population. So
Speaker 3: like you have this labor politician being like, well, we
Speaker 3: knew there was a foreign population there, and you guys
Speaker 3: just lied, and the Foreign Office in their own internal
Speaker 3: policies being like weeah, our policy was to lie about it.
Speaker 3: That's what we decided to do, was pretend it was
Speaker 3: the easiest thing to do.
Speaker 2: This is like, at least al Capone didn't denys or
Speaker 2: denovate as taxes.
Speaker 3: Weh al Capone was a nearly this evil And you
Speaker 3: know who else is it nearly this evil? Andrew the
Speaker 3: sponsors of this politics, I can guarantee you none of
Speaker 3: them are responsible for Chagos. We are not presently sponsored
Speaker 3: by the British Foreign Office or the Department of.
Speaker 2: Defense, So you know astorisk guarantee not guaranteed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if we ever do an ad for call of duty,
Speaker 3: this will no longer be entirely accurate. Anyway, and we're back.
Speaker 3: There's also a lot of movies we could read ads
Speaker 3: for and then would technically be being paid by the
Speaker 3: Department of defense in some way, so I don't know,
Speaker 3: there's no escaping it. Even with the nightmare of exile,
Speaker 3: Rita's situation might have been vastly improved if she had
Speaker 3: been informed that she was now a citizen of the
Speaker 3: technically really always had been a citizen of the UK,
Speaker 3: with the attendant rights and potential access to social services
Speaker 3: that that brought with it, she could maybe leave this
Speaker 3: place in Meritius that she had been dumped, go to
Speaker 3: the UK and gain access to some of the things
Speaker 3: that British people can access to help when they have
Speaker 3: a bunch of kids that they can't afford in the
Speaker 3: culture that they now live in. But Britain's High Commission
Speaker 3: in Mauritius wrote in nineteen seventy one in a meeting
Speaker 3: with the Mauritian Prime Minister, naturally I shall not suggest
Speaker 3: to him that some of these also have UK nationality.
Speaker 3: Always possible that it may spot this point, in which
Speaker 3: case presumably we will have to come clean. So the
Speaker 3: British High Commission's official statement was, if they ask us
Speaker 3: are we are we British, we have to say all right, yep,
Speaker 3: you guys are. But hopefully they won't find out I.
Speaker 2: There's a part of me that's like, why not just
Speaker 2: lie again? If you're going to be this evil, it's.
Speaker 3: Because there's this weird thing they have to believe most
Speaker 3: of us do in this country and in the UK,
Speaker 3: have to believe that the laws means something. Right, Yes,
Speaker 3: you can ignore them and often will, but if somebody
Speaker 3: catches you on it, you have to be like, well,
Speaker 3: all right, you know, Like it's like cops doing illegal
Speaker 3: search and seizures. They do it a lot on people
Speaker 3: who you know, are not informed, don't know enough access
Speaker 3: to the law to like properly protest it. But as
Speaker 3: soon as you're called like this was an illegal search
Speaker 3: and season, they're like, all right, well we got to
Speaker 3: give this one up, right, we break the law on
Speaker 3: your caddis are right? You have enough money to know
Speaker 3: what your rights are? Oki Doki Right, you know.
Speaker 2: I guess that's what it is is it creates a
Speaker 2: soft social stratification. Yeah, Like access that information is not free, right.
Speaker 3: Right, It's not. It requires having the benefit of a
Speaker 3: certain kind of education, access to certain kinds of libraries, barristers,
Speaker 3: all that kind of shit. Right, cool, So Rita and
Speaker 3: her family are just part of the first wave of exiles.
Speaker 3: The bulk of the Chegosian population could not be induced
Speaker 3: to leave on temporary trips where they could be surprise exiled,
Speaker 3: because again, it's pretty nice there and most people don't
Speaker 3: really It's the kind of place other people go on
Speaker 3: vacation you don't always want to leave. So the British
Speaker 3: authorities started choking them off by cutting they would just
Speaker 3: they made it basically illegal to send medicine or like
Speaker 3: other supplies to the islands. Right they stopped taking the
Speaker 3: things that, like the islanders had been exporting successfully to
Speaker 3: the rest of the world. They're just like, we are
Speaker 3: denying you the planet with our navy in the hopes
Speaker 3: that it will make your lives untenable. That said, this
Speaker 3: still doesn't fully work, because they are capable of keeping
Speaker 3: themselves fed by what they grow on the island, right,
Speaker 3: Like the access to medicine is important, but like, they
Speaker 3: can continue to exist there still. By January of nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy one, this had not emptied the islands of their populace,
Speaker 3: and the US was starting to get Antsy Admiral Zumwalt
Speaker 3: exchanged our friend Elmo exchanged a flurry of memos with
Speaker 3: his counterparts across the sea, and was warned by his
Speaker 3: own legal advisor, John R. Stevenson, that the eighteen sixty
Speaker 3: six US UK Agreement, or that the nineteen sixty six
Speaker 3: US UK agreement over Chagos and the UN Charter they
Speaker 3: both signed, gave them both a legal responsibility not to
Speaker 3: force people out of their homes without satisfactory arrangement. So
Speaker 3: the treaty that we had signed, we said, if you
Speaker 3: have to uproot anyone for us to build this base,
Speaker 3: they have to be given money and compensating properly for
Speaker 3: their loss. Right now, that's still bad in my mind. Right,
Speaker 3: a military shouldn't outweigh the existence of a culture, you know,
Speaker 3: but at least that's not. Now you live in this
Speaker 3: other country and you have nothing. Goodbye.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: It is better than that. But you know, Zoomwalt and
Speaker 3: his colleagues, their concern is not that this is not
Speaker 3: being done. Their concern again is that people might find
Speaker 3: out that this is not being done, and so they
Speaker 3: really just decide to push the British, like, you need
Speaker 3: to empty out Diego Garcia, this most populated island as
Speaker 3: fast as possible so we can send in our Ceabs,
Speaker 3: which are the very silly name that we have for
Speaker 3: the navy guys who are going to build this base.
Speaker 3: Right on January twenty fourth, nineteen seventy one, the population
Speaker 3: of Diego Garcia was ordered into the old manager's office
Speaker 3: for the company that had once run things, and it
Speaker 3: was announced to them that their island was closing. People
Speaker 3: had a variety of reactions. Some of them said, like,
Speaker 3: you're going to house us. Can we live in another
Speaker 3: island in Chagos?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Can we just like move to one of the other
Speaker 3: islands they're all pretty nice. Others asked if they would
Speaker 3: be given like money at least to start a new
Speaker 3: life elsewhere. Most vine notes were simply stunned. Half a
Speaker 3: decade later, in one of the court cases that resulted
Speaker 3: from all this, an employee of the plantation company and
Speaker 3: the company has been bought out by the British government,
Speaker 3: but they're keeping the employees who had worked on the
Speaker 3: island there to manage things with the natives. And an
Speaker 3: employee of this company a half decade later in court
Speaker 3: swears in a court statement that he had told the
Speaker 3: laborers quote it was quite probable they would be compensated
Speaker 3: now he says that to give himself an out right,
Speaker 3: he was like, yeah, you'll probably get something. The Chagosians
Speaker 3: who were there say, we were promised housing and financial
Speaker 3: assistance if we left, right. Yeah, I know who I believe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but quite probable, quite probable.
Speaker 3: We'll give you something. Sure, probably you'll get something for
Speaker 3: being forced out of the homes that your your ancestors
Speaker 3: lived and died on. Yeah. Probably. The deportations began in
Speaker 3: earnest after this point. Julian Derupe writes, the first boat
Speaker 3: of human cargo arrived on the Seychelles on the five
Speaker 3: hundred ton cargo ship the Nord Vior, the Boat of Shame,
Speaker 3: which is what the Jegosians called it, on Thursday thirtieth
Speaker 3: September nineteen seventy one. There were one hundred and forty
Speaker 3: six persons in a boat that was legally allowed to
Speaker 3: carry twelve cabin passengers. Some bitter experiences followed this evacuation.
Speaker 3: When the Nordveayor got to Mahi, four horses which she
Speaker 3: transported were taken care of and sheltered. The human cargo
Speaker 3: was deposited on the jetty with all their belongings. Wow,
Speaker 3: so they ship these people with an illegal number of
Speaker 3: them on this boat in squalid conditions to another island.
Speaker 3: And then their immediate concern is we got to make
Speaker 3: sure these horses are taken care of. We could leave
Speaker 3: these people out in the open.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: Eventually they do take them out of the opened and
Speaker 3: put them in a woman's prison where they are confined
Speaker 3: to cells and fed on prisoner's food.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that feels about right, I guess Jesus.
Speaker 3: Christ feels feels about feels about right for the uh,
Speaker 3: the old British Empire. Yeah, the sclerotic, rotting corpse of
Speaker 3: the British Empire, still fucking people over Spirit.
Speaker 2: Airlines part of the British.
Speaker 3: The British Empire and their Spirit Airlines era. Yeah, so
Speaker 3: pretty bad stuff.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: Some of the some of the people who are being
Speaker 3: deported from Chagos were not natives to Chagos. There were
Speaker 3: some like Seyschelois who had been working on Chagos for
Speaker 3: many years. They get to go back to the place
Speaker 3: where they had been born, but they're not given any money,
Speaker 3: like their their contract is essentially broken and they're when
Speaker 3: they get transported back, they're forced to sleep under shop
Speaker 3: mirandas until like someone finally calls their relatives elsewhere in
Speaker 3: the country. Right, it's just again this lack utter, lack
Speaker 3: of concern for these human beings. Boat trips continue to
Speaker 3: take people away from Chagos for the next two years.
Speaker 3: In all cases, this process was slap fucking Dad for
Speaker 3: the simple reason that the US was pressuring the UK
Speaker 3: to get all these goddamn people off the island, and
Speaker 3: the UK wanted to do it with the minimum amount
Speaker 3: of actual work. On February fourth, a State Department message
Speaker 3: warned all relevant personnel to avoid direct participation in the
Speaker 3: resettlement of Eloy's people because the basic responsibility is clearly British.
Speaker 3: Hey man, this can't be on us. You know, soldiers
Speaker 3: don't do anything. They kick these people off. Leave that
Speaker 3: to the English. Right, We got other like, we don't
Speaker 3: want the heat this is going to bring. Right, Well,
Speaker 3: we paid them for this, Yeah, we paid them in
Speaker 3: nukes for this. Come on now. Of primary concern to
Speaker 3: the US Navy and State Department men overseeing this process,
Speaker 3: the reason why they are so worried about American soldiers
Speaker 3: getting involved in the depopulation of the island is what
Speaker 3: was happening at the time, and another part of the
Speaker 3: US Empire on an island called Culebra in Puerto Rico. Now,
Speaker 3: at the start of the century, the US Navy had
Speaker 3: dissolved to the main town on Koulebra. We had just
Speaker 3: told this town, you don't get to be a town anymore.
Speaker 3: We got to have a marine base here. In nineteen
Speaker 3: forty one, President Roosevelt had claimed exclusive rights to the
Speaker 3: airspace above Kulebra. In the nineteen fifties, the Navy tried
Speaker 3: to evict all the remaining residents of Koulebra to expand
Speaker 3: the marine base. We just decided, like nobody gets delivery
Speaker 3: or anymore, we gotta fill this with marines, you know,
Speaker 3: like we don't have enough places for our marines. Southern
Speaker 3: California is not big enough for all the marines we need.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I guess our mo throughout Yeah, the biggest,
Speaker 2: most of the twenty and twenty first century.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, you guys have lived here for forever. I mean,
Speaker 3: you know that's unfortunate. But you'll understand once we explain this.
Speaker 3: We need another place to put marines, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 3: we gotta send these boys places to die. You know,
Speaker 3: you can't do that from I don't know Michigan. Right,
Speaker 3: that's not gonna make any sense. So the Navy tries
Speaker 3: tries to evict everyone from Culebra to expand their marine base,
Speaker 3: but the Puerto Rican government refuses. This ultimately sparks a
Speaker 3: conflict between the Puerto Rican people and the Department of Defense.
Speaker 3: In nineteen sixty nine, as part of this, Puerto Rican
Speaker 3: people you know on Culebra, and I think people from
Speaker 3: off Culebra who want to help the islands not get
Speaker 3: cleansed right start basically striking right and refusing to leave,
Speaker 3: and so to try to get them out, in nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty nine, the US Navy starts firing missiles at the island.
Speaker 3: They do two in that year, nineteen sixty nine, they
Speaker 3: do two hundred and twenty eight days of live fire
Speaker 3: missile exercises. They're just they're bombing Puerto Rico to make
Speaker 3: people leave this far.
Speaker 2: I didn't know that happened.
Speaker 3: Neither die We should easy. It's nuts. It's really fucked
Speaker 3: up that we that like this is not more. I'm
Speaker 3: sure Puerto Ricans are very well informed about it, but
Speaker 3: I was not going up in Texas. I could say
Speaker 3: that much misfires injured people and damaged property. The island
Speaker 3: was poisoned because I don't know if you know this, Andrew,
Speaker 3: missiles are not good for like water, Like if you
Speaker 3: if you drop, if you blow a bunch of missiles
Speaker 3: up and they land in the water supply, it's not great.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Next, I'm going to quote from an article in Swarthmore
Speaker 3: University's Global Nonviolent Action Database. Citizens on the island responded
Speaker 3: to the Navy's second attempt at a total eviction by
Speaker 3: demonstrating on the island's beaches In nineteen seventy, after a
Speaker 3: court reaffirmed the Navy's right to use Koolebra as a
Speaker 3: military site, residents marched to a local command post in
Speaker 3: a student ultimatum, one that they would also use direct
Speaker 3: action to force removal of the US Navy. The preyto
Speaker 3: Rican Senate also passed a resolution in which they asked
Speaker 3: President Nixon to reevaluate the Navy's presence on the island.
Speaker 3: This increased national attention on the issue and brought Congressional
Speaker 3: support that would prove helpful later in the campaign. Congressional
Speaker 3: hearings and investigations continued throughout the summer to determine what
Speaker 3: could be done about the issue throughout the summer. Demonstrators
Speaker 3: protested at a naval base in San Juan. In June
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy twenty Kulebrians owned use their bodies as a
Speaker 3: human chain to block shipped to shore missile fire. This
Speaker 3: was followed by a three day long encampment organized by
Speaker 3: the Puerto Rican Independence Party, which attracted six hundred people.
Speaker 3: Pip led by Reuben Barrios. Martinez pledged to follow a
Speaker 3: course of pacific militancy. The Navy responded by offering thirty
Speaker 3: five jobs, hoping to placate the people of Culebra. Instead,
Speaker 3: residents picketed at a proposed demolition site. One of the
Speaker 3: three boats used to pick at the site had to
Speaker 3: be towed away by force at the last moment to
Speaker 3: avoid human casualties. Okay, we know you guys are angry
Speaker 3: at us bombing your island. What if we give you
Speaker 3: thirty five jobs? What if we opened the equivalent of
Speaker 3: like a small Walmart worth of employment for you? Would
Speaker 3: that make you not angry about all the missiles? Amazing stuff?
Speaker 2: You know what, I guess the audacity of this shouldn't
Speaker 2: be so by the no, Yeah, what is.
Speaker 3: Maybe not surprising? What is good. Is that like, because
Speaker 3: Puerto Ricans we have owned Puerto Rico for a while,
Speaker 3: and they were, in the eyes of other Americans seen
Speaker 3: as kind of Americans. At least they get they win, right,
Speaker 3: they get sympathy. People in Congress get angry on their behalf.
Speaker 3: People on the mainland get angry on their behalf because
Speaker 3: even as irrational as Americans could be about like their
Speaker 3: military and patriotism, when you hear that your navy is
Speaker 3: firing two hundred and twenty eight days worth of missiles
Speaker 3: at an island with no weapons, Yeah, it's really hard
Speaker 3: to seem like the good guys.
Speaker 2: I mean, we never really are. Turns out, yeah, for decades.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's very every now and then it'll be
Speaker 3: like an aircraft carrier showed up to help it after
Speaker 3: a tsunami. But that's not most of what aircraft carriers do,
Speaker 3: it turns out. Ultimately, Nixon ordered the Navy to leave
Speaker 3: the island in nineteen seventy four. This is a rare
Speaker 3: case where Dick Nixon is like, yeah, this is fucked up. Like,
Speaker 3: you know, look, I've said some things about Puerto Ricans
Speaker 3: that like you don't want to hear you will hear it,
Speaker 3: but you don't want to. But like, even I know,
Speaker 3: bad as he was, there is like a well we haven't.
Speaker 2: Gotten that much. You know.
Speaker 3: The thing about Dick Nixon, he's such a weird guy
Speaker 3: because he's like simultaneously in some ways our most evil
Speaker 3: president but also was more able than a lot of
Speaker 3: our at least seemingly less evil presidents. He was a
Speaker 3: lot more able to be like, well, we got to
Speaker 3: stop this, right, like, yeah, we got we gotta have
Speaker 3: an EPA obviously.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's he's what people try to say good Republicans
Speaker 2: should be.
Speaker 3: God, Yeah, that is the reality of the situation. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like you know, yeah, I mean we're gonna back a
Speaker 3: couple of genocides to do it, but we should have
Speaker 3: people talking to the Chinese, right, you know, there's too
Speaker 3: much risk of a new clear war for us not
Speaker 3: to talk to now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's like kind of pragmatic in a way that's like, yeah.
Speaker 3: You'll do the right thing, even if you have to
Speaker 3: do a couple of unnecessary genocides, or at least to
Speaker 3: do it.
Speaker 2: He's he's he was evil but not delusional. And now
Speaker 2: the yeah or delusional.
Speaker 3: And I don't know, I don't know how to.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I really he's hard to quantify Richard Nixon.
Speaker 2: He feels like he was delusional about humble but not
Speaker 2: about concrete facts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I don't. We will eventually. I've already talked
Speaker 3: to the maybe I'm dropping this now, I've talked to
Speaker 3: the dollup guys. We're going to do our episodes on him.
Speaker 3: At some point, got delayed by what happened with my dad.
Speaker 3: He is like a baffling man to try to pin
Speaker 3: down Richard Nixon, like one of our most confusing leaders.
Speaker 2: It has only gotten simpler since then to see the evil.
Speaker 3: I guess, yeah, there's at least there's that. So eventually,
Speaker 3: thankfully the Puerto Ricans and Kulebra win their fight here.
Speaker 3: But again, this is nineteen seventy one, so that's like
Speaker 3: the height of the protest campaign against the Navy trying
Speaker 3: to clear Culebra of human beings. So the Navy guys
Speaker 3: who are getting this base ready and Diego Garcia are
Speaker 3: looking at this ongoing this hitting Everyone in the Navy
Speaker 3: who is like at a high position is dealing with
Speaker 3: the fallout from Kulebra. Right, it's this horrible headache, and
Speaker 3: so they're like, look, guys, we cannot have that happen here.
Speaker 3: Like you have to get these people out and do
Speaker 3: it fucking quietly.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So, once they start construction and cbe's start encountering angry
Speaker 3: locals who did not want to leave, these sailors started
Speaker 3: complaining one of them, right, And some of these sailors
Speaker 3: are actually sympathetic to these guys. One rights to his
Speaker 3: commander of meeting a fine old man who's been there
Speaker 3: fifty years and is like, this guy's really pissed at
Speaker 3: what we're doing, and like kind of seems like we're
Speaker 3: fucking him over. You know, there's a widespread feeling among
Speaker 3: the CBS that quote the UK haven't been completely above
Speaker 3: board on this, right. They did not tell us we
Speaker 3: were going to be doing an ethnic cleansing, and some
Speaker 3: of us feel ways about it. Actually, you know, he
Speaker 3: warned that Diego Garcia could be another Kulebra. One of
Speaker 3: the officers responsible for all this was Captain E. L. Cochrane,
Speaker 3: who knowed that this was a potential trouble area that
Speaker 3: could be exploited by our opponents. Quote. A newsman so
Speaker 3: disposed could pose questions that would result in a very
Speaker 3: damaging report that long time inhabitants of Diego, Garcia are
Speaker 3: being torn away from their family homes because of the
Speaker 3: construction of a sinister US base. And he writes sinister
Speaker 3: as like a oh, these silly newsmen describing us as evil.
Speaker 3: But like, bro, this is very sinister. This is one
Speaker 3: of the most sinister things I've ever read about. Can
Speaker 3: you not see that?
Speaker 2: Really? I that that is I think the thing that
Speaker 2: modern like I guess like TV gave to these people
Speaker 2: is thinking they could just hang a lantern on it
Speaker 2: and yeah, it it insulates them from reality. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: it is citist or you dub fuck fuck you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's very sinister. That is the word.
Speaker 3: So ultimately, this guy in his superiors conclude that the
Speaker 3: benefits of an air base in Chagos are so great
Speaker 3: that it's worth the risk. But quote, the United States
Speaker 3: should adopt district let the British do it policy. That's
Speaker 3: what Navy officers, right, The United States should adopt district
Speaker 3: let the British do it policy. You know, part of
Speaker 3: World War Two, we did that and that worked out. Okay,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 2: This is just cowardice. I guess.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a mix of cowardice, greed, and sloth. Right,
Speaker 3: it's and for like, for us, I don't know, it's
Speaker 3: I don't know if it's our least fine hour, but
Speaker 3: it's up there in terms of the history. It's like,
Speaker 3: it's not it's not our finest hour. And I would
Speaker 3: say for the British, this is the opposite of the
Speaker 3: Battle of Britain that was legitimately a stirring moment of heroism,
Speaker 3: and this is like, this is the rubber band effect
Speaker 3: of the Battle of Britain, Right, this is your least
Speaker 3: fine hour.
Speaker 2: I love how this is sort of like tattling to
Speaker 2: mom about how about whose turn it is to do
Speaker 2: the ethnic cleansing chores?
Speaker 3: Yeah, because it's like it is it's objectively or worse
Speaker 3: obviously when they were like literally doing ethnic cleansings with
Speaker 3: their own troops out in the field. But this is
Speaker 3: so like so much like you're not even willing to
Speaker 3: say what you're doing, like you're so scared of the newspapers.
Speaker 2: You're aucratic and cower and sniffling. I guess sniffling is
Speaker 2: high on the list of what this is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's sniveling. Right, you don't even have
Speaker 3: like the courage to go to Afghanistan and get shot
Speaker 3: by its jazail, right, like you're just hiding under paperwork
Speaker 3: as you do a genocide. And by the way, you
Speaker 3: don't actually have to. Again, I don't know if this
Speaker 3: would be internationally classified as one, but I think you
Speaker 3: could make a case for it. You don't have to
Speaker 3: kill everybody for it to be a genocide. Forced depopulation
Speaker 3: and destruction of a culture, destruction of grave sites, destruction
Speaker 3: of cultural facilities, all of that can be lumped into that.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: I don't know if the ICC certainly hasn't said that
Speaker 3: this is one, but I think this is at least
Speaker 3: like it's at least like the diet mister pib, you know,
Speaker 3: compared to the mister PIB of genocide.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Shlagosians report being threatened that they would be bombed, shot
Speaker 3: or starved if they stayed. Aircraft began doing and this
Speaker 3: is us close slow flies over inhabited areas to scare
Speaker 3: the locals. We start, we start just dive bombing them
Speaker 3: basically to try and freak them out. And by the
Speaker 3: and we also poison their waters with diesel fuel. You know,
Speaker 3: I don't know if that was like purposeful or just
Speaker 3: an inevitable thing when you have that many boats in
Speaker 3: the area, but either way we do that. Two. In
Speaker 3: April nineteen seventy one, the UK issued an immigration ordinance
Speaker 3: that made it a criminal offense for anyone but military
Speaker 3: personnel to reside in the Chagos Islands without a permit.
Speaker 3: By July, the runway on the new base was operational.
Speaker 3: The final people forced from the islands were allowed to
Speaker 3: take one small box of possessions and a straw mat.
Speaker 3: All of their animals, including their pets, were to remain
Speaker 3: on the island, as shipping them elsewhere would be too
Speaker 3: difficult and complex, so instead a decision was made to
Speaker 3: make people abandoned. This is in terms of wealth. This
Speaker 3: is the majority of the wealth. All these people own
Speaker 3: is their lifestyle, right, that's the way this works. And
Speaker 3: then you know dogs are dogs, right, we all know
Speaker 3: what dogs are. The Biot Commissioner, Sir Bruce great Batch,
Speaker 3: which is definitely this guy's name, orders So again there's
Speaker 3: these former companymen who are now being employed by the
Speaker 3: British government, who were still handling direct relations with the
Speaker 3: natives and the guy who's kind of running this is
Speaker 3: named Mulini, right, And Bruce great Batch goes to Mulleni
Speaker 3: and he's like, hey, the Americans, you know, we're not
Speaker 3: letting these people take their dogs. But the Americans don't
Speaker 3: want a bunch of wild dogs on the island. So
Speaker 3: you're gonna have to kill all those dogs. To murder
Speaker 3: every one of those dogs, bro, these like well trained
Speaker 3: fishing dogs that these people had considered part of their
Speaker 3: own family. Why don't you just kill all those dogs, buddy,
Speaker 3: You take care of that for me, will Yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm sir Bruce great Batch. I'm not gonna do any
Speaker 3: dog killing. I'm when your name is, Sir Bruce great Batch,
Speaker 3: it's your genetic legacy to order other men to murder
Speaker 3: people's dogs.
Speaker 2: It is nominative determinism.
Speaker 3: It happens, It happens, It sure does. I'm going to
Speaker 3: quote from the book Island of Shame, very appropriate title.
Speaker 3: According to Mullini, he first tried to shoot the dogs
Speaker 3: with the help of seabees armed with sixteen rifles. When
Speaker 3: this failed as an expeditious extermination method, he attempted to
Speaker 3: poison the dogs strychnine. This two failed. Sitting in his
Speaker 3: home overlooking a secluded beach in the Seychelles, thirty three
Speaker 3: years later, Mulini explained to me how he finally used
Speaker 3: raw meat to lure the dogs into a sealed copra
Speaker 3: drying shed the Colora fire. Locking them in the shed,
Speaker 3: he gasped the howling dogs with exhaust piped in from
Speaker 3: US military vehicles, setting the coconut husks ablaze. He burnt
Speaker 3: the dog's carcasses in the shed. The Chagosians who are
Speaker 3: still on the island are left to watch and ponder
Speaker 3: their fate. We gas their dogs with our fucking jeeps
Speaker 3: or whatever in front of some of these people. Some
Speaker 3: of them have been forced out, but not all of them.
Speaker 2: And this is uh putting sinister in scare quotes.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, and scare crows like, oh oh, we're so sinister.
Speaker 2: All we do is yeah, murder.
Speaker 3: You're pretty sinister. If I put that, if I, if
Speaker 3: I like again, if I did like a Star Wars
Speaker 3: and I had the Empire gas everybody's dogs on an island,
Speaker 3: people would be like, come on, man, you're making them
Speaker 3: look a little like you've gone to silly territory here, right,
Speaker 3: Like yeah, of course it's all like that great shit.
Speaker 3: You know, who isn't the Galactic Empire from Star Wars
Speaker 3: unless they're sponsoring our podcast now, in which case, you know,
Speaker 3: we're actually fine with that because star destroyers look pretty cool,
Speaker 3: cooler than an aircraft career. You know that's my problem
Speaker 3: Andrew with the US Empire, right, Like, why like star
Speaker 3: destroyers dope as hell aircraft carriers. It's just a big
Speaker 3: air strip on a on a fucking boat, Like come on, man,
Speaker 3: come on.
Speaker 2: If an five could come out, be shot out of
Speaker 2: the belly of aircraft car.
Speaker 3: And it made that sound, The tie fighters make I
Speaker 3: feel so much better about being in an empire, Oh
Speaker 3: my god. And don't get me started in our stupid
Speaker 3: you ever seen a navy uniform like they look like?
Speaker 3: Give me give me those death Star guys with the
Speaker 3: rad helmets. Any day of the week, I will say
Speaker 3: it was it was a it was fleet week a
Speaker 3: couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 2: I guess at l A.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and Res, I know that this is like part
Speaker 4: of whatever and they got to do it, but I
Speaker 4: would just want to say, and I know that a
Speaker 4: lot of the I don't know if they're like made
Speaker 4: to or they just choose to wear their like white
Speaker 4: little sailor suits and.
Speaker 2: They got to.
Speaker 3: They have no choice in the matter. I have a
Speaker 3: baby family. This is this is there they do. They
Speaker 3: are not because none of them like them, right.
Speaker 2: I will just say though I do understand they're they're young,
Speaker 2: mostly men, and their mission on fleet week is it
Speaker 2: be here and get laid. I do think if you
Speaker 2: if you have sex with the sailor during fleet week,
Speaker 2: you should go on a list of some kind because
Speaker 2: that means you met them wearing that uniform that way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, man, they like, yeah, yeah, anyway.
Speaker 2: Something's awry.
Speaker 3: Come on, I mean like, look, literally, Navy, take take
Speaker 3: the uniforms that the Death Star guys wear and just
Speaker 3: make that be the Navy uniform are trying it a
Speaker 3: little better.
Speaker 1: Were you trying to go to an adverrek?
Speaker 3: Did we?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 3: Yes, here's ads. We're back. And I just I just
Speaker 3: got a communicate from the the head admiral of the Navy.
Speaker 3: I don't know his name, but anyway, he called me
Speaker 3: and he said they're doing it. They're doing the Death
Speaker 3: Star thing. So Navy listeners, you are welcome. The better
Speaker 3: uniforms are coming.
Speaker 2: It can't be worse.
Speaker 3: It can't be worse.
Speaker 2: Quite a lot better.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'm still really sad about the dogs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really bad, Sophie. It's horrible.
Speaker 2: Really.
Speaker 3: They start trying to shoot them, and obviously what I
Speaker 3: think must have happened the seabees must have been like,
Speaker 3: I really don't want to shoot anymore ducks, like like
Speaker 3: this might be stuck in my head forever, So let's
Speaker 3: just gas them.
Speaker 1: Doctor Gift. Humans are discussing they did.
Speaker 3: It is worth saying that like that company man who
Speaker 3: is being ordered by Sir great Batch, and those sebs
Speaker 3: literally recreated the exact path that the SS took in
Speaker 3: Eastern Europe, where they're like, wow, it really fucks people
Speaker 3: up to shoot all of these people. Let's just gas them.
Speaker 3: We just did that, but with dogs over the course
Speaker 3: of like a week.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, but we're the good guys here.
Speaker 3: But we are the good guys here. This is some
Speaker 3: good guys stuff, a little bit of dog murder. So
Speaker 3: we have an airbase. Who's to say, what's wrong?
Speaker 1: Oh, that's wrong, fucking asshole.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So Diego. Garcia gets emptied of its indigenous populace
Speaker 3: over the year nineteen seventy one, the other inhabited islands
Speaker 3: in Chagos are rid of human habitation over the next
Speaker 3: two years. I think by seventy three all of the
Speaker 3: indigenous people are off for reasons of rank and competence. Basically,
Speaker 3: every time the British authorities would like send a bunch
Speaker 3: of these folks away on boats, they would just like
Speaker 3: forget that they needed to buy food, or they would
Speaker 3: like forget that well they've got to land somewhere and
Speaker 3: need someplace to stay. Like they they are so lazy
Speaker 3: with how they do this shit right. People are. There's
Speaker 3: several case times where like boatloads of people accidentally starve,
Speaker 3: like not to death, but like to enough that it's
Speaker 3: a medical problem because they just forget to make sure
Speaker 3: there's food. But by hooker by crook, the deed is
Speaker 3: eventually done. Over the next years, the bewildered and grieving
Speaker 3: Chegosi and Dias for a built communities in Meridius, the
Speaker 3: say Shells, and in the UK. It's actually noted that
Speaker 3: like there's like four thousand or so Chegosian like a
Speaker 3: mix of people who had literally been born there and
Speaker 3: forced out, and obviously their kids, their grandkids. At this point,
Speaker 3: there's a decent number of them who live in London.
Speaker 3: I think about four thousand and actually a significant amount
Speaker 3: for whatever reason of like the maintenance and janitorial staff
Speaker 3: at Gatwick Airport are from or descended from Chagos. Many
Speaker 3: exiles keep small bowls of precious sand from Chagos in
Speaker 3: their homes. You can kind of think of this as
Speaker 3: like how a lot of Palestinian families keep like keys
Speaker 3: to their family houses when they got forced out during
Speaker 3: the Knack Bow or got forced out later.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: The Chagosian version is we have these bowls of sand
Speaker 3: from Chagos. From this island is it has been illegal
Speaker 3: for most of the last like sixty years for us
Speaker 3: to return to Most Chigosians, when asked express a desire
Speaker 3: to return, or to at least have that option, A
Speaker 3: lot of them are like, well, I have a life
Speaker 3: in London now, I was born here, but I would
Speaker 3: like to see the island.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Nearly all wanted British citizenship or some sort of compensation
Speaker 3: for what has been done to them. In nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 3: the first jet landed on the New American runway in Diego, Garcia.
Speaker 3: And you want to guess who was on it, Andrew Oh, no,
Speaker 3: History's greatest monster. Bob Hope. He deplained there for a
Speaker 3: Christmas show for American troops stationed on the Basis Jacos.
Speaker 3: The Chagosians aren't allowed there, but Bob Hope is, Oh God,
Speaker 3: great stuff. Now, by this point, the war in Vietnam
Speaker 3: was kind of nearing it's in right by the time
Speaker 3: they GE's seventy three, which is when you know, we
Speaker 3: finally leave by the time Chago's or the islands are
Speaker 3: fully depopulated. And it just so happens though that Diego Garcia.
Speaker 3: It's due south of the Arabian Peninsula, which is going
Speaker 3: to be close to a significant chunk of the world's
Speaker 3: oil and the significant chunk of like the next generation
Speaker 3: of American wars. Right, the strategic value us of this
Speaker 3: island is only going to get greater in the years
Speaker 3: after we get that air base working, right, like we
Speaker 3: basically we build this base right underneath the Arab Peninsula
Speaker 3: just as that becomes the center of the conflicts that
Speaker 3: we're getting involved with. So for the DoD there's really
Speaker 3: no chance that they're going to give this place up, right,
Speaker 3: it's just too good a position, and there's no people there,
Speaker 3: so nobody can be you know, can say that we're
Speaker 3: being unfair to the locals. There aren't any locals. We
Speaker 3: made damn share it, right, But the people of Chagos
Speaker 3: don't take this lying down either. Islanders began organizing right
Speaker 3: away to force both the govern to force you know,
Speaker 3: the UK government to give them something because like we
Speaker 3: need food or you know, money or citizenship in the
Speaker 3: immediate term, and hopefully initially securing a right to return.
Speaker 3: In nineteen seventy five, they petitioned the British High Commission
Speaker 3: in Meridius and told them our ancestors were slaves on
Speaker 3: those islands, but we know we are the heirs of
Speaker 3: those islands, right. Your ancestors took us from another home,
Speaker 3: put us there, and by sheer, look it turned out
Speaker 3: to rule. You know, it's not fair to take it back, right.
Speaker 3: We are the only people in the history of slavery
Speaker 3: who got lucky with where they wound up, and you
Speaker 3: fucked us like that's the attitude, right. The High Commission
Speaker 3: told them to take their problems up with the Mauritanian government,
Speaker 3: but this whole Brujaja got the Washington Post interested, and
Speaker 3: for the first time the story entered way Western media
Speaker 3: described in an editorial accurately as an active mass kidnapping
Speaker 3: and got my issues with the Post in the modern era,
Speaker 3: but that is what it is. Yeah, you kidnapped the
Speaker 3: civilization and stuck him somewhere else, the Post doing the joy. Yeah,
Speaker 3: this was really in their golden era.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there were inquiries in Congress and in the Houses
Speaker 3: of Parliament. An interest would return briefly every few years
Speaker 3: when Chagosians engaged in a new active protest, including a
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty one hunger strike by the exiled women of
Speaker 3: the islands, but no amount of protest was enough to
Speaker 3: overwhelm military necessity. The Navy used Chagos in nineteen seventy
Speaker 3: three to fly P three surveillance planes in support of
Speaker 3: Israel during the nineteen seventy three era of Israeli War.
Speaker 3: Gerald Ford secured a huge batch of new funding to
Speaker 3: expand the base. When Congress made him promise that this
Speaker 3: was essential to the national interest, Ford told them the
Speaker 3: oil ship from the Persian Gulf area is essential to
Speaker 3: the economic well being of modern industrial societies. It is
Speaker 3: essential that the United States maintain and periodically demonstrate a
Speaker 3: capability to operate military forces in the Indian Ocean. During
Speaker 3: the House Committee hearings that followed, State Department Representative George
Speaker 3: Vest was asked if there were any was any question
Speaker 3: about the territory being open to our use. No. Vest
Speaker 3: told them it is open sea and uninhabited, which was
Speaker 3: true at that point, But he's kind of leaving out
Speaker 3: an important part of the story.
Speaker 2: And how it became that way. No one can ever know.
Speaker 3: M impossible to say, how impossible to say, how is
Speaker 3: these cbs are like waking up with nightmares of shooting
Speaker 3: dogs boats full of so one of the things we
Speaker 3: do in Chagos we do this to this day. This
Speaker 3: is still there right now. Is we have these huge,
Speaker 3: massive boats that are filled with tanks and like armored
Speaker 3: vehicles hum v's, all sorts of like all of the
Speaker 3: materiel that the US needs to fill with ground forces
Speaker 3: to have a war, right, And we have boats where
Speaker 3: these things are special prepared and ready so that we
Speaker 3: can drive that boat anywhere nearby and have all of
Speaker 3: them the gear that an army needs, and like we
Speaker 3: ship in the troops kind of separately, right, and one
Speaker 3: of those boats or at least a couple of them
Speaker 3: are always based in Chagos, off the coast of Diego Garcia.
Speaker 3: When desert storm kicks off, we send those Those are
Speaker 3: the first tanks that we get to the Persian Gulf
Speaker 3: come from Chagos, right And in fact they get there
Speaker 3: like a month before any of the other material that
Speaker 3: gets shipped over because it's just so well positioned. And
Speaker 3: again to thinkers in the DoD that's one more reason,
Speaker 3: like we can never give this up, right, it's the
Speaker 3: best way we have to get an army rapidly to
Speaker 3: this area. That is the future of our wars, right,
Speaker 3: you know, again and again, Diego Garcia proved itself to
Speaker 3: be among the most important strategic outposts in the DODS profile. Likewise,
Speaker 3: the UK is going to spend the nineteen nineties pretending
Speaker 3: everything is copasetic. In Chagos eighteen ninety, Margaret Thatcher promised
Speaker 3: the House of Commons that the Chegosians who were protesting
Speaker 3: were just quote former plantation workers. She claimed their families
Speaker 3: were resettled in Meridius and given considerable financial assistance, which
Speaker 3: was just a lie. They had after nineteen eighty one
Speaker 3: been given a little bit of money when they did
Speaker 3: that hunger strike, but it was not much, it was
Speaker 3: not considerable, like as usual, you know, the Iron Lady
Speaker 3: was full of shit, and endless series of court cases
Speaker 3: eventually forced the UK to extend citizenship to at least
Speaker 3: some of the Chigosians, and minimal payments were authorized to
Speaker 3: compensate them for a fraction of their loss. To get
Speaker 3: these payments, they had to sign a contract many of
Speaker 3: them could not read that gave up any future right
Speaker 3: to return to their homes, which is that's that's the
Speaker 3: classic classic imperial contract.
Speaker 2: Shit again, never signed a contract with these people, yeah,
Speaker 2: with us or with them the actual devil.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. In the year two thousand, a UK court
Speaker 3: finally declared the biot Immigration Ordinance from nineteen seventy one
Speaker 3: that made it illegal for anyone but army people to
Speaker 3: live in the islands to have been unlawful. Alongside this
Speaker 3: oh really, yeah, come on, they did, they did in
Speaker 3: two thousand now and alongside this case. Yeah, it takes
Speaker 3: a while, but they start the millennium off on an
Speaker 3: ethical note, sophy. The British Empire's changed. You know, everything's
Speaker 3: going to be good after this point. And this is
Speaker 3: where I tell you how all of the people got
Speaker 3: to return, and Chagos is a happy island filled with
Speaker 3: happy people living in paradise to this day. No, of
Speaker 3: course not. I'm as much of a liar as the British.
Speaker 3: Alongside this case came a wave of documents produced by
Speaker 3: the discovery process, which is where we get most of
Speaker 3: those quotes from, in secret internal memos that I've read
Speaker 3: over the course of these episodes. The good news is
Speaker 3: that the government at the time accepted this ruling, called
Speaker 3: their actions against the Chegosian shame and wrong, and rescinded
Speaker 3: the laws that stopped them from returning home to every island.
Speaker 3: But of course Diego Garcia still not allowed to go
Speaker 3: back there. US needs it, you know, for war and stuff.
Speaker 3: Give them back, right, we need We're not going to
Speaker 3: give back those world ending weapons now. I will say,
Speaker 3: being able to return to the other islands at least
Speaker 3: would have been something, right. That's better than not, you know.
Speaker 3: But that's not what happens either, because right after this
Speaker 3: ruling is the year two thousand and one, and that's
Speaker 3: when we get us in nine to eleven and the
Speaker 3: UK becomes an ally in the global war on terror.
Speaker 3: Given the geographical realities of that conflict, Diego Garcia becomes
Speaker 3: more important than ever. In two thousand and four, the
Speaker 3: UK government issued a new Orders in Council. Now I
Speaker 3: hadn't heard of these, because honestly, the structure of the
Speaker 3: British government is confusing and frustrating to me, as it
Speaker 3: is to every British person that I know. But Orders
Speaker 3: in Council are a legal construct that, like say, Parliament
Speaker 3: or a court says something is illegal, the executive can
Speaker 3: issue these and the Queen or at this point the
Speaker 3: King will sign it and say like nope, it's fine.
Speaker 3: That's basically what this is. It's kind of a holdover
Speaker 3: from the day when the King was really an executive
Speaker 3: for the queen. In this case it's the queen because
Speaker 3: Queen Elizabeth iiO signs the orders overturning the two thousand
Speaker 3: court ruling and bans Chegosians from returning home. Thanks Liz, Yeah,
Speaker 3: great stop. A twenty twenty three article for Human Rights
Speaker 3: Watch summarizes most of the rest of this century's legal
Speaker 3: battles over Chagos. The UK government has never provided an
Speaker 3: adequate explanation as to why it was considered viable in
Speaker 3: two thousand to lift the band On Chagosians from permanently
Speaker 3: returning home, and yet the UK government considered it necessary
Speaker 3: to reinstate this ban after four years. Successive UK governments
Speaker 3: have argued that it is not possible for the Chegosians
Speaker 3: to return, based on vague assertions of security and cost.
Speaker 3: The latter, they suggest, but place an unfair burden on
Speaker 3: the British taxpayer. The US has kept a low profile
Speaker 3: and sidestepped its fraternities by claiming it is not responsible
Speaker 3: for the Chegosians. Now, when I say a low profile,
Speaker 3: you know, one thing we did with Chagos. You know,
Speaker 3: it's a great place to keep boats full of tanks
Speaker 3: and stuff, right, it's a great place to fly planes,
Speaker 3: you know, into the Persian Gulf. It's also a really
Speaker 3: good place. We realized, like, so we got these guys
Speaker 3: we've captured, and the CIA has found a way to
Speaker 3: argue that we get to torture them. But where to
Speaker 3: do it? You know, well you do some of that
Speaker 3: at Guantanamo, but that's pretty far. You know, it's a
Speaker 3: lot closer Chagos.
Speaker 2: Baby.
Speaker 3: So it's what this is one of those things where
Speaker 3: like I don't think it's been fully admitted, but it's
Speaker 3: it's pretty clear that we tortured at least some people
Speaker 3: in Chagos. Sure, just fly them over there. Tortum journalists
Speaker 3: are specifically not allowed there by law, neither are the
Speaker 3: native Chagosian people. But we can take some dude, pull
Speaker 3: some guy out of a rack and torture in there.
Speaker 3: It's cool, that's good, good guys.
Speaker 2: Stuff. Listen, I'll just throw out I guess I'm not
Speaker 2: saying this as a specific plot against the United States
Speaker 2: or UK government, but given that, apparently, as you said,
Speaker 2: like a big population of Chegosi and diaspora work in
Speaker 2: airport maintenance.
Speaker 3: Yeah, get jobs typically maybe you.
Speaker 2: Know, join the US military, get a job there and
Speaker 2: maybe no long colonization, long long clan this one because
Speaker 2: take this ship back Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: Yeah, join like, become US citizens, join the navy, and eventually,
Speaker 3: when there's enough of you, seize the air base.
Speaker 2: Listen, you got it. I'm not saying you gotta do
Speaker 2: it or that you should do it, but can you
Speaker 2: pretty scribing to the video.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So, in twenty twelve, the UK government started a
Speaker 3: policy of review towards Chagos and they commissioned a survey. Basically,
Speaker 3: they had a survey firm ask all the Chegosians they
Speaker 3: could find, do you guys actually want to go back?
Speaker 3: And like the vast majority of them were like, yes,
Speaker 3: we would like to return to our island paradise where
Speaker 3: we don't pay rent. That sounds cool. So they also
Speaker 3: kind of commissioned to survey and found that it would
Speaker 3: cost it most about five hundred million pounds in order
Speaker 3: to do this. So, you know, obviously the UK, you know,
Speaker 3: I got a lot of money right now, they're not
Speaker 3: doing this shit. Right In twenty sixteen, the UK again
Speaker 3: announced it's going to block Chagosians from return, turning claiming
Speaker 3: national security and cost. This has remained its position up
Speaker 3: to the present day, although negotiations with Meridius restarted in
Speaker 3: the end of twenty twenty two, so this is an
Speaker 3: ongoing story. Recently, some Chagosians who had been exiled were
Speaker 3: allowed to return to the islands, not to stay, but
Speaker 3: to like plant a flag and walk around a while,
Speaker 3: which is kind of a weird compromise to make, but okay, anyway,
Speaker 3: I my hope remains that like something will be done
Speaker 3: to let these people live there. Again.
Speaker 2: You know, I just did a quick little search to
Speaker 2: point out that, uh, this is five years. It'll cost
Speaker 2: five years of supporting the royal family.
Speaker 3: Right right exactly. Just sell those sell their palaces and
Speaker 3: use it to send those people back to Chagos. You
Speaker 3: can put the king up in some public housing or something, right,
Speaker 3: There's plenty of it in England, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the biggest, the biggest dole queen available.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, he's already on the dole you know, why not. Look,
Speaker 3: I think that if we're going to have public housing anywhere,
Speaker 3: it should be fit for a king, and the UK
Speaker 3: has a chance to prove that. Yes, there's there's there's
Speaker 3: my good socialist attitude on the matter, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, council council flats, Charles.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you put them on a new in the new
Speaker 3: season is shameless good stuff. Well, Andrew, that's the story
Speaker 3: of Chagos.
Speaker 2: Oh God, that was fucking grim.
Speaker 3: Dog that was bleak, right, The dog murder really comes
Speaker 3: out of nowhere.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The timing it too, because it does almost seem
Speaker 2: like this is gonna be Yeah, I was warning, but
Speaker 2: I was still Yeah that made it worse. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Reading doing the research on this was like wow, this
Speaker 3: was already pretty bad, but then dogs in his side
Speaker 3: really came out of left field. Yeah, I haven't heard
Speaker 3: of one of.
Speaker 2: Those bizarrely unnecessary.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the rest of my life making it up to
Speaker 1: my dog.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know the question of like, because it is
Speaker 3: one of those things. All empires are evil in their
Speaker 3: day and eventually become history, right, Like, you know, you
Speaker 3: could look at bad things that Babylonians did, but as
Speaker 3: a general rule, when people talk about Babylon, they're not
Speaker 3: talking about like, oh, how evil, They're talking about like, yeah,
Speaker 3: this is like an interesting period in history, right, Like
Speaker 3: generally when we talk about the Roman Empire, who did
Speaker 3: awful things, we talk about it more like it's like
Speaker 3: I don't know, a fictional faction in Star Wars or something,
Speaker 3: because at this point it's just so distant from us, right,
Speaker 3: And one day, one day that will be true of
Speaker 3: the American Empire, once we once we finally collapse to
Speaker 3: at least the extent that the British have not.
Speaker 2: Necessarily the British we're on one of our paths is yeah,
Speaker 2: there's not going to be history to be removed from.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, people. My suspicion is that twenty thousand years
Speaker 3: from now, when aliens colonize this planet, after we've wiped
Speaker 3: ourselves out, they'll probably cosplay as Americans in British. They'll
Speaker 3: have like a whole weekend at Chagos where they like
Speaker 3: cosplay expelling the chickos, trying to.
Speaker 2: Kill a god.
Speaker 3: In bioha bio. Oh Yeah, there'll be nudes in bioing
Speaker 3: left and right, and that will be our legacy. That
Speaker 3: will be, that will be how humanity lasts on in
Speaker 3: the futures.
Speaker 2: Right, film them out right?
Speaker 3: Actually, Yeah, a bunch of guys dressed as CBS saluting
Speaker 3: and going nudes and bile a bunch of aliens, you know,
Speaker 3: doing the nudes in bio. It's what we deserve.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we definitely don't deserve dogs.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 3: Now, hopefully the aliens find a way to resurrect dogs
Speaker 3: and be better to them than we've been. If you're
Speaker 3: listening to this podcast, aliens, I task you with that
Speaker 3: moral responsibility, do more to deserve the dogs than we
Speaker 3: ever did.
Speaker 2: Maybe they're dogs. Maybe maybe it's not aliens, it's just
Speaker 2: the dogs finally get thumbs.
Speaker 3: I would love it if the dogs in the Vampire
Speaker 3: Squid become like the new ruling race on Earth and
Speaker 3: we're like, we have like a fucking Planet of the
Speaker 3: Apes style collapse.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's about time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Andrew, do you have any you want to plug?
Speaker 2: Oh? My podcast is yours's racist? I don't know. We're doing.
Speaker 2: We're trying to do more fun things. We have a
Speaker 2: premium show called Yo Can we Live Suboptimal pods dot
Speaker 2: com find out about that stuff, planning other things, trying
Speaker 2: to get a No, I'm not gonna plug it because
Speaker 2: it might not happen, so yeah, do that cool?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we'll check that out. And if you're an
Speaker 3: alien listening to this podcast, uh, you know what you
Speaker 3: need to do? Yeah, and resurrectogs and look, guys, you
Speaker 3: don't need to stay away from Oklahoma, Like, I don't
Speaker 3: know what Oklahoma is doing in ten thousand years after
Speaker 3: human beings have gone extinct but extinct. But it's nothing good,
Speaker 3: you know, just avoid it.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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