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