Part Two: How the British Empire and U.S. Department of Defense Murdered an Island Paradise

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, who did it?

Speaker 2 (00:06):
I did it?

Speaker 3 (00:06):
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?

Speaker 1 (00:23):
This is why people ask you to do the atonal
shrieking because what was that?

Speaker 3 (00:28):
You happy?

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Now? Beautiful?

Speaker 3 (00:29):
You get enough? Andrew T Welcome to the program.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
What up? How's it going?

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Give us one shriek? Andrew? Just one time?

Speaker 3 (00:41):
Yeah? That was tonal.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
There was.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
Subreddit's going to be livid. People are going to be
letting you up, Andrew.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Get the get the get the music theory people on here.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
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,

(01:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yeah, she's like in top ten of most likable people.

Speaker 3 (02:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
You know that's true.

Speaker 3 (02:28):
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,

(02:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
This really is like a relay race, like a.

Speaker 3 (03:04):
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.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
We end this cold open, I just just one more,
one more, a tonal shriek.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
You So I'm not a I'm not a wind up doll,
all right, you know I'm a person.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
Two three, Ah, beautiful.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
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

(03:56):
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

(04:16):
unique case perhaps about precedent in British colonial history. Like
they didn't get forced. They wanted some nukes for cheaper.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
It's not forced, you can say a lot, but without
precedent is the wiest lie.

Speaker 3 (04:32):
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,

(04:54):
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

(05:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Yeah, now you watch them with just like a kid
who's there. We're here for minimum.

Speaker 3 (05:36):
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.

Speaker 1 (05:57):
I'm going to guess you're wrong, and that's fine.

Speaker 2 (05:59):
Yeah, bass nectar is a worm or like a little fly.

Speaker 3 (06:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
But y'all, y'all can y'all can just get dungeonus crabs
from the ocean at times of the year, right.

Speaker 3 (06:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
This.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
It's like a huge, huge shame because uh, I used
to go to muscle Monday every week.

Speaker 3 (06:42):
Oh glorious, Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (06:44):
And then also the food was good.

Speaker 3 (06:47):
I have two great muscle memories. One time me and
me and a very good friend.

Speaker 1 (06:52):
Like how great Andrews joke just was?

Speaker 3 (06:55):
I'm sorry? Did I What did I miss? Not ship?
What did I miss?

Speaker 1 (07:00):
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.

Speaker 3 (07:10):
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

(07:30):
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

(07:52):
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

(08:13):
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.

Speaker 1 (08:31):
By the way, I'm really too I'm trying to guess
which friend of.

Speaker 3 (08:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
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.

Speaker 3 (09:01):
We did, My man, we did.

Speaker 2 (09:03):
It's like, no, not because of the danger, it's just
you gotta go with high, high margin foods.

Speaker 3 (09:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
I know.

Speaker 3 (09:10):
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.

Speaker 1 (09:23):
Did you at least did you at least still a bathroom?

Speaker 3 (09:26):
Uh? No, not from the Belagio?

Speaker 1 (09:28):
Damn it?

Speaker 2 (09:29):
Robert can I and I tell my muscle story, which
for sure, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:34):
Yeah, you're allegedly allegedly Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:38):
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

(10:00):
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

(10:22):
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.

Speaker 3 (10:35):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:51):
Yeah, all well done.

Speaker 3 (10:54):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:14):
Something done before.

Speaker 3 (11:16):
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,

(11:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:51):
Right.

Speaker 3 (11:51):
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

(12:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:25):
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.

Speaker 3 (12:37):
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

(12:59):
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

(13:19):
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

(13:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:54):
The only way to make sure we don't look bad
is to you know, like exile all of them.

Speaker 3 (13:59):
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,

(14:19):
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

(14:45):
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

(15:05):
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,

(15:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (15:45):
Oh my god, that's so uniquely awful. It is.

Speaker 3 (15:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
You know.

Speaker 3 (16:06):
Yeah, amazing scat I have.

Speaker 2 (16:08):
This would looks terrible. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:10):
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.

(16:30):
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.

(16:53):
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

(17:13):
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

(17:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
Yeah sounds about right, I guess, Yeah, sounds about right.

Speaker 3 (17:55):
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

(18:18):
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

(18:39):
just never say anything.

Speaker 2 (18:41):
Jesus.

Speaker 3 (18:43):
It's amazing stuff. A Foreign Office memo from nineteen seventy wrote.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
This is some mister beanship, by the way, this is crazy.
It's bean esque.

Speaker 3 (18:53):
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

(19:14):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:31):
True, that's true. The truth is in recession and yeah,
what can you do?

Speaker 3 (19:36):
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

(19:58):
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

(20:20):
never explain it. That seems easier for us. I love
the rules based international orator Andrew t. It's dope.

Speaker 2 (20:29):
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.

Speaker 3 (20:39):
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

(20:59):
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.

(21:21):
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

(21:41):
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

(22:01):
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.

Speaker 1 (22:24):
Right.

Speaker 3 (22:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:40):
Right.

Speaker 3 (22:40):
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

(23:02):
you one happy dog story about Catorus the fishing dogs.

Speaker 1 (23:05):
You didn't tell us that there was sad.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
Oh this is this is gonna be a real bad
So I picked.

Speaker 1 (23:11):
Up I picked up Anderson because she wanted to be
picked up. And now I want her out of your show.

Speaker 3 (23:16):
Yeah, I just don't let any officials of the British
Foreign Office near Anderson.

Speaker 2 (23:21):
Actually that's a rule.

Speaker 1 (23:23):
Yeah, I was gonna say that's that's never gonna Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (23:28):
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

(23:48):
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

(24:10):
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

(24:30):
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

(24:53):
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,

(25:15):
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

(25:37):
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

(26:00):
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

(26:23):
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

(26:45):
he just his body just gave up. He was too sad.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
Oh god, yeah, that's like that so wild to just
be like, yeah, your island, you can't go home.

Speaker 3 (26:56):
Yeah, you're out one sold. No one will ever explain
this to you. Buy Yeah, yeah, I will just say.

Speaker 2 (27:03):
In traditional Western literature, the person that rips you from
paradise is typically Satan, just.

Speaker 3 (27:10):
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,

(27:32):
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

(27:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
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.

Speaker 3 (28:21):
You've got your husband's strokes out and you have five
kids to support. Like a fucking nightmare.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:28):
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

(28:51):
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

(29:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (29:26):
This is like, at least al Capone didn't denys or
denovate as taxes.

Speaker 3 (29:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (29:48):
Defense, So you know astorisk guarantee not guaranteed.

Speaker 3 (29:52):
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,

(30:14):
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

(30:35):
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

(30:58):
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.

Speaker 2 (31:16):
There's a part of me that's like, why not just
lie again? If you're going to be this evil, it's.

Speaker 3 (31:22):
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

(31:43):
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.

Speaker 2 (31:59):
I guess that's what it is is it creates a
soft social stratification. Yeah, Like access that information is not free, right.

Speaker 3 (32:08):
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

(32:29):
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

(32:51):
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

(33:14):
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

(33:34):
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

(33:56):
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.

Speaker 2 (34:09):
You know.

Speaker 3 (34:09):
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,

(34:31):
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,

(34:52):
you're going to house us. Can we live in another
island in Chagos?

Speaker 2 (34:55):
Right?

Speaker 3 (34:55):
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

(35:17):
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

(35:38):
assistance if we left, right. Yeah, I know who I believe.

Speaker 2 (35:43):
Yeah, but quite probable, quite probable.

Speaker 3 (35:47):
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

(36:09):
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,

(36:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
Now.

Speaker 3 (36:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (36:56):
Yeah, that feels about right, I guess Jesus.

Speaker 3 (36:59):
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.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
Airlines part of the British.

Speaker 3 (37:14):
The British Empire and their Spirit Airlines era. Yeah, so
pretty bad stuff.

Speaker 2 (37:21):
Now.

Speaker 3 (37:21):
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

(37:43):
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

(38:05):
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

(38:27):
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

(38:50):
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

(39:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:32):
Yeah, yeah, I guess our mo throughout Yeah, the biggest,
most of the twenty and twenty first century.

Speaker 3 (39:41):
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

(40:02):
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,

(40:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (40:46):
I didn't know that happened.

Speaker 3 (40:48):
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,

(41:10):
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.

Speaker 2 (41:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (41:19):
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

(41:39):
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

(42:00):
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

(42:23):
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

(42:47):
like a small Walmart worth of employment for you? Would
that make you not angry about all the missiles? Amazing stuff?

Speaker 2 (42:57):
You know what, I guess the audacity of this shouldn't
be so by the no, Yeah, what is.

Speaker 3 (43:04):
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

(43:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
I mean, we never really are. Turns out, yeah, for decades.

Speaker 3 (43:49):
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,

(44:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:22):
Gotten that much. You know.

Speaker 3 (44:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:45):
Yeah, he's he's what people try to say good Republicans
should be.

Speaker 3 (44:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (45:08):
Yeah, he's like kind of pragmatic in a way that's like, yeah.

Speaker 3 (45:12):
You'll do the right thing, even if you have to
do a couple of unnecessary genocides, or at least to
do it.

Speaker 2 (45:18):
He's he's he was evil but not delusional. And now
the yeah or delusional.

Speaker 3 (45:25):
And I don't know, I don't know how to.

Speaker 2 (45:27):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (45:27):
I really he's hard to quantify Richard Nixon.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
He feels like he was delusional about humble but not
about concrete facts.

Speaker 3 (45:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (46:00):
It has only gotten simpler since then to see the evil.

Speaker 3 (46:03):
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

(46:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (46:40):
Right.

Speaker 3 (46:42):
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

(47:02):
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

(47:22):
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

(47:44):
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?

Speaker 2 (47:57):
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.

Speaker 3 (48:16):
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

(48:36):
let the British do it policy. You know, part of
World War Two, we did that and that worked out. Okay,
you know.

Speaker 2 (48:44):
This is just cowardice. I guess.

Speaker 3 (48:48):
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,

(49:09):
and this is like, this is the rubber band effect
of the Battle of Britain, Right, this is your least
fine hour.

Speaker 2 (49:18):
I love how this is sort of like tattling to
mom about how about whose turn it is to do
the ethnic cleansing chores?

Speaker 3 (49:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (49:41):
You're aucratic and cower and sniffling. I guess sniffling is
high on the list of what this is.

Speaker 3 (49:47):
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

(50:10):
and destruction of a culture, destruction of grave sites, destruction
of cultural facilities, all of that can be lumped into that.

Speaker 2 (50:17):
Now.

Speaker 3 (50:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (50:29):
You know.

Speaker 3 (50:31):
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

(50:51):
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.

(51:11):
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

(51:31):
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

(51:52):
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

(52:13):
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

(52:34):
people's dogs.

Speaker 2 (52:38):
It is nominative determinism.

Speaker 3 (52:42):
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

(53:02):
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

(53:23):
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.

Speaker 2 (53:40):
And this is uh putting sinister in scare quotes.

Speaker 3 (53:44):
Right, yeah, and scare crows like, oh oh, we're so sinister.

Speaker 2 (53:48):
All we do is yeah, murder.

Speaker 3 (53:52):
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.

(54:13):
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

(54:37):
air strip on a on a fucking boat, Like come on, man,
come on.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
If an five could come out, be shot out of
the belly of aircraft car.

Speaker 3 (54:47):
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

(55:09):
couple of weeks ago.

Speaker 2 (55:10):
I guess at l A.

Speaker 4 (55:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (55:26):
They got to.

Speaker 3 (55:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (55:34):
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.

Speaker 3 (55:52):
Yeah, man, they like, yeah, yeah, anyway.

Speaker 2 (55:56):
Something's awry.

Speaker 3 (56:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (56:09):
Were you trying to go to an adverrek?

Speaker 3 (56:11):
Did we?

Speaker 1 (56:12):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (56:12):
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

(56:34):
uniforms are coming.

Speaker 2 (56:36):
It can't be worse.

Speaker 3 (56:37):
It can't be worse.

Speaker 2 (56:39):
Quite a lot better.

Speaker 1 (56:40):
Yeah, yeah, I'm still really sad about the dogs.

Speaker 3 (56:44):
Yeah, it's really bad, Sophie. It's horrible.

Speaker 2 (56:47):
Really.

Speaker 3 (56:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (57:02):
Doctor Gift. Humans are discussing they did.

Speaker 3 (57:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (57:27):
Yeah, you know, but we're the good guys here.

Speaker 3 (57:32):
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?

Speaker 1 (57:42):
Oh, that's wrong, fucking asshole.

Speaker 3 (57:46):
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

(58:08):
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

(58:31):
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

(58:54):
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.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
Right.

Speaker 3 (59:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (59:33):
Right.

Speaker 3 (59:33):
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.

(59:57):
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

(01:00:20):
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

(01:00:41):
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

(01:01:02):
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

(01:01:25):
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

(01:01:46):
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,

(01:02:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:02:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:20):
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

(01:02:42):
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

(01:03:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:03:25):
And how it became that way. No one can ever know.

Speaker 3 (01:03:29):
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

(01:03:50):
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

(01:04:12):
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

(01:04:33):
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,

(01:04:54):
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

(01:05:15):
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

(01:05:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:05:49):
Shit again, never signed a contract with these people, yeah,
with us or with them the actual devil.

Speaker 3 (01:05:59):
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

(01:06:22):
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.

(01:06:44):
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.

(01:07:04):
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.

(01:07:26):
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

(01:07:47):
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

(01:08:07):
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

(01:08:34):
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

(01:08:55):
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,

(01:09:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:09:33):
Baby.

Speaker 3 (01:09:34):
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.

(01:09:57):
It's cool, that's good, good guys.

Speaker 2 (01:10:00):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:10:18):
Yeah, get jobs typically maybe you.

Speaker 2 (01:10:20):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:10:31):
Yeah, join like, become US citizens, join the navy, and eventually,
when there's enough of you, seize the air base.

Speaker 2 (01:10:43):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:10:51):
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

(01:11:16):
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

(01:11:39):
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,

(01:11:59):
I my hope remains that like something will be done
to let these people live there. Again.

Speaker 2 (01:12:05):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:12:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:12:29):
Yeah, yeah, the biggest, the biggest dole queen available.

Speaker 3 (01:12:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:12:52):
Yeah, council council flats, Charles.

Speaker 3 (01:12:56):
Yeah, you put them on a new in the new
season is shameless good stuff. Well, Andrew, that's the story
of Chagos.

Speaker 2 (01:13:10):
Oh God, that was fucking grim.

Speaker 3 (01:13:12):
Dog that was bleak, right, The dog murder really comes
out of nowhere.

Speaker 2 (01:13:17):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:13:29):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:13:38):
Those bizarrely unnecessary.

Speaker 1 (01:13:42):
Yeah, the rest of my life making it up to
my dog.

Speaker 2 (01:13:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:13:49):
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

(01:14:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:14:30):
Necessarily the British we're on one of our paths is yeah,
there's not going to be history to be removed from.

Speaker 3 (01:14:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:14:58):
Kill a god.

Speaker 3 (01:15:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:15:11):
Right, film them out right?

Speaker 3 (01:15:13):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:15:23):
Yeah, and we definitely don't deserve dogs.

Speaker 2 (01:15:26):
No.

Speaker 3 (01:15:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:15:41):
Maybe they're dogs. Maybe maybe it's not aliens, it's just
the dogs finally get thumbs.

Speaker 3 (01:15:46):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:15:57):
Yeah, that's about time.

Speaker 1 (01:15:59):
Yeah, yeah, Andrew, do you have any you want to plug?

Speaker 2 (01:16:03):
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?

Speaker 3 (01:16:20):
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,

(01:16:40):
you know, just avoid it.

Speaker 1 (01:16:44):
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.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part Two: How the British Empire and U.S. Department of Defense Murdered an Island Paradise