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

Publish Date: 2024/6/20

Chapters

- Who did it? - I did it. I pressed all the buttons. - 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 for a job? - This is why people ask you to do the atonal shrieking, 'cause what was that? - How's that, Sophie? You happy now? - Beautiful. - You get enough? - Thrilled. - Andrew T., welcome to the program.

What up? How's it going? It's going good. Give us one shriek, Andrew. Just one time. That was it. That was tonal. That was a tonal shriek, Andrew. That was tonal. There was not a tonal. That was tonal. Well, the subreddit's going to be livid.

People are going to be lighting you up, Andrew. Get the music theory people on here. I want to hear what they have to say. Yeah, somebody make an EDM track from all of my various atonal openings. But also Doug. You know who's not atonal?

Dolly Parton. And the Federalist's Twitter account just went after her 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. Yeah.

Oh! Also, we have incredible chemistry with Burt Reynolds. Is it possible that the Federalist Society is like, if you give children free books, that's actually doing violence to them because they haven't gotten a job and earned money to buy books? Yeah, they think there's a good chance that's what's going on there. Sounds like them. I also think this is...

This is like a case of a naked caveman picking a fist fight with a mastodon. You really do not want to throw down against Dolly Parton. She's in top 10 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. The Department of Defense. Oh, yeah. Controversial. I don't know if that's true. People like soldiers, Andrew. But even soldiers, if you want to talk, if you talk to soldiers, the number one thing they complain about is the DOD. Right? 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.

- Yeah. - That's what we're gonna talk about. - This really is like a relay race, like a clean baton pass. - Yeah, yeah, 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 atonal shriek. You. - Sofay, I'm not a windup doll. - All right, one. - I'm a person. - Two, three. - Ah. - Beautiful.

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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, Etudes Océan Indien, by Julian DeRoupe, 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 without precedent in British colonial history. Like...

They didn't get forced. They wanted some nukes for cheaper. Also, you can say a lot, but without precedent is the lie. Yes. 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, I wasn't fast 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 8 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. What? Glorious. Oh my God. Gas stations in a lot of states now sell all of the drugs that you used to have to spend like 25 minutes listening to Rammstein 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 working for minimum wage. 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 7-Eleven in a civilized nation. Is that how you pronounce that bass nectar? Bass nectar? I don't know. I think it's probably bass nectar. 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 going to 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 would go for the- I consider fish oil, I call it bass nectar, Andrew. That's right. It's not made from bass.

Y'all can just get Dungeness crabs from the ocean at times of the year, right? You sure can at times of the year. Yeah. And you could get mussels, but all of our mussels are poisoned right now. So we are not doing that this year. It's like a huge, huge shame because I used to go to Muscle Monday every week. Oh, glorious. Yeah. Oh, my God. And then also the food was good.

I have two great muscle memories. One time me and a very good friend- - You did not catch how great Andrew's joke just was, I'm sorry. - What did I miss? Ah shit. What did I miss?

Okay, you'll listen to it when you listen to the edit. And I just want you to know, Andrew deserved his flowers. Here you go, Andrew. Nice job. Thank you. I will be proud of you in the future when I listen to this episode, Andrew. But now I got to talk my muscle stories because I got two really good muscle stories. Oh, good.

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 cliffside that was filled with like tidal pools. And there were all of these muscles that we like picked and then climbed up the rock side and like they were alive until the second we threw them into the fucking pasta. 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 I was in the all you can eat buffet at the Bellagio 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 Bellagio had muscles. And they were like, oh, yeah, we got them. And as soon as we arrived, we realized the muscles had been rancid and the Bellagio staff had decided to cover them with Thousand Island dressing in order to disguise the fact that they were no longer fit.

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 battle of the bulge logic. We're Americans, you know? Yeah. Win at all costs. Yeah.

And in this case, that meant we each consumed several pounds of rancid muscles. I won at 14 plates, by the way. One, I'm proud of you. Two, I'm trying to guess which friend of yours this is. 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 LA. Oh, no. Good Lord.

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 Bellagio buffet. We did, my man, we did. It's like, no, not because of the danger. It's just you got to go with high margin foods.

Yeah, I know. It was a bad decision because we the Bellagio buffet has a bunch of like really good looking food and we walked past it for 14 plates. Can I just say it was a horrible decision. Did you at least did you at least steal a bathrobe? No, not from the Bellagio. God damn it, Robert. Can I can I tell my muscle story? Oh, yeah. Oh, for sure. Oh, yeah. Allegedly. Allegedly. Yeah.

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 were 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 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 if it was the mom or the dad was like, you guys didn't go past this, did you?

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. This is, yeah, this is where they would have, it was a,

A president at a time when that very well could have happened. And I guess I'll just leave it at that. Yeah. First of all, well done. Anyway, that was quite a long digression about muscles. I guess. Sorry, but I thought it was. Yeah.

So that's what I read from those British from that from that French article where they were like, ah, the poor British forced to force to ethnically cleanse their island by the Americans. Something they've never 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. 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. Sure. 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, oh, we're put upon by those American bullies. And the Americans, in our attempt to ignore our complicity in this, we do the thing we do best, which is we pretend to be big, dumb tourists. Like, well, no, we didn't know. I'm just a poor, simple boy from Kansas, you know? I didn't know there was people on this island when I built my Navy base.

That was not a Kansas accent. I don't know if there's a foghorn leghorn there. I was like, what are we doing? What is happening? I don't know why I said Kansas, but there you go. Sort of like what you'd imagine like a real good LBJ paradist 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? Right. 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 going to 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. In fact, they demanded it in 1965 for Admiral, and this is one of the most ridiculous names in Navy history, Elmo Zumwalt told his British counterparts, fucking Elmo, an Elmo, 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 be none there when we take over and establish the base.

And it's such a such a Navy man in the fucking 60s thing to be like, yeah, it's those damn communists making all these people angry that we have turned their sparkling beaches into diesel fuel. Yeah. Also, it's like poisoning the goons for some reason.

The only way to make sure we don't look bad is to, you know, like exile all of them. Yeah. Violently. Kick them all out. The communists can't take advantage of this situation. Amazing stuff.

When one reads the correspondence of U.S. Navy officials who first laid eyes on Diego Garcil, you can almost feel their hunger, right? They write about like Atoll's 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 Chagos for it to be a problem.

Admiral John McCain described the islands as the Malta of the Indian Ocean. The other John McCain. Now,

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, later claimed that the initial bay 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 there and neither great military power wanted to risk the bad PR of herding 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 kick those tortoises out of their home. Better kick the people out. Oh, my God.

- Oh, that's so uniquely awful. - It is, it's like a fascinating and like almost, yeah, almost a precious kind of evil. - It's a really 20th century American awfulness, yeah. - Yeah, yeah. It's the kind of evil you can only do while wearing a specific sort of khaki suit, you know? - Yeah. - Amazing stuff. - Well, we can't have this, it would look 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 Bayat, and again, the Bayat 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 ink a deal with the US in 1965. And after this point, Great Britain begins what you might describe as a slow motion exile of the Chagossian people. At first, this took the form of encouraging migration away from Diego Garcia to Mauritius. Free tickets on quarterly steamships 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 Chaya. It goes, 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 going to go be on vacation for three months, and

And then they just don't ever 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 Bayat was, in British law, British territory. And all legal precedent makes it clear that the Chagossians 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 is being annihilated for some reason, you know, and that's a real issue. You can't have him 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 1970 wrote this out. This is like some Mr. Bean shit, by the way. This is crazy. It is, it's bean-esque, yeah. Yeah.

A foreign office memo from 1970 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 facts. That's true. The truth is in recession and what can you do? What can you do? There's got to 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 a U.S. base being set up on the island, they were to be brushed off and the matter noted as hypothetical until construction actually began. A 1968 memo from a foreign office legal observer had been even more blunt, bragging, "'We are able to make up the rules as we go along and treat inhabitants of Bayot 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 order, Andrew T. It's dope. Yeah. You know, 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 that's that's progress, baby. Yeah. Yeah.

Great stuff. So under this logic, no explanation was needed as to why Chagossians 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 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 Chagossians who get forced out, is Rita Bancol. She had been born in June 1928 on an island called Peros Banjos, about 150 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. Right.

But like they get paid a lot in food because it's more useful to them often than cash. Right. But they're not this is not like a gift they're being given. They are laboring for this. Right. Rita also recalls having a dog named Coutures who would dive into the sea and bring fish back to her, which sounds pretty cool to me.

Right? That's kind of dope. That's so cute. 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. Oh, good. So I wanted to give you one happy dog story about Catoris, the fishing dog. You didn't tell us that there was sad stuff. Oh, this is going to be real bad, Sophie. I picked up Anderson because she wanted to be picked up, and now I want her out of your shot. Yeah, just don't let any...

of the British Foreign Office near Anderson. Actually, that's a standing rule. Yeah, yeah. I was going to say that's never going to happen. Oh, Anderson. 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 Chagos.

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 1967, Rita's three-year-old girl, Noelle, had her foot run over by a mule-drawn cart. The nurse in their tiny local clinic told Rita Noelle needed an operation at a real hospital in Meridius.

They still had to wait two months for this. By the time the boat arrived, Noelle was sick with gangrene. Still, Rita piled her whole family onto her boat, her husband Julian and their five uninjured children, planning to spend three months recovering with Noelle in the capital of Meridius, Port Louis.

Tragically, Noelle's gangrene was too severe for the medicine at the time. She died a month after they arrived in Meridius. Rita and her family waited and grieved for two months until they could book passage to return home. Because again, these steamships were quarterly.

Vine writes,

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 Chagossians came to say, deracine, 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. Right.

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 Sagran, which is another Chagossian word, and it means deep sadness. It is specifically the kind of sadness of being separated from Chagos. So he dies of Sagran, and a lot of her family, her kids, are going to follow in a similar path. Nobody from the British government ever explains to Rita 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. Then

The next to perish was her son, Alex, who passed at 38 after years of addiction to drugs and alcohol. Their son, Eddie, overdosed on heroin at 36. Their little boy, Reynald, died at age 11 while begging for money for reasons the family will never know. The way she describes it is like he just his body just gave up. He was too sad. Oh, God. Yeah. That's so wild to just be like.

Yeah, your island, you can't go home. Yeah, your island's been sold. No one will ever explain this to you. Goodbye.

Yeah. You know, I will just say in traditional Western literature, the person that rips you from paradise is typically Satan. Right, right. The devil. Yes. And I do like that term, sagran, 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, 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? Now they have to pay rent. They have to buy food. They have to work in factories and shit. It's this totally alien existence for them. And it's horrible. Yeah. Well.

Well, and it's also like if you have to live in capitalism, like starting when you have a family is right. Yeah. You've got your husband strokes out and you have five kids to support.

Like a fucking nightmare. Yeah. The year after Rita's lifelong nightmare began, 1968, Michael Stewart, the Baron Stewart of Fulham, a British Labour 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 stretch of the English language, there was an indigenous population, and the Foreign Office knew it. A Foreign Office minute from 1965 recognizes policy as to certify the Chagossians more or less fraudulently as belonging somewhere else. Another Whitehall document was entitled Maintaining the Fiction. The Foreign Office legal advisor wrote in January 1970 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 in the foreign office in their own internal policies being like, we 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 deny his or didn't evade his taxes. Al Capone was a nearly this evil. And you know who else is it? Nearly this evil. Andrew.

The sponsors of this podcast. 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. Asterisk guaranteed, not guaranteed. Yeah, if we ever do an ad for Call of Duty, this will no longer be entirely accurate. Anyway. Anyway.

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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. Yeah. 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...

with the attendant rights and potential access to social services that that brought with it. She could maybe leave this place in Meridius 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 1971 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 they 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 British? We have to say, all right, yep, you guys are.

But hopefully they won't find out. There's a part of me that's like, why not just lie again if you're going to be this evil?

And 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 mean something. Right. 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 a legal search and seizures. They do it a lot on people who don't.

You know, are not informed, don't have enough access to the law to like properly protest it. But as soon as you're called like this was an illegal search and seizure, they're like, all right, well, we got to give this one up. Right. We broke the law and you caught us. All right. We got you. You have enough money to know what your rights are. Okie dokie. Right. You know, I guess that's what it is, is it creates a soft social stratification. Yeah.

Like access to 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 Chagossian 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. Yeah.

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 1971, this had not emptied the islands of their populace and the U.S. 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 1866 U.S.-UK agreement or that the 1966 U.S.-UK agreement over Chagos and the U.N. charter they'd both signed was

gave them both a legal responsibility not to force people out of their homes without satisfactory arrangements. 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 compensated properly for their loss, right? Now, that's still bad in my mind, right? A military base 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. Yeah.

You know, Zumwalt 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 Seabees, which are the very silly name that we have for the Navy guys who are going to build this base. Right.

right on january 24th 1971 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 Chagossians who were there say we were promised housing and financial assistance if we left, right? Oh, 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 ancestors lived and died on. Yeah, probably. Probably.

The deportations began in earnest after this point. Julian DeRupe writes, "...the first boat of human cargo arrived on the Seychelles on the 500-ton cargo ship the Nordwehr, the boat of shame, which is what the Jagosians called it, on Thursday, 30th September 1971. There were 146 persons in a boat that was legally allowed to carry 12 cabin passengers."

Some bitter experiences followed this evacuation. When the Nordweyer 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.

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 open and put them in a woman's prison where they are confined to cells and fed on prisoners food.

Yeah. That feels about right, I guess. Jesus Christ. Feels about right for the old British Empire. Yeah. The sclerotic rotting corpse of the British Empire. Still fucking people over. The Spirit Airlines part of the British Empire. You know what? The British Empire, their Spirit Airlines era. Yeah. So...

Pretty bad stuff. Now, some of the people who are being deported from Chagos were not natives to Chagos. There were some Seychellois 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. Their contract is essentially broken. And when they get transported back, they're forced to sleep under shop barandas until someone finally calls their relatives elsewhere in the country, right? 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 dash for the simple reason that the U.S. was pressuring the U.K. to get all these goddamn people off the island. And the U.K. wanted to do it with the minimum amount of actual work.

On February 4th, 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 to kick these people off. Leave that to the English. Right. We got other like we don't 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 U.S. 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 in another part of the U.S. Empire on an island called Culebra in Puerto Rico. Now,

Now, at the start of the century, the U.S. Navy had dissolved the main town on Culebra. We had just told this town, you don't get to be a town anymore. We got to have a marine base here. Yeah.

In 1941, President Roosevelt had claimed exclusive rights to the airspace above Culebra. In the 1950s, the Navy tried to evict all the remaining residents of Culebra to expand the Marine base. We just decided, like, nobody gets to live here anymore. We got to 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. I guess our M.O. threw out.

Yeah. I guess most of the 20th and 21st 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. Yeah. We got to send these boys places to die. You know, you can't do that from, I don't know, Michigan, right? God.

That's not going to make any sense. So the Navy 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 1969, as part of this, the Puerto Rican people 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 1969, the U.S. Navy starts firing missiles at the island. They do in that year, 1969, they do 228 days of live fire missile exercises. Yes.

They're bombing Puerto Rico to make people leave. I think I didn't know that happened. Neither did I. We should have. It's nuts. It's really fucked up that this is not more. I'm sure Puerto Ricans are very well informed about it, but I was not growing up in Texas. I could say that much. Jesus Christ.

Missfires 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 drop if you blow a bunch of missiles up and they land in the water supply, it's not great. 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 1970. After a court reaffirmed the Navy's right to use Culebra as a military site, residents marched to a local command post and issued an ultimatum, warning that they would also use direct action to force removal of the U.S. Navy. The Puerto Rican Senate also passed a resolution in which they asked President Nixon to re-evaluate 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 1970, 20 Kulebrans used their bodies as a human chain to block ship-to-shore missile fire.

This was followed by a three-day-long encampment organized by the Puerto Rican Independence Party, which attracted 600 people. PIP, led by Ruben Berrios Martinez, pledged to follow a course of Pacific militancy. The Navy responded by offering 35 jobs, hoping to placate the people of Culebra. Instead, residents picketed at a proposed demolition site. One of the three boats used to picket 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 35 jobs? What if we, what if we opened the equivalent of like a small Walmart worth of employment for you? Will that make you not angry about all the missiles? Yeah.

Amazing stuff. You know what? I guess the audacity of this shouldn't be surprising, but how the fuck... Maybe not surprising. What is good is that 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 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 228 days worth of missiles at an island with no weapons. Yeah. It's really hard to seem like the good guys. Yeah.

I mean, we never really are. It turns out I haven't been 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 1974. This is a rare case where Dick Nixon is like, yeah, this is fucked up. Like,

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 to 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 going to 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 nuclear war for us not to talk to Mao. 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 enable them to do it.

He was evil, but not delusional. And now the thing is- Yeah, or delusional and I don't know. I don't know how to- Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I really, he's hard to quantify, Richard Nixon. He feels like he was delusional about people, 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 Dollop 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. Yeah. It has only gotten simpler since then to see the evil, I guess. Yeah. So there's that. At least there's that.

So eventually, thankfully, the Puerto Ricans and Culebra win their fight here. But again, this is 1971. 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 were getting this base ready in Diego Garcia –

are looking at this ongoing, this hideous, everyone in the Navy who is like at a high position is dealing with the fallout from Culebra, 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? Hmm.

So once they start construction and Seabees start encountering angry locals who did not want to leave, these sailors started complaining. One of them – and some of these sailors are actually sympathetic to these guys. One writes to his commander of meeting a fine old man who's been there 50 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 is a widespread feeling among the Seabees 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 Culebra. One of the officers responsible for all this was Captain E.L. Cochran.

who noted 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 longtime inhabitants of Diego Garcia are being torn away from their family homes because of the construction of a sinister U.S. base. And he writes sinister as like, 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 i 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 isolates them from reality it's like yeah it is sinister you dumb fuck fuck you yeah

Yeah, yeah, it's very sinister. That is the word. So ultimately, this guy and 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 a strict let the British do it policy. That's what Navy officers write. The United States should adopt a strict let the British do it policy. You know, part of World War II we did that, and that worked out okay, you know? Oh, my God. This is just...

Cowardice, I guess? Yeah. It's a mix of cowardice, greed, and sloth. Right? And for us, I don't know if it's our least fine hour, but it's up there in terms of the history. It's not our finest hour. 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...

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, like about whose turn it is to do the ethnic cleansing chores. Yeah. Cause 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,

But this is so much like you're not even willing to say what you're doing. Like you're so scared of the newspapers. Bureaucratic and sniveling. I guess sniveling is high on the list of what this is. Yeah, yeah. It's sniveling, right? You don't even have like the courage to go to Afghanistan and get shot by a gazelle, 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. 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 the diet Mr. Pibb, you know, compared to the Mr. Pibb of genocide, you know? Chagossians report being threatened that they would be bombed, shot or starved if they stayed. Aircraft began doing, and this is us, close low 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 way, 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, too. In April 1971, 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.

And 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 Greatbatch, which is definitely this guy's name, orders

So, again, there's these former company men who are now being employed by the British government who are still handling direct relations with the natives. And the guy who's kind of running this is named Molini. Right. And Bruce Greatbatch goes to Molini 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 going to have to kill all those dogs.

You're gonna need 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 ya? You know, I'm Sir Bruce Great Batch. I'm not gonna do any dog killing. 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. - Robert, it happens. - It sure does. I'm gonna quote from the book "Island of Shame," a very appropriate title.

According to Mulini, he first tried to shoot the dogs with the help of Seabees armed with M16 rifles. When this failed as an expeditious extermination method, he attempted to poison the dogs with strychnine. This too failed. Sitting in his home, overlooking a secluded beach in the Seychelles 33 years later, Mulini explained to me how he finally used raw meat to lure the dogs into a sealed copra drying shed, the colorifier.

Locking them in the shed, he gassed the howling dogs with exhaust piped in from U.S. military vehicles. Setting the coconut husks ablaze, he burnt the dogs' carcasses in the shed. The Chagossians, who are still on the island, are left to watch and ponder their fate. We gassed 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 putting sinister in scare quotes. Right, yeah, in scare quotes. Oh, we're so sinister. All we do is...

yeah murder a bunch of dogs systematically 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 always 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 carrier. 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 airstrip on a fucking boat. Like, come on, man. Come on. If an F...

35 could come out, be shot out of the belly of an aircraft carrier. 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 on our stupid. You ever seen a Navy uniform? Like, they look dumb. Like, 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 weeks ago I guess in LA yeah silly silly uniforms 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've got to they have no choice in the matter I have maybe family this is this is they are 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 a sailor during Fleet Week, you should go on a list of some kind because that means you met them wearing that uniform. They were dressed that way. Yeah. Oh, man. Like, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, something's wrong. Something's awry.

Come on. I mean, like, look, literally Navy. Take the uniforms that the Death Star guys wear and just make that be the Navy uniform. It'll look better. Were you trying to go to an ad break? Did we? Oh, yes. Here's ads.

We'll be right back.

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Thank you.

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We're back. And I just got a communique from 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 than that. It would be quite a lot better, yeah. Yeah. I'm still really sad about the dogs. Yeah, it's really bad, Sophie. It's horrible. It's horrible.

They start trying to shoot them. And obviously what I think must have happened is the Seabees must have been like, I really don't want to shoot any more dogs. I feel like this might be stuck in my head forever. So let's just gas them. Dogs are a gift.

Humans are disgusting. They did. It is worth saying that like that company man who was being ordered by Sir Great Batch and those CBs 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. Yeah. You know.

but we're the good guys here. We are the good guys here. This is some good guy stuff.

A little bit of dog murder so we have an air base. Who's to say what's wrong? Me. That's fucking wrong, you fucking asshole gremlins. Yeah. So Diego Garcia gets emptied of its indigenous populace over the year 1971. The other inhabited islands in Chagos are rid of human habitation over the next two years. I think by 73, all of the indigenous people are off.

for reasons of rank incompetence, basically every time the British authorities would send a bunch of these folks away on boats, they would just forget that they needed to buy food or they would forget that, well, they're going to land somewhere and need some place to stay. They are so lazy with how they do this shit. There's several case times where boatloads of people accidentally starve, not to death, but to enough that it's a medical problem because they just forget to make sure there's food.

But by hook or by crook, the deed is eventually done.

Over the next years, the bewildered and grieving Chagossian diaspora built communities in Meridius, the Seychelles, and in the UK. It's actually noted that there's like 4,000 or so Chagossian, 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 4,000, 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 keys to their family houses when they got forced out during the Nakba or got forced out later. The Chagossian version is we have these bowls of sand from Chagos, from this island. It has been illegal for most of the last 60 years for us to return to.

Most Chagossians, 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 1972, 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 deplaned there for a Christmas show for American troops stationed on the base. The Chagossians aren't allowed there, but Bob Hope is. Oh, God. Great stuff. Now, by this point, the war in Vietnam was kind of nearing its end, right? By the time, it's 73, which is when we finally leave, by the time Chagos, or the islands are fully depopulated.

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 a significant chunk of the next generation of American wars. The strategic value thus of this island is only going to get greater in the years after we get that air base working.

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. For the DoD, there's really no chance that they're going to give this place up. It's just too good a position and there's no people there. Nobody can say that we're being unfair to the locals. There aren't any locals. We made damn sure of it.

But the people of Chagos don't take this lying down either. Islanders began organizing right away to force the UK government to give them something, because we need food or money or citizenship in the immediate term, and hopefully initially securing a right to return. In 1975, 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."

Your ancestors took us from another home, put us there, and by sheer luck, 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 brouhaha got the Washington Post interested. And for the first time, the story entered Western media, described in an editorial accurately as an act of mass kidnapping. And got my issues with the Post in the modern era, but that is what it is. Yeah. You kidnapped a civilization and stuck them somewhere else. Yeah.

- This was when the Post was still doing the journalism. - Yeah, yeah. This was really in their golden era. Yeah, yeah. There were inquiries in Congress and in the Houses of Parliament, and interest would return briefly every few years when Chagossians engaged in a new act of protest, including a 1981 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 1973 to fly P-3 surveillance planes in support of Israel during the 1973 Arab-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 shipped 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 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. Impossible to say how. Impossible to say how.

as these CBs are like waking up with nightmares of shooting dogs. Jesus Christ. 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,

and like armored vehicles humvees 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 with where these things are specially prepared and ready so that we can drive that boat anywhere nearby and have all of them the gear that an army needs and we like we ship in the 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,

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 materiel 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?

Yeah. You know? Again and again, Diego Garcia proved itself to be among the most important strategic outposts in the DoD's profile. Likewise, the UK is going to spend the 1990s pretending everything is copacetic in Chagos. In 1990, Margaret Thatcher promised the House of Commons that the Chagossians 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 1981 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. An endless series of court cases eventually forced the UK to extend citizenship to at least some of the Chagossians, 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 the classic imperial contract shit. Yeah.

Again, never sign a contract with these people. Yeah. With us or with them. Don't do it. With the actual devil. Yeah. Yeah.

In the year 2000, a UK court finally declared the BIOT immigration ordinance from 1971 that made it illegal for anyone but army people to live in the islands to have been unlawful. Oh, really? Oh, really, bro? Come on. They did. They did in 2000. Now, alongside this case. Yeah, it takes a while, but they start the millennium off on an ethical note. Sophie, the British Empire's changed, you know? Yeah.

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 Chagossians shameful 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. U.S. needs it, you know, for war and stuff. We still have the Tridents. Why don't we give them back? Right. 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 2001 and that's when we get us in 9-11.

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 2004, 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 like the king was really an executive. In this case, it's the queen because Queen Elizabeth II signs the orders overturning the 2000 court ruling and bans Chagossians from returning home. Thanks, Liz. Yeah. Great stuff. Cool. Yeah.

A 2023 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 2000 to lift the ban on Chagossians 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 Chagossians to return based on vague assertions of security and cost.

The latter, they suggest, would place an unfair burden on the British taxpayer. The U.S. has kept a low profile and sidestepped its fraternities by claiming it is not responsible for the Chagosians. Now, when I say a low profile, you know one thing we did with Chagos, yeah? 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, we can 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 over there, torture them. 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 Iraq and torture him there. It's cool.

It's good. It's real good guy stuff. Listen, I will 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, a big population of Chagossian diaspora work in airport maintenance... Yeah, Gatwick specifically. Maybe join the US military, get a job there, and...

Still three colonization. Long con this one because take this shit 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 got to do it or that you should do it, but if anyone's subscribing to the video. Yeah.

So in 2012, the UK government started a policy of review towards Chagos and they commissioned a survey. Basically, they had a survey firm ask all the Chagosians 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 a survey and found that it would cost at most about 500 million pounds in order to do this. So, you know, obviously the UK, they don't got a lot of money right now. They're not doing this shit, right? In 2016, the UK again announced it's going to block Chagossians from returning, claiming national security and cost. This has remained its position up to the present day, although negotiations with Meridius restarted in the end of 2022. Wow.

Um, so this is an ongoing story. Recently, some Chagossians 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. Yeah. You know, I just did a quick little search to point out that 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, exactly. 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. Yeah.

put him in the new season of 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 to, because it does almost seem like this is going to be... Yeah. And you gave us a warning, but it was still...

Yeah, that made it worse. Yeah. Yeah. Reading, doing the research on this was like, wow, this was already pretty bad. But then dog genocide really came out of left field. Yeah. I haven't heard of one of those before. Bizarrely unnecessary. Yeah. Yeah. I plan to spend the rest of my life making it up to my dog.

Yeah. Yeah. The question of like, because it is one of those things, all empires are evil in their day and eventually become history, right? You could look at bad things that the 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? It's like generally when we talk about the Roman Empire who did awful things, we're

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 finally collapse to at least the extent that the British have. Not necessarily. One day it will be true of the British. We're on one of our paths is there's not going to be history to be removed from.

Yeah, yeah. As far as humanity goes. People, my suspicion is that 20,000 years from now, when aliens colonize this planet after we've wiped ourselves out, they'll probably cosplay as Americans and British. They'll have like a whole weekend at Chagos where they like cosplay expelling the Chagosian people. Trying to kill a dog. They're like, ha ha ha, it's in bio.

Nudes and bio. Oh, yeah. There'll be nudes and bioing left and right. And that will be our legacy. That will be how humanity lasts on in the future. I guess that feels right. That feels about right, actually. Yeah. A bunch of guys dressed as CBs saluting and going nudes and bio. A bunch of aliens, you know?

Doing a nudes and bio. It's what we deserve. Oh, boy. And we definitely don't deserve dogs. No. No. 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 it's not aliens. It's just the dogs finally get thumbs. I would love it if the dogs and 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. It's about time. Yeah. Andrew, do you have anything you want to plug?

Oh, my podcast is Yo! Is This Racist? I don't know. We're trying to do more fun things. We have a premium show called Yo! Can We Live? Suboptimalpods.com. Find out about that stuff. Planning other things. Trying to get a... No, I'm not going to plug it because it might not happen. So, yeah, do that. Cool. Yeah, yeah. Well, check that out. And if you're an alien listening to this podcast... You know what you need to do. Yeah. Yeah. And run. And wreck dogs. And look, guys...

You don't need to stay away from Oklahoma. Like, I don't know what Oklahoma is doing in 10,000 years after human beings have gone 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, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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

Behind the Bastards

Chapters

Who is Responsible for the Chagos Islands Exile?

The British and American Involvement in Chagos

The Impact of Exile on Chagossians

The Legal Battles and Ongoing Struggle for Return

The Future of Chagos and the Chagossians

Shownotes Transcript

PodQuest PodQuest Podcast Discovery Engine tailors playlist for your curiosity

Part Two: How the British Empire and U.S. Department of Defense Murdered an Island Paradise 01:17:00

Behind the Bastards

Chapters

Who is Responsible for the Chagos Islands Exile?

The British and American Involvement in Chagos

The Impact of Exile on Chagossians

The Legal Battles and Ongoing Struggle for Return

The Future of Chagos and the Chagossians

Shownotes Transcript

PodQuest PodQuest Podcast Discovery Engine tailors playlist for your curiosity

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