Blinded by Patriotism

In 2003 the Americans tried to convince the World that Al Jazeera had been infiltrated by spies, in an effort to produce propaganda for the war in Iraq. It is an interesting and mightily hypocritical claim by the U.S who have a media largely in bed with the American Government, and largely responsible for the biggest manipulation in war time history. Propaganda is an absolute specialty of the United States of America.

Ex CBS reporter Dan Rather stated recently, on the subject of his unquestioning adherence to absolutely everything the Bush Administration was insisting, that:

“Had journalists questioned the deceptions…the invasion would not have happened.”

The truth is, Al Jazeera is the only news network in the World who were investigating the horrors of the U.S invasion of Iraq. Where were the U.S press, the freest press in the World, when the population of Fallujah were being massacred? Phrases like “terrorist” and “insurgent” were being used everywhere, to describe anyone in Iraq who wanted to fight back against the U.S invasion.

Fox went along to an anti-war rally in 2004, and suggested several times, that the protesters were “unpatriotic“. Fox went along to the Tea Party rallies in 2009 and 2010 and referred to them as “true patriots“. Fox was the most watched news broadcaster for news on the war. Throughout coverage of the war in Iraq, Fox displayed a little waiving American flag in the corner of the screen.

Similarly, MSNBC played a segment every week, called “America’s bravest”, which showed photos of American soldiers deployed in Iraq.

Peter Arnett, a reporter with NBC was fired for questioning the legitimacy of the war. He had interviewed Iraqi officials and said the American “first war plan had failed”.

A Maryland University study into the media affects on public perception of Iraq, found that 57% of mainstream media viewers believed Iraq was involved in 9/11. 69% believe that Saddam was directly involved in 9/11. 22% believed WMDs had been found in Iraq. 80% of Fox News viewers had one or more of the above misconceptions.

Media watchdog group “FAIR” found that 79% of all 319 news stories on Iraq in 2003, were sourced from Government officials or Military officials.

The media became the mouthpiece for a barrage of lies and propaganda. This is evident even today. When Wikileaks leaked the war files, the news outlets, from Fox in the US to the BBC in the UK focused almost entirely on Wikileaks itself. American Republicans are referring to Assange as a traitor for exposing their criminal activity. The UK media was focusing on Assange personally. No one focused on what the war logs were saying.

Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster, along with a team of researchers, surveyed 4,800 people in Fallujah and concluded that dramatic increases in cancer rates and infant mortality since the relative genocide by American troops, is “worse than Hiroshima”. After Fallujah, US Marines admitted, after first strongly denying, that they had used white phosphorus. The report is open for any to read, called “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005-2009“. It shows a 38 fold increase in leukaemia (compared to a 17 fold increase, after Hiroshima), a ten fold increase in breast cancer, and an increase in brain tumours. This sharp rise if health defects, was not helped by the fact that the city continued to be blocked off to essential supplies, by the US, long after 2004.

Whilst the U.S networks were struggling to understand a map of the Middle East:

And using handy little catchphrases that seemed to give credit to the horrors:

Al Jazeera was getting right into the heart of the situation, and showing images, like the one below, which is beyond awful. (I have spent the past few minutes looking at this photo, and it is something I cannot comprehend without being overcome with quite profound sadness):

It is then, no wonder that the one media outlet that was actually bothering to do some investigative journalism, rather than imbedded journalism (in which the Western Military dictates what a Journalist is allowed to see and where he can go), showing pictures and videos of innocent people’s lives ruined, in the same way that Fox and CNN were after 9/11 were bombed. The Al Jazeera Kabul and Baghdad offices were bombed by the Americans, who also drew up plans to bomb the Al Jazeera office in Doha – Qatar!. Why? They weren’t harbouring terrorists. They were just a threat to US mass propaganda. We were not supposed to see the destruction and terrorism left by the Americans. We were supposed to see a happy population, joyfully welcoming the Americans as great liberators fighting for freedom. If people fought back, we were supposed to believe they were “insurgents” who “hated our freedoms”, rather than the fathers of dead children or orphaned children.

The “reality” of war, is not a natural reality, it is a construct. When thousands are killed in American and British aggression it is called the “reality of war“, simply because a Western Government has used the word “war” to describe it. But when a far smaller number are killed by extremists, it is called “terrorism” and it is “evil”. It is the creation of a narrative that seeks to propel Western aggression as necessary, to defeat evil. Whether that evil be Communists, Muslims, Vietcong, or Arabs. That is the public narrative. The truth is that if your dictator opens up his markets to American Capitalist ventures, he will be propped up for years to come. The moment he closes those markets, we will take them by force.

How blurred the lines of “reality of war” really are, and absolutely always in favour of the Western World. Vietnam, the propping up of Latin American and Middle Eastern Dictators, the dropping of the Atomic Bomb, the invasion of Iraq. None of it is labelled “terrorism”, and yet what else is it other than the spreading of terror and death across Nations that aren’t ours.

It isn’t new. The British Empire did it in Australia. Terrorised the Country but apparently it was for their own good. What if Aboriginal Australians had invaded England? Rome labelled anyone who disagreed with its policies as “Barbarians”. The concealing of crimes behind romaticised ideals is not new. Especially with America. America celebrates Columbus Day. A day when Europe began the mass genocide project across that continent.
The great American author Kurt Vonnegut sums this up in his book “Breakfast of Champions“:

rout and Hoover were citizens of the United States of America, a country which was called America for short. This was their national anthem, which was pure balderdash, like so much they were expected to take seriously:

O, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thru the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

There were one quadrillion nations in the Universe, but the nation Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout belonged to was the only one with a national anthem which was gibberish sprinkled with question marks.

The motto of Dwayne Hoover’s and Kilgore Trout’s nation was this, which meant in a language nobody spoke anymore, Out of Many, One: “E pluribus unum.” The undippable flag was a beauty, and the anthem and the vacant motto might not have mattered much, if it weren’t for this: a lot of citizens were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country, or even on the wrong planet, that some terrible mistake had been made.

It might have comforted them some if their anthem and their motto had mentioned fairness or brotherhood or hope or happiness, had somehow welcomed them to the society and its real estate. If they studied their paper money for clues as to what their country was all about, they found, among a lot of other baroque trash, a picture of a truncated pyramid with a radiant eye on top of it. Not even the President of the United States knew what that was all about.

It was as though the country were saying to its citizens, “In nonsense is strength.” A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout.

The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless education, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well. But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

Here was another piece of evil nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom to human beings everywhere else. There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of an ice-cream cone on fire. Like this [the Liberty torch].

Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines

Vonnegut is ingeniously pointing out the illogical mental illness of Patriotism and its refusal to accept the horrors that came before it, and are committed in the name of it. It is a delusional, non-existent entity that exists to hinder human progression rather than help that seed to grow. A heartfelt anthem and a flag are just ways to mask injustice. It is a clever social construction, to make you think what you are doing is for the greater good and that the greatest good is the Nation State, when in fact the truth is, it is all for the sake of profit.

The dominant superpower will always place itself as the moral standard, and we buy into the bullshit, because it takes too much effort to stop playing on Fifa, and actually read.
Instead of seeing a little girl marched out of her home, crying and scared and made to kneel down on the floor with her hands in the air, by our troops, isn’t presented in the media. Instead, the media will have experts in to talk about how awesome our aircraft is, or how the Democrats are trying to block Defence funding. As if any of that bullshit matters.

We don’t see a bunch of vicious soldiers shooting random people or committing mass murder in Fallujah. Instead, we see a Saddam statue being brought down and how wonderful and free Iraq now is. We don’t see the pictures of a family digging their dead child out of the rubble, instead we only hear words like “insurgents” and “terrorists”. If my child had just been killed by American forces, for no reason, I’d fucking do all I could to kill the bastards too.

We are all desensitised to war, by this obsession with an us VS them mentality. Consumerism is a useful tool against the questioning of the immoral actions of big business and government. It is a simple narrative to understand, we don’t have to read too much into it, we’re busy working our arses off for shit we don’t need, so we consume easily accessible news, without questioning its motives or its intentions. We are apparently the good guys, and they are apparently the enemies, that is how it is presented. A healthy dose of National Pride, by making pictures of American soldiers draping their flag over the head of the statue in Baghdad, ensures that we are kept docile and unquestioning. We don’t want to seem unpatriotic.

Whereas, the reality is that the good guys are the idiots who are compelled to fight to perpetuate the economic war system, on both sides, rather than joining hands and fighting the very people who profit from war and make it a rational product of Capitalism. Do we really believe that the American private defence contractors and oil companies would love to see a peaceful World? They exist, to profit from war. Therefore, the financial sector profits from war. It is gross manipulation. These are the real bastards, not a few farmers in Afghanistan.

David Cameron went to Kuwait and told them that 20 years ago a brutal and violent dictator invaded their home land, and they had a right to defend themselves. How offensive; we sold those arms to that brutal dictator, before we designated him a brutal dictator, because he was nice to our businessmen. I keep seeing arguments defending Cameron’s arms sales across the Arab World as “good for jobs in England”. Economic matters are being placed above human rights. It is believed that British arms were used in the massacre of protesters in Libya this week.

Blair’s government lifted sanctions on the sale of weapons to Libya in 2004. Since then British companies have sold £500,000,000 worth of arms to Libya n 2009 alone. This includes Sniper rifles, tear gas, and crowd control ammunition. Are we seriously suggesting that selling tear gas and crowd control ammunition to a dictatorship, is going to be used to protect itself from an evil outside force? They are always going to be used against protesters, to keep the dictatorship in power. For that, I don’t care how many jobs it creates in the UK, we should be ashamed.

And so whilst the Libyan government uses our weapons, like Saddam did before him, on its own people, the rest of the World will sit back and have lots of UN meetings and keeping saying “please stop“.

Sometimes, death is good for the economy, and so we are all expendable.
Was is an essential ingredient of Capitalism.

Privatise profit, socialise risk

I am not an economist.
Never studied economics.
The graphs, the analyses, the spreadsheets, the intricate data fine tooth-combing is not something I do on a regular basis. Even if I had studied economics, I might have a better understanding of the language we use to describe capital flow and its merits and contradictions; but I can’t honestly say i’d understand economics as a science, any better. When the Queen asked top economists at the London School of Economics, why they didn’t see the credit crunch coming, they couldn’t answer. They knew nothing. All those years at a top economist school taught them nothing when it came down to it. So therefore, I, like everyone else, can only comment on the relationship between society and economics as I see it, from my perspective.

This is how I interpret the financial crash.

The first thing to note, is that this isn’t Capitalism. This is a system of perpetual yet flimsy consumerism. It is not a free market system. It is a Financial Sector system.
The obvious link between this crises, and society as a whole is also the catalyst for the problems. The subprime mortgage market began plunging around 2005. It was largely ignored because those who were losing their homes and livelihoods in cities like Detroit in the US, were predominantly Hispanic or African American. The media did not question it. The economists did not question it. The Bush administration did not question it. But it was a small basement fire that before long would engulf the World.

When white middle class towns and cities around California for example started to experience a wave of foreclosures, and people started owing more than their properties were actually worth, the World took note. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae all but died. Lehmann was allowed to collapse. AIG, who snook onto the gravy train, expecting the housing market to be on an upward turn forever and ever, were bailed out and then faced a liquidity crises. It’s a funny thing, because this started to happen in 2007. Two years after the poorer black communities felt the pinch hard. Suddenly millions were losing their homes in the US. This didn’t appear to upset those who actually caused the mess in the first place.

Wall Street gave out bonuses of well over $30bn in 2007, despite crushing the entire system. Often you will hear Right Wingers defend these obscene bonuses with “you have to pay the best to get the best”. These people aren’t the best. If Wayne Rooney single handedly drives Manchester United down into the First Division, from the Premiership and then the Championship, he isn’t likely to get a massive bonus at the end of it.

The point of neoliberalism today, as it was in the 1980s, is to protect financial institutions at all costs. An it has worked. It concentrates wealth within the Nations with big powerful financial institutions. A report by the World Institute for Development Economics Research at United Nations University found that 1% owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults own 85% overall. In the US, it was found that 38% of the Nation’s wealth is owned by 1% of the population.

A similar study from the Federal Reserve shows that between 1989 and 2004:

“there are indications that wealth became more concentrated”

and

“from 1992 to 2004 the wealth share of the least wealthy half of the population fell significantly to 2.5 percent of total wealth”

During the 1980s, real wage growth stagnated both here in the UK and in the US. Money did not trickle down. This great neoliberal Thatcherite/Reaganomic experiment actually did nothing but make the wealthy, very very wealthy. The poverty rate under Thatcher was higher than it has been since. The wages and assets of the guys at the top increased massively at the same time as the average workers’ wage stagnated. You see for example, the fact that you have to earn far over the National average to be able to afford a home now. We cannot afford homes, and we are working in the UK the longest hours in Europe. We have nothing to show for it, except stagnating wages, and massively inflated wages for the guys at the very top. But, the propaganda of Neoliberalism, tells us that they deserve their wealth, and we deserve nothing. So we get nothing. This creates a problem, because the workers are in the majority and they are where the demand comes from for the economy to flourish. How do you fill the gap between keeping the wealthy very wealthy, and making sure the masses can afford to consume? Well, if you’re a financial institution you employ an idiot to come up with the idea of easy credit. Give everyone a credit card. Give everyone store cards. Give everyone subprime mortgages. You are essentially giving people money that doesn’t yet exist, in the optimistic view that everything will be okay, and the money will exist sometime in the future. I was offered a Student Credit Card with £1500 on it. I’m 24, but presumably my bank had also offered this non-existent money to 18 year olds. They are only just allowed to legally buy alcohol, and banks are already luring them into this hellhole of consumer capitalism.

David Cameron, when accused of socially cleansing London of poorer people, with his plans to cut housing benefit, said:

“The point everyone in this House has got to consider: are we happy to go on paying housing benefit of £30,000, £40,000, £50,000?

“Our constituents working hard to give benefits so people can live in homes they couldn’t even dream of? I don’t think that’s fair.”

This is interesting for a few of reasons. Firstly, housing benefit has only gone up recently, because many people have been kicked out of their jobs as a result of the failings of the Neoliberal system David Cameron holds so dear. The benefit is a safety net for those who were unfortunate enough to lose their jobs. It is fine, if you managed to escape the chop, and can still afford your house. But no one knows what the future brings. What if double dip recession hits as a result of these cuts the Coalition are introducing? A lot more people will lose their jobs, and wont be able to find one for quite some time, when 10 or 12 people are chasing the same job. So, do they get kicked out of London too? They aren’t scrounging. They are victims of a crises of Neoliberalism.

Secondly, the comment suggests that David Cameron sees no inherent problem with the way the housing market actually works. He hasn’t said he’ll make it easier for people to be able to actually afford a house. He simply offers ways to prop up a grossly overvalued housing market. The reason that “constituents working hard” can’t afford home they “even dream of” is because the Tories of the 1980s sold all social housing, and the Financial Institutions have been ripping people off ever since. Apparently, Cameron has no issue with this.

And thirdly, kicking the poor out of London isn’t going to free up housing for Cameron’s “hard working constituents“. These hard working people wont suddenly flock to the City of London for homes that are now magically cheaper; purely because these hard working people are having to deal with stagnated wages, inflated prices, and a mass of debt encouraged by the Tories, Labour and the Banks for thirty years. The homes will be bought up by property developers, and people who want nice little London bachelor pads, becoming a city of croissant-at-Canary-Wharf-eating businessmen.

British households, on average, tripled their debt over the past thirty years, mostly housing market debt. They had to, in order to keep up. Now, what happens what you can no longer pay that debt back? The subprime crash happens. And then suddenly banks stop lending, because they have no money themselves. They gave out this fake money, that not only didn’t exist before, but doesn’t exist when they suddenly need it. So now business can’t borrow. So unemployment shoots up. But then demand across the marketplace falls, because people have less and less disposable income. So businesses go bust. Good times!

Millions became unemployed, millions lost their homes, the suicide rate shot up, the homeless rate was at a forty year high, and yet bonuses on Wall Street in 2008 were close to $32bn. Quite a nice rewarded for ruining lives.

Consumerism obviously can only exist and perpetuate if there is some sort of emotional attachment to it. The need to “fit in”. I HAD to have Nike trainers at school because kids have their own social heirarchy going on, and we all have to try to fit in with it. We are what we own, that is how consumerism, supported by governments and the media have presented life. Volvo embodied this idea beautifully, with the slogan “Life is better lived together”. We need to buy an XBox 360 because all our friends play online together, we don’t want to be left out. How can we afford it? Ah yes, student credit card. Or, buy on finance, on which you pay about one and a half times as much as you would have done if you’d have brought it from a shop. Easy credit rears its ugly head once more, to ease our need to “fit in”.

The Financial institutions keep getting fatter that way. Wealth becomes very concentrated. Capital becomes just as powerful and destructive, as the Unions were in the 1970s. This isn’t helped by the fact that businesses everywhere, and in fact, our consumer haven itself, relies on the Financial sector. The sector truly is too big to fail. They weren’t lying. Which means those working within the Financial sector are very very powerful people. And so people start to pump money into the Financial sector.

A few economists have pointed out, that although capital accumulation appears limitless, when you start to make a lot of money, you start to look for other avenues to invest in, in order to get one over on your competition. You need to expand. But there are limits to expansion (scarcity of labour supply, consumption, production etc). But those limits are barriers that need to be broken, according to Capitalist thought. Marx stated that “Every limit appears, as a barrier to be overcome” as being a massively destructive force at the heart of the Capitalist ideal. The consequence of being unable to use this mass amount of surplus profit in expansion, was that more money was pumped into speculating on the stock market, in unproductive ventures with absolutely no social good. When the stock market tanked, the money tanked with it.

When an entire financial system is built essentially on fake money, it is no wonder it didn’t last. For Nobel prize winning economists and top level financial experts at the Bank of England or the Federal Reserve, not to notice this, is a massive failure and quite frankly, disastrously unnerving. This isn’t Capitalism. It is a financial sector consumer economy. And out of nowhere, its failings are socialised. Suddenly we blame the public sector. Suddenly government spending on help for single mums has to be cut. Why? What have they done? They didn’t gamble away the Nation’s money on dodgy packages and risky easy credit. In fact, they took on the easy credit, because without it, they can’t afford to eat, what with wages stagnating across the board, and unemployment at a decade long high. Irresponsibility in the Financial sector has been ignored, and blamed entirely on the public sector.

That is how I viewed the crises.

Diego Garcia

“When the final time came and the ships were chartered, they weren’t allowed to take anything with them except a suitcase of their clothes. The ships were small and they could take nothing else, no furniture, nothing.”
- Marcel Moulinie, owner of a crop plantation on Diego Garcia.

Quite amusingly, in a story full of unamusing anecdotes, is the name of an American military base on the island of Diego Garcia, in the Chagos Islands of the Indian Ocean named ‘Camp Justice’. The irony of this name becomes apparent as you learn of the history of the island.

In the murky depths of British foreign policy and international relations lies a story that quite frankly shames the Country I call home.

Diego Garcia sounds like an Argentinian Football player. No one knows what it is. We haven’t heard of it. It isn’t in the news. It’s whereabouts are not known, and yet it is the sight of one of the most undemocratic, and anti-freedom forceful exiles, by the UK and US in a very very long time.

During the 1960s the US Government was searching islands throughout the Chagos for a potential military base that could be used in it’s ongoing non-war with the Soviets. They scouted many islands, and Diego Garcia was their eventual proposed location. The problem was, it was inhabited by a population that since it’s colonisation by the British; had developed its own sense of self including a unique culture and a unique language.

The inhabitants of Diego Garcia originated from around 1800, when the French owned Mauritius and the surrounding islands, including the Chagos Islands. The islands were surrendered to the British in 1814, the slave trade to and from the islands continued until around the mid 1830s, when all slaves became freed men. Their ancestors lived on Diego Garcia for about 150 years after the abolition of slavery, as free men. The island was a mixing pot of Indian, Mauritian, Somalia and Seychellois cultures, and it worked. A military film shot by US military personnell investigating the Island in the early 1960s, shows a local population who are more than happy with their lives, and are at home. Far away from Britain, far away from the United States. Far away from Western privilege, and people who know little if anything about this island, the people who inhabited it, considered it their home.

When Mauritius gained its independence from Britain in the 1960s, plans were already underway to lease Diego Garcia to the U.S and so Britain could not afford to let the Island find its independence. To counter this, the “British Indian Ocean Territory” was created especially to keep Diego Garcia under the control of the British. When Mauritius gained its independence, the Mauritian Prime Minister agreed to sell any link Mauritius had to Diego Garcia and all the islands in the area, for a measely £3,000,000. Quite ridiculously, the same Prime Minister was then given a Knighthood.

By 1966, work had begun to rid the island of its inhabitants, in order to make way for a Military base for the U.S. Firstly, all plantations were closed down so work was very scarce. The idea was to make the inhabitants leave the island voluntarily to find work. As was food, which the British stopped from being shipped to the Island. Secondly, anyone from Diego Garcia who had travelled to Mauritius for work, or to use the hospital or other health facilities were refused entry back to their homes. Their houses were left, their possessions now belonged to Britain. They were not allowed to even contact family on the Island. Thirdly, the local population had developed a sense of family that included two children, a wife, a husband, and a dog. Every family had and cherished their pet dog. Sir Bruce Greatbatch MBE, Governor of the Seychelles ordered all dogs were to be killed. John Pilger in “Stealing a Nation” notes that families of the islanders he had spoken to, had said they remember as children watching the British walk away with their dogs, and throwing them into a room to be gassed. The dog deaths was used as a warning to let the locals know that they had to leave, or they would suffer the consequences. It was a Western imperial intimidation technique.

One lady from the Island recalls:

American soldiers had already started building the base.They backed several of their big vehicles against the brick shed where the coconuts were prepared; hundreds of dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed with a tube from the truck’s exhaust. You could hear them crying.

A Mauritian lawyer acting on behalf of those evacuated, said:

They were absolutely destroyed by the fate reserved to their dogs, and many of them told me it was clear to them that if they offered any objection to the depopulation they would suffer the same fate.

A Colonial Office Memo from the time reads:

They wish to avoid using the phrase ‘permanent inhabitants’ in relation to any of the islands in the territory because to recognise that there are any permanent inhabitants will imply that there is a population whose democratic rights will have to be safeguarded and which will therefore be deemed by the UN to come within its purlieu. The solution proposed is to issue them with documents making it clear that they are ‘belongers’ of Mauritius and the Seychelles and only temporary residents of BIOT. This devise, [sic] although rather transparent, would at least give us a defensible position to take up at the UN.

A lady who had been removed from the Island told Pilger recently:

I left in 1967. My husband was very ill and I decided to take him to Port Louis to get the special treatment he needed. When we were ready to return, we went to Rogers and Company – they ran the boats – and asked for our tickets. They said they had instructions not to let us go back. They told us Diego had been sold. Diego was my bird in the sky that was taken from me. I was sent to live in a slum, in rooms previously inhabited by goats and pigs.

Clearly people inhabited the islands, and called the island of Diego Garcia; home. But to get around the UN’s Special Committee on Decolonization rules, the British had to suggest that those islanders did not live on Diego Garcia, and were actually just working there, and were from Mauritius. The Head of the Indian Ocean Department in the 1960s, Eleanor Emery sent a memo to colleagues in Government stating:

We would not wish it to become general knowledge that some of the inhabitants have lived on Diego Garcia for several generations and could, therefore, be regarded as ‘belongers’.
We shall advise ministers in handling supplementary questions to say that there is only a small number of contract workers from the Seychelles and Mauritius, engaged to work on the copra plantations.

In the 1960s, the British Government used, through dodgy dealings, dog murders, and underhanded techniques to manoeuvre away from scrutiny by the UN’s Special Committee on Decolonization; leased the Island of Diego Garcia to the U.S in exchange for a huge reduction on the cost of nuclear subs. The decolonisation of Diego Garcia was not known to both Parliament in the UK and Congress in the US. In 1975 the Defence Department in the UK said:

“there is nothing in our files about inhabitants or about an evacuation”.

A blatant lie to cover up the entire episode.
Throughout the 1980s, 90s and 00s, the ex-islanders brought lawsuits against the British government and that of Mauritius, demanding compensation and the right to return to their homes. All lawsuits have ended in failure for them. The House of Lords and Blair when he was PM denied any wrongdoing and stated that the islanders do not have the right to return. In April 2010, the British government set up the MPA (Marine Protected Area) around Diego Garcia, meaning that commercial fishing and other extractive industries are prohibited in the area, a clear attempt to limit any kind of commerce islanders may have restarted had they moved back, in the hope that it would convince them not to keep brining lawsuits.

British foreign secretary Michael Stewart and the US secretary of state Dean Rusk in the mid-1960s came up with the plan to lie to the World that the inhabitants of the island were merely labourers and not inhabitants, in order to advance the deal between the two Countries.

Whilst the UK directed the deportations (many who were sent away on the British boats, had to sleep in cabins full of bird shit), the US is also massively responsible. A UK 1965 Foreign Office file reads that Washington made full deportation:

virtually a condition of the agreement when we negotiated it

And Stewart himself did not do too well in covering up what he knew. In 1968 he wrote:

by any stretch of the English language, there was an indigenous population, and the Foreign Office knew it

He then advised the PM (Wilson) that to get around the UN, they should lie, with:

by present[ing] any move as a change of employment for contract workers . . . rather than as a population resettlement

In 1970, a civil servant travelled to Diego Garcia to oversee the expulsion of the last few inhabitants. When they asked him if they would receive help resettling in Mauritius and compensation, the civil servant told them that they would. Yet, the only compensation paid, was £650,000 to the Mauritius Government to offset the cost of resettlement. About £3000 per person. The Mauritius government did not use it to resettle and has said it is not their responsibility. Hence most of the inhabitants of Diego Garcia ended up in overcrowded slums, sleeping in sheds with pigs and goats.

The economy of Mauritius had no place for the inhabitants of the newly proclaimed “Camp Justice”. Their trade was copra farming, which had no room in Mauritius. Nor did the language of the new crowd, or their culture. Unemployment in Mauritius was already standing above 20%. For all intents and purposes the depopulation of Diego Garcia is surely considered a crime against humanity; and yet legally, apparently it isn’t. When America and Britain do it, it’s legal. When two Congressional Committees attempted to delve further into the matter, they were told it was all considered classified and they couldn’t look further into it.

A terrible stain on the history of Britain and America. We continually act like victims, because others “hate our freedom“. What utter shit. We aren’t victims. We are the instigators. We plant the seeds and then complain when the plant grows. There should be no military base on Diego Garcia and the people should be back home, without any American or British person in sight. There is no Cold War any more. It’s over. We should act like the apparent advocates of freedom that we apparently like to suggest we are, and get out of the area. The Bush Administration said that Diego Garcia as a base played a vital role in the war on terror. What this translates to is; We need it because we have delusions of imperialist grandeur. It is a human rights issue, and the human rights of the people of Diego Garcia were vastly undermined. There is no two sides to this story. There are those on the right side and those on the wrong side, and the wrong side happens to include the UK and US. It is not subjective because it is not justifiable, what happened on that island.

Why haven’t the media had any say on the matter? Surely this should be a bit of a scandal? I can guarantee if a Muslim country did the same, the national newspapers would be outraged. Fox News would say it is clear that Islam is dangerous, and the overly protective pro-American/British media would treat us in the West like the heroes.

Jeanette Alexis lived on the island as a child. She says:

“We were crying, we were hanging onto our mothers’ skirts crying, because although we were very young we understood that we were leaving something very valuable behind, and that was our home.”

I wonder how America would react if the British tried to tell everyone on Rhode Island that they had to all leave their homes, their dogs would be killed, they would be resettled 2000 miles away, and they would be compensation about $2000 for it. I can’t imagine it’d be so easy.

The Fall of the American Economic Empire

Please excuse the over simplification of the money markets that i’m about to talk about, i’m not an economist.

In June 2003, Iraq, under U.S guidance started trading Oil in U.S Dollars again. Which certainly gives credit to the idea that The Bush Administration, with it’s ties to the Oil business and it’s incessant need to expand it’s supply; invaded Iraq for two reasons Firstly, because they needed to increase supply. And secondly, to revert back to trading in U.S Dollars, something Sadam Hussain put a stop to back in 2000. And although I despise the Bush Administration, and it’s horribly reclusive policies, i’m a little sceptical when my fellow lefties try to find even the slightest shred of evidence that could be used by the Bush Administration as a pretext for war for oil. I just don’t buy it.

As far as i’m aware Iran doesn’t trade Oil in dollars. Hasn’t for a couple of years. And surely if America were so committed to being the dominant force in Global finance, economists must have noticed that promoting Democracy and Capitalism across the Globe, would not help that cause, and in fact, would lead to the growth of foreign currencies that inevitably challenge the dominance of the Dollar?
The Oil Bourse in Iran opened in 2007, trading oil in Euros and not Dollars, with no interference to try to prevent it from the U.S. Surely if they cared that much, something would have been done? And since then, transactions in Euros (among others) on the IOB have been worth well over $1.5bn. Surely the U.S would have intervened if it were THAT concerned? Obviously not militarily, given that the public wouldn’t support it after the debacle surrounding Iraq, and troops are already preoccupied with Iraq and Afghanistan, but even covertly, nothing has been done. Which to me suggests that although the Johnson/Nixon Administrations with the help of Kissinger may have needed the trade deals between the U.S and Persian Gulf States to boost America’s economic standing in the World during the late 60s and 70s, it’s not as important now as it was back then, because no matter how much the US now tries to sustain it’s economic dominance, inevitably it isn’t going to last all that much longer. Especially given that the the Dollar isn’t considered as “risk free” as it has been for decades.

The Euro was created to almost counter the dominance of the Dollar. So why hasn’t the EU been the target of U.S aggression? Given that most countries (Russia has decreased it’s Dollar reserves recently) now have a split reserve, between Dollar and Euro, that isn’t a good sign for the almighty Dollar, and in the long run, is hugely damaging, much more so than Iran’s IOB. And much more so than Sadam and his decision to stop trading in Dollars.

Also, Russia, Saudi Arabia (after refusing to cut interest rates in line with the U.S back in 2007), South Korea (who shifted investment from US currency to other currency in 2005 and fears that it may sell $1bn US Bonds in the not too distant future), China, Sudan (who suggested dumping the Dollar as far back as 1997) and Venezuela are considering doing the same as Iran at the moment.

Surely the more aggressive the U.S is with the World, the less likely other Nations are to feel happy about trading in Dollars? Aggression caused by the U.S need to prevent any challenge to it’s economic Empire is only going to isolate the U.S further.

I can understand the point on Iraq, given that Iraq mysteriously started trying Oil in Dollars again after the invasion, so yes, that was definitely a motive perhaps because the Republicans at the time thought ruling the World through fear was the only way to stay on top of the World. But Iran’s move to open the IOB was a far greater kick in the teeth to America, than Sadam was, and Iran haven’t been the target of such a mass invasion or even threat of invasion. Certainly the Bush Administration had harsh words for Tehran But no more so than Tehran has for Tel Aviv and their allies.

I think Iraq went a lot deeper. Crap intelligence (the U.S is good at that) and personal vendetta. If America were committed to sustaining it’s dominance economically across the Globe, invading one nation because they stopped trading oil in dollars, is pretty insignificant given that there’s half a World willing to do the same in the not too distant future. Iraq wasn’t just about oil.

If devalue of the Dollar were considered enough reason to go to war, then in the next twenty – thirty years, the U.S is going to have to commit to taking on pretty much the entire World, (either that, or creating a brand new common currency with Russia and China) because as the Euro will inevitably start to pick up pace, and nations start to shrink their Dollar reserves even more, and corporations then start to sell their dollar short for financial gain; Iran selling it’s oil in another currency will seem like nothing in comparison.

The problem I foresee for President Obama and President Bush, is that Republicans and Democrats will start to find reasons to blame them both respectively, when America starts losing it’s economic dominance, even though, it’s merely a case of Economic Evolution.