Part One: How the British Empire and U.S. Department of Defense Murdered an Island Paradise
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Cold Zone Media. Ah! Alright, you happy? Are you happy? People on the subreddit, I did another atonal screech to open an episode. Fuckers. There was like one person on the subreddit. There's a massive thread. There is a massive thread of people complaining that I no longer do atonal shrieking. Oh no, that's not it. I was gonna say there was like one person on the subreddit that was like, I really enjoy these cold opens. And

And then I didn't continue reading the thread because I knew what the rest of it would be. So thank you to that one person. Look, folks, my assumption was that the atonal shrieking was something I did because I was out of ideas for how to open shows. And you were all, if I kept doing them, eventually everyone would be like, wow, Robert's really lost it. I love it.

I love them. I tried to be creative in new ways, but I'm just going back to it, right? Like that's the real lesson of fame is never change or grow as a person. So I won't. I swear to you all that. I'm not gonna. Anyway, Andrew T., welcome to the program. Is that atonal or was that just... There were some tones to it. Yeah. Wow. It just wasn't Western melodic.

Yeah, it was not Western. You're right. You're right, Andrew. I was showing solidarity with whatever culture on Earth sings the way that I opened this podcast. I don't know who they are. I'm sure there's somewhere with the vast tapestry of peoples on this planet. Yeah, just like the quarter tones kind of jam. Just kind of. Does it? Does it make you happy to atonally shriek, Robert?

I don't know, Sophie. What is happiness? Where is happiness? That's fair. I was just going to say, if it brings you slight joy, keep doing it. You know what doesn't bring me joy these days? I'm going to start with a complaint. I'm going to start my... Like one of those late show hosts, like Bill Maher or something. Should I write this down? Yeah, for sure. Robert's mono in three, two...

All right, so you know how the internet's being eaten up by all of these fucking chatbots and these AI companies and you try to make a post on Twitter, try to make a heartfelt little acknowledgement like I did the other day about the brave men who lost their lives at Normandy.

And it's just filled at the bottom with people going, my nudes and bio, my nudes and bio. And these like weird hallucinations where they're trying to say my nudes and bio, but they like they misspell it a bunch of times. And it's clearly like a machine just had a stroke in like my post acknowledging the deaths of a bunch of 17 year olds trying to fight the Nazis. Well, I've been angry about it long enough that I switched around from anger to having an idea.

And I think it's a good idea. Right. We recuperate this machine attempt to clog up our species information superhighway. Right. And we we adopt as a global greeting because here's the thing I've noticed. Right.

You watch Star Trek and the Vulcans, they've got their like species wide greeting. Everybody does like a live long and prosper. Right. You know, that's that's that's how the Vulcans, you know, it's like the whole species does it. You assume they got a big planet. There's bunches of different regions of Vulcans. Right. But there's one thing they all say. And I think we as a human species are.

to get ready for when we take to the stars, need to all agree as a planet on one phrase that we can use, you know, that can be like the human phrase, the thing that we say to everybody we meet out there in the great empty. And I think the phrase we should adopt is my nudes and bio, you know? You meet a Vulcan, he's like, live long and prosper. Klingon's like, kapla, and you're like, my nudes and bio, brother. I think that's great. I do think that it was...

interesting that when you first started this rant that you somehow Bobby Kennedy's ghost took over and that was your voice. I just want to point that out. I was like, oh my god. Also, there's kind of a lovely humanity thing. I'm into it. Under our clothing, in our biology, we're all nude. Yeah, our nudes are in a bio. Our nudes are, in fact,

In bio. Yeah. I support you on that one, Robert. Yeah. How long have you been thinking about this? It seems like quite a while. I haven't slept in days, Sophie. This is the only thing on my mind. This and the story...

of a place that might be the closest to paradise of any chunk of the world I've ever heard on, and how the United States and the United Kingdom destroyed it so that we could bomb the Middle East with slightly more ease. Andrew, have you ever heard of the Chagos Islands? No. Well, you're fucking about to. And that's the cold open. And that's the cold open. Yeah.

I love being on this show because it's sort of like an involuntary summer school for comedy people where I'm just like, I'm going to learn some shit I never considered. Oh, Andrew. Oh,

I guess it's voluntary. You know what? It is voluntary, but it is voluntary. I never know what's happening and I'm not prepared and I'm a little bit hung over and you just like, ah, shit. Well, I was hung over when I wrote this. So I think this is all going to mesh together very nicely. Hell yeah. Very nicely. Be warned that once you pick up a refreshingly cold drink from McDonald's and

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And now we're hot. Now we're warmed up. You know, we're juicing. It's like when you stretch, except for stretching before working out, I think actually increases your odds of being injured, which is not to say that stretching is bad. Just do it right before a workout. Stretch other time. Anyway, whatever. This isn't where you go to get exercise advice. This is not that podcast. This turned into a real Joe Rogan bullshit. Let's go, brother. Yeah. Eat only elk. Yeah.

So if you spend any length of time in online space is frequented by like what you might broadly call the anti-imperialist left. There's a meme you'll see a lot of variants of, and it's usually like a map of Iran or Russia and the surrounding countries. And they're riddled with dots that are supposed to be U.S. military bases. The implication being that like whatever bad thing either country has just done is self-defense against a U.S. empire that is surrounding them at all times.

I tend to find these memes frustrating because they always needlessly fuck up the maps and will put like U.S. bases in places where we do not have bases. And it's like, guys, there are a thousand U.S. literally a thousand U.S. military bases and installations not in U.S. territory. Just get the map right. If you're going to make this point, there's no need to do the map wrong. Embellishing U.S. imperialism is...

Yeah, lipstick on the piggiest of pigs. It's like if you made up a guy and accused fucking John Wayne Gacy of murdering him. He's like, he killed plenty of guys. You know, we don't need to create a fake guy that John Wayne Gacy killed, right?

And most of these bases, you know, there's an argument because one thing you'll hear when you read about this is that like the U.S. did not have a lot of foreign bases until like the Spanish-American War is when we really started. But the other way of looking at it is that, well, the U.S. has kind of always been defined and we in fact –

westward expansion was achieved largely by the constant positioning of forts, which are military bases on the frontier to help us extend the amount of North America that was the United States until we had all of it.

Now, that is different from what we do now, which is because the US is different from kind of the empires that preceded it. We are an empire. I don't even think there's really any serious scholarly argument with that. But we're primarily an empire that exists based on like a mix of economic and social influence.

And rather than actually conquering and holding large chunks of territory the way, say, the British Empire did, we keep a lot of bases just kind of everywhere so that we can we can jinx shit in our direction when we need to. Right. That's more or less how we work. Right. Yeah. And I'm not saying that's better than what the it's just it's different. Right. It's worth acknowledging the difference because they work differently. Right.

I will say probably the sad thing is it's technically better. It's better, but not good. It's real bad. I think in a thousand years, people will be like, yeah, I mean, it was a little better, but not all that much, right? Yeah. It's better, but not good. It's a little better than the British Empire. Yeah. Yeah.

maybe, you know, that's still debatable. Yeah. But who knows? Truly, who knows? Truly. Right. So a lot of these bases, kind of the bulk of them come up in the wake of world war two. Um, and it's kind of impossible to exaggerate the degree to which the United States military was fucking everywhere. After that war, a lot of this came from the fact that in order to beat the empire of Japan, we just started filling up islands, right? We would throw in the air bases everywhere. We fucking could. Um,

Globally, at the end of that war, we were building 112 base facilities per month.

Right. So in less than a year, we were building as many bases as we currently occupy. It is it is really almost beyond argue. There's almost no way this is not the case that the U.S. military at this point had the largest collection of bases and was able to project power over the largest chunk of the Earth's landmass that any single power has ever been able to do. No one's ever really come close to the United States at the end of World War Two in that regard.

And you know what? We talk about a lot of this, a lot of these bases, a lot of the places that we do now. There's a lot that's fucked up about it. It's not entirely unjust that the end of World War II, we had a bunch of bases in, say, Germany and Japan because both of those countries really got out of pocket for a while, right? You know, the Soviets had a bunch of bases in East Germany and who can blame them for wanting those, right? Right.

But, you know, it always starts with like a kernel of like, all right, this one's OK. Yeah. Somebody's got to keep an eye on these folks for a minute. Right. They really went hog wild there for a second. But U.S., we can't be trusted. We cannot be trusted. Right. Like we come into Okinawa and the Japanese had treated the Okinawans pretty badly, but

And then we put thousands of people in camps right at the end of that war. A bunch of them die of disease and we set up an air base and we're still running it to this day. And there's, you know, there's a lot to criticize in that. I say this as someone whose family grew up in the air base in Okinawa, which is still there. I'm grounding this episode by talking about Okinawa, not to, you know, minimize whatever sort of moral problems you want to attach to that base or the fact that we have all these foreign bases in general.

But because the story we're going to talk about this week is a step beyond, several steps beyond what the U.S. has done with any other foreign base I can name. Because say what you will about Okinawa, there are still Okinawans on Okinawa. It's still mostly Okinawans, right? We have bases in Japan and Japan is still mostly Japanese. Like we have bases in Germany still, I think 11. And nobody's going to argue that like we destroyed Germans as a people.

But the story we're going to tell today is how the United States, working with the British Empire, annihilated an entire culture for the sake of an airstrip where the CIA could also torture people. And this brings us to the Chaco silence. Jesus Christ. Thanks, Robert. Thanks. Yeah.

It's going to be a fun one. Glad to be here. Yeah. So the Chagos Archipelago is one of the most isolated places on this planet. It is a group of seven atolls. And atolls, I think, are just basically like underwater volcano rims that take the form of islands, right? But it's...

The result of you had a big volcano and then there's ocean over it. But so like the top of that rim is a bunch of different. Got it. So they, yeah. Right. We should just keep a, keep a running total of like positive fun fact. Fun fact. A toll. A toll.

Here's what I'm told. Now, the Chagos Archipelago, if you look at it on a map, it's like smack dab in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It is 500 kilometers or so south of the Maldives. If you want to kind of find it, like pick your globe that I'm sure everybody has these days, right in the middle of your living room, you know, where every American keeps their globe, find the Arabian Peninsula on a map and draw a line straight down.

And then you draw a second line down from the bottom of India. And more or less where those two lines meet is about where you'll find the Chagos Islands. For an idea of how lonely a place this is, right? In the entire sweep of human civilization prior to the 1700s, there were no humans on these islands. It was a place we never got to because it is the middle of nowhere. It is still hard to get to, right? Right.

It's just like it's one of the emptiest places there has ever been. And that only started to change in the 1700s when a bunch of enslaved people were moved there by initially by the French who came primarily from Senegal and other parts of East Africa, I think Madagascar, too. And these people became the indigenous habitants of Chagos by dint of generations of blood, sweat and tears poured into the land.

In 1642, the French took possession of an island named Reunion off Madagascar. I think Reunion is still a French possession to this day. Like most smart colonizers, once they're in Reunion, they start sort of looking around to be like, is there anything near here we can take? And they find out that the Dutch, who were like the first Europeans to find Chagos, had like set up a settlement there and then failed to hold on to it. They'd kind of like, you know, left. And so the French were like, let's try holding on there, right? Right.

And so, you know, that actually goes pretty well. They set up a couple of bases in that area. And the initial purpose of French possessions in Chagos and in the surrounding area, the Seychelles, you know, is they want to provide cover and places to resupply their navy. You know, they've got this grand game going on with the British. They spend a lot of this century fighting what is basically a proto-World War with the British Empire. Yeah.

And when you're doing that, you need a bunch of places all over where your ships can go get food and the other things that people on ships need, like fresh water in order to not die.

Tragically, there was not enough war going on in the Indian Ocean to justify all of the islands the French took. So the French pivoted to commercial endeavors with these new lands, right? They wanted to keep them in case they had a war there. And in the meantime, they were like, let's just make them into plantations, you know, because that's what everybody did at the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's the like build more build more mines of Starcraft. But with people. Yeah. Yeah. They need to.

They needed more Vespian gas, which was the primary thing that powered navies in the 1700s, you know?

From the book Island of Shame by David Vine. French settlers built societies on the islands around enslaved labor and particularly in Mauritius, the cultivation of sugar cane. At first, the French company of the Indies tried to import enslaved people from the same West African sources supplying the Caribbean colonies. Later, the company developed a new slaving trade to import labor from Madagascar in the area of Africa known then as Mozambique.

Indian Ocean historian Larry Bowman writes that French settlement in Mauritius produced a sharply differentiated society with extremes of wealth and poverty and an elite deeply committed to and dependent upon slavery. So Mauritius is basically right next to Chagos, and Chagos is essentially part of Mauritius. But it's kind of like...

It's kind of like Hawaii is to the continental U.S., where it becomes part of this whole, but it's also distant from it, right? It's not convenient to get to the Chagos Islands from Meridius. Hey, everyone. Robert here. I just wanted to let you know it's Mauritius, not Meridius.

I'm going to screw it up later on here. I'm not always good at being consistent about this stuff, but it is Mauritius. Also, as a note, it sounds very similar to, but has nothing to do with Mauritania, which is located in a completely different part of Africa.

Well, it's located in Africa as opposed to the middle of the Indian Ocean. Anyway, now these islands are a profitable place for the French to do their business because it's kind of, especially Chagos, they're kind of like paradise, right? Like things grow really, really weirdly well there. And like Meridius, they still have to deal with like storms and shit. You get your cyclones and whatnot. But the Chagos Islands don't. They're kind of like, hey,

heaven on earth almost like that's how that's how the people who used to live there describe them the weather is always kind of good and the growing season is like 12 months of the year basically right shit's pretty much always flowering

So, you know, French do pretty well in Meridius. For the most part, they don't really spread to Chagos in this area, right? They set up a temporary settlement in one of the islands in the Chagos archipelago, Peros Banos, in 1744. But the largest island, Diego Garcia, is going to remain empty of humans until 1769, when a French naval lieutenant named La Fontaine sails there. And, you know, Diego Garcia is the largest of the Chagos Islands.

And he writes home to his fellows in the French military. You could shelter a fuckload of boats here. Right. Great place to place to put a lot of military ships. Sure. A long time later, the United States military is going to agree that La Fontaine was on to something here. But we're getting ahead of ourselves there.

The first permanent inhabitants of the Chagos Islands, because I think that, that, you know, Peros Banos settlement, it doesn't last very long. But the first permanent settlement the French are going to make in the Chagos Islands is, starts with a group of 22 enslaved Africans who are landed on Diego Garcia in 1783 after a businessman named Pierre Marie Le Normand, who's a plantation owner, asks his government for the right to settle some of the people he owned there and start a coconut plantation. And, uh,

you know, slavery is bad. This is bad. But these people comparatively, if we're looking at like the broad strokes of both slavery and just kind of being a human in this period of time, they get kind of lucky because they're going to stay enslaved, but their descendants are going to inherit these islands and become free in a place that's really nice and also very isolated from most of the shitty things going on in the world.

world. So it's kind of one of those like, well, could have worked out worse. When you say isolated, this is the period of history where it's like, that's not the worst thing in the world. You want to be far away from the people, particularly the white people, right? Yeah. Humanity is pretty bad. Yeah. A few years later, after Lenormand sets up his plantation, the British East India Company came to the same conclusion about the strategic and economic value of the island.

And they sent forces to take possession of Diego Garcia from the French. Since most of the French at this point are enslaved people, they're not going to fight the British, right? Look, you want people make you want us harvesting coconuts. It doesn't really matter which language you speak, you know? Yeah. So Lenormand's people flee and he reports his loss back to the home country. And so France sends a warship and takes Diego Garcia back.

The company abandons the settlement without a fight. And the reality of the situation is that like both of them kind of want this island, but there's no real way to actually fight over it, right? If you start fighting over Chagos, you're going to run out of bullets or soldiers.

quickly because that's what fighting does and you can't resupply anybody there it's it's so far away right you need an aircraft carrier there so basically control of the islands tends to revert to like whoever feels it's worth sending an air a warship through that day right one one power will have will briefly have a boat there and then the islands there's you know oh man that

does seem like a you know removing it all from the realities of history seems like that would be a fun play or maybe a very weird movie yeah yeah and you've got these people these like enslaved workers just being like yeah sure we're British now yeah cool

This state of affairs continues until the Napoleonic Wars, when France fumbles most of their Indian Ocean possessions. In 1814, under the Treaty of Paris, France hands over Meridius to Great Britain. The Chagos Islands get lumped into the deal, and for more than 100 years, things in Chagos are...

Pretty calm, boring, given the circumstances of the rest of the world. And some would say shockingly pleasant, which, again, isn't to ignore the fact that these people are still enslaved for a chunk of that period. But they like they have a lot of food all the time and the weather is always good. So, you know, life is worse for a lot of people. Right.

Over the next couple of decades, numerous islands in the archipelago are settled by small groups of enslaved people working mostly in coconut plantations. And the islands are ruled to the extent that they're ruled by the company. Always a good sentence, by the way. Always a good sentence, right? And it's one of those things where, again, these people are slave labor. Control over them by the company is maintained through violence. However, it's also a situation where like –

They're so isolated and there's so few white people, there's so few overseers that like the violence, at least from the reports that you do get, and we don't have perfect information on this, seems to mostly be contended to when people were actually working on the plantation. And when, you know, the working day was over, they had like a more independence than most people in plantations tended to have. And it's also a situation where the climate is not actively murdering them because it's really nice there.

Plantation owners described their workers as happy while admitting that they labored from sunrise to sunset. However, we also have reports that have come down in lore from like the actual, you know, indigenous people of Chagos that they were allowed their own little plantations, basically big gardens.

And this kind of evolved into a state. Eventually, the company started giving them the materials to build their own houses. And it led to a state where everybody on the island, all of the denizens of Chagos, own their own houses once they get freed. And that's sort of the state of affairs on it. Like nobody ever pays rent on Chagos, right? Like-

Everybody works for the company because that's the only game in town. But as soon as you're an adult, you get all the things you need to build a house and everybody just owns their house and there's plenty of food. Again, these are reports from the people who live there and then get forced out who pretty much universally say life was kind of rad, you know, for the most part.

French law and language remained dominant, as did the Catholic faith, because once all that was in place, the British don't. It's not really worth it for them to be like, yeah, you have to learn British now. Right. But you got to learn the King's English. They're going to do that. They're going to make an Anglican like who gives a shit. We need coconuts. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. First order of business is not a language school or like fucking church. Yeah. That is really not our priority here. We just want some money. Now, a fun aside here is that the obsession that the British had with maximizing profits was,

leads to a wildly lopsided gender ratio because they mostly want men there because men are the ones who work best, right? And one of the things this results in is that as Chagos turns from like these are slave plantations from people that have been uprooted from elsewhere to this is its own civilization, right? Which is what happens over time is the people of Chagos become their own society and that society is matriarchal.

because of the fact that for at least in the early years, there were very few women and so they were really deeply valued by society. Again, by total accident, the slavers create this matriarchal agrarian paradise. They do not mean to, it's just a quirk.

I will say, in our pre-record conversation, you said we weren't going to talk about Furiosa, but it does feel like this is where we're heading. It does feel a little bit like that, yeah. Slavery was abolished in 1835.

And once it's gone, the Mauritian plantation owners start importing Indian indentured laborers to their plantations in Mauritania. This happens in Chagos too, but they never become, not as much, and so they never become the majority of the populace, which up until the mid-20th century is largely of African descent. Because Chagos is so isolated,

and the population imbalance between white managers and workers is very lopsided, culture in the area after everyone's free in particular evolves in a direction where laborers are given surprising concessions out of a practical understanding that, well, we can only realistically push these people so far. They have some strikes and stuff that are often very successful, right? Just because

There's not a lot of options, you know, and as a result, again, it's not perfect. These people work incredibly hard. Most people would argue that like the degree to which they labor for the company is more than most, certainly most modern people would want to labor. But if you are comparing them to the way most human beings on the planet are living after freedom, life in Chagos is quite good.

Plantation companies develop a pay system that mixes a small amount of hard currency, which people would primarily use to buy spices or alcohol at the company's store. Alongside, you get regular rations of like rice and stuff that you can't grow on the island. Everyone has free healthcare. It's not great healthcare, but it's free. There are free vacations on a semi-regular basis to Mauritius and free building materials for workers to construct their own homes, which are considered their legal property.

In 1860, workers' wages consisted of 10 shillings a month, a dollop of rum, and quote, a twist of tobacco if times were good.

Your seafaring bank account is so insane. Yeah. I guess it's just like an inventory in like a fucking like Elden Ring kind of game, but it's like- You pull up your Bank of America app and it's like, yeah, I got three twists of tobacco, so retirement savings are doing all right. Yeah.

honey, you're 18 now and it's time for you to know, you know, your father and I have worked hard to save for your college education. We've got 30 dollops of rum in there. So you're really on a good... Yeah, you keep studying, you can do anything you want.

So as a result, the Chagossians who were born on the islands and who have been exiled since look back on their lives there as a utopian paradise. That is how – again, I am not making this up or whatever. That is how they describe it. They worked very hard, usually from sunup until midday, basically.

but the rest of the day they would spend tending their own gardens, fishing and hunting, or preparing a variety of delicacies with the abundance of an island that grows everything all the time, right? Like it's just really easy to have all of the food you need on Chagas. If you were going to be like stranded after the apocalypse on an island, this is the one, you know?

By 1880, the island population had risen to more than 760 and the locals were noted as being cheerful, healthy, and extremely well fed.

That year, or that decade, as the modern world starts to rear its ugly head, two different companies tried to turn Diego Garcia into a coaling port for steamers. The British Admiralty considered doing something similar, but none of this worked out. The steamship companies got in trouble because passengers were stealing so many coconuts that Mauritian police had to establish an outpost there. Ha ha ha ha!

Coconut PD. Yeah. Oh yeah. Just Miami vice, but it's like two fucking like British dudes trying to stop coconut from steamships. Oh yeah. I guess it's more of a, this situation. Yeah.

Yeah. As the 20th century dawned, there were more than a thousand people in the Chagos Islands and there were seven small hospitals. The Chagosian people had developed their own unique language at this point. It's a Creole and it is unique to this world. Only the people of Chagos speak this Creole.

And it had been developed by the Islanders alongside a unique musical tradition called Sega. Yes. Like the, like the game systems. Yes. It's called Sega. It's actually pretty dope. I wrote this listening to hours of Sega music on YouTube. It's a, it's pretty rad. Check it out.

The free people of Chagos also started to call themselves Elois, which I think just means islanders in Creole. And the name for their Creole language is Creole spelled with a K, right? Like a Creole is any kind of mix, I think, of language that's like a mix of languages. But like their language, they just call Creole and it's spelled with a K.

Visiting foreigners began to take note of the totally unique culture that had developed on the islands as a product of their splendid isolation. That isolation, for an example of how out in the middle of fucking nowhere these people are, after World War I starts, the German battleship Imden sails to the port at Diego Garcia to like fill up with food.

and the British dudes who were there are like, "Yeah, of course, we'll sell you food. Why wouldn't we? There's no reason for us not to fill a German battleship up with food." 'Cause like nobody had bothered to tell them a war had started. - What a weird day.

World War I thus basically passed the islands by. The same is pretty much going to happen in World War II, right? It's a little less isolated in the big dub-dub dose. The RAF does build a landing strip on the island and they garrison a few colonial troops from India there. But the main impact this has on the locals is that like they wreck a seaplane and they leave it behind after the war and it becomes a popular playground for the children of Chagas. Yeah.

It's like, yeah, crawl around on that crashed seaplane, kids. It does sound like if you designed a fort when you were a kid. Yeah.

Yeah. It's just up to this point, it's kind of the if you're just again, if you're judging it by how most human beings on planet Earth are living, you're kind of doing like upper 20 percent. If you're on shock, that's just what it sounds like to me. The one thing you lack is modern medical care. But that is helped by the fact that there's not again, the people who live there and works, I will say, like, we didn't have a lot of sickness. Right. Right. Like.

there's nobody traveling there. So they're not bringing their illnesses in generally. And like, we have enough food all the time and the weather's always good. You know? Um,

There's not a lot of ways to get sick compared to- Falling out of a tree feels like the worst thing. Right. And that, like, when you hear about people getting, like, I fell out of a tree, I got, like, run over by a goat-drawn cart. Like, those are the kind of injuries people have, which is, you know, those can be pretty serious. But it's, a lot of places are worse, right? You'd prefer to be here than the Russian steppes in the early 1900s, for goddamn sure, right? Beats being in Ukraine at this point in time, you know?

Anyway, speaking of living on the Russian steppes in the midst of a terrible series of wars and genocides, you know who doesn't do any of that? You don't know that for sure. I'm pretty sure none of our sponsors have taken place in genocides in Ukraine or the Russian steppes.

That's not a good bet, bro. Oh, nope. You know what? We are being sponsored by the Tsarist government of Russia. I completely forgot we made that deal with the last surviving Romanov. Got to. Ah, Sophie. Money's money. Money's money. Money's money, baby. Wow. They paid us in Faberge eggs. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. This year has gone so quickly. We're almost halfway through of it already.

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Oh, we're back. And I tried to deposit a Fabergé egg into my bank account, but USAA said they don't take those anymore. Not anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Alas. All your tobacco and rum rations are going to waste. All my twists of tobacco are worthless.

It was after the war, the big dub-dub-dose, that the lovely state of affairs that had largely characterized life in Chagos started coming to an end. Some of this was inevitable. They get radios after the war, right? And they start getting... You get...

They have quarterly steamships. So once a quarter, a steamship will come from Merlius and like bring stuff that they can't make on Chagos and bring things like magazines. Right. So people start getting a little connected to the outside world.

Right. Some numbers of young people start leaving Chagos for communities in the Meridius and the Seychelles. Not a lot. Once they have the opportunity, they seem to be pretty freely able to leave. The vast majority of people born on Chagos seem to know like, yeah, man, we got it pretty good here. Yeah.

The rest of the world sounds rough. You got to pay rent places? Nah, fuck that. The largest problem is that things in Chagos are just too darn pleasant, right? And this is actually going to be an issue for the Chagosians because...

Things are not nearly as pleasant in most of the places owned by the British Empire. And so in the post-World War II era, a lot of those places start to rebel and eventually get their freedom, right? There's some pretty brutal wars, but they do get their liberty. The people of Chagos...

you know, I'm sure if you had talked to them, a number, a lot of them would be like, well, yeah, we would prefer to not, you know, to be our own independent thing, to not be owned by this, basically owned by this company, you know, that's part of, of Great Britain. But they also seem to have agreed, like, it's not really worth fighting a war over. Yeah.

Like, why am I what am I going to do that for? In 1949, a representative from the Meridian Labor Office visited and described the relationship between workers and the company managers as patriarchal, but pleasant. And then writes this problematic ass line dating back to what I imagined would be the slave days. But by this, I do not imply any oppression, but rather a system of benevolent rule with privileges and no rights.

I think what's actually going on here is, again, there's not enough white people here for them to be that shitty. Like they have to keep a lid on it because they're so outnumbered and it's just kind of the perfect place to exist. And so people are pretty happy because they're on an island paradise and they got to work doing, you know, coconut stuff. But the other the upsides of life in Chagos kind of outweigh that.

By the early 1960s, the islands had a population of like two or three thousand people. Everyone basically still labors for a foreign company, but they grow everything they need for their survival, and they keep up an increasingly healthy trade with the outside world. As the British Empire began to shed its colonial possessions,

An outside observer might well have guessed Chagos would eventually do quite well as a microstate, right? But like, yeah, eventually the Brits are going to leave and they'll have their own island. And, you know, it seems pretty easy for them to make it as a country, you know? They don't have a lot that they need and they don't have a lot that they can't make for themselves that it's necessary for life, right?

By this point, their exports of various coconut products had proven to be quite profitable. The islands had started exporting guano as well, and there was talk of opening parts of the islands to tourism. All available evidence suggests Chagos could have functioned rather well as either an independent small nation or as a semi-autonomous region of Meridius.

Neither of these things happened. In 1961, an Anglo-American survey gets conducted on Diego Garcia to determine whether or not it might be a good place for a U.S. island base. Now, if you want to talk about whose fault is this, right? Why does the U.S. What are we doing there? Right? We didn't fight these people in a war. We were at an

these people in a war, right? What are we doing sniffing around Diego Garcia? Well, the good news is we know exactly whose fault it is, and it's a sick white boy from Connecticut. That's the...

Hell yeah, dog. His name was Stuart Barber, and he was born in New Haven in 1922. Again, he is very ill as a little boy, and he grows fascinated with geography. So he spends his entire childhood obsessively studying maps of the world.

And as a result, from an early age, he is one of the minuscule. He might have been the only American who knew that the Chagos Islands were a thing. Oh, my God. Just play some Risk, bro, and move on. Yeah, play some Risk. Do anything but this. Now, the fact that Stu really liked maps probably wouldn't have been a problem if, as an adult, he hadn't taken a job in naval intelligence during World War II. So, yeah.

He is part of, you know, he is on the planning end of this brutal but very effective island hopping campaign during the war. Right. What we do to beat the Empire of Japan is a mix of we build a shitload of aircraft carriers and we also turn a bunch of islands in the Pacific all the way from Hawaii to Japan into like stationary aircraft carriers. Right. Like that's that's in brief. That's how we we win. Right.

David Vine writes, quote, It was 1958. Then in Bespectacled, Stu was a civilian working back for the Navy at the Pentagon. The Navy ought to have a permanent facility, Stu realized, like the island bases acquired during the Pacific's island hopping campaign against Japan. The facility should be on a small atoll, minimally populated, with a good anchorage.

The Navy, he began to tell his superiors, should build a small airstrip, oil storage, and logistical facilities. The Navy would use it to support minor peacetime deployments and major wartime operations.

So that's Stu's idea. You know, he comes back to the Navy after the war, but as a civilian and he's like, hey, you know that thing we did in World War Two? Well, we're doing a Cold War now. And rather than like have to rebuild a bunch of island bases when we inevitably go to war with the Russians, we should start picking a bunch of island bases now. Right. And the thing that has occurred to Stu and that he really is ahead of the curveball and recognizing is that like,

Well, as all of these Western powers are decolonizing, a big part of how we had gotten some of our island bases is we'd go to like our French or our British friends and be like, hey, hey, guys, you really need our asses in this war and we need some space on your islands. Right. And they'd be like, we don't give a shit. Sure. But then we give up a lot of those bases after World War Two. And Stu sees this as a looming problem.

He writes to the Navy brass, within five to ten years, virtually all of Africa and certain Middle Eastern and Far Eastern territories presently under Western control will either gain complete independence or a high degree of autonomy. And thus, they might- And we can't have that. Can't have that.

His whole fear is that like, as soon as everybody's independent, those mean old Soviets are gonna come in and be like, you know how you were brutally ruled by colonial oppressors for years? How would you like some AK-47s? By the way, don't let the US build airstrips on your land and we'll give you all the guns and whatever else we can handle.

Which is, you know, a pretty smart strategy for the Soviets. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's it's once we played our previous hand, we have, I guess, no choice or both sides have kind of no choice but to do this. But yeah. Yeah. The fruits of fucking colonial imperialism.

Yeah. So a couple of months and for an example of like how right Stu was a couple of months before I typed this in March of 2024, the U.S. trained military junta of Niger kicked U.S. troops out of the country, putting it into the residence of about a thousand soldiers and contractors. Right. They did this because they took over and suddenly they did not see a benefit in Americans benefiting.

being there. And this is a miniature example of what Stuk saw coming, right? Because our base in Niger was important to a wide variety of plans that we had going on in Africa. But it was also the kind of thing where like, we were only able to keep occupying that base if whatever was the government of Niger said it was okay, right? So as soon as they stopped saying it was okay, we can't stay anymore, right?

Stu sees this problem coming and he's like, we need to have a bunch of bases all over the world, ideally on these little islands that are strategically located where we can stash planes and where if some country gets pissed at us, it doesn't matter because we have the absolute right to be there based on some contract or some shit. Right.

Right. So the Soviet Union sees the opportunity in isolating the US from potential areas of having airstrips. And Stu is like, well, this is going to lead to a situation where the withdrawal of Western military forces will lead to severe restrictions in where we can project power during all of these little wars we're fighting during the Cold War. So Stu proposes what he calls the strategic island concept.

which meant shying away from bases in established countries and populated areas like Okinawa, where there could be resistance from the locals. There could be protest campaigns. We can eventually get forced out. And at the very minimum, there can be constant bad PR for us, right? He writes, quote, only relatively small, lightly populated islands separated from major population masses could be safely held under full control of the West, right?

And what you see with the way Stu talks about all this is that he sees islands as a military resource, right? Yeah. Not as communities, not as cultures with like a history, you know? These are not peoples to them. These are nations.

This is an aircraft carrier. That is how he thinks of these islands, right? Why shouldn't we own another aircraft carrier, you know? Yeah, it's like a geopolitical version of like a prepper. He's just like, where can I stash another handgun? That is literally, because he literally, the word he uses is we need to stockpile basing rights around the world, right? The same as we keep a strategic reserve of oil. Yeah.

Jesus Christ. And so, in order to help the U.S. build a stockpile of useful islands, Stu starts combing his beloved maps, and he remembers an island chain he had seen as a little kid. And he lands upon the island of Diego Garcia and goes, you know what? That looks pretty fucking good to me. Oh, my God. We will talk about what happens next. But you know what looks pretty good to me, Andrew? What?

Taking out my wallet and just handing over my bank number to whoever comes up next as an advertiser. Just trust them with it. Trust them. For some reason, I thought you were going to say the 65 foot hot dog that's in Times Square right now.

Is there a 65 foot hot dog in Times Square right now? Well, yeah, give that thing your routing number. Fuck it. You need to talk to Jamie Loftus more. Swipe it. She's going to speak at it soon. She's going to speak at it? They invited her. My God. She's a hero. She's saying speak at it. We all know speak to it. We're going to

We're going to do an episode about it on 16th Minute. But it's incredible. That rules. I do like, Robert, the implication that your viewers are going to be wiring money via bank transfer to whoever's advertising. How else do you spend money in the 21st century, Andrew? You know what? Yeah, don't worry about it. Some sort of vending motion app that you could use? No, that's impossible. Anyway, here's that.

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You're probably careful with your personal information, but what about the other places that have it? Like the doctor's office that mixed up your files. They have your social security number. The power company that mistakenly cut your service has your payment info and last three addresses. And the hotel that lost your reservation has your passport info.

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We're back. So...

Our friend Stu has just become a cautionary tale and why you shouldn't allow sick kids to get interested in geography, you know? Yeah. Get them onto drugs. It's like true supervillain shit. Right? Yeah, he's like Magneto of map nerds. Just like staring at the map like one day. They laughed at me now, but when I will have my revenge. I think V.

I think video games have really saved us from this kind of guy. There's no sick little boys just obsessing over maps. You know, they're playing hell divers or something. Thank God. They all say the N word, the equal amount, but you know what? They,

They are maybe more racist. But they can't hurt quite as many people. Yeah. They're not going to do what Stu's going to do. Right. So around the same time as Stu is thinking out his brilliant plan to stockpile islands, the British are deep in the decolonization process with Meridius, right? And the officers of this now ailing world power, they have accepted that they can't keep control of everything they used to own in the Indian Ocean, right? Right.

But the permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office wrote in 1966 that he and his fellow officials had set themselves a goal. And this gives you an idea of like how, like...

66 years prior to this, the sun literally never sets on the British Empire. It is the most expansive imperial, by some accounts, the most expansive and mighty imperial force that has ever existed. You know, it's certainly up to that point in time. And 66 years later, the Undersecretary of the Foreign Office writes, okay, we have to give up all our colonies, but we should figure out a way to, quote, get some rocks which will remain ours. That's where they're at now.

From like, we will never give up South Africa to, well, we can probably keep some rocks in the ocean if we really try. God, that, by the way, the U.S. is not doing enough of that. No, we will. Don't get, don't get, don't worry. We need, yeah.

Ours is going to be uglier in ways that I guess I can't even really understand. There will be a glorious day in the future where like the entire U S Congress devotes themselves to maintaining control of a single seven 11 in Puerto Rico, right? Like that. We will, we will one day, God willing, we'll be reduced to that. Um, so yeah, the, the British foreign officials want some rocks and they decide the Chagos islands are going to be those rocks. So,

So they made a deal with Meridius. We'll give you your independence and we'll give you like three million pounds, which is a lot of money in those days. And all you got to do is give us these barely inhabited islands out in the middle of fucking nowhere. Right. So Great Britain wraps the Chagos Island group up. I think it's also locked in. There's some islands from the Seychelles that they kind of pull in there, too. And they call this kind of random group.

of islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean that they have just sort of like lassoed together in Photoshop. And they give it a name, the British Indian Ocean Territory or Bayot. I don't know if they actually pronounced it Bayot, but I'm going to call it Bayot. I bet they said some shit like Biot. Biot, fuck them. The British Empire.

which is basically just Great Britain, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the biot. Now, like they retain ownership of the biot to this very day. The colonial office admitted in internal documents that the prime object of creating the biot was to keep a handful of islands, quote, under the greatest possible degree of UK control. This is all they can manage now, you know? Right.

Yeah. Now, the only problem with this is that the UK didn't have much to do with those islands. Right. They've the entire like actual British people population is like a couple of guys on each island who are like helping to oversee coconut shit. Right. Like that is the extent of English civilization. Yeah.

It's like a sunburned Hugh Grant character. Right, right. There's one sunburned Hugh Grant. And he gets to be grumpy twice a year at his workers. And if he's really much more of a dick than that, they'll kill him. Also, just picture Hugh Grant in the cursed 2024 or 2023 Willy Wonka remake movie. It's the worst thing I've ever seen.

Oh yeah. It sounds like it. He's an Oompa Loompa. Yeah. By the way, there's a, there's an EDM Oompa Loompa song that is the single most bizarre thing I've ever heard in my life. My friend's kid came over. I let, I let this fucking 11 year old play whatever he wanted on Spotify. And now I get suggested the most insane shit you've ever heard. Never share your Spotify with an 11 year old kid. No, this is dope. This is crazy. I,

I have been of the opinion for a long time that we need to have like criminal penalties for certain uses of algorithms. But the one thing they should be used for is ensuring that like if I start listening to some tropical house while I'm working just to like keep my brain occupied, I eventually wind up in an EDM track where it's just a bunch of remixed Margaret Thatcher speeches from 1987.

Just some shit. Look, if it's going to be algorithm driven, it should at least be weird. Yeah. Yeah. Come on, guys. Like, yeah, make it make it strange. You know, that's all I really ask from art.

So I'm being a little bit too fair when I say that they got to be grumpy occasionally. They can. There's at least one case I've read about where they were legitimately imprisoned some people for a unionization attempt. So there is still some brutality here, right? Like I'm not saying, again, these islands, my opinion is we should have just let them, the British should have just let them be a country, right? But there's not a whole lot of comparatively control that's actually being exercised over there on a daily basis because it's just not practical.

The whole motivation that the British Empire has for this caper that is having the Bayat be part of them is, again, just holding on to something so they can still claim to have an empire that reaches across the Indian Ocean. That's it. That's the only real reason. They don't...

have a better idea of what to do with these islands because there's very little to do with these islands. And so despite expressing that we want to exercise the greatest control possible over Chagos, in December of 1966, the Wilson government in the UK signs an agreement with the US military leasing the biot for 50 years with an added 20 year option.

In his 2003 book, Web of Deceit, Mark Curtis notes that in making this agreement, quote, Britain thus ignored UN Resolution 2066XX, which called on the UK to take no action which would dismember the territory of Meridius and violate its territorial integrity. But Chagos was the middle of nowhere. Most Westerners weren't even aware that it existed.

Now, at this stage, things still could have worked out okay for the Chagossians. There are, in fact, US bases in many parts of the world that exist without uprooting an entire local population. Now, we're going to talk about Puerto Rico in the next episode. We do love uprooting entire populations. We've done it a number of times. Ask the Marshall Islands. But there are also plenty of cases where we have a base and the people who live there don't all get forced to go somewhere else. Right.

But in secret files not revealed for decades, it's made clear that the U.S. demanded Great Britain clear the Chagossians off of their homes, quote, to reduce to a minimum the possibilities of trouble between their forces and any natives.

Curtis goes on to write, this removal of the population was made virtually a condition of the agreement when we negotiated it in 1965. In the words of one British official, foreign office officials realized that they were open to charges of dishonesty and needed to minimize adverse reaction to U.S. plans to establish the base. In secret, they referred to plans to cook the books and old-fashioned concerns about whopping fibs. They're

Like, well, we're going to have to lie like a son of a bitch in order to pretend nobody lives here. Like people will probably get angry when they learn that we have ethnically cleansed these islands of their self-sustaining indigenous population. So, brothers, we got to lie like a cheap rug. I mean, at the very least, they're at a time. Listen, there's a sense of honor that at least they feel bad about it. At least they want to hide this.

Yeah, they know they have to hide it might be the fairer thing to say. I don't know that I think they really feel bad. Well, sure. But I'm just saying, like, you know, contemporary times show that I don't think we even have that level of. I will say if we were doing this in the future, there would be full throated argument arguments in Congress of like those people don't deserve to live on that island. Right. They've only been there a couple of years because they got brought there as slaves. You know, it's really our property. You know, why not?

That's what folks would be saying. Now, the fibs in question revolved around the existence of an indigenous population in Chagos. British colonial officials, because they govern this island, these islands know quite well that a self-sustaining population of several thousand people, you know, a couple, three thousand, exist on the islands with their own culture, traditions, and even a unique genre of music all their own.

It became a matter of crucial national interest for the UK's foreign office to deny this so that the deal could go through and they would receive the great, precious, invaluable prize promised to them by the US in exchange for Diego Garcia. Andrew, do you want to guess what the Titanic sum offered to the United Kingdom for this island full of people was? Oh, God.

I feel like it's going to be some, it was a dollar shit, but I don't want to undercut your number. It's not quite that bad, but for wiping out an entire people and giving us access to this island for like 70 years, the British get a $5 million credit on the purchase of some Trident nuclear missiles. Oh, God. They get it. So they get a gift certificate. Yeah, they get an IOU. They get a gift certificate.

They get a gift certificate for the end of the world. Yeah. They get a gift certificate for a weapon system that's only use is when every human being is going to die. It's store credit. It's store credit. It's not even a gift certificate. Oh my God. The sheer power of the British Empire's negotiators truly inspires awe. Wow. Good Lord. Yeah.

I would, by the way, argue that's worse than a dollar, just FYI. That is worse. At least a dollar is a dollar. Like, what are you going to do with those nukes? You're going to keep them on a bunch of submarines so that you can do your bit in ending all human life if things go pear-shaped, right? That's all. You can just lie and say you had them.

Or just, yeah, I guess what you're buying is your populace is vaporized 20 minutes later than the one place you hate the most. Right, right. In a secret file, a foreign office official described his feelings towards the unique culture that had formed on Chagos. Unfortunately, along with birds, go some through few Tarzans or Man Fridays whose origins are obscure. Phew.

Jesus Christ. That's what he calls these people, Tarzan. By the way, I will just say- That's some classic imperial racism right there. This is also the power of fucking narrative, right? Like this is how we sell fucking genocide. Well, also, if I'm recalling, I haven't read the original Tarzan stories, but I think he's the good guy, right? Like, right? Right?

I would say there's a lot of books from that era where if you're a British naval officer, it's a real are we the baddies kind of situation. Yeah. Now, along with being racist, this is also untrue. The origins of the population of Chagos are extremely well documented. We have shipping, the French and the British have shipping manifests of all kinds.

All of the people they brought over there that became the indigenous population. This is like maybe in all of world history, the best documented that a culture's origins have ever been because it just it was just a couple of hundred years ago that they got started, you know? And people kept receipts because they needed to expense them. Yeah.

because they had to expense this shit and pay taxes on it. So again, it's also true that by this point, everyone on those islands has lived there for generations. Every Chagossian had great, great grandparents and beyond buried in meticulously maintained graveyards that they had inherited alongside the sparkling blue waters and perfect climate.

This reality was dismissed with a sneering callousness that helps to explain why every sci-fi evil empire gets a de facto British accent. In reference to a UN body on women's issues that some in the Foreign Office worried would interfere with their plans to uproot these people, a British Foreign Officer wrote, There will be no indigenous population except seagulls who have not yet got a committee. The Status of Women Committee does not cover the rights of birds. Oh, God.

He's saying this because a kind of bigoted term for women is to call them birds. Sure. That's the joke. That's the bit. Oh, God. Oh, the British Empire. Really? And you can, if you change around a couple, you throw in some like weird Boggins alien there for birds, right? Seagulls you replace with like Wookiees or whatever. That's an Imperial officer in Star Trek, you know? Yeah. Like that's a line from Andor. You can throw that right in the script. Yeah.

Also, this does show the power of like fucking, I guess, the BBC, because it only takes like a couple, couple dozen decades, couple decades after this. No, not even like it's almost contemporary where Merchant Ivory turns these people into the fucking heroes. Yeah. Yes.

Oh, the power of the media. So these very racist internal messages I've been reading were not for public dissemination. In any announcements meant for widespread consumption, British colonial officers denied the islands had any permanent population. When they had to acknowledge the existence of Chagossians, they described them as essentially migrant labor, workers who had been parked on an island to do a job and who could be moved elsewhere with no real trouble.

But in letters to each other, officers sang a different, very racist tune. One sniffed, these people have little aptitude for anything other than growing coconuts.

What have you done with your life other than send memos, bro? That's what I want to know. Coconuts are useful, motherfucker. I bet they know how to fish too. Can you fish, asshole? The choice of the voice acting there was very nice, Robert. I agree. They know because they know the basic history of this island. Every single adult builds their own house. Did you do that?

No, you live in a manor that your great, great, great, great grandfather made peasants build and it's falling apart because nobody can keep their manors working. God damn it. The governor of the Seychelles described the Chagossians as extremely unsophisticated, illiterate, untrainable, and unsuitable for any work other than the simplest labor tasks of a copra plantation. Copra is one of the byproducts of coconut harvesting. It's the primary thing that they're exporting from Chagos.

Now, I want to make it very clear, everything in that last quote is also bullshit. The Chagossians built schools and operated them. They taught their children to read. And while it is true that the local economy was quite simple, the entire island built their own houses and churches, which were repeatedly remarked upon by the Westerners who were like colonial officers in Chagos as being beautiful and of high quality. Curtis adds,

Contrary to the racist indifference of British planners, the Chagossians had constructed a well-functioning society on the islands by the mid-1960s. They earned their living by fishing and rearing their own vegetables and poultry. Copper industry had been developed. The society was matriarchal, with Eloise women having the major say over the bringing up of the children. The main religion was Roman Catholic, and by the First World War, the Eloise had developed a distinct culture and identity, together with a specific variation of the Creole language.

There was a small hospital on the school. Life on the Chagos Islands was certainly hard, but also settled. None of these realities mattered in the face of the U.S. need for a perfect airbase and the British desire to continue being able to say they were an empire. And in part two, we are going to talk about how both our great nations worked together hand in glove to wipe this unique culture off the face of the earth. But that's Andrew for Thursday. Hell yeah. How you doing?

So far on the scale of behind the bastards appearances, uh,

This is one of the less depressing ones, but not not depressing, I think. That's, wait for part two. I'm still processing. I'm still processing. So far, a lot of what we've describing is how some very, some like brutalized enslaved people accidentally, like by peer struck of fortune wound up in paradise. And that's kind of a nice story for a while. This is act one of a tragedy. I understand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, do you have any pluggables? Oh,

Oh, yeah. Just listen to Yo, Is This Racist? I don't know. We're doing a lot more. We're putting a lot more energy into our premium shows. It's called Yo, Can We Live? Suboptimalpods.com. I don't know. That's what we're doing. My dog, Peanut, makes a lot more appearances. We're doing video as well. Hell yeah. What a nightmare. Well, speaking as among one of the Yo, Is This Racist people, is this racist? Yeah.

- This, the British Foreign Office? - I mean, that is like the like benchmark of what other racism is held against, I feel. - Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like the thermometer of racism. - Yeah, they're the creme de la creme. - You definitely could have just ended with, "Is this racist? The British." - I just wasn't sure which of the number of things we were going for. - Yeah, there's a lot racist going on here. - Yeah, yeah, Jesus Christ. - Anyway.

We'll be back. 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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