In October, the prime ministers of the UK and Mauritius announced the decision to transfer sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius. Diego Garcia now stands at the center of a Byzantine nexus of colonialism, indigenous dislocation and contemporary geopolitics.

Settlement and colony

The native population of Diego Garcia, known as Chagossians, descended from enslaved Africans brought by French colonists in the late 18th century. The French were the first European power to lay claim to Diego Garcia, using the island primarily for coconut plantations. They brought enslaved people to the island who worked in agriculture and established a small, thriving community. 

After the abolition of slavery, these populations mixed with other ethnic groups and formed a Creole-speaking community with a unique cultural identity. However, in 1814, Britain took control of Mauritius and its dependencies under the Treaty of Paris — including Diego Garcia. For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the island and its Creole culture remained relatively isolated as it served as an obscure outpost of the British Empire’s Indian Ocean territories. 

The strategic importance of Diego Garcia only came to international attention during the Cold War. At the time, the US was searching for military base locations to counter communist influence from the Soviet Union and China. Diego Garcia’s location made it an ideal spot for a major military installation.

This was a watershed episode in the island’s history. In 1965, in anticipation of the establishment of a US military base, the British government separated Diego Garcia and the other islands of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius. This was part of the creation of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), under which Chagos became the last British colony in Africa. Under this agreement, the British leased Diego Garcia to the United States for use as a military facility. 

Mauritius, then still a British colony, was subsequently compensated £3 million ($3.8 million) for the transfer of the Chagos Archipelago. Based on an average inflation rate of 4.9%, that amounts to £50 million ($63 million) in today’s currency. This arrangement was made as part of the broader context of Mauritius gaining its independence, which finally occurred in 1968. However, critics claim the payment was inadequate. They state it took too long to reach Chagossian pockets, and that only 16.5% of the sum awarded to Mauritius actually went to the exiled Chagossian islanders.

More disturbingly, the entire arrangement was completed without the sanction or knowledge of the Chagossian peoples themselves. This planted the seeds for future disputes over the legal status of Diego Garcia and the rest of the Chagos Islands. It also laid the groundwork for the indigenous population’s deportation.

The expulsion of the Chagossians

One of the darkest days in the history of Diego Garcia was the forcible removal of the Chagossian population to make way for the US military base. Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing into the early 1970s, the British government undertook a systematic campaign to remove all the inhabitants of the island. The exact number of people displaced is disputed, but estimates range from 1,000 to 2,000 individuals. 

The British justified this removal on the basis that Chagossians were only “transient contract workers,” not indigenous inhabitants. Declassified UK Foreign Office documents outline the extent of the falsehood which was utilized to deliberately justify British actions:

A small number of people were born there and, in some cases, their parents were born there too. The intention is, however, that none of them shall be regarded as being permanent inhabitants of the islands (28 July 1965 Foreign Office memo).

On this spurious basis for eviction, namely length of historical settlement, one could similarly have argued that the entire Pakeha population of Aotearoa New Zealand should be removed given that they have lived for less time on their islands than the Chagossians have on theirs. Regardless of the illogicality, as a result of this fiction, the Chagossians were forcibly transferred from their homes to Mauritius and the Seychelles, often under the pretense of “resettlement.”

Instead of resettlement, these communities were effectively abandoned in foreign lands where they faced extreme economic hardship. In his book Island of Shame, David Vine describes that the exiles often lived in “slums or temporary housing, struggling to adapt to life in an unfamiliar environment without the means to sustain themselves.” The difficulties plagued Chagossians in Mauritius and the Seychelles alike.

The battle against displacement

The exiled Chagossian population, including the descendants of the original displaced community, was estimated in 2016 to be around 5000. While scattered across several countries, many still reside in Mauritius. Despite the passage of time and their continued displacement, the Chagossians have maintained their identity and culture, and many still hope to return to their ancestral lands. 

For decades, the various displaced Chagossians dispersed across the world have fought legal battle after legal battle for the right to return to their homeland and for compensation for the injustices they had suffered. As a result of this pressure, the British government finally offered an additional sum of £4 million ($5.1 million) to Chagossians in 1982, but this too was insufficient. 

Most significantly, this compensation did not address the right to return. A British Court of Appeal ruling in 2000 did, however, make a start on that by deeming the expulsion of the islanders illegal and granting them the right to visit their homeland for the first time in thirty years. However, Diego Garcia itself, the largest and most habitable island, was to remain off limits to them still for security concerns.

Considering that the other atolls in the archipelago were concurrently deemed uninhabitable, and with Diego Garcia itself still off limits, this ruling was merely a Pyrrhic victory. To borrow Tim Marshall’s term, Diego Garcia and the Chagossians remained “prisoners of geography.” 

Calls for for the return of Diego Garcia 

Unsurprisingly, the status of Diego Garcia has remained an ongoing subject of international legal disputes. In February 2019, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a ruling that Britain’s occupation of the Chagos Islands, including Diego Garcia, was illegal and that the islands should be returned to Mauritius. 

The court concluded that the detachment of the Chagos Islands from Mauritius in 1965 as part of the BIOT was unlawful and that the process of decolonization was incomplete. Whilst the court’s ruling was non-binding, it carried significant moral and political weight. 

Following the ICJ’s decision, the UN General Assembly then passed a resolution calling for the UK to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. However, the government refused to comply until this past October, citing the continued strategic importance of Diego Garcia for defense purposes. The US had also expressed opposition to any changes in the status of Diego Garcia until recently, when President Joe Biden reportedly pushed for a transfer of sovereignty.

History repeating itself

There is a sad irony at play with the recent willingness of the UK Government to comply with the ICJ’s decision. While the UK has agreed to hand over power, the judgment now gives control of the islands to Mauritius, not to the Chagossian peoples themselves. One very distant colonial power merely seems to have been replaced by another, less distant one. 

This recent development mirrors the events of 1965 when negotiations were brokered solely with the incoming Mauritian government of the day rather than the Chagossians themselves. To add further injustice to this recent political development, today’s agreement will continue to see Diego Garcia remain under US and UK jurisdiction for the next 99 years. This again is reflective of the 1965 narrative when it was made clear that Mauritius’s independence would not be granted without the annexation of Diego Garcia. 

History is repeating itself. Today, the only difference is that instead of being hidden in secret Foreign Office memos, this handover is being celebrated openly as the culmination of justice. 

The path forward

Some Chagossians see it as an event worth celebrating, at least according to the Mauritius Government Information Service. In the British press, the transfer of control is likewise being described as “making sense.” Meanwhile, international pundits are claiming that the agreement is a “‘win-win-win-win’ moment in international relations.”

Nevertheless, there is a flip side to this halcyon perception, namely the danger that the British, with UN connivance, are enabling Mauritius to rule an island group and its peoples some 2000 kilometers plus away without the consent of the entire indigenous population. 

Peter Lamb, the Labour MP for Crawley where a Chagossian community 3,000 strong resides, has been publicly critical of his own leader’s recommendation to hand the islands to Mauritius without their consent. He claimed that “the decision… belongs [to] the Chagossian people, it’s not for the UK to bargain away.” Other Chagossians are similarly highly critical, referencing indigenous rights. 

Wherever they reside, all Chagos Islanders deserve to have a say in their political future. Even with the return of the islands to Mauritius, little financial compensation is likely to reach the displaced Chagossians directly. Not to mention that base lease rights and payments notwithstanding, the entire archipelago has a potential exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of an astounding 640,000 km². It remains unclear if, and how, the Chagossians will regain independent rights to these zones and their resources. But the UK and US governments are not alone in bearing responsibility. The UN is also at fault in this dire situation, as the organization played a significant role in influencing the decision to return the atoll without the consent of the indigenous population. 

As the treatment of the Chagossian population in Diego Garcia demonstrates, history continuously repeats itself when it comes to the story of empire. As long as indigenous voices continue to be overlooked, the ghosts of the colonial past will haunt the present.

[Emma Johnson edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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The Far Right’s Alternative History

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What is particularly disturbing is the recognition that many recent violent crimes perpetrated by the extreme right seem to be connected or influenced by such worldviews. Anders Breivik, responsible for bombings and the shooting of 77 people in Norway in 2011, identifies as an Odinist. James Alex Field, arrested for the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, marched alongside a flag depicting the black sun, a Nazi symbol drawing directly on Germanic heathen Ariosophic imagery, which in turn had inspired the formation of the Thule Society.

This same black sun emblem appeared on the front and last pages of the manifesto of the Christchurch mass murderer in March 2019. The manifesto ended with the clarion call: “see you in Valhalla.” In the UK, Thomas Mair, who murdered West Yorkshire MP Jo Cox, was reported as being influenced by racist Ariosophic literature too.

Gospel of Hate

The internet, the dark web, online gaming forums and encrypted messaging services are frequently accused of helping to spread this gospel of hate. Thus, some academics, such as Steven Woodbridge, have cautioned of the need to watch the uses of “historical themes, imagery and language” that are used in these forums to promote their particular brand of violent political discourse. One of these potential memes is black metal music and its offshoot, national socialist black metal (NSBM). Indeed, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, in “Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity,” states that black metal and its “fascination with the occult, evil, Nazism and Hitler” were a possible motivation behind the 1999 massacre, on Hitler’s birthday, of 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado.

Black metal is also associated with a series of church burnings across Norway in the 1990s by Varg Vikernes, a racist heathen and black metal musician. More recently, it was reported that Holden Matthew, the 21-year-old charged with burning down three black churches in Louisiana, was also influenced by black metal and held racist heathen beliefs. Some of black metal’s aesthetics even appear to have influenced the violent imaginary of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division. Plato may have been correct when he warned “about the interconnectivity of politics and music.”

Black metal is an extreme genre of heavy metal that first emerged in the UK with the band Venom. The subgenre took its name from the title of Venom’s second album, “Black Metal,” released in 1982. It was intended as a rejection of the commercialization of heavy metal as well as a critique of modern secular society. A second wave of the movement, which was more ideological in orientation and often emphasized Satanism or paganism, became infamous for promoting a series of church burnings. It emerged primarily in Norway in the 1990s and is exemplified by such bands as Burzum.

This Norwegian second wave helped to popularize the genre even further and led to the creation of other black metal bands across Europe and the globe. So influential has this genre now become that one commentator said that “black metal has arguably become Norway’s greatest cultural export.”

Karl Spracklin defines black metal as “a form of extreme metal typified by evil sounds and elitist ideologies,” with a number of bands drawing on “nationalist and fascist images and themes.” Its sound is generally characterized by shrieking and growling vocals, disjointed guitar riffs, a frenetic pace and an emphasis on atmosphere, often deliberately created through the implementation of a raw, lo-fi quality of the recording. Many black metal performers tend to adopt pseudonyms and dress in a kind of Kiss-inspired corpse paint. Upside-down crucifixes and medieval weaponry, alongside Satanic and pagan imagery, additionally appear with relative frequency on black metal websites, CD covers and tattoos.

Other common musical and visual leitmotifs include war, death, fantasy, the apocalyptic and the mythological. Norwegian Satanic black metal band Gorgoroth, for example, took the inspiration for its name from a fictional setting in Tolkien’s land of Mordor. Although such motifs might be viewed as deliberately transgressive in order to attract devotees, some have suggested that black metal practitioners also intend the genre to function “as a springboard from which violent actions could logically emerge” with the specific intent of “reclaiming … a pagan heritage.”

National Socialist Black Metal

Defenders of the genre, however, argue that it “is not a unified, monolithic culture” and that accusations of violence are too frequently “fabricated by conservative groups seeking to impose their own moral agendas.” Indeed, bands such as the Rolling Stones and Eagles have been linked erroneously with a Satanic agenda as early as the late 1960s. Cronos of Venom also denies outright any religious affiliations, stating: “We are entertainers first and foremost — if I wanted to be a murderer or a Satanist, I’d do that full time instead of playing songs for a living.”

The genre is notoriously difficult to define, with a litany of subgenre offshoots, including unblack/Christian, depressive suicidal and ambient black metal, to name but a few extreme variants. Black metal followers also argue, in their defense, that the music is primarily mystical, celebrating a romantic and idealized view of the past which is heavy on ritual and critical of secularism. Aron Weaver, of the US black metal and heathen-inspired band Wolves in the Throne Room, describes it “as an artistic movement that is critiquing modernity on a fundamental level, saying that the modern world view is missing something.”

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Some contemporary UK black metal bands, such as Winterfylleth, while admitting that their “musical influence … unashamedly borrows from Burzum” and other black metal bands of an extremist predisposition, say that they do “not necessarily” believe the message behind those bands. A number of black metal followers would agree, as Spracklin points out, with many fans making “a distinction between the sound and the ideologies.” There are also heathen black metal bands, such as Norway’s Enslaved, that are avowedly anti-Satanic and anti-fascist.

Some black metal musicians are openly Satanist but reject Nazism. King ov Hell, who played in Gorgoroth, states that “I am totally against every form of flock ideology. Nazism is an ideology of the flock.” There is even a countermovement against Nazism within the black metal music scene, evidenced by the US-based band Neckbeard Deathcamp and its 2018 album, “White Nationalism is for Basement Dwelling Losers.” The latter is a satirical critique the NSBM subgenre, which is avowedly pro-Nazi.

Black Metal Against Racism

While it is important to point out that national socialist black metal remains a minority element within black metal, signs of far-right extremism similarly contaminate related musical genres such as goth, industrial and neofolk. The latter incorporates elements of traditional European folk and reconstructed medieval instruments, exemplified by such bands as Fire, Sol Invictus and Death in June. The latter take their name from the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler arranged the murder of his rivals in the Sturmabteilung critical of his policies. Nazi imagery, including the death head worn by the SS, is a consistent theme on their album covers, as are such Germanic runes like Algiz and Odal that were appropriated by neo-Nazis into their blood-and-soil ideology.

According to one Death in June fan on Nordic Elite in a post now removed, “European Civilisation … is going down the drain with the jewish/American mulicultural invasion.” But in the neofolk scene, too, there are recently established bands that are explicitly anti-racist and who reach a much larger, liberal audience. The band Heilung, for instance, recently issued a statement on the alleged harassment of a black woman at a performance in New York: “Apparently some people attended our ritual with the idea that Heilung is only for white people … This is not the case. Heilung is for ALL people, regardless of the color of the skin. And we are sorry that this happened at our show. We do not tolerate hate speech and racism.”

The neofolk band Wardruna, the authors of the soundtrack to the History Channel series “Vikings,” has made prominent anti-racist statements. In a blog promoting “antifascist neofolk bands from around the world,” the band’s lead singer, Einar Selvik, states: “It is a very positive effect, that increased interest does not allow the subculture on the extreme right wing to use our history in peace. We have somehow taken our own story back.”

Whilst outright extremism in the neofolk, black metal and related music scenes is not the norm, it is important to address this problem as well as to draw attention to instances in which such prejudice is less explicit. The Manchester-based Winterfylleth may denounce Nazism by labeling it “the first attempt at some kind of tyrannical EU,” but their critique of extremist politics is reserved. Note that they were “not necessarily” believers in national socialism — this is far from outright rejection.

Winterfylleth are overtly nationalistic and “unashamedly Anglo-Saxon in their approach” to their music, expressing a particular concern about a loss of national English identity. Hence their recent turn from black metal to a more lyrical folk black metal style, evidenced by their 2018 song “The Hallowing of Heirdom” with its melancholic refrain, “So who are we now?” Fandom comments on the latter signify an ambiguous range of responses to their politics and new musical direction, from the negative (“its like countryfile meets the druids”), to the more enthusiastic (“Celebrate that you are English… hail Woden”).

Another English pagan metal or folk metal band, Forefather, like Winterfylleth also celebrates its Anglo-Saxon roots. Intriguingly, with these UK bands, a broadly Germanic influence has become explicitly rooted more in specific English heathen blood-and-soil themes, exemplified in songs such as “When Our England Died.” Fan comments tend to praise the greatness of Anglo-Saxon culture and critique other foreign elements.

Beyond the Footnote

Given that not all black metal fans are fascists or Satanists, that many are simply intrigued by the genre’s ability to shock and entertain, and that some are genuinely attracted to the genre for its interest in ancient heathen religion, an even more specific blood-and-soil subgenre emerged from within black metal, the NSBM. National socialist black metal aimed to specifically distinguish its politics and religiosity much more clearly than black metal. It mixes extreme-right racism with paganism, is explicit in its rejection of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and was very much influenced in its development by the actions of Varg Vikernes. It is also violent, exemplified by the German NSBM band Absurd and their killing of a 15-year-old boy, which they also then referenced on the cover of their 1995 album, “Thuringian Pagan Madness.”

According to Benjamin Hedge Olson, NSBM “reskins the classical fascist ideological elements and combines them with racist and ethnic Paganism.” Critics state that NSMB is deliberately being utilized “as a vehicle to spread hate and radicalize nominally apolitical metal fans.” While many of these NSBM bands appear to be primarily Ukrainian and Scandinavian, the subgenre has become global. According to Celan Brill-Voelkle, “When the keywords ‘national socialism’ are searched in ‘the metal archives’, there are an astounding 774 results of active bands worldwide.”

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Ian Stuart Donaldson, former lead singer of the English Nazi rock band Skrewdriver, once stated that “A pamphlet is read only once, but a song is learnt by heart and repeated a thousand times.” Given their global reach and violent messaging, NSBM and other extremist elements within black metal can be seen to promote “paganism and Nordic folk myths … far more effectively than any number of meetings and marches could.” While others have commented on the way in which Christian nationalists are trying to infiltrate and influence mainstream Christian groups “in order to pull Christians to the far right,” there is an urgent need to monitor more closely a similar development within heathenry.

The black metal genre, alongside the existence of extremist racist heathen groups such as the O9A, is interesting for another theoretical reason too. It reinforces the conclusion made by Graham Macklin more than 15 years ago that if scholars of the far right in the UK look beyond a traditional narrow political lens, they will see that a study of fascism in Britain, given its wide cultural influence, deserves more than a mere epilogue or footnote in the history books.

*[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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