As Western leaders pontificate about unlawful annexation in the context of the Ukraine war, perhaps some British politicians should pause before feeling so smug about their loudly protested “unlimited support” for freedom and national self-determination.

Let’s recall: the island of Diego Garcia was not only stolen from Mauritius—brazenly ignoring a UN resolution and multiple international court verdicts—but its indigenous population was also forcibly deported. To add insult to injury, Britain quietly leased the island to the United States, which in 1991 transformed it into the principal refueling base for the Bush administration’s illegal and murderous carpet bombing of Iraq, a campaign aimed squarely at eliminating Iraqi competition to Saudi Arabian oil.

To this day, the small island has not been returned to its rightful owners. According to John Pilger in Hidden Agenda, the British Foreign Office even dared to tell an aggrieved Mauritian government that the island’s sovereignty was “no longer negotiable.”

Of course, the catalogue of state terrorism perpetrated by the UK and US—so often euphemistically labeled “coercive diplomacy”—is a long one: from Malaya to Cambodia, Kenya to British Guiana, Panama to Iraq, Vietnam to Nicaragua, Somalia to El Salvador. If you wish, add US-sponsored Israel and its ongoing unlawful “self-defence” against Lebanon and Palestine.

Even today, the UK remains the world’s second-largest weapons exporter, just behind the USA—steadfastly ignoring any notion of morality as a premise for its “foreign relations.” As The Guardian has reported, “Britain is Saudi Arabia’s second-largest arms dealer after the US, providing military exports worth £10.3 billion over the past decade, despite continued condemnation of the kingdom’s use of British weaponry in its bombing of Yemen.”

History must never be erased or ignored. As George Santayana warned, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The power of those in the present to sabotage our understanding of the past is sometimes the most terrifying weapon against our future.

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