Sterling set up his own political party called Capricorn Africa. He proposed an alternative form of power where people like himself would civilise the black majority. It attracted widespread support among the white middle-class settlers. But it was firmly rejected by politicians in London. ibid.
In 1962 John Aspinall opened his own gambling club, the Clermont Club in Mayfair. Stirling was one of its members. The Clermont was deliberately designed to recreate a time when Britain had been rich and powerful. The set that Aspinall gathered around him at the Clermont were like Stirling disaffected right wingers, men who felt themselves out of tune with the consensus politics of the post-war world: they included James Goldsmith, a playboy and ferocious gambler who was to become a close friend of Stirling’s; the tycoon Tiny Roland who Stirling already knew from his time in Africa; Lord Lucan, a descendant of the man who had led the Charge of the Light Brigade; and Jim Slater, a takeover tycoon and asset-stripper who ran the notorious Slater-Walker. What united all these men was a belief in decisive action: it was this they believed that made Britain great not moderate post-war governments. ibid.
Then an event occurred in the Middle East which have Stirling the chance to reassert Britain’s power abroad but in a new different way: in September 1962 Egyptian troops invaded the Yemen. ibid.
They proposed a plan: a group of ex-SAS men would mount an operation to fight the Egyptians but they would do it privately. ibid.
[Prince] Faisal was terrified that Nassar would invade his county next and agreed to the British idea: the Saudis would pay for the war. ibid.
The Saudis agreed to pay for the British mercenaries but also to smuggle weapons into the Yemen. ibid.
What was invented in the Yemen was a new private form of foreign policy for Britain, paid for by other countries’ money. But then at the very moment when Stirling’s team seemed to be on the brink of success, an economic crisis hit Britain which threatened his whole concept: in 1964 a new Labour government was elected; almost immediately there was a run on the pound. ibid.
To save the pound Labour decided on wide-ranging spending cuts, and one of the main targets was defence. Denis Healey had been made minister of defence, and in 1965 he began a series of enormous cutbacks; he closed the overseas’ bases and brought the troops who had once protected the empire back home. ibid.
[Denis] Healey believed that instead British defence industries should make money for the country. The Americans were selling weapons throughout the world and Healey wanted Britain to compete with them and earn precious foreign currency. But Britain was not very good at selling weapons until David Stirling decided to get involved. ibid.
He [Khashoggi] told Lockheed that the only way to win the [arms] deal was to bribe the Saudi government. Ten years later in a Senate investigation Lockheed’s chairman admitted what had happened. Stirling told the British government they would have to do the same as the Americas: pay commission to their agents in King Faisal’s entourage. If they didn’t, Britain would lose the deal. In December 1965 the Saudis announced they would buy the British planes: the bribes had worked. It was the biggest export deal in Britain’s history. And King Faisal came on a state visit to celebrate it. It was also the beginning of the modern arms trade with the Middle East which has grown to dominate Britain’s economy. And from it also came a much wider commercial relationship with Saudi Arabia. ibid.
By the late ’60s many of Britain’s former colonies were being torn apart by civil war. In Nigeria the federal government were fighting a vicious campaign to stop Biafra from seceding. The British government were secretly supplying the federal side with weapons. Their aim was to protect Britain’s oil interests in Nigeria. ibid.
The federal government won helped by the British arms. But the resulting scandal clearly showed the limits of openly using arms sales as a tool of foreign policy. As coups and civil wars spread throughout the Third World, Stirling was determined to find a subtler way to maintain Britain’s influence in the world. He set up a secret organisation called WatchGuard: its job was to provide Africa and Middle-Eastern leaders with a private army of British mercenaries. They would prevent the rulers that Stirling approved of from being overthrown. WatchGuard was a great success. Stirling organised protection for leaders in Africa and the Middle East. ibid.
In Oman many of the Sultan’s advisers were ex-SAS men. They ran the Sultan’s guerrilla war against Marxist rebels. The rebels made a propaganda film attacking the Sultan and his British mercenaries. But the British won. ibid.
By the early ’70s [David] Stirling had become a successful businessman. He arranged enormous arms deals, and his mercenaries kept many third-world leaders in power. Almost single-handedly Stirling had created the foundations of Britain’s modern privatised foreign policy. It is a hidden world of vicious guerrilla wars fought by British mercenaries, a world that occasionally surfaces in scandals like the Sandfire affair. It all began with Stirling selling Britain’s military power to countries he approved of. ibid.
The price of oil had been massively increased as a result of the Arab/Israeli war. The oil-producing states led by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia were furious at American support for Israel. Their action had catastrophic effects for Western economies. ibid.
Stirling’s mercenaries returned home after twenty years of trying to keep Britain powerful. The country they came back to was very different from the one they had left. ibid.
The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make. And could just as easily make differently. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head I: Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain, David Graeber 1961-2020, BBCiplayer 2021
We are living through strange days. Across Britain, Europe and America societies have become split and polarised. Not just in politics but across the whole culture. There is anger at the inequality and the ever-growing corruption. And a widespread distrust of the elite. But at the same time there is a paralysis, a sense that no-one knows how to escape from it … And never a different tomorrow. ibid.
Because in the age of the individual what you felt and what you wanted and what you dreamed of were going to become the driving force across the world. ibid.
Often power that was decaying and desperate to keep its ascendancy. These strange days did not just happen; we and those in power created them together. ibid.
In the late 1950s as the British empire was falling apart, there was a growing sense that something was badly wrong under the surface. There was a feeling of unease. Despite all the reforms after the Second World War and the welfare state, the old forms of power had not gone away. And neither had the violence and the corruption that had always been a part of that power. ibid.
Reports had started to come back from one of the last parts of the empire Kenya that seemed to show that those in charge had gone out of control. They had been fighting a liberation movement called the Mau Mau. The reports said that hundreds of thousands of Kenyans had been put into special camps where they were going to be psychologically adjusted. The British were trying to manipulate what their chief psychologist called The African mind. But what then happened in the camps turned into a frenzied madness. The British used mass torture and killing as they desperately tried to hold on to power. The government in London denied all the accusations but the rumours of violence and horror continued. ibid.
Those who came to Britain from the empire were shocked at the strange country they found … a sad and frightened country. ibid.
In the homeland, England, the old structure of power remained intact. And not only in the Institutions. But inside people’s heads as well. The old attitudes of power were still deeply embedded in the minds of the establishment who dominated the country. Those in charge demanded obedience. ibid.
Peter Rachman was far more than the brutal gangster he was portrayed as. He had lived an extraordinary life … The English judged him: he was hated with an overwhelming disgust as the face of evil … On the surface there was the overt racism against the immigrants that Rachman was bringing into Notting Hill … Rachman’s property empire was a brutal and violent one but it was doing something that polite English society completely refused to do: he was giving people on the very margins of society – prostitutes and black immigrants – somewhere to live … They hated him for it. ibid.
‘This is Peter Rachman: one of Britain’s big-time twentieth century racketeers.’ ibid. Panorama
Behind the polite veneer of the middle classes there was a hard ruthlessness and a suspicion of others. DeFreitas [Rachman heavy] gave it a name: he called it Englishism, it came he said from both an anger and melancholy at the loss of their empire. Then, Peter Rachman died of a heart attack. And Michael DeFreitas suddenly found that he was the new face of evil. ibid.
For men like Robin Douglas-Home the expectation of power had been deeply embedded inside their minds. But as the world had changed around them, real power ebbed away. They were left with a terrible melancholy. But in some would turn to despair. A year after filming, Robin Douglas-Home committed suicide. ibid.
Edgar Mittelholzer had come to England in the 1950s from British Guyana. And he had become a best-selling novelist. What Mittelholzer wrote about was violence: the violence and the racism that had been at the heart of the European empires. Mittelholzer believed that it still haunted the minds of those who had ruled the empires … One night Mittelholzer walked up the hill by his house, poured paraffin over himself and set himself alight. He burned to death. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head II: Shooting and Fucking are the Same Thing
One evening after making a speech in Reading Michael X [DeFreitas] was arrested. And he was sent to prison for ten months for inciting racial hatred. The MP Enoch Powell had also made a speech at the same time violently attacking immigrants. He wasn’t charged and he carried on being an MP, which Michael X said rather proved his point. ibid.
Michael X realised that what was happened now in Notting Hill was the opposite: people were being treated as subjects to be counted and measured and managed. He became increasingly cynical about the liberals’ real intentions. Michael X had come to believe that the talk of revolution had just been empty rhetoric that disguised something else. The new groups might look like radicals and dance to black music but really they were the children of the colonialists who had run the empire, and they had no intention of giving up their power. That old system of power was simply mutating, morphing into a new form that camouflaged itself in radicalism but still would manage and control. ibid.
What the Chinese were alleging in their campaign was historically accurate, but what they didn’t know was that the opium trade had also had powerful consequences inside Britain itself. It had started to undermine the self-confidence of the British empire, and introduce a dark and corrosive fear into the heart of British society. By the middle of the nineteenth century those who ran Britain were already aware of the horrors created by the slave trade. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head V: The Lordly Ones *****