Richard Poe - Are the British Destabilising Africa Through Economics and Intelligence?

Show Notes and Transcript

New York Times bestselling author and award winning journalist Richard Poe always gives great context and depth to news stories so he returns to Hearts of Oak for a leftfield conversation concerning Britain and Africa. 
Last year, Italy's Prime Minister, Georgia Meloni suddenly started denouncing French neo-colonialism, blaming them for keeping Africa poor and forcing the inhabitants to flee to Europe. 
Richard asks if she is focussing in the right direction, is it not the British who are destabilising Africa through economic levers and intelligence operations? 
We have seen African governments falling like dominoes with 7 coups in just three years. 
What lies behind these and are they connected or just purely random?

Richard Poe is a New York Times-bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He has written widely on business, science, history and politics.
His books include The Shadow Party, co-written with David Horowitz; The Einstein Factor, co-written with Win Wenger; Perfect Fear: Four Tales of Terror; Black Spark, White Fire; the WAVE series of network marketing books; and many more.
Richard was formerly editor of David Horowitz’s FrontPageMag, contributing editor of NewsMax, senior editor of SUCCESS magazine, reporter for the New York Post, and managing editor of the East Village Eye.

Connect with Richard...
WEBSITE: https://www.richardpoe.com/
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/RealRichardPoe?s=20
SUBSTACK: https://richardpoe.substack.com/
BOOKS: https://amzn.eu/d/18lNMtp
Interview recorded 8.9.23

*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.

Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and Twitter https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20 

To sign up for our weekly email, find our social media, podcasts, video, livestreaming platforms and more...https://heartsofoak.org/connect/

Please subscribe, like and share!

 

Subscribe now

Transcript

(Hearts of Oak)

Hello, Hearts of Oak, and welcome to another interview coming up in a moment with Richard Poe, who re-joined us. He was last with us when we looked at his book, The Shadow Party, looking at George Soros and his control, power, and influence. And today we look at something completely different, and that is a thread that he put up on Twitter titled, Are the British Destabilizing Africa?
And this is from a video that Giorgia Meloni, the Italian PM, put up denouncing French neo-colonialism and I often think well the Brits did good in Africa but maybe the French and the Belgians and the Germans and they were a bit naughty. But Richard brings his deep understanding, his delves deep into this subject and, exposes maybe why that thinking is not necessarily correct, how the British have been closely involved, look an economic side of it but also the intelligence services and how they operate and look in some of the recent coups, maybe what lies behind that a little bit.
So much to pack into this huge subject.

Richard Poe, it is wonderful to have you back with us again.
Thank you so much for joining us again today.

(Richard Poe)

Thanks, Peter, it's great to be here. 

Great, and we're going to go through quite a bit.
Just before we jump in, I'll just say to the viewers, that Richard is well worth following because his tweets actually bring something quite different.
Bring the historical side to a lot of what happens and I think the conservatives movement can often be guilty of kind of in your face what's happened that morning and by the afternoon it's old news and just for our viewers and listeners I think Richard brings context often to stories that are happening but whenever Richard is last on we look through his book The Shadow Party. How George Soros, Hillary Clinton and the 60s radicals seize control of the Democratic Party. That is in the description for you to go back and have a look at and delve deeper into that topic. But he is a bestseller on many other books but that's what we stuck on and of course former editor of Front Page Magazine and we've had David Horowitz on with us before. But Richard there, people can obviously find you @RealRichardPoe, richardpoe.com, the website, and Richard Poe on Substack.
Everything is in there for the viewer and listeners to take advantage of.
Richard, one tweet that caught my eye, and we will delve a little bit into that, is on Africa and the Brits. And as much as I like blaming the French for everything as a Brit, that is our national pastime, sometimes the British have been at fault over history for a few things. If it hasn't been the French, it's probably been the Brits or the Belgians maybe. But there was a statement I think by Georgia Meloni, the Premier of Italy, and she had started denouncing French neo-colonialism and you had put up about the British destabilizing Africa. Do you want to maybe just begin with that and set out why we can't point the fingers solely at the French?

Right. Well, basically, I knew something about, let's call it the neo-colonial infrastructure of Africa, because I was actually hired by a think tank, oh, more than 10 years ago to do a paper on that subject. And for various reasons, it was never published, but it was extremely eye-opening. What I basically discovered, to my astonishment, was that the EU, and in particular Great Britain, France as well, but really Great Britain more than anyone else, had essentially continued their colonial relationship beyond the date when these various African countries supposedly became independent, that what they actually did, they being the various European colonial powers, is they simply set up alternate structures through various kinds of diplomatic channels and the UN system as it was being set up.
So that the UN today.
Really is a neo-colonial structure. And that's really what I discovered in this research, which again, never saw the light of day.
A topic I may write about someday in my memoirs. But so I had studied this in some detail, these NGOs and international treaties and such that had been set up for the very purpose of making sure that those European countries which had formerly owned colonies in Africa continued to maintain that relationship.
So specifically the Anglophone colonies that were English speaking, maintained their relationship with Great Britain.
The Francophone colonies maintained their relationship with France and so on.
And in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, establishing the European Economic Commission, or community.
This relationship was actually formalized, whereas the countries which had been former colonies, and I think the way they put it in the treaty, they didn't call them colonies, but they said countries in Africa having a special relationship to members of the EEC, would have a certain kind of membership in the EEC.
I think they were called associated members.
And they would have a special diplomatic and economic relationship with the EEC, trade privileges and so forth.
So maybe because I researched this so deeply, I don't want to bore your viewers with so many details, but the bottom line is, so in the last few weeks on Twitter, we've suddenly seen an uproar from, especially from certain influencers with these coups that have been happening in Africa.
In particular, there have been six coups in three years.
In a number of countries, most of which are former French colonies.
In fact, all of which are former French colonies except Sudan, and the cry has gone out that at last the freedom-loving people of Africa are getting on their feet and overthrowing the yoke of French colonialism. This map has been getting wide circulation and all this enthusiasm from people on Twitter about overthrowing French colonialism. So I thought this was remarkable for a couple of different reasons. First of all, I thought French colonialism was overthrown a long time ago, or at least that's the official story. I remember as a kid, you know, in the 1960s, that was the big thing. The end of colonialism. It's all over. And, you know, these nationalist leaders in Africa who had become, you know, the first presidents of the newly independent countries. These were big pop culture heroes in the 60s. And so now so many decades later to say, finally at last French colonialism is being overthrown. So on the one hand I thought that was interesting because it broke with the pop culture narrative that we were all brought up with that colonialism ended decades ago. All of a sudden it's here, it's now, and it's being overthrown in the year 2023. But the other thing that caught my attention is that they were specifically referring to French colonialism, when in fact there were several colonial powers, in Africa. There was Great Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, the list goes on.
And in the case of Italy and Germany, their colonies were taken away because of world wars.
But still, there were several colonial powers that remained, which still considered themselves officially, quote unquote, responsible for their former colonies, which meant, especially in the case of France, that they would intervene militarily in those countries when they felt there was some need to do so.
And the French in particular have done this probably more than any other quote unquote former colonial power, but the British do it too. They just have a more subtle way of doing it.
And so this is what I discovered that think tank research had done more than 10 years ago.
So that was the second reason that I was, or the third reason that I was surprised by this sudden enthusiasm for throwing off the yoke of French colonialism, because I knew that in fact there was such a thing as French colonialism, and there was in fact such a thing as EU colonialism.
The EU itself as a bureaucratic entity has directly involved itself in the management and admin of the African continent.
And so I knew all these things, but most people don't.
And it just was surprising to me to suddenly see this acknowledgment of that colonial relationship which in the past had been very controversial and hushed up and denied.

Can I ask, because I've been reading a book on tax havens and delving into that world, understanding about money flows, and the book basically starts with the French, takes Gabon as an example of how the French set up the president there, and the coup has supposedly removed his son Ali Bongo and they use this as an example of how the French control large parts of Africa and I read that as a Brit thinking you see France have been really bad we're actually Africa should be thanking the Brits for what we've done for education roads and is is that a very simplistic view of Africa. 

Well, when you say simplistic you mean the view that Africa was actually better off under colonialism? 

Yes, because I know I've seen stuff and I've seen even you retweeted the thought that actually what Africa needs is for those colonial powers to go back and to fix it once again. That obviously would not be a popular view in many parts of Africa with the whole conversation about payments, colonial payments, repatriations, all of that. But my simplistic view is, well, Britain could actually fix that, build a few more roads, a few more hospitals, a few more schools, and life would be good again. Is that view extremely simplistic?

Well, I would simply have to confess that I don't know, in answer to that question.
The fact is, what I'm learning now, excuse me, the research that I'm doing now about the American Revolution and the economic and financial reasons for, the reasons why our founding fathers wanted independence from England in the first place, I'm really learning a lot about the colonial system and how it works.
And you know, there are people in America who say essentially the same thing.
We're not quite in as bad of a fix as Africa yet, although we seem to be headed that direction pretty quickly.
There are people in America who are monarchists and who are questioning whether we were better off under the British, as strange as that might seem to you.
And you're seeing that more and more. I think it's being pushed a little bit on social media in some quarters as a kind of PSYOP, and the fact is, you really have to dig to some extent to try to figure out, you know, why did the founding fathers feel so strongly that they needed to get away from England?
And there actually were some really compelling reasons, most of which had to do with an extremely oppressive economic system that was enforced by law, in particular by the so-called Navigation Act, whose effect was basically to keep the colonies by force of law in a situation where we had to produce raw materials, food, crops, tobacco, cotton, things like that, and to sell them very cheaply in England and then to get all of our manufacturers from England, where they were beginning to have their industrial revolution and we had to buy them more expensively. And this is the heart and soul of the colonial relationship. The colony produces raw materials and food and sells them to the, very cheaply.
The mother country then sells us, the colony, everything that we need in terms of manufactured goods, but they sell them quite expensively. And so there is a permanently enforced balance of trade, which is wildly disadvantageous to the colonized state.
And this system is enforced by local corruption, because in order to make such a system work, you have to get local people to support the colonial relationship, and you make them very, very rich, but at the expense of the majority of people.
And the best illustration for that in the United States is the pre-Civil War South, the Antebellum South, where you had a cotton-producing economy, which was almost entirely run for Britain.
Almost all the cotton was sold, I think more than 80 percent, was sold to Great Britain, which was, of course, at that time the leading producer of cotton textiles in the world.
And so some people, like our little Harris family in Gone with the Wind, got very, very rich selling cotton to England.
But the way they did it was by enslaving people and making them work for free as slaves.
And it was argued at the time of the American Civil War and in the years leading up to it that this colonial system, that essentially the American South had been recolonized by England and that slavery was the result of that. This was argued by certain economists at the time who were sympathetic to the Northern position. They were saying that the institution of slavery in the South was a direct result of the elite southern planters whose livelihood depended on Great Britain, on trading with them.
Always having to try to please their British buyers by keeping the price low because the British did have other places where they could go. They were constantly trying to develop other sources of high-quality cotton in Brazil, in India, in Egypt, in other places.
And so the southern planters who were what modern scholars would call a colonial elite, they were a small portion of the population who enforced essentially a British colonial system because it made them rich personally, but it was at the cost of everyone else, where the black slaves and the poor whites as well, essentially there wasn't much left for them at the end.
And they weren't allowed to develop an industrial economy because that's not what the British wanted. They wanted the South to remain an agrarian society that devoted itself to selling cotton.
So this situation actually led directly to the American Civil War, which was the most terrible episode in our history. And I wrote an article about this called How the British caused the American Civil War.
What happened is the North started to, trying to impose tariffs on overseas trade for the specific purpose of discouraging the southern planters from selling to England and the British did what they do when their colonial interests are threatened. They sent in their secret agents and their provocateurs and one in particular named Thomas Cooper, who was a British, apparently, intelligence agent. He had first gotten his start going to France and helping to stir up the French Revolution. Then he moved to South Carolina.
He became a very prominent, respected person. He was a judge. And in 1828, he delivered a speech calling for secession of the South. And this speech is widely recognized by historians as having been the beginning of the Southern secession movement. So because of that and various other manoeuvres, including material assistance, which Great Britain gave to the South during the Civil War.
It is very clear and in fact undeniable, although it's been scrubbed pretty much from our history books. It is undeniable that Great Britain caused and instigated the American Civil War and did everything in their power to help the South win. And you can see British newspapers and political speeches by British statesmen. There was no question that they were on the side of the South and they wanted the South to win and they tried very hard to intervene, including having the French put a very large army into Mexico, putting a lot of British troops into Canada.
So, what I'm saying by this, Peter, is that when you look behind the scenes, when you look at the surface, you might think that colonialism, or British colonialism, is seemingly benign, and that it actually helps people who are in a lower phase of development to develop infrastructure and trade and education and health and all these things, that it brings in money, it brings in expertise, and all of that. But when you look a a little deeper, you realize that the intention of the colonializers or the colonizers, whatever.
Is not fundamentally a good intention. That what they want is to set up economic relationships that are actually disadvantageous to the colonized country in the long run. And to maintain those relationships, even if it means tearing apart a country in civil war, and in our case a country of people of European and British and Irish stock, especially at that time.
It wasn't even a matter of race, you know. It's just when those economic interests are threatened, the colonizing power becomes very ruthless and the colonial elites become loyal to a foreign country instead of to their own country, which is what happened in our South.
So, on the one hand, yes, I would agree that this question of were certain parts of the world under colonialism, I don't want to answer with a knee-jerk response to say, oh, out with the colonizers, it's racist, it's sexist, it's homophobic, it's whatever.
Yeah, I just threw in homophobic just for the heck of it. Actually, I don't even say that.
But I mean, what I'm saying is I hear what you're saying, I hear your question and I absolutely don't go with the knee jerk.
Woke or politically correct, autumn idea that colonialism was totally bad.
I don't go with it. I think it's a complicated question.
But I also think that my research into the colonial past of my own country, the United States shows that our relationship with England was in fact terribly damaging to our country.
Even though there were good aspects to it as well, because our own industrialization of the building of the Great American Railroads, all of that was funded by British capital.
So it's two sides of the same coin. But if you have a foreign country meddling in your affairs and doing things like causing secessions and civil wars, that's a very serious matter.
So what would, what would Africa really be like? The narrative now is, well, look, it's in a hopeless condition.
The dictators, genocides, wars, constant military coups, and so forth.
And if the colonizing powers came back, maybe everything would be better and nicer.
But it's not always in the interests of the colonizing powers to make everything nicer and better.
And I guess that's what I'm saying. And I also would raise the question as to what extent, these troubles that we're having today are actually caused by covert interference, by the West and by the former colonial powers.
And, I think in this case that we're talking about now with these former French colonies, there's some kind of psy-op going on where, for reasons, let's say reasons unknown.
Whoever controls the political discourse on Twitter is pretending to be all excited about these military coups and pretending that it all has to do with some mass movement from the ground level of people who want to throw off the yoke of French colonialism. But the fact is, first of all, these countries, most of them have had many, many coups. It's not at all unusual. They're showing this map, they're saying, oh my gosh, six coups in three years. That's actually not so unusual, for those countries or others in Africa. And the other thing that's kind of weird about it is, are these really French colonies or former French colonies, or are they just nominally French colonies and actually some other countries among whom is Great Britain are actually calling the shots there. And so it gets into this, and so I guess on one level I'm saying yes it is it is simplistic if we assume that whatever the news tells us is correct that once upon a time there was colonial Africa then the colonial powers all left for some unstated reason, which is never really adequately explained. And then supposedly these African countries were on their own and then supposedly all hell broke loose and they all started killing and massacring each other. I think it probably is a little naïve to accept that narrative at face value. I am not at all convinced that that's exactly what happened.
And what instead appears to have happened is that the old colonial system was replaced by a new colonial system, basically run by the United Nations system, and that these disorders were allowed to go on.
And in fact, in some cases, encouraged to go on for all kinds of reasons.
I'll give you one example. 

Yeah, give me an example and then I'll bring up another piece you had up, so go with your example.

One famous example, of course, was the Rwandan genocide in 1994, where now Rwanda was a French colony and, in fact, while the genocide was happening, there were French troops there who were supposedly trying to stop it, and they were very sharply criticized for being strangely ineffective in not being able to stop it, especially since they were modern troops with modern weaponry and these people who were committing the genocide were supposedly armed with only machetes.
So there were questions about the French handling of it. But even beyond that, the result of this genocide was that Rwanda, was subsequently taken into the British Commonwealth.
Whereas before it had been in the French sphere of influence.
And the normal traditional rule of the Commonwealth is that countries who are admitted to it are supposed to be former British colonies, but Rwanda wasn't.
It was taken as a special case because the French had supposedly done such a terrible job of not protecting their people that it passed into the proprietorship of Great Britain.
And so, I'm not the only person who has to raise an eyebrow and ask the question, qui bono? I mean, if Rwanda passed from French control to British control, and if the pretext for that passage, was the Rwanda genocide, would it be out of line to ask, what caused the genocide in the first place?
And to what extent was it possibly even instigated by some foreign power, as was the American Civil War, as we're now learning more than 150 years after the fact.
So that's one example. I could give others, but you said you had a point you wanted to make.

Well, because you obviously, in a lot of the information you put out, you're talking about the intelligence services of the West and how they work behind the scenes.
But then also there's the economic side.
And this was, this is kind of the article I was touching on, let me bring up, this was a Daily Mail article, Recolonize Africa.
And you said that it seems to be saying, and this is an old article, 2005, but it gives historical context once again, says it appears to say that Africa's become so violent and lawless that most African countries will welcome, kind of the West, colonial powers coming back in again. But then you mentioned the kind of colonial economic side, I think, when you look at the EU and how the EU keeps a lot of the countries poor through their tax and tariff systems is, yeah.
I'm wondering where does, again, the fault lies at the economic side?
Is it still the intelligence services working very much within those countries?
Is it a mixture of those two?
Yeah, what are your thoughts on that? 

Well, I would go so far as to say that I don't believe that the colonial powers of Europe specifically, ever let go of their colonies, especially France and Britain. I think they simply found a different way to administer them and actually a cheaper and more efficient way where they didn't have to physically occupy these countries anymore and they didn't have to be held responsible for things like mass murders and genocides and coups and so forth, that they could have a more rough and ready kind of environment and they didn't have to worry about looking good in the face of world opinion.
So in some ways it's actually a better situation for them than the situation they had before where they really had to make everything look good because their flag was flying over these various countries and if they committed terrible atrocities or allowed atrocities to be committed there would be consequences. Other European countries would criticize them and would take advantage. And we see that, for example, in the ruckus that the British propagandists made at the turn of the century over the Belgian Congo, where terrible atrocities were committed by King Leopold II in the
push to harvest rubber, and he basically enslaved the whole people of the Congo and subjected them to terrible, inhumane practices.
And the British, for their own reasons, made a huge, big deal about that.
This was back in the turn of the century, of the 20th century, in the 1900s.
And they made a huge ruckus about it and said, oh, how terrible, look how badly he's treating these people.
The part of that story you never hear about is that the British themselves, British interests were heavily involved in the rubber trade in the Belgian Congo and were taking part
in all of it.
That part is never mentioned. Likewise, there was a similar ruckus in Peru, again over rubber harvesting.
Now Peru was officially never anyone's colony since its independence from Spain, but in fact a lot of people don't know that the British basically exercised an informal control of Peru and some say that they still do to this day.
And there was another big public relations ruckus over cruelties related to the rubber trade in Peru, which again British missionaries and human rights activists were leading.
And it was somehow effectively concealed that the British themselves were deeply involved in committing these atrocities.
So it's really a world of smoke and mirrors, where propaganda and psychological operations have really been part of the whole
toolkit of colonialism really since the very beginning, and I believe that the reason the British became the greatest and most successful colonizers in the world is specifically because they are the best propagandists and the best at psychological operations. They basically invented modern psyops, and they're the very best in that field to this day, and that's really what it's all about.
It's all about how to do things in foreign countries without seeming to be doing them, or to blame other people for doing them, such as blaming King Leopold II of Belgium for all these atrocities, and he certainly was guilty of them, but leaving out the part that British financial interests were in there very heavily, helping him to commit them.
So this continues to go on today, where we have now a very fluid situation, a neo-colonial situation, as the left, as the Marxists named it decades ago, where the colonial colonizing countries are still there, and they're still probably just as much in control as ever were, but no longer held responsible to keep order in the same way they used to be.
So it's really kind of a better situation for them.
They can get away with a lot more. Now in these, the interesting thing in that article by Andrew Roberts, the British historian, he wrote that article in 2005.
A lot of people in our, as you pointed out, in our social media culture think 2005 was, you know, like the last millennium or something. But actually, it's very important to understand what was happening then because,
what actually happened is that the EU was in the process then of setting up an elaborate neo-colonial structure which basically controls Africa to this day.
And now I mentioned that in the original treaty of Rome setting up the EEC back in 1957, they already had a formal relationship with past and present colonies in Africa which they recognized in that treaty.
They call it a special relationship.
And in the 1990s, some strange things started to happen.
Which is that as the EU became activated and the Maastricht Treaty and the Eurozone, and it started becoming a reality, this thing that people have been talking about since the 1890s and before, It started becoming a reality in the 90s and immediately the cry went up to form an African union.
And there was a strategy developed called the Joint EU Africa Strategy.
And the motto of this EU Africa group was one Europe, one Africa.
And what they wanted was a United Europe dealing one-on-one with the United Africa.
So they wouldn't, that is so the European countries would not have to negotiate separately with each little country in Africa.
They would have one authority controlling the entire continent with whom they could make their deals and their treaties, whatever those were.
So interestingly, Muammar Gaddafi, the late dictator or president of Libya.
He came out in, I forget what year it was.
It could have been, it was around 19, in the late 1990s, I think.
He made a very controversial speech in Libya where he said that the Arab Maghreb Union was a farce.
That now the Maghreb is basically all of North Africa except Egypt.
And in 1989, I think they had come together to form a regional economic structure called the Arab Maghreb Union. And Gaddafi had been one of the leading people pushing that.
It was actually his brainchild, supposedly. But then, I think it was 15 years later, he gave this speech saying, let me tell you the truth.
The reason we formed this Maghreb Union was because the EU forced us to do it.
They said, we're not going to do business with you anymore because it's too burdensome dealing with each country unless you, unless all the Maghreb countries of North Africa come together in a union, we're not going to even talk to you. So on that basis, Gaddafi got up in circa 1989, and using the language of third world-ism and the non-aligned movement and Arab nationalism.
Said that what we need to do is form this union so we can all be strong, all us Arab-speaking countries in Africa together. But then 15 years later, he openly and publicly confessed actually the EU is the one who wanted us to get together, had nothing to do with Arab nationalism, and they basically forced us to do it. And so then he said, let's dissolve this union, let's get out of it.
Oh, it was in 2003, I just remembered. It was in 2003, so this was post 9-1-1, it was after Afghanistan and Iraq had been invaded, so things weren't looking too good for Arab nationalism at that moment. And so Gaddafi, getting with the spirit of the time, said the Arabs are finished, they're a laughingstock, and we want nothing to do with Arabs anymore, even though we're Arab speaking. We are now African. And then he came up with a new idea. Let's have an African union, he said. Now, actually, he had already proposed the African Union. It came into being in the year 2000, and supposedly Gaddafi was the one who thought of it and was the founding father of this African Union. But, you know, in 2003, he confessed that the last time he pulled that manoeuvre with the Arab Maghreb Union, it was the EU forcing him to do it.
Should we imagine that on the second go-round with the African, that he suddenly became the third world Nationalist that he always claimed to be or was he simply like Scarlett O'Hara and all those southern planters in the United States in the antebellum South, was he simply, lining his own pockets by doing business with the colonizers and going where he thought the power was.
Well, it looks like the latter.
And that's how colonial elites work. You know, people are not that idealistic, unfortunately.
I wish they were, but let's face it, they're not.
You know, people will go where the money is, and that's just how it is.
And so they formed this African Union to the cries from the EU of one Europe, one Africa, And they started signing all kinds of treaties and putting forth all kinds of policies that were completely mysterious and unknown to the African people who have enough of a struggle trying to get democratic government as it is.
But now all of a sudden, whatever democratic structures had been set up at a national level in the individual countries had suddenly become obsolete because now the EU was talking directly to these officials in charge of this thing called the African Union.
And the African Union was empowered to make treaties that could be enforced on all African countries. Imagine that.
So, now that we've had the African Union since the year 2000.
And one of its rules, supposedly, is that you're supposed to have free elections which are monitored by international authorities and absolutely no military coups.
Military coups are strictly not allowed.
And yet, since then, we've had the Arab Spring.
These colour revolutions and civil wars in the Western powers, and now we're having these, continuing to have these coups, which everybody is cheering about on Twitter.
All of this is supposedly, supposed to be impossible and illegal under the African Union and should trigger military interventions by the African Union.
I think they call it the African Union Peace and Security, something or other, which basically mobilizes peacekeeping troops and also arranges to have European troops to come in, in order to fix problems, whatever they are.
And so the mechanism actually exists in Africa probably better than anywhere else in the world where you have a transnational authority, the African Union, which actually has the real power and the real willingness to bring in heavy military force whenever they like, to stop things like military coups from happening, and yet they're still happening.
Why is that? Why is that?

I'll pick up on one thing as we finish. Realizing the Gaddafi started African Union changes my whole concept of it. That blows me away. But the fact that when you look at the EU, the EU, European Union, has been hugely successful at control within Europe economically.
There are lots of questions that the EU has never been able to rise above and be a economic bloc, I guess, to rival the US, which was always the dream, probably, of the EU and the European Economic Community before that. But it's full control of EU members and if the EU can punish and has done with those in Eastern Europe for many violations on tax, on faith, on immigration.
But the African Union, you don't hear of it as having that much say or power.
It hasn't brought together those countries.
Can we just finish just maybe touching on that, that kind of comparison between one bloc in Europe that has worked certainly for control, the African Union, is that by design or are there other reasons behind that?

Well, I think it's by design that the African Union is weak. Is that what you're saying?
That it really doesn't exercise the authority it's supposed to. I think it's by design.
I think it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, which is to create a central authority for European powers, especially Great Britain, which really masterminded the whole thing, in my opinion.
And if you, I would just like to leave your audience with one point, which, is that article you showed by Andrew Roberts, where he said it's time to to recolonize Africa. That was in 2005.
That was right after Tony Blair had done his African, Africa commission and they had mapped out this whole plan for basically re-colonizing Africa through the African Union and through other regional structures.
Now in that article, Andrews actually says, he actually states that the French and the Germans will not be allowed to re-colonize Africa, that only English speaking countries.
He actually says the United States and Great Britain, and with the support of New Zealand, Canada, and Australia, will be the ones to make this happen.
The French, because of their cruelty in the past and their mishandling of all kinds of colonial situations, will not be allowed to have anything to do with it, nor will the Germans, because look what they did when they were colonialists back before World War I.
You think 2005 was a long, long time ago, but he, Roberts actually evoked what the Germans did before World War I as a reason why they will not be allowed to take part in this great project of colonizing Africa.
So now all of a sudden we're getting all this propaganda from Giorgia Meloni of Italy and from big influencers like Ian Miles Cheong.
I don't mean to single him out, but he wrote this extraordinary tweet saying, yes, the people of West Africa are rising up against French colonialism.
We're going towards a multipolar world. Hooray. Some words to that effect.
He linked it to the whole idea of multi-polarism.
And what is that all about? That's about overthrowing the global hegemon, the USA, which is supposedly the cause of all evil in the world.
Overthrowing the USA, stripping us of our power, so then power can be decentralized among various countries. And so certain influencers such as Ian Miles Cheong is out there celebrating and saying, yes, out with the French, out with the French. Is it just a coincidence that Andrew Roberts, when he first publicized this recolonization plan, he expressly said the French are out.
We will not allow the French to take part in this now, all of a sudden, so many years later we're hearing that cry again that the French are out. And some of these French countries, French colonies, so-called, one of them Guinea, maybe on another, we don't have time to talk about it now, but I have massive evidence that the British are really effectively in control in that country, Guinea, and running things in an extraordinary way, quite openly, including Rio Tinto, the mining company, the Anglo-Australian mining company, and Guinea has more than one half of the world's bauxite deposits, aluminium ore.
And Rio Tinto has been trying to get in control of that, working with the Chinese.
And it's interesting that, you know, the cry goes out, you know, from all the usual sources, the US State Department and what have you, oh the Chinese are taking over in Africa, that's one of the reasons why we have to go back in there and otherwise the Chinese are going to take over everything. But I notice whenever the British get involved with something, they somehow bring the Chinese with them. I'm not sure why they do that, but it's a little strange, what can I say?

Well, we'll leave it on a cliff-hanger, that, about the British involvement there, and we'll pick up on that. Richard, I really do appreciate coming on. As I said at the beginning, I love reading your tweets and how you expand on so much. So thank you for joining us today and going through that Africa tweet, which is one of your latest ones. Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Peter. Always a pleasure.