This is a true story. In the Fall of 1963 I was travelling on a ship from Israel to Turkey. Midway, the ship was scheduled to make a stopover in Cyprus. At the time the Cypriot population was about 80% Christian Greek, and 20% Muslim Turk.
On that ship I befriended a middle-aged journalist. I believe his name was Andrew Ellison, but I could be wrong. Anyway, one drunken night, Ellison confided to me that he was going to stay in Cyprus. He told me that he was being paid to start a newspaper. The secret underlying purpose of the newspaper was to print atrocity stories about the Christian Greeks killing Muslim Turks. He said the point of the atrocity stories was to stoke enough racial strife so that the Turkish army would be politically justified to invade Cyprus and take as much land as it could. Ellison invited me to join him on this endeavour, but I demurred and continued onward to Istanbul.
As you can verify in any history, this is more or less what happened. It got delayed about 10 years for other reasons, but in 1974 the plot paid off, and the formerly unified country of Cyprus was divided into a Muslim North and a Christian South. So far, the international “community” hasn’t accepted this division, but the facts on the land will soon enough become facts on paper.
I’ll get to the point of this story in a minute, but let me divert briefly. If you ever come across atrocity reporting in the media, it’s a safe bet that it’s the opening salvo in some new and vicious military operation. This is not a function of modern media, or even Gutenberg. Ever since the beginning of oral history, atrocity stories have signalled the beginning of war. If “they” are so evil as to commit the atrocities, then they lack humanity, and it is our moral duty to commit the immoral act of killing them. I’m not saying this from any kind of political perspective, nor am I trying to change how things happen, I’m simply describing how they do happen.
With that detour out of the way, let’s return to what happened in Cyprus. It was previously owned by the United Kingdom, Venice, France, Arabia, Rome, Persia, among others.
Now to the point of this story. There’s a big American ice cream company called Ben & Jerry’s (hereinafter called BJ). A few years ago, BJ sold their ice cream company to Unilever for $326 million. Like the majority of the newly wealthy, BJ looked for new causes to spend their capitalist winnings. Last week, on 4 July, American Independence Day, BJ tweeted as follows: “The United States was founded on stolen Indigenous land. This Fourth of July let’s commit to returning it”.
However, as some internet sleuths have pointed out, the BJ headquarters in Vermont is actually itself built on land formerly owned by the Abenaki, an “indigenous” American Indian confederation. Calls have been growing for BJ to give back the stolen land on which their own headquarters is built. The hypocrisy of the ice cream emperors has not gone unnoticed.
The American consumer has gotten so angry at BJ, they’ve stopped buying the ice cream. The boycott is still spreading, and the parent company Unilever has itself become tainted. So far, share value of Unilever has dropped over $2.5 billion, which is about 10 times what they paid for BJ in the first place.
The sin of BJ was to try and push their woke ideology onto the American consumer. Americans, by and large, don’t care that much if someone has a woke belief system. But if companies try and push woke onto their customers, they’re beginning to find out their customers are mad and aren’t going to take it anymore. The most popular American beer, Bud Light, tried to push transgender sex onto their beer drinkers, and so far, it’s cost their parent company (Anheuser-Busch) about $30 billion in market value. Disney wanted to push gay sex education on young students in schools, and lost $50 billion because of that. Disney doesn’t seem to have learned, and its current roster of woke films are all losing money.
However, back to Cyprus, and the story of formerly owned lands. In 1991 a frozen body was found in a glacier high in the Italian Alps. He was male, about 40, and although strong and wiry, he had a few problems such as arthritis in his hips and knees, as well as bad teeth and probably ulcers. They found out he had been shot in the shoulder with an arrow, and bled to death, high in the Alps, cold and alone. They called him “Otzi” since he was found in the mountains above the Otztal Valley. They also determined he died about 5,300 years ago.
When Otzi was killed, his body was quickly frozen, mummified, and kept more or less in a state of suspended animation for all those thousands of years. With the invention of DNA technology, we’ve learned still more about Otzi. In fact, 2 years ago, his DNA was used by the same team that cloned “Dolly the sheep”, and after a lot of tries, a viable embryo was created. The team denies they allowed the embryo to grow into a child, but they have maintained complete silence on their project. What we do know is that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has gotten involved, and among their claims is that all Europe belongs to Otzi as the primal indigenous person on the continent.
The paragraph above is of course nonsense … for the time being.