Aloha to the illusion of history.
I shouldn’t really be writing this. I’m meant to be writing a navigation training course for a client, for submission to the coastguard for approval next week. But I’m now becoming a person for whom the urge to write becomes a pressing question. No other activity can proceed until the clicking of a keyboard is heard to answer it.
I love Hawaii. I visited there once, about 13 years ago, I think.
I had joined a six-star luxury cruise line that was on the Pacific leg of its annual round-the-world tour. I was an officer cadet, which is a bit like a mild form of modern indentured servitude. Still, the main way to enter the Merchant Navy.
I had joined in Sydney, Australia, and spent a couple of weeks navigating down to Tasmania, then up through Milford Sound, and round the New Zealand islands, Fiji, and Samoa, before approaching Oahu, Hawaii.
There were some days of moderate seas, which were quite unusual for the peaceful ocean in summer, according to the retired US Navy captain I got friendly with on that cruise. (We united over a loathing of the then-popular, Glenn Beck).
It is hard to express how vast the Pacific is. Steaming full speed at 20+ knots, it took us a week to reach the continental US, after leaving Hawaii. There were entire days when you never saw another ship. The clear skies and deep blue ocean appear as though the firmament was not yet a glimmer in the eye of the creator. Only the folk knowledge of the ghosts of the battle of the Pacific, clutching at their shark repellent, allowed you to dimly remember the existence of things like countries or jurisdictions.
At about 30 metres in the air, the navigational bridge allows you to see to a visible range of about 10 Nautical Miles. This allows the navigator to view an area of about 466 square miles at any given moment, with good visibility. That’s 169,000 football pitches, continuously visible, every second, while steaming at 20+ knots, 24 hrs per day, for a full week without seeing any land, and virtually no traffic.
The Pacific is so vast, that you can allow yourself to feel as though there is no land at all.
Hawaii felt like America. It was lovely and warm. Unlike the other Pacific islands, the streets were well-paved, and smooth. The chunky civil engineering seems perfectly designed for skateboarders, as the imperial system is still clearly favoured over metric, in US architecture. Proportions are big. When you see pacific islanders, you realise Texan men have no monopoly on physical size.
Glass buildings, banks, and clean public toilets. Pharmacies that sell toiletries, candy and beer. Bars with refrigerators and indoor plumbing. Catering establishments without cats wandering through the food prep area. Ports and harbours free of Japanese whalers and illegal fishing. Rude people, who mind their own business. Far more more American, than any other Pacific island I’ve visited. It felt like paradise.
The long passages at sea had allowed me to save up some of my meagre £120 per week salary. The poor pay was offset, however, by the perk of being able to tag along to locations that cost the passengers about $15K per week to visit.
I went ashore with an Irish friend and a Croatian friend. We took a bus up to the north shore and did a tandem skydive from 10,000 feet, so I learned the geography of Oahu during a 10-second freefall, like zooming into Google Earth for real.
We saw the countryside on the drive back. I remember that warm wet tropical smell of the deep orangey/brown earth being tilled under a very blue sky.
There were lots of pretty girls. Everyone was happy. We had cocktails with lunch on Waikiki Beach. Coconut-flavoured rum, cold beer, amazing food, and the sand between your toes as you dine. It was the first time I remember noticing the pretty new singer at the end of the table of the ship’s dancers. She would later become my wife.
Hawaii was like a dream for me. I wanted that day to last forever.
It was the first time in my then six years at sea that I came back to the ship late for my duty at 4 pm. But I needn’t have worried. Everyone felt the same. The captain was so enthralled by the Pearl Harbour museum that he too was late back, and delayed our departure to 11 pm, so the passengers could linger a little longer in heaven.
Like so much in our current time, those little havens of peace that we have known appear to have been shattered, in Hawaii.
Just over a week ago, in Lahaina, Maui, a fire devasted four square miles of the island. At least 114 people were killed, and 850 remain missing, after an event that eyewitnesses described as ‘a bomb going off’.
The media, who have been lying to us about all things since their inception, call it the biggest natural disaster the island has seen.
Conspiracy theorists make claims about laser-like Directed Energy Weapons (DEWs) being deployed to clear privately held land and make way for proposed 15-minute city development sites that were part of Agenda 2030. Others believe the fire was cover for kidnapping the 850 still missing children. Joe Biden thinks ‘Ice Cream, barbeque, giraffe’.
I’m not going to speculate about any of that. I have no insight.
However, I do want to make it clear that what we call a ‘conspiracy’ or ‘conspiracy theorist’ is now changing, as Covid-era propaganda has revealed the corruption of corporate legacy media to a degree not previously thought possible.
It might just be that Democrat environmental policies have led to wildfires, as they repeatedly have all across the continental US. Or it might well be that factions within the US government are testing experimental weapons on their own territory, and ‘disappearing’ test subjects for analysis.
At this stage in the game, I think all things are possible.
What I do know – and this is where knowledge of maritime law does come in handy – is that Hawaii itself is a conspiracy perpetuated by the media.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Hawaii was fully recognised as a sovereign independent nation – at a time when only 44 nation-states were recognised to exist. Hawaii had a constitutional monarchy that had rules in one form or another for over 200 years. Hawaii was a member of the Universal Postal Union, the forerunner of the League of Nations, and the UN. It had an embassy-like diplomatic presence in over 90 locations throughout the world, including Washington DC. The Kingdom of Hawaii had engaged in multiple free trade agreements with the US, and other states. You may have noticed that the flag of Hawaii incorporates a Union Jack, despite the fact that the locals killed our illustrious Captain Cook, who had taken time out of his busy schedule to discover and name the islands so that us nice North West Europeans could one day come and fantasise Elvis movies and grass skirts while getting drunk on the beach.
It was Captain Vancouver, who much like James Tiberius Kirk, initially observed, then totally disregarded the Empire’s (sorry, federation’s) policy of non-intervention. In 1794 his recognition of one tribal chief over others – in the midst of a bloody civil war – is what saw the first Union jack hoisted over some protected tribal soil on Hawaii.
As a British Empire protectorate, Hawaii flourished and started to grow from it’s newfound wealth as a Naval staging post for vessels crossing the Pacific. Hawaii only came under full control over the British for a very brief period when war with France became a possibility. Queen Victoria returned autonomy to the Hawaiian monarchy as soon as the threat of war had passed. Their society grew wealthy from British sugar plantations, and a Laissez Faire attitude from the Brits.
However, in 1875, when the US removed the import tax on Hawaiian sugar, American corporate interests came to the fore. By the 1880s, US business interests were taking primacy over the interests of the local people, and of the Hawaiian monarchy.
In what international courts have continuously reaffirmed as an illegal and unprovoked military coup until this day, members of the US deep state – and the US Marine Corps contingent of the USS Boston – went ashore in 1893 and used the threat of their overwhelming military force to overthrow the Hawaiian monarchy.
The monarchy which had been seated in Lahaina, for 220 years.
As clumsily thuggish newcomers to Pacific colonialism, the Americans introduced their philosophy of segregation and banned the native language and customs from public life. The Queen of Hawaii was humiliated, until her death, and Hawaiian citizens were not granted US Citizenship, or the rights expected thereof.
Having never taken a US civics class, I forget if it was the House or the Senate responsible, but the occupation and annexation of Hawaii as a territory of the US was rejected immediately, and for a further six decades, due to the illegal actions by which it came under US governorship.
I think, it was decided by the US State Department, that since technically a bloodless coup had taken place, this was proof that the Hawaiian monarchy was in a state of war. The rogue US governor who seized control of local government then promptly told the US Government to stay out of sovereign Hawaiian affairs that did not concern them. (Seriously, look it up – the circular reason of legalistic warmongery was as delusional then as it is now).
The ’conspiracy theory’, but now more or less documented fact that Pearl Harbour was another Gulf of Tonkin false flag military operation, is, I believe, largely uncontested. (Please correct me if I’m wrong, but there were multiple warnings of Japanese aircraft that were wholly and deliberately ignored by the US Naval command in Pearl Harbour).
The reason being, that, the unofficial agreement was that sovereignty would be returned to the Hawaiian royal family, fifty years after the 1891 ‘declaration of war’, where the Queen ascended to the throne and rejected the ‘Bayonet Constituion’ imposed by American deep state operatives, who invaded in 1893.
Under international law, countries can either be in a state of war or a state of peace. Sovereign state power can not be transferred during a time of war.
WW2, the Korean War, the (not so) Cold War, the Balkans, the war on terror, the war in Ukraine.
Hawaii, and the USA, have been in a state of war or emergency perpetually ever since December 7th, 1941.
Hawaiian people, being quite sensible and realising their weak position in the realpolitik of the twentieth century, did petition for full statehood and citizenship for about 60 years. World War 2 seriously hindered any attempts at full statehood, due to the fact that the largest ethnic group on the Hawaiian islands was in fact, Japanese.
Hawaii only became a State after largely Democrat-voting (at the time) Alaska was added. Largely Republican Hawaii was admitted so that the GOP could effectively stuff the ballot in their favour.
Or at least, those were the broad strokes, as far as I can remember.
So, what’s my point, I hear you cry.
Yesterday’s conspiracy theory is today’s history. Today’s fake news, if left unchallenged, may become tomorrow’s fake history. It is your job to navigate ‘misinformation’ throughout your life, and cling to universal and undeniable truths, like:
1. Always believe first-hand accounts and your own empirical observation over ‘authoritarian official narratives’.
2. Understand that conspiracies are everywhere. All that means is people acting toward a particular goal. It may be centrally controlled, or it may have distributed autonomy. For example, don’t all nation-states hope to expand their tax base? Aren’t all religions trying to take over the world?
3. Correlation may not necessarily mean Causation. But wherever there is causation, there is always correlation.
4. The plural of anecdote is not evidence. Until it is. That’s why they call it anecdotal evidence.
Stay safe, shipmates.
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