The truth about the diamond trade

The lust for resources

The sixteenth century Aztecs wrote of the Spaniards, “They lifted up the gold as if they were monkeys, with expressions of joy, as if it put new life into them and lit up their hearts. As if it were certainly something for which they yearn with great thirst. Their bodies fatten on it and they hunger violently for it. They crave gold like hungry swine.”

The Aztecs could have said the same thing for white people and diamonds, except that the lust had to be prompted a little by a DeBeers’ marketing campaign. To bolster a sagging diamond economy in the 1940s the cartel hired a public relations firm that launched DeBeers’ now-famous slogan, “a diamond is forever,” convincing every American woman that she must have a diamond ring to get engaged or married.

The DeBeers cartel was built on their fabrication that diamonds are a rare commodity. Diamonds appear anywhere in the world that there is carbon—and that is almost everywhere. They also are easily manufactured. DeBeers has used its own private armies and other forms of intimidation to manufacture diamond scarcity by forcing countries to keep them off the market.

Unlike other precious gems and metals, the price of diamonds is always going up but the resale value is very low, no matter how much one pays for them in the first place.

In the third century BC, diamonds were found and used in India for religious and artistic purposes. In China, because of their hardness, diamonds were mounted on the tip of an iron tool as an engraving instrument. Traditionally diamonds were considered by many cultures to have healing properties.

When diamonds were found in Africa all that changed.

In 1875, despite the ravages of the slave trade, 90 percent of Africa was still controlled by African people.

Ten years later the colonial era was officially consolidated. In 1884-5, without a single African present, the heads of European governments sat in a conference in Berlin for the sole purpose of carving up every inch of the African continent. The objective of this gathering was to parcel out all of Africa to Europeans to exploit all possible resources--human beings, gold, land, animals, rubber, iron, ivory, tourism, fishing, farming and of course, diamonds.

The conference was a move on the part of the European powers to attempt to reduce conflict within Europe and inside European countries themselves by sharing the vast stolen loot of Africa. Every European country wanted a piece of Africa to elevate their standard of living, not just for the already wealthy, but also for the workers, who for the past 40 years had been in a state of rebellion for a greater share of the stolen loot of slavery and colonialism.

Even the Catholic pope, the moral authority of Europe, gave his tacit blessing to the Berlin Conference and the plans to colonize all of Africa. All the imperialists had to do now was defeat the powerful African resistance and then slaughter, subdue and enslave the Africans who survived. Multitudes of white people volunteered enthusiastically for that task.

Imperialist diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes was passionate about colonialism as a solution for the English masses.

Rhodes once wrote, “I was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread, bread!’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism…My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.”

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