mike04456
Brilliant_Rock
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2002
- Messages
- 1,441
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On 1/29/2004 10:34:32 AM Griffin wrote:
Isn't the US Government still pissed at them over a number of things including espionage and sabotage of American programs during WWII, stuff with the Nazis, etc?
I know they were formed from Cecil Rhodes genocidal rampage through Africa in the first place. That was both criminal, brutal, and organized - an auspicious start.
'Mob' seems accurate.
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During WWII, De Beers and the US government got into a big spat over alleged price-fixing for industrial diamonds. This dispute has been running off and on since then. But it's an anti-trust issue, not an espionage issue. De Beers is barred from doing business in the US as the result of a consent decree during the 1970s. They are currently trying to settle this thing once and for all, but it's anyone's guess whether they will succeed--too many things they do violate US anti-trust laws.
Cecil Rhodes was certainly no saint, and he had something of the megalomaniac in him, but he had a lot of irons in the fire, only one of which was De Beers. His colonial rampaging was really an attempt to set up a British-dominated empire in southern Africa--it had little or nothing to do with diamonds except to the extent that he used his profits from diamond-mining to fund some of it. De Beers, which was founded in 1888, already existed when Rhodes went on his rampages in the 1890s. And while Rhodes is commmonly described as having founded De Beers, this is not quite true. He was the chairman, but was only one of a group of diamond miners who joined together to control the market. There were a number of others, such as Barney Barnato, who had been more successful at it than he was. Rhodes never controlled the whole thing or even 50% of it, and his partners were not wild about his penchant for adventurism.