Is there a grain of truth to this? (USA still paying war debts to the UK)

This is very convoluted. My father’s worldview is like when Glenn Beck was on Fox News and would have that chalkboard diagram connecting conspiracies. As soon as you refute 1 point, 6 others come at you like a shotgun, wildly disconnected and finally you just give up and try to change the subject.

He has some sort of idea that at the end of the American Revolution, the U.S agreed to make payments to the UK. And we are still paying. We are paying 1 trillion dollars per year to the UK. Thats the interest. All of the US’s industrial growth post civil war was financed via loans from the Bank of England and the U.S is still a colony with the illusion if independence.

The Queen has much more power than we think. The commonwealth pays money to the crown. The crown is like the mafia. There is a vast movement in Canada to leave the commonwealth but they can’t because the crown controls their purse strings.

Prince Phillip wants a genocide in Africa and he supports the green movement because he wants to reduce world population by 1/3rd.

The pope is either gonna resign or die by the end of the year and the new Pope will call himself “Peter Romanov”.

The financial system cant go on and the leaders are gonna agree to wipe all debt out and all countries are gonna start at zero.

There’s a bunch of other stuff too, but my brain is a fog now.

Does the particular idea above have a name? Like ‘Moon landing conspiracy’ or ‘9/11 Truther’? Something I can look up by name to get a summary of where and why the ideas originated, however goofy? Also, can anyone pick out grains of truth in these ideas?

Hm. That papal thing is a modification of that papal prophecy where the last pope before armageddon will name himself Peter. Though it is Peter the Roman.

The other stuff, no idea. Though I sort of like the one about the world governments all agreeing to set all debt to 0 and starting from scratch. Though the logistics of that one sort of boggles my mind.

Until December 2006, the UK was paying the US for Lease-Lend loans incurred in WWII. If there really were loans the other way, they would have offset the Lease-Lend debts.

Si

It’s all true. Problem is, with the austerity cuts on military funding in the UK, all the black helicopters we usually use to silence folk like your father have been grounded, indefinitely. :frowning:

Tell me you’re joking - Please!

They are so much nonsense.

Just to take one: the UK had a national debt of 977 billion dollars in 2011 - a trillion a year would come in handy to pay this off (a trillion dollars is about 40% of the UK’s GDP - I think we would have noticed inflows of this size :dubious: )

Yep; they all share the same name: “complete and utter nonsense”.

A trillion dollars per year? Does your father have any idea just how much money that is?

That condition has a name - it’s called being nuts.

Buy him a copy of the Illuminati trilogy. At least that takes the attitude that every conspiracy theory you ever heard is true.

Honestly, there is not a lot of point refuting stuff like this. People love conspiracy theories, and the whole point of them is that they are impossible to disprove, since the goalposts get moved with every refutation.

Grains of truth? The US/UK lend lease agreement of WW2, Brits of a certain age remain a mix of proud and angry that “they repaid the US for the war, no matter how much it hurt” with an implied belief that the UK paid vastly more than they though they owed. Not hard to see how this idea is easily reversed. The Allies imposed war reparations on Germany after WW1, the idea that the UK would require payment from the losing side in a war is also something that could somehow be reversed, and the idea that the winner would pay come about. The UK is a lot smaller than the US, and in truth if you think the US has economic problems, you haven’t looked at the dire situation the UK sees itself in. Every bit of industrial decline you might see in the US, the UK got there first. Indeed some would argue that exporting jobs to Asia was a UK invention. A trillion dollars a year would make an astounding difference to the UK economy, and is larger than the entire tax income that the UK government receives. It would interesting to understand how the money is received or spent. But conspiracy theories can always come up with an answer.

Money sent to the UK Monarchy may be confusing the UK Crown with the royal family, and the civil list. The civil list used to the be the list of people paid to run the country. The list of civil servants. The monarch got the money and then paid them. This was in the days when the UK really was a full monarchy and they ran the place. Long since gone. The Royal family still receives money via the civil list, but only for those members of the family that do work that is related to the country. All the royal ceremonies, upkeep etc. About $20 million a year last I saw. But all other money and responsibility for paying for the running of the civil government has long since been the direct responsibility of the UK government. The vast estates technically owned by the monarchy are for all useful purposes controlled by the UK government, which runs and receives the income from them. These are the Crown Estates. This is why when talking about the UK it can be confusing, the actual people that are the current royal family are not the same as the Crown. The way the law works, is complex, and relies upon many unwritten but well established rules. The system requires a living monarch. But it also requires that that same monarch have no influence on the running of the country at all. An attempt by the monarch to become involved in any political component would render them in an untenable position, and they would be swiftly forced to abdicate. This is true for all the commonwealth countries that also have her as their head of state. In one form or another there is a legal need for a living person to be the ultimate root of power. The counterpoint being that they actually cannot wield any power. They have no effective power, even of veto, and if they were to try to exercise even that, the action would trigger a crisis that would soon result in their removal from power. They would be replaced by the next in line, the country still requiring a monarch. So it is nothing like a republican revolution, simply the removal of a troublesome monarch, after which business proceeds as usual.

I’m not sure that Prince Philip supports the green movement much at all. Charles is more the guy for that. He does things like run some part of his estate on methane, and other token green things. (The Windsor family do still own property, and are wealthy of themselves, but this is separate to the Crown, and is nothing like the same scale.) Charles is of course not the monarch. First in line, but not there yet. It is also important to realise that Prince Philip has no power at all. He is the queen’s husband. That is all.

The ultimate fate of the financial system is anyone’s guess. Wiping out the debt and starting again is an amusing idea. It is based on the idea that debt is inherently a bad thing. But makes some astounding assumptions. Mostly that the leaders have any say in this, and such a thing is possible. Or that it matters. It sort of assumes that the finances of countries work like an individual person’s finances. Which they don’t. Cancelling the debt does require that those that are owed the debt agree. Otherwise the term isn’t cancelling - it is default. Cancelling would only work if everyone owed the others what they were owed. If this was the case no-one would care, and the world system would continue on as it was, recognising that holding bonds on one another’s economies brings stability to the system.

The monarch and next-in-line both own fairly hefty chunks of the UK personally.

Isn’t it Lyndon LaRouche and his followers who believe that the British Royal Family ultimately controls everything? Perhaps your dad has been got at by them.

Wiki:

Prime looniness there!

Lyndon LaRouche won’t stop with the knock-knock jokes.

A trillion a year in just interest?

Coocoo for caoco puffs, that is.

Well hey, he’s right so far. The US agreed via the Treaty of Paris, that ended the Revolutionary War, that private Americans would have to honor debts to private Britons incurred before the war. As time went on and Britons had trouble collecting–American courts were both dysfunctional and unfriendly–the British government kept raising the issue, and the US finally agreed to make compensation via government-to-government payment in 1802.

Oops, there he goes off the track. It was a one-time payment, made in 1802, and that was the end of it.

Ah well, what’s 210 years among friends?

Have you considered the possibility that your father is becoming senile? Perhaps for him it shows itself by him getting stuck on ideas that he can’t get out of his head, no matter how carefully you explain their lack of logic. You might start to watch his behavior in general for other such symptoms.

Hey, the British Crown has been around in its present form for 950-ish years. So obviously it’s not that big of a deal.

I think it’s just called batshit crazy?

I mentioned Lend-Lease. He shook his head, smiled and said *“you’ve got alot to learn, but you’re gonna see soon.”
*

I’m not joking.

I knew that was coming. :smiley:

Yeah. He’s been on a big Lyndon LaRouche kick lately.

It’s sorta exhausting. I try to steer clear of politics as much as possible, because the most mundane conversation will turn into some crazy conspiratorial lecture and suggestions to watch various lectures on youtube.

A few weeks ago, he had been saying we are heading to a one world government, then later in the same conversation he said “The EU is gonna break up and you’re gonna even see alot more power returned to the individual states here in the U.S” I pointed out the obvious contradiction but then he switched to money we owe to the crown. Also the USA is a corporation and every citizen is traded as stock. Via social security number.

They’ve been taking that cosplay entirely too seriously for far too long.

Hey, I was just reading about this one yesterday. It’s part of the Freemen on the Land movement. Here’s the Rational Wiki link for that particular delusion.

Sounds like your dad and my dad would get along really well!!!