# Is there a grain of truth to this? (USA still paying war debts to the UK)
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-grain-of-truth-to-this-usa-still-paying-war-debts-to-the-uk/628095
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [July 13, 2012, 9:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-grain-of-truth-to-this-usa-still-paying-war-debts-to-the-uk/628095 "2012-07-13T09:30:32Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@Blakeyrat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blakeyrat)
#### Post date: [July 13, 2012, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-grain-of-truth-to-this-usa-still-paying-war-debts-to-the-uk/628095/21 "2012-07-13T19:45:26Z")
Just FYI, the UK still owes the US at least 1,090 million pounds from WWI:
> [@](#):
>
> Of this, £1,200 million was borrowed from the U.S.A. A total of £640 million was repaid to them, but only £110 million of this was capital, the remainder being interest. All 1914-18 loan repayments were suspended by agreement in 1932; but, in theory, Britain still owes the U.S.A. £1,090 million from the First World War.
[Source](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002RI9DME/ref=r_soa_w_d)
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### Author:  [@Ximenean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ximenean)
#### Post date: [July 13, 2012, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-grain-of-truth-to-this-usa-still-paying-war-debts-to-the-uk/628095/22 "2012-07-13T20:13:34Z")
> [@coremelt](#):
>
> The monarch and next-in-line both own fairly hefty chunks of the UK personally.
>
> [Duchy of Cornwall - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchy_of_Cornwall)
> [Duchy of Lancaster - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchy_of_Lancaster)
Although you shouldn’t take it from that that they own the entire county of Cornwall, or Lancashire for that matter. Land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall amounts to about 200 square miles. Most of it is not actually in Cornwall, and as a proportion of the UK as a whole (94,000 square miles), it is tiny. The Duchy of Lancaster’s holdings are smaller still.
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### Author:  [@Quintas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quintas)
#### Post date: [July 18, 2012, 11:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-grain-of-truth-to-this-usa-still-paying-war-debts-to-the-uk/628095/23 "2012-07-18T23:26:10Z")
Christ.
Now he’s insisting that Joe Arpaio’s press conference yesterday was something to be taken seriously. He said “if this doesn’t convince you Obama’s birth cerificate is fake, you don’t have a brain”
He’s started watching Alex Jones’s web broadcasts constantly and blows up my phone several times per day sending me texts with links to the latest World Net Daily BOMBSHELL he’s stumbled across.
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### Author:  [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)
#### Post date: [July 18, 2012, 11:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-grain-of-truth-to-this-usa-still-paying-war-debts-to-the-uk/628095/24 "2012-07-18T23:59:28Z")
The “depopulating the world by one third” is definitely from Alex Jones. The UN Population Fund sponsored some studies in the 1970s that suggested that the maximum number of people the world could sustain at a Western European standard of living was 2 billion. Right wing nutjobs take this to mean the UN is quietly sterilizing everyone.
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### Author:  [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)
#### Post date: [July 19, 2012, 12:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-grain-of-truth-to-this-usa-still-paying-war-debts-to-the-uk/628095/25 "2012-07-19T00:18:25Z")
> [@Quintas](#):
>
> 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?
Probably a New World Order conspiracy. It came out of a fusion of extreme right-wing and Christian fundamentalist conspiracies. Add some Lyndon Larouche and subtract the lizard people.
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