Base officials dismissed displaced islanders as too few to matter.

Evidence

In the minds of many U.S. officials, the supposed gains to be realized from a base justified what they saw as the limited impact of removing a small number of people. Henry Kissinger is widely reported as having said of the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands, “There are only ninety thousand people out there. Who gives a damn?” Stu Barber’s Strategic Island Concept was largely predicated on the same assumption: Who gives a damn? But from the perspective of the Chagossians and a long list of other peoples, there was of course nothing limited about the impact of their expulsion. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 212

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: The Kissinger quote directly pays off the Strategic Island Concept calculus from earlier chapters.

Related

• US strategic thinking discounted displaced populations as too few to matter. (similarity 0.91)
• Strategic gain calculations discounted the humanity of displaced peoples (similarity 0.91)
• Officials omitted the human costs of displacement from consideration (similarity 0.79)
• The base site was chosen partly because its population was deemed negligible (similarity 0.78)