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Historic Schemes that Backfired in Catastrophic Fashion

Khalid Elhassan April 30, 2021 36 min

Battleship USS West Virginia sunk and burning at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, with the battleship USS Tennessee in the background. History on the Net

Great Abaco, the biggest of the Abaco Islands. Abaco Real Estate

29. The Would-Be Libertarian Founding Fathers Next Turned to Run Guns to a White Secessionist Movement in the Bahamas

The following year, Michael Oliver and his associates tried to create another libertarian tropical island paradise, this time closer to home: in the Bahamas. In 1973, as the then-British colony neared its independence, some white Bahamians objected to living in a majority-black country ruled by blacks. So they decided to secede, laid claim to the Bahamas’ Abaco islands as the nucleus for a white majority country, and formed the Abaco Independence Movement. That attracted the libertarians as swiftly as chum attracts sharks.

Flag of the Abaco Independence Movement, and proposed flag of the future independent nation of Abaco. Create Recreate

So they passed the plate to buy weapons and explosives for the secessionists. In exchange, they were promised that the white-ruled island would be run on principles that would make Ayn Rand proud. However, the plan backfired when the libertarians’ chosen gunrunner double-crossed them. Instead of smuggling the machine guns they had paid for to the secessionists, he tried to sell them in Costa Rica. He was caught, and in the ensuing scandal and legal mess, Oliver got deported from the Bahamas, and the plan for a libertarian Caribbean country was abandoned.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.