Page 28 - AEI Insights 2020 - Vol. 6, Issue 1

AEI Insights, Vol 6, Issue 1, 2020

geographic suburbia – actually a remote peninsular northerly extension of the huge Asian
continental mass – started calling itself an Old Continent. Historian Toynbee calls it “a
secularized version of the primitive Western Christian proposition Nemini salus …nisi in
Ecclesia.” See for yourself how much current debates, sparked by the ongoing refugee crisis,
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follow the above patters.

Triangular economy of othering

Why does our West so vigilantly promote the so-called international trade all over the place?
Answer is at hand; the US President George H.W. Bush clarifies: “No nation on Earth has
discovered a way to import the world’s goods and services while stopping foreign ideas at the
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border.”
There is a consensus within the academic community what was the critical factor in redefining
the world’s periphery – from a sub-permafrost – Europe into the advanced West. Undeniably,
it was the extension of its strategic depth westward, to the Americas upon 1492 – a huge
continent unreported in the Bible and unknown to Europeans. There is also a consensus over
the two factors facilitating the initiation of the age of Grand discoveries. The push effect was
the fall of Constantinople, relative decline of the Maghrebian Arabs and the Ottoman techno-
military and demographic threat onto Europe from south and southeast. And, the pull effect
was the Ming dynasty inward retreat and to it related dismembering of the superior transoceanic
Sino-fleet.
This unleashed the so-called triangular transcontinental trade that incorporated one more
previously unknown continent to Europe – (sub-Saharan) Africa. Triangular trade was a brutal
instrument imposed by Europeans: Enslaved Africans shipped as cattle to America to dig for
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gold and silver which was destined for European colonial centres.
(Needleless to say that soon after American continent has been ‘discovered’, Europeans
brutally derogated its indigenous civilisation. Only 100 years later, Americas have suffered
loss of 90% of its total pre-colonial population – a final solution in one of its most effective
workings. The same went on in sub-Saharan Africa. Far from being an undiscovered prior to
the European conquistas, Africa was for many centuries an integral part of the Afro-Asian

ruled by despots – due to their tropical location – a political phenomenon linked with economic failure, and harsh
primitive dictatorships.
15 “Even in the wake of the WWII, Western liberals still had a very hard time applying their supposedly universal
values to non-Western people. Thus when the Dutch emerged in 1945 from five years of brutal Nazi occupation,
almost the first thing they did was raise an army and send it halfway across the world to reoccupy their former
colony of Indonesia. Whereas in 1940 the Dutch gave up their own independence after little more than four days
of fighting, they fought for more than four long and bitter years to suppress Indonesian independence. No wonder
that many national liberation movements throughout the world placed their hopes on communist Moscow and
Beijing rather than on the self-proclaimed champions of liberty in the West.” – argues Y.N. Harari (21 Lessons for
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the 21 Century, page 10).
16 This deep historical animosity towards the externally induced, forced trade – so foreign to the organic tissue of
the nation – is deeply rooted even with the champion of the world’s trade of today: China. Its Communist Party
leader – not so long ago – Jiang Zemin in his inaugural speech of 1989, defined entrepreneurs as: “self-employed
traders and peddlers who cheat, embezzle, bribe and evade taxation.”
17 Historian Patrick Manning estimates that at least 8 million people were exported to Americas as slaves from the
West Africa alone between 1700 and 1850. To this number, it has to be added at least 30% more that died in in
the enslaving related struggles all over the Atlantic coast of Africa from a present-day Mali to Angola. Early
French colonial records for the western Sudan; a large swath of western Africa (from Senegal via Mali and Burkina
Faso, to Niger and Chad) accounted for over 30% of population being slaves as late as in 1900. Even Liberia –
founded for freed American slaves – accounted up to one quarter of its population as slaves or in a slavery-like
conditions, as late as in 1960s!

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