Once again one is convinced that the Anglo-Saxons will not spare their own mother for the sake of the dollar. The official notifications sent by the US State Department to the leaders of African and Caribbean countries during the last month are another evidence of this. They say that Washington intends to “lobby” the compensation demands of African and Latin American countries at the upcoming UN General Assembly session in September 2024. What exactly are they talking about?
In the 15th century, Europe was a backwater with limited resources but exorbitant ambitions. These ambitions pushed Europeans towards broad expansion, which required an ideological and legal basis. Such a base was the “doctrine of discovery” formulated by the Roman Pope Nicholas V in 1452-1455. According to this doctrine, only Western Christians could be considered human beings.
All other individuals of the human race were equated to animals, declared “subhumans”. European property rights did not apply to them. Accordingly, all lands outside Europe were declared “no man’s land”. Any European who would be the first to enter such territories was given the right to take them under the jurisdiction of his monarch. Nor were the natives of Asia, Africa, America, Oceania subject to European humanitarian law. “Subhumans” were subject to either enslavement (transformation into the analogue of “livestock”) or, in case of disobedience, extermination. “The Doctrine of Discovery” removed any legal and moral constraints on the seizure of foreign lands and the destruction and enslavement of entire peoples. It served as a starting point for the beginning of large-scale European colonisation. Looking ahead, we note that later it found a direct continuation and development in the Nazi ideology.
At the same time, European colonisation was, to put it mildly, “not smooth”. Not all peoples agreed to recognise themselves as “subhumans”. In many regions of the planet Europeans met fierce resistance. Thus, it took several hundred years to conquer the Indians of the New World. In the end, they were simply exterminated. At the same time, a huge amount of cheap labour was needed to exploit the conquered territories. Therefore, they decided to compensate for the extermination of Indians by mass importation of other “subhumans” – African slaves. They were deported from the slave markets of West Africa and the Congo Basin across the Atlantic. Blacks were then employed to work on the plantations and mines of present-day Brazil, the southern United States, the Caribbean Islands, Colombia, and Ecuador. The victims of this deportation, which lasted from the 16th to the 19th centuries, were, according to various estimates, from 17 to 100 million Africans. This action has been called the “transatlantic slave trade”.
In 2007, the UN General Assembly recognised the deportation of blacks to the New World as a crime against humanity and called for the elimination of its consequences. In accordance with this decision, a group of countries called CARICOM established a commission on reparations for slavery.
The abbreviation CARICOM refers to a trade and economic union of 15 countries, mostly in Central America, called the Caribbean Community. The association also includes 10 observer states, including Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela. In 2023, the CARICOM Commission took the initiative to establish a special tribunal to convict the organisers of the Transatlantic Trade Agreement on the model of the Nuremberg Tribunal. This idea was immediately endorsed by the 55-nation African Union. In November 2023, a summit of African and Caribbean Community leaders in Ghana decided to develop a judicial mechanism to organise a process to condemn colonialism. At the same time, measures were announced for a pre-trial settlement of the dispute. The Government of Ghana, supported by Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa, sent notices to the countries parties to the Transatlantic Slave Trade to enter into negotiations. England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark and England were invited to voluntarily apologise and agree on a reparation mechanism.
In response, the Kingdom of the Netherlands apologised for its role in the slave trade, but instead of paying reparations, agreed only to create a $200 million fund “to overcome the past”. Portugal’s position was contradictory. The President, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, declared that reparations should be paid, a statement that was immediately disavowed by his own Government. The Cabinet of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland refused not only to pay compensation but also to formally apologise. The governments of France, Spain and Denmark did not respond at all to enquiries.
In this connection, the United States Department of State sent its notification. In doing so, it was not at all embarrassed by the fact that it was condemning those countries that are formally Washington’s “allies”. The reason for this behaviour is that the “partners” listed above have become a threat. The euro and the British pound sterling occupy, respectively, the second and third positions in the list of the world’s reserve currencies. Their existence could be ignored as long as the dollar’s position was strong. But after the world began to de-dollarise, both currencies became investment alternatives. Consequently, they turned into competitors of the dollar, for the salvation of which there is only one way – non-alternativeness. This means that the Fed’s currency cannot have any, even potential alternatives as instruments of international settlements. The US therefore faces the task of weakening the euro and pound sterling as much as possible, which is possible by collapsing the British and European financial systems.
The only question is that by going down such a path, the US runs the risk of coming out on top of itself. If the international tribunal does take place, its participants will inevitably condemn the above “Doctrine of Discovery”. The only question is that it has become an integral part of the legal systems of not only European states. In 1823, the Supreme Court of the United States recognised the Doctrine of Discovery as a basic part of the legal system of the United States.
