TRAVELERS

Steal It Abroad

The travelers are the heralds, discoverers, and imperialists on the planet that is the Human Farm.

They are also the orators of great adventures, insofar as they are—not quite literally sailing a boat yet but imaginatively exploring the shores of distant continents from behind their desks—graduating to the Name-it-Claim-it-University of sheer will, conquest, and subterfuge.

[But really, most travel writers really only engage in confabulating the most exotic and wildest texts about who discovered her and named it which way.]

This was also how, during the age of letters, rumors and misinformation about the Americans, the Indians, and the Chinese spread uncontrollably, and how their civilizations became forever distorted to no recovery.

When this one comes about, tremble: Captain Cook sailed to Terra Australis Incognita. Matteo Ricci opened Khitan [China]. Rabbits conquered England. The German forests were plagued by witches. The French were Irish who dressed like Russian men but were really brown women from the Ivory Coast with the assistance of the Egyptians who really were the lost Mexicans who survived the earlier discovery of the Old World before Columbus the detective.

Oh, and many travelers were renowned impostors, like Marco Polo, Karl May, and Baron Münchhausen. Some came back home with three, four, five new identities and became pick-up-artists. [They plagiarized travel tips from each other, too.]

Sublationists. Sublation means the act of taking away by changing it through giving. It is the core principle of (Hegelian) dialectics, imperialism, and thievery:

China is both preserved and changed when westernized through sublation in the concept “Humanity.”

Greece is the corpse of Christianity upon which, through sublation, “Europe” was conceived—et quae sequuntur

Heralds. When the European travelers made “discoveries,” they made them for all those living outside of Europe too: Why wouldn’t European discoveries not also apply to all those regions and people of the lesser sort in the developing world too? The Portuguese discovered fantastic new land and sea lines that divided half of Asia to themselves and the other half to their Spanish brothers—if they so ganged up against their distant cousins, the English and the Dutch that is! This, and the HERALDS of New Knowledge better had to be the FIRST to that magic island…

Imperialists. The traveling imperialists had no time to study foreign languages but “translated” foreign words into European language, which became the dominant language of the universe.

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