Portugal says no plans to pay colonial reparations
Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa had called for Lisbon to find ways to compensate its former colonies, including canceling debt. The government says it has not initiated any process to that effect.
Lisbon is not planning to pay reparations for trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism, Portugal's government said on Saturday.
The statement comes in response to remarks by President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who said Portugal could find ways to compensate its former colonies.
Portugal said in a statement that it seeks to "deepen mutual relations, respect for historical truth and increasingly intense and close cooperation, based on reconciliation of brotherly peoples."
It stressed that it had not launched any "process or program of specific actions" for paying reparations.
Sorry but being held responsible for what your ancestors did is bullshit. The very same bullshit as trying to reclaim the land your ancestors had. Both are not mine, it's in the past and I have nothing to do with it.
Also, it is most likely that everyone's ancestors did some bad things. Sad but it is a process in the human history.
Ancestors?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Colonial_War
There are people alive right now who were slaves in Portuguese Africa.
The closest for fairness we can get in this is for the descendants of those who suffered getting compensation and that coming from the money inherited from those who did the deeds.
Through most of the XX Century, the vast majority of the Portuguese weren't big land owners in the "colonies" (horrible word, by the way, but representative of that mindset), rich trading or industrial burgeoises making money from cheap raw materials, or a descendant of those: they were incredibly poor subsistence farmers who couldn't afford shoes for their kids and put them to work by the age of 12, in a country that even got food help from The Netherlands.
In this like in every other situation were such a concept is applied, group guilt and group compensation are just going to move the injustices around and create new ones by making mainly those who are blamless and never got a cent from those actions pay for the deeds of those who never get punished - the rich from the Fascist regime and the Monarchy before it - whilst the ones that end up getting compensation are the pointy-elbow middle and upper classes in some african nations rather than the ones who need the help (and very likely deserve it) who are poor, illiterate and would have no clue how to claim the help.
I think some measure of justice needs to be done here, I just disagree with the whole group guilt approach since it's invariably a way dilute the blame from the old wealth who are generally the one who inherited most of those historically ill gotten gains.
I spoke generally but in this specific topic, Portugal should be fined by European Court of Human Rights for those individuals. Because it's unlikely there are still people alive who caused this incident in the first place. So yes, ancestors, for those who didn't commit these crimes.
Colonialism is a structure, not a historical event. So it still needs to be dealt with. Just because you’re not to blame doesn’t mean you’re not the only one who can do the right thing as voting citizens. Nations that colonise absorbed wealth of other nations and that advantage can still be seen today in infrastructure that was built, wealth amassed. Museums today hold stolen artefacts and even bodies from lands they colonised.
Please don’t use ancestors as a smokescreen for what is happening right in front of our eyes.
It's not about what somebody's ancestor did. It's about what the country as a whole did. Country X had Y policy that oppressed Z group, and has resulted in that group still being impoverished today? Country X is on the hook then. They caused the problem, they need to help clean it up.
I agree. Please produce 16th century Portugal and have them pay money back.
Duh. No country is going to do this, it will do nothing but open up a can of worms. I mean, what about the ancestors of the African tribes that rounded up the slaves and sold them? Shouldn't they pay something? What about the countries who fought for slaves to be free? What about all the families of the union soldiers in the US Civil War, shouldn't they get something? Or, is this whole "reparations" thing only for black Americans whose great, great, great, great grandparents were slaves? It's silly.
Pretty sure spain and portugal used to be muslim colonies themselves, shouldn't they get paid first then?
Many people were fed up with the Spanish king at that point and invited the Muslims to take over. Spain would not be captured so easily if the inhabitants fought for it instead of against their current rulers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Spain
"The last Visigoth king, Roderick, was not considered a legitimate ruler by all of the inhabitants of the Spanish Kingdom, and some Visigothic nobles aided the Islamic conquest of Spain. One name frequently mentioned is Count Julian of Ceuta who invited Tariq ibn-Ziyad to invade southern Spain because his daughter had been raped by King Roderick. "
If you just substitute some nouns you get the takeover of Hawaii by the US. I mention this because based on what I am seeing it sounds like some some random local thugs sold out their people to invaders hoping that they would get a better deal for themselves under them vs the king.
Unless you got multiple opinion polls and voting records showing that the "people" supported it I don't think much of your argument.
Those Italians dug a lot of gold and silver out of the Iberian peninsula too.
Spain and Portugal aren't full of disease and poverty despite the fact that they used to be colonies, while their former colonies are full of disease and poverty.
That's largely because of geography. You can't blame europe for mosquitos existing in africa.
Well I can't say Spain and Portugal aren't full of disease and poverty, but that's probably because of the decades of corporatist fascism and Nazi Germany/Italy/the Vatican quashing the socialist/anarchist governments there to install a dictator, and not because of Al-Andalus which actually brought great prosperity to the region
And I'm pretty sure that the Muslim caliphates didn't participate in a triangular slave trade which still has repercussions across North America and Africa today in terms of inequality and oppression.
Well, apparently the Mourish Occupation of the Iberian Peninsula was what brought to the Dark Ages Europe advanced irrigation techniques which spread from there increasing agricultural production, the growth of cities and ultimatelly the Renaissance, so we probably would need to pay them, or at least their descendants (mainly Northern African Arabs).
That said Portugal at least in this is a joke (and I say this as a Portuguese National) - for example some years ago the local politicians came up with a scheme to give the descendants of Jewish Sephardites (a group which was expelled from Portugal in the 15th century) portuguese nationality, which is quite an "interesting" choice of "reparations" taking in account the country's much more recent and way more harmful history of Slavery.
Anyways, the whole thing is corrupt as fuck, with for example Jewish Organisations in Russia providing wealthy Jewish locals with "proof" of their Sephardite ancestry for the purpose of gaining Portuguese Nationality (which is only worth it because it means EU citizenship), to the point that the present day richest and most well known portuguese national is Roman Abramovich.
This talk now is in the sequence of that crap (which continues, which for example some Hamas hostages given expedited Portuguese Nationality to try and secure their release as "portuguese"), the sudden rise in the recent elections of the far-right party who are the only nationalists around (so the only who frown upon the whole giving away of citizienship to people who never ever even visited the country) and the Portuguese President (who is basically a powerless figure who loves media attention) having suggested that Portugal and Spain should "compensate" former colonies.
I see. This means that if any invader improved a property they took over in any sense of the word the takeover was justified. If for example I steal your car but give a good wash. You should thank me for cleaning it and I was right to steal it, since you were neglecting it.
The Moorish kings were genuinely better rulers on many, many topics, so it's more like your car thief replaced the transmission with a clear upgrade, but yes, reparations are an innately immoral idea that punishes children for the sins of their parents.
You can not fix the sins of the past, only stop them from happening again.
Many of the former Euro colonies started with stone tools and a nomadic lifestyle and where drug into the modern age (for the time of course) If Europe should repay the descendants of slavers, conquerors, and rapists for the advancements they brought, then by your own logic the colonies owe Europe reparations. Congrats your colonial policy is French!
Do you apply the same logic to all other developments too? That descendants of american slaves now live in the US instead of having to run from lions and hippos, or all the western science and technology spread all around the world by european colonizers? That's a pretty shit argument dude.
Rest of your statements seems logically sound though.
The argument I was making is the same argument you are making: "It's not at all as simple as many think it is".
I think it is pretty simple. Everyone fucked up everyone else for a very long time and there is nothing we can do about it but try to help people alive today who need help today.
That would excuse murder, rape, theft and so on as long as it was done yesterday, not today.
Clearly there is some need to place responsability on people, at least up to a point, with some kind of limit of how far one goes in that, both in terms of temporality and directness of the relation of the punished with the criminals and those recieving compensation with the victims.
There are some widelly accepted rules for some of these things: for example somebody who murders somebody else should pay for it no mater how long it takes to catch that person, whilst the children of the murderer should not pay for their father/mother's crime.
However in other areas it's not so simple: should the children of somebody who stole money be forced to give it back if they inherited that ill gotten money?! An argument can be made that if they are not forced to return it, they would be enjoying the proceedings of the crime whilst the victims carry on suffering because of not having that money, all of which would be an injustice.
But if they should, how about grandchildren? How about great grandchildren? How about all the present day citizens of a nation whose elites commited crimes centuries ago? Should they all lose a little bit to compensate a group of people only entire verifable link with victims from long long ago is having been born in a present day geographical nation that contains an area were the victimization is thought to have occurred?
Whilst I think group guilt and group victimhood for crimes commited centuries ago - as in the suggestion of the President Of Portugal - is complete total bollocks and a way to whitewash the ill gotten nature of the wealth of most of the Portuguese Old Money (including him, who is the son of a Minister in the time of Fascism, hence old money), I can see how, say, taking away things people inherited which were obtained by theft (for example, returning to the descendants of the owners old paintings stollen by the Nazis) is a fair and just thing to do.
You are just describing statue of limitations
I'm describing the reason why the statute of limitations came to be.
The reason is however more generic that just that, and provides explanation for things like not making the children pay for the crimes of their parents.
As for my overall point of it not being simple, notice how there are different statutes of limitations for different crimes.
Tennesseean here, the only people I've ever heard say that lion and hippo line are racists.
I mean, Hippos are statistically one of the largest killers of people where they live, they are adorable killing machines. But yeah it's a bad line that makes a salient point in this instance
The descendants of slavery owe white people for the privilege of living next to white people, usually in a neighborhood with poorer infrastructure, huh?
That's what the post I responded to said yes
It's no secret that large parts of africa are still uncivilized. That doesn't mean africans are inferior to us, they're not, but many of them still need to deal with wildlife in ways we do not.
Lul, uncivilized
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/3/10/how-portugal-silenced-centuries-of-violence-and-trauma
The Fascists were the ones who loved and spread all over all that iconography celebrating The Discoveries, to make up for a country which was incredibly poor except for a handful of selected Families. It was pretty standard Fascist ultra-nationalism in the same style as Moussulini's Italy.
A lot of those ill-gotten gains were blown up centuries ago, and whatever was left never actually made its way down from the Old Wealth to most people.
Real compensation should go to the ones that were being exploited much more recent in the "colonies" before the Revolution that brought Democracy to Portugal and should be coming from the ones doing the exploitation, many of whom are still alive, got given a whole lot of benefits as "Returnees" following the Revolution and many who whom are still today in the top political parties.
It should also be done in a way that it ends up with the most in need, not in the hands of the rich and crooked of places like Angola.
As I said elsewhere, group blame is how the wealthy who benefited from such abuses get to diffuse the blame through entire etnicities/nationalities so that they don't have to loose a significant chunk of their wealth for compensation. Curiously, the President Of Portugal who started with all this talk is the son of a Minister of the old Fascist Dictator - Salazar - and got to go study in France at a time were most of the country was way too poor to even dream of going for a week all expenses paid to Lisbon, much less a couple of years to Paris.
It was also the first country in the entire world to abolish slavery (European Portugal, that is)
If you're going to separate out mainland Portugal and its overseas territories like that, then technically slavery was never legal in England.
Unlike England, Portugal did not keep any overseas territory.
Gibraltar anyone?
I didn't mean to claim that the British Empire were the good guys. I was just pointing out the silliness of only looking at one very narrow fact to make a country look good, while ignoring the wider context.
As the article says, they were benefiting from slave labor in their colonies until the second half of the 20th century.
Benefitting how? They were a drain on the Portuguese economy.
Portugal invested more in the colonies infrastructures than in the country itself. The carnation revolution had a few reasons and one of them being that despite the government stubborness, the Portuguese people did not want to keep the colonies.
Sorry... you don't understand how economies benefit from unpaid labor?
But sure, you're right. They weren't getting a benefit from having de facto slavery in their colonies until 1961. So I guess they were just doing it to be cruel.
Only well connected members of the Fascist Regime were benefitting from that (for example,, the guy who founded a Coffee Company who got cheap raw materials from the "colonies", something that at the time was only possible with the authorization of the Fascist Dictator himself).
Most of the rest of the country was incredibly poor and I suspect that the exploitation of the natives in the "colonies" allowed Fascism to keep going a lot longer than otherwise, since Portugal itself (were most people were illiterate subsistence farmers) did not generate much wealth.
It was a Resource Curse kind of situation, with the extra Evil element that the "resource" being exploited to keep the members of the Fascist power circles fat and happy without caring in the least for the welfare of their countrymen, were people in far away lands.
"Only some people benefited" is a terrible excuse to not pay anything back to previously enslaved people who are alive right now.
That's a hyper-simplified False Choice Falacy, not a rational argument.
If your process for righting old injustices requires committing even more widespread newer ones, it's not Just and it needs rethinking.
I think that if you can have some standard of proof for the crimes and can trace both the victims and the proceeds of the crime to the present day it's just to compensate the descendants of said victims by confiscating the proceedings of the crime (for example, what's being done with paintings stollen by the Nazis).
However being born within the present day geographical borders of a nation whose elites were (or even are) criminals is not itself a crime nor does it make one a benificiary of the proceeding of the crime (possibly the reverse, as criminal elites are way more prone to also pillage their own country than they are to share with their countrymen the proceedings of their pillaging abroad) and being born within the present day geographical borders of a nation containing an area where in the past those crimes were committed does not make one a victim of those crimes.
(To cast blame or claims of victimhood on people merelly based on the place they were born in is pretty straighforward Descrimination)
The situation with the paintings is extremelly easy to solve in a fair way because the paintings themselves are proof plus it's mostly (sadly, not always) reasonably easy to now, 2 generations later, find the handful of descendants of the victims, but it's way harder to trace long ago human exploitation (including the evils of slavery) to present day benificiaries of said crimes because it long ago became money and money is fungible and got spread out, dilluted by money from legal sources or even totally spent by an earlier generation.
I'm not saying an effort shouldn't be made, I'm saying that it should be made with the proper effort, not some bullshit group blame and group compensation that leaves the ill gotten gains of the Portuguese Old Money untouched (by taking it mostly from everybody else) and further enriches well connected elites in some other nations rather than the people there who need that money the most and are much more likely to be descendents of the victims (since poverty has a tendency to stick).
What is the "widespread newer" injustices that come from paying restitution to living people who were slaves under Portuguese rule?
Since there are no actual living "people who were slaves under Portuguese rule" to pay compensation to your "interesting" formulation asks a meaningless question and is nothing more than yet another Falacy, that of Appeal to Emotion.
Only in a hypersimplified totally imaginary universe can the whole thing be approached as if it is exactly the same as if today's living citizens voted for and elected "rulers" who exploited slaves for the benefit of those very same citizens.
In the real world, nobody from back then is alive, somebody has to pay, the rulers who did or allow doing the deed were neither elected nor ruled for the many (and probably exploited the locals as much as the non-locals), and if you're going to use place of birth as sole factor in determining who pays and who gets compensation you're going to take money from many who have no fault at all, even indirect, and give to many whose ancestors did not at all suffer thus not properly correcting the injustice and adding newer fresher injustice on top of it.
(Or in a formulation more within your "argumentative" framework: take money away from schools and hospitals to give to foreign Dictators. Funnilly, it sounds a lot like American Foreign Policy).
In the Neoliberal Capitalist regime we live in it's as usual going to be the less well of in a country paying to whitewash inherited lucre of Old Money whilst the corrupt New Money in another country gets most or even all of that and the actual descendents of the victims who deserve real compensation get little or nothing, and to add insult to injury said Old Money is going to actually leverage that "friendly gesture" with somebody else's money to get some nice deals going on with the corrupt New Money of that other country.
(All of this is based on exactly what has already happenned in the way Portugal has managed its relations with a few of those "colonies", especially Angola - taxpayer's money is invariably used by the well connected corrupt in Portugal to create business opportunities with corrupt elites abroad)
It's the Neoliberal way, as always: garrish fake displays of empathy and appeal to emotion claiming there is a need to "right past wrongs" merelly as an excuse for yet another political scam that will take away money from the many for the benefit of the few.
Again- there was slavery in the Portuguese colonies until 1961, so there are definitely people still alive who were slaves.
Now you're just outright lying.
Should the french also pay reparations to Portugal for all the rape and murder that occured during the french invasions? What about the Romans? Should Italy also pay reparations to most European countries? Should the Scandinavians pay reparations to UK for the viking invasions?
Portugal would actually have to possess spare cash, for them to pay any of their former colonies so much as a penny in reparations
Shame, I was hoping for that stolen gold...
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The statement comes in response to remarks by President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who said Portugal could find ways to compensate its former colonies.
Portugal said in a statement that it seeks to "deepen mutual relations, respect for historical truth and increasingly intense and close cooperation, based on reconciliation of brotherly peoples."
Portugal's colonial era lasted more than five centuries, with the decolonization of some African countries happening as late as 1974 after the fall of the authoritarian Estado Novo regime.
Portugal's president called on Lisbon to initiate a reparations process in comments made to reporters on Saturday, saying that the issue could not be swept "under the carpet."
He suggested that Portugal could pay reparations by canceling the debt of former colonies, developing special cooperation programs or providing financing.
The election was called after former Prime Minister Antonio Costa of the center-left Socialist Party stepped down over corruption allegations.
The original article contains 286 words, the summary contains 148 words. Saved 48%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Canada looks disappointed.
Canada is an interesting demonstration, we've actually been going hard into funding reservation services and returning land that the government controls. I think the transparency of the government w.r.t. truth and reconciliation has also been helpful... but legitimate reparations? Canada can't afford to make right the damage that's been done - the scars we've left on some communities is difficult to fully grasp. So what's the solution? It's a fucking hard problem.
Heh, I was referring to the fact that chunks of what is now Canada used to be Portuguese colonies.
Huh, as a Canadian, that is new info. Though I wouldn't call them "chunks" so much as "bits."
Not that difficult, you just move on. Use money from rich areas to build out poor areas and the elimination of inequality will solve the creation of it
The difficulty is getting people to sign onto eliminating inequality when they benefit from it
España, nos pagan la deuda?