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.
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
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
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!
España, nos pagan la deuda?