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.
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.
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
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
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!