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.
For a country that both established the transatlantic slave trade and was one of the last to continue reaping its profits – it was still using de-facto slave labour in its colonies in the 1960s – Portugal has been slow to reckon with its past.
The national school curriculum, museums and tourism infrastructure all amount to a grandiose rendering of the country’s 15th to 17th-century “discoveries” in Africa, Asia and the Americas, and a selective recollection of its 20th-century colonial exploits in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé & Principe, Goa, Macau and East Timor.
There are monuments and statues up and down the country dedicated to navigators, missionary priests responsible for the conversion of Africans and Indigenous people to Catholicism, or soldiers who fought against African independence in the colonial wars. Meanwhile, it is often said that “Portugal is not a racist country”, despite enormous structural inequalities and decades of documented discrimination. “There has been a silencing here of centuries of violence and trauma,” says Kia Henda.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/3/10/how-portugal-silenced-centuries-of-violence-and-trauma
It was also the first country in the entire world to abolish slavery (European Portugal, that is)
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).
Pretty sure spain and portugal used to be muslim colonies themselves, shouldn’t they get paid first then?
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.
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.
