Portugal says no plans to pay colonial reparations
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.
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.
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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.
The problem with that is that the effects of our ancestors are real whether we like it or not.
Some people are living way better lives than others because their ancestors screwed over other ancestors.
Is it really fair that people should have egregious excess as a result of exploitation?
Is it really fair that the descendants of slaves should be punished for what other people's ancestors did?
That's why wealth redistribution should be applied as indiscriminately as possible based on wealth, instead of discriminate cash payments based on cherry picked events that occurred more recently. Most people born into the rat race aren't there because of their own failures, but because their lineage were historically screwed by the wealthy stretching back thousands of years, and everyones ancestors contributed to the current state of civilization, so rather than discriminate cash injections which create a new generation of people left behind and continue the imbalance, it should be focused on reducing the deviation from the mean and median both domestically, and internationally.
Do you really believe that cash injections to developed economies will benefit the people instead of their domestic oligarchs?
I don't disagree. Yes, the effects of what happened are ongoing. You cannot expect to fix a joy of children by paying them money for their father's loss, they won't be ever the same. You can only make their living standards better. What's done is done, no one can revert it. The whole issue is no different than this.
I wish the world was fair but I don't think it will ever be. We cannot even fix our own countries, own municipals. We can only fix the future by taking an act today, we cannot fix the past.
The migration of tribes had shaped the world. Is there anything we can do about it? Industrial revolution had shaped the world, the world wars had shaped the world. Even though we have no intention to continue affecting the world negatively, there is no end to that. Sorry but we haven't reached that serenity as homo sapiens. We must work for it but we won't see it in our lives.
We should learn from our past, however we mustn't try to fix it since we cannot, it's plowing water.
We can only fix the future by taking an act today
That's what reparations are for.
Dude, I'm not descendant of slaves and I'm pretty much a slave of the Portuguese state at the moment. If this corrupt cast of politicians wants to pay reparations, I do not oppose to it, but they need to pay it from their own pockets.
I'm not descendant of slaves
Highly unlikely. Effectively the whole human race is.
I meant directly descendant. And I don't disagree on your reasoning, it's true.
What is the difference between direct and indirect descendant? Also how does the original sin interact with the physical body in such a way that it knows how to follow direct descendant lines?
Ok say I am a slave owner and I have five children. The original sin does it couple with my eldest child or all five, does it divide into 5 equal parts or multiple into 5 or does divide in half with each child? What units does ancestor guilt have, is there a SI version or is it just industry standard units? If I adopt a kid does the original sin particles connect to the adopted kid? If one of my "direct" descendents becomes a slave does his inherited original sin particles meet anti-originao sin particles and cancel out or not? Can original sin particles be passed like a STD, say for example one my kids married a women, has a kid with her, then my son dies, woman remaries and has another kid, would that new kid have the original sin particles or just their older sibling? If two people pass through double doors at the same time do the original sin particles form an interference pattern like waves do?
So many questions. Maybe just show me the equations governing your original sin particle wave thing and how it knows how to follow families
I don't believe the children should pay for they fathers mistakes. I was replying to the OP comment that suggests that we should take into account slavery has something to do with poor conditions some of said descendant of slaves are atm.
I came from a long line of poor people in the sense of money, and only one of my uncles was able to get a degree (from his pocket money and hard work, you have to pay even if it's a public university), recently a cousin was also able to get a degree as well. And me and my brother pursuit more technical courses.
I can have a decent income by working on projects from abroad but the Portuguese state takes ~70% of that in direct and indirect taxation.
Meanwhile I don't have a family doctor for 14 years now, and if I need something to be taken care of I need to get help in the private sector. Justice is slow, the streets and public buildings are decaying to a point of rupture, public administration is a complete disgrace in general...
I'm basically a slave to this corrupt politicians. They take my hard work in the form of taxation and provide nothing/almost nothing in return.
It's not fair that some people have more but the existence of inequality is not enough of a justification to seize property.
Ancestors?
By the middle of the 1920s, the whole of Angola was under control. Slavery had officially ended in Portuguese Africa, but the plantations were worked on a system of paid serfdom by African labour composed of the large majority of ethnic Africans who did not have resources to pay Portuguese taxes and were considered unemployed by the authorities. After World War II and the first decolonization events, this system gradually declined, but paid forced labor, including labor contracts with forced relocation of people, continued in many regions of Portuguese Africa until it was finally abolished in 1961.[55]
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.
so the current citizens of country X should be punished for things that their parents/grandparents/etc did? no that's stupid - and it doesnt work.
I agree. Please produce 16th century Portugal and have them pay money back.