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Portugal says no plans to pay colonial reparations
(www.dw.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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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.
I literally pasted the information about it. More than once. Not my fault if you're going to ignore it.
Except that's not even described as "Slavery" in the source you quoted.
It was basically the same shit that US companies like Chiquita did in South America and the US still does now in its private prisons.
Using the same logic as you used, then the US still has Slavery because people in its prisons are forced to work all of which is legal hence the State approves of it.
Similarly by that logic of yours the UK also had Slavery until the 20th Century since they had Indentured Servitude.
Oh yeah, and pretty much every single instance in any country (Communist China being a good example) were people were forced to move to the fields and work there is per your logic Slavery.
It's still exploitation, there is still a duty of compensation for the victims (and I have actually defended it in the past, though not here in Lemmy), it's however not the same evil as Slavery were people were actually owned and so were their children as soon as they were born.
As I see it, the people who did the exploitation or their direct descendants are still alive so it's only fair if the victims or direct descendants of victims are compensated with whatever can be clawed back from those who did the deeds or those who inherited the proceedings of those deeds. That is however not what the President Of Portugal was suggesting, especially because he comes from well off families in the Fascist regime who directly or indirectly benefited of those actions approved by top people in that very regime (were his own father was a Government Minister).
What I'm a little more concerned about is your idea that any people who happen to have been born in Portugal have to pay for the evils of a Dictatorship they did not chose and which they even threw out when they finally could.
What you’re describing (enslaved people’s children are automatically also enslaved) is chattel slavery, it’s a special kind of evil.
However, those other things you listed are also slavery (people forced to work against their will). No, they’re not the same, but they’re both forms of slavery. The definition is broader than you might expect.
Correct. A slave by any other name is still a slave.
Well within that definition of yours, I have to agree.
All that shit is exploitation and people who suffered should be compensated, with the money for the compensation coming from those who profited from the exploitation and those in positions of authority who made it possible for it to occur.