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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.
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.
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.
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.
Pretty sure spain and portugal used to be muslim colonies themselves, shouldn't they get paid first then?
Many people were fed up with the Spanish king at that point and invited the Muslims to take over. Spain would not be captured so easily if the inhabitants fought for it instead of against their current rulers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Spain
"The last Visigoth king, Roderick, was not considered a legitimate ruler by all of the inhabitants of the Spanish Kingdom, and some Visigothic nobles aided the Islamic conquest of Spain. One name frequently mentioned is Count Julian of Ceuta who invited Tariq ibn-Ziyad to invade southern Spain because his daughter had been raped by King Roderick. "
Those Italians dug a lot of gold and silver out of the Iberian peninsula too.
Spain and Portugal aren't full of disease and poverty despite the fact that they used to be colonies, while their former colonies are full of disease and poverty.
That's largely because of geography. You can't blame europe for mosquitos existing in africa.
Well I can't say Spain and Portugal aren't full of disease and poverty, but that's probably because of the decades of corporatist fascism and Nazi Germany/Italy/the Vatican quashing the socialist/anarchist governments there to install a dictator, and not because of Al-Andalus which actually brought great prosperity to the region
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
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.
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."
solution
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...