Mastodawn

MicroWave Apr 27, 2024

Portugal says no plans to pay colonial reparations

Portugal says no plans to pay colonial reparations - Lemmy.World

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 [https://www.dw.com/en/lisbon/t-40075833] is not planning to pay reparations for trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism, Portugal’s [https://www.dw.com/en/portugal/t-19099779] 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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Flying Squid Apr 27, 2024

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.

aljazeera.com/…/how-portugal-silenced-centuries-o…

How Portugal silenced ‘centuries of violence and trauma’

There has been little acknowledgement of Portugal’s role in the transatlantic slave trade – until now.

Al Jazeera

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Aceticon

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 to most people from the Old Wealth.

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 point 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.

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 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 and everything at a time were most of the country was way to poor to even dream of going for a week all expenses paid to France, much less a couple of years.