Pretty sure spain and portugal used to be muslim colonies themselves, shouldn’t the’ 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 Sephardits (which were 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 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, the sudden rise in the recent elections of the far-right party who are the only nationalists around (so frown upon the whole giving away of citizienship for free) 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.

That would excuse murder, rape, theft and so on as long as it was done yesterday, not today.

Clearly there is some need to place responsability on people, at least up to a point, with some kind of limit of how far one goes in that, both in terms of temporality and directness of the relation of the punished with the criminals and those recieving compensation with the victims.

There are some widelly accepted rules for some of these things: for example somebody who murders somebody else should pay for it no mater how long it takes to catch that person, whilst the children of the murderer should not pay for their father/mother’s crime.

However in other areas it’s not so simple: should the children of somebody who stole money be forced to give it back if they inherited that ill gotten money?! An argument can be made that if they are not forced to return it, they would be enjoying the proceedings of the crime whilst the victims carry on suffering because of not having that money, which would be an injustice.

But if they should, how about grandchildren? How about great grandchildren? How about all the present day citizens of a nation whose elites commited crimes centuries ago?

Whilst I think group guilt and group victimhood for crimes commited centuries ago - as in the suggestion of the President Of Portugal is complete total bollocks and a way to whitewash the small details that the Portuguese Old Money (including him, who is the son of a Minister in the time of Fascism, hence old money) are the only present day portuguese who might actually be benefiting from those crimes - are way too far and complete total bollocks, I can see how, say, taking away things people inherited which were obtained by theft (for example, what’s being done with old paintings stollen by the Nazis) is just.