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.
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, all of 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? Should they all lose a little bit to compensate a group of people only entire verifable link with victims from long long ago is having been born in a present day geographical nation that contains an area were the victimization is thought to have occurred?
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 ill gotten nature of the wealth of most of the Portuguese Old Money (including him, who is the son of a Minister in the time of Fascism, hence old money), I can see how, say, taking away things people inherited which were obtained by theft (for example, returning to the descendants of the owners old paintings stollen by the Nazis) is a fair and just thing to do.
You are just describing statue of limitations
I’m describing the reason why the statute of limitations came to be.
The reason is however more generic that just that, and provides explanation for things like not making the children pay for the crimes of their parents.
As for my overall point of it not being simple, notice how there are different statutes of limitations for different crimes.