
Hague court orders Dutch state to pay out over colonial massacres - Tomte
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/27/hague-court-orders-dutch-state-to-pay-out-over-colonial-massacres
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bitcharmer
I'd say this may be a risky precedent for other cases like this. UK comes to
mind immediately with their ex-colonies now constituting a better part of the
UN.

How far into the past do we allow for these historic compensations to be still
valid? Can Spain sue Turkey for the occupation of the peninsula (711 - 1492)?

I think this is just a bad idea.

~~~
ahelwer
Forcing colonialist countries to return their ill-gotten wealth is nothing but
justice. If you live in those countries your affluence is built on a history
of appalling human suffering. Saying it's all water under the bridge is just
tremendously self-serving and shouldn't be an option. To quote our friend
Malcolm X:

"If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, there's no
progress. If you pull it all the way out, that's not progress. The progress is
healing the wound that the blow made. They won’t even admit the knife is
there"

~~~
jacobriis
Many countries without an extensive history of colonialism have achieved
similar prosperity to the great European colonial powers: Spain (29k per
capita gdp), Portugal (23k), Netherlands (52k), United Kingdom (40k), and
France (41k).

Consider Korea (31k), Taiwan (24k), Finland (48k), Austria (50k), Switzerland
(80k), Czechia (23k), Hungary (17k), Slovenia (26k), Estonia (23k), Greece
(19k), Lithuania (23k), Latvia (18k), and Cyprus (27k).

Hard to make the case that colonialism is the sole or principal factor that
produced the prosperity of any of these countries.

But if it is true that Portugal (23k) is an evil white supremacist economy and
Lithuania/Estonia/Czechia/Taiwan (~23k) are virtuous economies, we should
study Lithuania, Estonia, Taiwan and Czechia! Great job lads!

Does the Republic of Ireland (#4 per capita GDP) need to pay for United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland colonies or does the United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Northern Ireland (#21 per capita GDP) need to pay Republic
of Ireland?

Is the Ottoman Empire also very bad? Do the Turks need to pay up? The
colonialism people seem to pass over them for some reason.

~~~
anticodon
Germany had colonies. East European countries are not rich. East India Company
was the most profitable corporation in the history of humanity. It accumulated
the wealth much greater than any of the current corporations. And contemporary
corporations wealth is mostly ones and zeroes increased arbitrarily with ever
increasing speed.

~~~
iguy
Germany had a few overseas colonies, late in the game. And boy did they resent
it.

Eastern Europe is not as rich as the west, but is not all that far behind --
Poland has the GDP that the UK had in about 1987 (says google). And of course
got deeply massively trodden on in a way that certainly wasn't colonialism,
rather more recently than most ex-colonies.

The East India companies were indeed large for their time, the biggest
companies ever until canals & railways got invented. But it's hard to
comprehend how small the scale of commerce was then, the sum of all long-
distance trade was a few containers. Enough to make a few well-positioned men
very wealthy indeed, they built some nice mansions. But not countries.

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didgeoridoo
>> Andi Monji, 83, who travelled to the Netherlands to tell his story to the
court, was awarded €10,000 (£9,000) while eight widows and three children of
other executed men, mainly farmers, were awarded compensation of between
€123.48 and €3,634 for loss of income.

Is it just me, or are these _astoundingly_ small amounts of money to
compensate people for having their immediate relatives murdered by the state?

~~~
zo1
Why should it be any amount of money at all? If crimes were committed, the
people responsible should be tried and held accountable.

~~~
inetsee
The people responsible are probably all dead by now, given that the crimes
occurred 73 years ago. The people were acting on orders of their government,
so the only recourse now would be payment to the families of the victims. The
payments seem to be exceptionally small to me.

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onetimemanytime
>> _The court recognised in its ruling that the sums granted the relatives of
victims were “disproportionate” to the suffering caused._

Makes no sense, unless the court couldn't give more by statute. He saw his
father killed and was deprived of his love and financial care. This is a joke,
after 8 years, $11K

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inetsee
It's not just you. One thing I noticed in the article is that the Dutch
state's defense was that "the claims {should} be struck out given the time
that had passed since the acts were committed."

