• Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I come from a country - Portugal - which before 1974 had a Fascist Dictatorship and during that time there were 9 very rich families which were fully entwined with the dictatorship and supportive of it and pretty much the rest of the country was crushingly poor (and this is no exageration: at one point this European country was the recipient of Food Aid from countries such as The Netherlands, which, by the way, I know from family members, amongst other things sent cheese, so Dank u wel Nederland!).

    The “ladies” of those very rich families used to boast of how much Charity they did.

    Rights, consecrated in Law (ideally a Constitution) are for everybody and cannot be arbitrarily denied or withdrawn because, say, the person has not shown enough thankfulness.

    Charity is entirely arbitrary, given arbitrarily in arbitrary amounts and taken away arbitrarily for any reason, even maliciously to inflict suffering on the needy.

    The function of Charity is not to help, is to salve the consciences and polish the social image of the very people who with their actions the other 99% of the time cause the very suffering they so loudly and overtly claim the be reducing with their “charity”