Indemnity: Fill & Download for Free

The world learned this lesson more than two thousand years ago, during an episode in the 118-year struggle for Mediterranean dominance between Rome and Carthage.After the Carthaginians lost the First Punic War in 241 BC, they had a problem. The peace settlement with Rome included a costly indemnity, and it so happened that Carthage had fought the latter stages of the war largely with mercenary soldiers. When Carthage lost the war and sued for peace, the mercenaries were still around and still expected to be paid for their services. And the Carthaginians were broke, after paying Rome off.The result was the Mercenary War, in which the Carthaginians’ plans for bringing the troops home in stages was botched, and 20,000 soldiers-for-hire ended up in camps near Carthage, expecting to get paid. The Carthaginian government had planned to bring a few thousand in at a time, pay them off, and send them home. But they couldn’t pay 20,000 all at once. The mercenaries went to war against Carthage itself, seized Tunis (then a suburb of Carthage) and then demanded even more than they were entitled to be paid.The Carthaginians eventually put Hamilcar Barca, father of the legendary Hannibal, in charge of their army. Many of the rank-and-file mercenaries had served under Hamilcar against the Romans, and he lured them to his side. Eventually, Carthage won a war in which neither side gave quarter to the other. The war was far more devastating to Carthage than the First Punic War and the Roman indemnity had been.Then the Romans took advantage of the Mercenary War to re-open hostilities with Carthage, and force it to cede Sardinia and Corsica to Rome. This treachery was a big part of the later enmity of the Barcas toward Rome, and why Hannibal basically started the Second Punic War of his own accord 19 years later.The moral: Don’t let a large body of professional killers assemble in one place unless you have the money to pay them off.

Wait~ What kind of history western countries are teaching to their kids that could possibly make people ask questions like this?In Layman Terms……Colonialism = Racism + SlaveryImperialism = Exploitation + RobberyImperialist colonial = Using slaves to rob.A quick review of history……FIRST, western powers went to China to buy Chinese goods. SECOND, western powers started opium trade and sold over a million tons of opium to the people of China. THIRD, western powers repeatedly wage wars on China, ask China to cede territories and pay 1.4 billion troy ounces of silver for indemnities. It was not a pretty picture, civilized society and superior culture were nowhere to be found.So the logic here is simple; Western powers were pure evil. China would not be better off in western hands.(Western power does not equal Western people)

France was required to pay an indemnity of 700 million francs. Payments were to be staged over a period of five years.In addition, they had to pay all the expenses (wages, provisions, lodgings, etc) for an Allied army of occupation numbering 150,000 men for the same five-year period. The cost of this has been calculated as nearly 200 million francs per year, of which 50 million was paid in cash and the rest in kind.Total payment was therefore 700 million indemnities plus 965 million in support for the troops, or 1.7 billion francs in total.The indemnities were shared out as follows:Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia received 100 million each.112.5 million was shared between 35 smaller countries, proportionately to the number of troops they had committed to the war against France.50 million was to be given as a gratuity to the troops of the British and Prussian armies who fought in the Waterloo campaign.The remaining 137.5 million was to be used to pay for the construction of border fortresses in the Netherlands, German Confederation, Piedmont-Sardinia and Spain to guard against any future French aggression.A key difference between the Treaty of Vienna in 1815 and the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 was that France was ordered to pay indemnities, while Germany paid reparations. Legally these were not the same thing, though in practice the differences were largely semantic.Indemnities meant simply that the Allies said to France, “You lost, pay up”. There was no attempt to justify the payments in any other terms: it was the cost of defeat. The Allies shared out the booty proportionately to the contribution they had each made to defeating Napoleon.It must be stressed that this was perfectly normal at the time, though the amount of the indemnities was high — by comparison when Napoleon defeated Prussia in 1807 he had demanded 155 million francs (42 million thalers) as an indemnity.During the First World War, Germany had planned to impose a large indemnity on France if it had won the war — enough to pay off the entire German national debt. However, when it was the Allies who won instead, they decided that it would not be justifiable to simply demand money from Germany ‘just because they won’.Instead, the idea behind reparations was that they would be compensation for damage done. This was seen as entirely morally justifiable. Germany had launched a war of aggression, invaded Belgium and France, and systematically wrecked factories, farms, and mines in the areas it occupied as well as deporting tens of thousands of French and Belgian civilians to Germany as forced labour. They should be compelled to compensate their victims for the damage done.The only problem was that when the Allied governments totalled up the actual cost to set right all the damage, the amount was eye-watering; in the hundreds of billions of marks. There was no way Germany could pay so much. In the end they decided to force Germany to pay only a token amount, roughly one seventh of the actual value of the losses they had caused, but even that was around 50 billion marks (and Germany ended up paying about half that amount before defaulting).