Jimmy Carter too?
Teddy Roosevelt never said “The only good indian is a dead indian.” That quote is typically associated with Philip Sheridan.
A number of sources claim a similar quote (“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are…") alleged to be from an 1886 speech in New York, but this still goes against how he treated native americans generally and I can’t find the original speech so I’m a bit suspicious of this as well.
There’s almost no national leader that is going to be a “good person”.
This is lemmy.ml, I’m sure you can name a few that they would agree with. Stalin, Putin, Pol Pot, Mao…
Carter was a pretty good person, at least post-Presidency, can’t really speak on how he was in the White House though.
Reagan, otoh, was irredeemable all the way through, given while he was in the White House, that guy effectively destroyed the middle class, created the current disaster that is unaffordable post-secondary education, and created the current credit score system among other atrocities, not to mention that whole Contra business.
Yes, really, if it weren’t for Reagan, there wouldn’t be a massive and progressively-widening gap between the bottom and top of society, it would still be possible to get affordably educated, and people wouldn’t be getting completely screwed by bad credit.
For a perfect foil of everything the US has stood for for at least the last four decades, look at most of the EU having universal healthcare, having an actually regulated education sector where for-profit grift schools like University of Phoenix or even the late ITT Tech or EDMC and its subsidiaries, wouldn’t have ever been allowed to take root to begin with.
For Carter the worst thing I know is that alot of the free iran Iranian people really hate Carter for his actions in the Whitehouse and blame him for the current oppressive Iranian regime. I don’t really think that was something malicious on his part, just a policy mistake.
Everything you mention for Reagan was passed by a democrat controlled Congress. Both parties killed the middle class
My biggest complaint about Lincoln was the people he didn’t hang.
Kinda like how the only thing John Brown did wrong on May 24th, 1856 was stop at 5
Worse now, with modern tech they kill a lot more people
I hate the “it was a different time” excuse for these awful human beings. It falls apart if you do any reading from the time. Plenty of people wrote about how shit these people were AT THE TIME. Our morals haven’t expanded somehow. Our systems of control have changed to be more sustainable. The ruling class learned that slavery was not sustainable. That’s it.
Also, this doesn’t give an excuse for the leaders of today. The slave owners of the past are not “less caring” than the current ruling class is. The current ruling class has just better distanced themselves from direct acts of violence while expanding their ability to perform mass violence. Slavery has evolved into mass incarceration for example. We’ve just normalized our violence into different systems and outsourced a lot of it to the global south.
If you’re a Billionaire today you are the equivalent of a slave owner of the past with significantly more violence and control than a slave owner could ever dream of.
Also, don’t ignore shipping jobs overseas to where labor might as well be slavery if it technically isn’t.
303 natives were convicted and sentenced to death following the Dakota War of 1862. Lincoln actually commuted the sentences of 264 of those natives, allowing the convictions to stand only for those he believed personally engaged in the murder of innocent women and children.
Therefore, the last one is deliberately and intentionally misleading.
The Dakota War came out of a strategic starvation campaign imposed by the Union Army over Sioux Territory. The original tribes had been forced off the productive soil around the Minnesota River and displaced into barren wasteland. Subsequent crop failure and long winter made trading for foodstuffs from their home territories the only means of survival. And the settlers took maximum advantage, deliberately scamming and price gouging the Sioux for the remains of their family wealth. This, after a series of treaties had been casually violated from administration to administration.
The war was quite literally a fight for survival by the Sioux. Lincoln’s largess in hanging only the young men directly involved in the raid did nothing to prevent the Sioux population from continuing its rapid decline, as the surviving elders were left to starve to death in the wilderness and the children were forced into Christian schools notorious for brutalizing and killing the kidnapped youths.
He didn’t kill ALL the innocent, whose land he stole and whose relatives he murdered. Only those that dated fight back.
Yeah, sounds like Trump.
He didn’t steal any land. The battles fought between Natives and non-native populations were rarely a fight that had “good” vs “evil” sides.
They executed those that wantonly murdered innocent people. It tirns out murdering people for their food, goods, and horses is something the government did not want to encourage.
Bro he literally freed the slaves.
They still have slaves. They are just in prison. That’s my point.
Instead of actually working towards something better, let’s just spend our time arguing over things we can’t change. /S
and hitler was a pretty good painter …
I’m sorry, did you just compare painting TO ENDING SLAVERY*
*some exclusions apply
That’s objectively false. His line work was shit and this meme is inaccurate.
Decent architect trying to be a painter
Removed by mod
Wait Abe too? Damn
The Republican Party was predicated on continuous western expansion. It was the successor to the Free Soil Party in the west and what was left of the Whigs in the East.
That necessarily meant seizing more land from American Natives and distributing it to Settlers. Much of the Union Army, before and after the Civil War, was focused on decimating the Native population and securing new tracks of free land for settlers. Lincoln inherited that mandate when he took office and pursued it as zealously as any Republican before or since.
You want to find me a head of state that wasn’t or isn’t?
Perfection is the enemy of good.
Perhaps, and I didn’t get a philosophy degree so take this with a grain of salt, but slavery and child rape seem to be even greater enemies of good.
And in what way are America’s presidents unique in these atrocities among world leaders of their era? Other than “America Bad” is trendy right now?
Don’t recall saying that child rape or slavery are unique to anyone, just that they are a worse affront to “good” than “perfection”. I’m against them in all their manifestations. Don’t really care who specifically tbh.
But I’d also go so far as to say that just because “America bad” is trendy, doesn’t mean these child raping slavers are being unfairly targeted. Cuz you know, they did have slaves and diddled kids.
And we’re paying special attention to American slave owning child diddlers who have been dead for 200 years and not British or Canadian or French or German or Russian slave owning child diddlers who have been dead for 200 years because…?
We as in me? Didn’t think I was. Even specified that I didn’t care about the specific “who”.
We as in the royal we? I reckon because the post was making a point about not romanticizing past presidents in the face of our current super awful kiddy diddler and you took offense to the specificity?
Ok, historically some political leaders felt that raping all brides before their wedding night was a great honor bestowed upon the family. Egyptian royalty had slaves, family members and pets murdered or buried alive with them when they died.
Human history is full of it’s leaders doing shitty and horrendous things… We can either sit here and microanalyze whatever country or set of leaders we want to single out or just recognize that historically everybody in power was a piece of shit, and look for ways to do better and make our leaders do better.
Does anyone here think that the United States and the world is better off with Donald Trump in power as opposed to Kamala Harris? If your answer to that question is " but Kamala supported Israel too hard"… Then my original comment about perfection and goodness is for you.
Lol, omfg, Lemmy is nuts sometimes.
No, I dont think we are better off with the known child rapist Donald Trump. I actually also think it’s quite unlikely that Kamala has raped children or owned slaves.
But I do stand by my claim that child rape and slavery are worse enemies of good than “perfection”. And if your response to that is “child rape is still a relative concept”, then I’m sorry to say you can piss up a rope.
I voted for harm reduction like a sensible person, now can I please be offended over children getting raped or do I need to pass another purity test?
Perfection is the enemy of the good. I don’t know why you are obsessed with child rape…
Well, it was literally mentioned in the post. Unlike… Kamala and Israel.
And you responded to my comment regarding it with random facts trying to soften how terrible it is, historically speaking.
So if we are talking obsessive behavior… Not sure it’s mine that qualifies.
My comment was responding to another comment (which referred to heads of state). I wasn’t responding to the original post. You then responded to my comment which was a sub comment to the post that I guess you really wanted to respond to…Try to keep up.
Just a little reminder that governments have killed more people than any other entity and it isn’t even close. You could try to point at religion - and that history is also fucked - but even if you exclude “holy wars” waged by religious government leaders, religious killing still doesn’t add up to what has been done by governments where religion wasn’t really a factor. The proletariat must not be disarmed. You might trust your current government, but give it a generation (or even an election) and things could be very different.
What a weird, self defeating line of thought. Yes, wielding the collective power of a larger group of people will do more damage. Was anyone under the impression that a loose tribe of 30 dudes could physically accomplish the same feats as 30 million?
I wouldn’t call that a particularly insightful observation. Ever since humanity settled down in agricultural societies there have been governments, and with governments come a monopoly on force, so obviously governments have killed more people than anything else. Any organisation of humans is gonna have at least some threat of lethal force backing it.
@Confidant6198 That’s why I like to call them the Genocidal Regimes of America.
Can someone tell me more about Washington? Wiki says he purchased the teeth from slaves. I’m sure that’s not entirely true, or is it?
He had dentures made of human teeth, human teeth dentures were almost always made from slave teeth during this time.
William Henry Harrison should have ate it at Tippecanoe but at least he corrected his misstep during his first month in office
Not to mention defacing a mountain by putting a bunch of faces on it
It’s [not] funny actually - Trump would absolutely come up with this idea for himself while alive, had it not been done before.
Since it has been done, now he’s going to want a bigger mountain face.Not just a mountain. A mountain holy for native americans
It’s a lot more holey now
Defaced then refaced
