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.
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
I mean sure, the ruling men of more then a century ago by our standards were terrible people. But goddamn teddy Roosevelt was a man fighting for shit you’re still fighting for today and hell he got you closer to it then compared to you now… You can lump him in with slave owners and child rapists FFS.
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.
I agree with most of this, but slave owners could dream of a lot of violence.
Also, don’t ignore shipping jobs overseas to where labor might as well be slavery if it technically isn’t.
Plenty of people wrote about how shit these people were AT THE TIME.
This. It’s disheartening to realise that in a hundred years’ time, most people will be excusing Trump and Putin with “that’s just how people were back then”.
There’s almost no national leader that is going to be a “good person”.
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I have never seen anybody on any platform anywhere defend Pol Pot.
I think it’s tremendously funny that you saw a list including Stalin, Putin, and Mao, and your only response was "I’ve never seen anyone defend Pol Pot.
Proves my point, there are plenty of leaders that users of this instance think were good people.
And I think it’s funny that you’re blatantly lying about what other people believe, and your response to that is, “Ha! Not every word that comes out of my mouth is a lie, only lots of them!”
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 a lot 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.
They aren’t wrong! Carter may have been the best president post office, but he is also the American most responsible for the religious dictatorship that took over Iran and much of the middile east.
I’m a leftist, but after finishing “Reading Lolita In Tehran” and watching the PBS documentary “Taken Hostage” I understood completely how Reagan defeated him in a crushing landslide. The outpouring of grief after Carters death was difficult to stomach understanding the damage he had done. Yes the man built houses and gave generously late in life, but that’s because he knew he had a lot to make up for it. The man destabilized several nations, including his own, with entirely foreseeable negligence.
Everything you mention for Reagan was passed by a democrat controlled Congress. Both parties killed the middle class
The reason to hate Carter is that a lot of the economic policies attributed to Reagan had their beginnings under Carter.
The post WWII economic consensus was Keynesianism, but beginning around the time of Nixon there was an economic phenomenon called “stagflation,” which refers high unemployment at the same time as high inflation, something that isn’t supposed to be possible under Keynesianism, which advocates confronting high unemployment with injecting money into the economy, and then reducing those injections when employment comes back down. Nixon attempted to address the problem with price controls as a short-term solution, Ford’s idea was just asking people to spend less, but Carter was the one who made the decision to view inflation as a bigger problem than unemployment and began moving towards Neoliberalism.
The big difference between Carter and Reagan was branding. Carter branded the policy terribly which is to say he was honest about it. Work was going to become more alienating and purchasing power would decrease, but it’s ok, because we as a society will just have to pursue meaning outside of the economic sphere, making do with less, cultivating out personal virtue. There’s likely a connection between Carter and the right’s meme of, “You will own nothing and be happy.”
Reagan has much better branding for these policies, which is to say he lied. Look at how cheap we’re gonna make everything! You’re gonna be able to buy so much stuff, it’s gonna be great, let’s party and celebrate capitalism and consumerism! Of course, with wages divorced from productivity and the decline of the power of organized labor, purchasing power would decrease, but the effects of that would take time to fully manifest.
There were a wave of wildcat strikes during this period but unions had already defanged themselves, they kicked out all the communists and the leadership sold out, because from the New Deal era up to this point things were going fine.
Reagan definitely bears a lot of the blame but there wasn’t a huge difference in economic policy, the democrats didn’t really have anything to propose as an alternative and voters weren’t given much of a choice about it.
It’s easy to pick on “the levels of bad”, when you’re not the one one enslaved in a priaon, but writing behind a screen.
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?
They do genocide and colonialism and slavery and they are settlers
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…?
Because settlers are always more evil
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?
OP is probably an American, it’s that simple.
Be the change you want to see. Post memes about past politicians from other countries. I will upvote them.
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.
Jimmy Carter too?
Especially him!
“he’s history’s greatest monster!”
The rabbit knew.
Worse now, with modern tech they kill a lot more people
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.
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.
I wouldn’t call that a particularly insightful observation.
I would even say it’s incredibly trivial. But even making such observations points to the fact that such person is somehow treating that as apparently undesirable, wanting what, going back to hunting-gathering?
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“Fun fact”: Mount Rushmore or Six Grandfathers was a sacred mountain for the Lakota to actively disrespect their beliefs
other “fun” fact: the man who defaced Six Grandfathers, Gutzon Borglum, was a member of the KKK
Gutzon Borglum
I refuse to acknowledge this is a real name.
That’s a gnome NPC in WoW, right?
Much much worse, either villain or very minor supporting character from Harry Potter. Especially that he was member of KKK.
Lincoln also commuted the sentence of 264 other Dakotans that had to be executed the same day. If he didn’t intervene the executions would’ve been 303
So what’s the real dirt on Lincoln? Did he snore or something? :P
I think he was a shitty husband? From memory he didn’t cope well after one of his sons died in the civil war and took it out in his personal life. He was also horribly depressed. Not that mental health was something people even considered at that time, so it’s not like seeing a therapist was on the cards.
Honestly the worst thing Lincoln ever did was choosing Johnson as his VP. Even then, I learned recently that he asked a different (better) guy, Benjamin Butler, to be VP but he turned him down. Had he lived to do Reconstruction, we might have more to critique, certainly he’d have done better than Johnson (not a high bar), but since he died he’s off the hook for figuring that one out.
You could also criticize him for not being committed enough to ending slavery from the start. But really, other than the mass hangings of the Dakotas (which could’ve been worse but was still not great), most criticism of him is just Lost Causers whining about “authoritarianism” by freeing the slaves and expanding the scope and power of the federal government as was necessary to free the slaves.
It is telling that while you can’t think of something cartoonishly evil he did off of the top of your head- you definitely remember that he was assassinated.
Edit: Apparently this edit is required. Whether Lincoln held the mission of abolishing slavery personally or not, he was associated with it. And was shot in cold blood for it. Do something less than the worst thing you could do as president and the American project will answer your arrogance.
I’m not American, so I don’t really know that part of your history.
Edit: he was assassinated for wanting to give black people citizenship is what I’m reading…?
A primer on the American Civil War, as understood by a natural born citizen of the state of North Carolina and a graduate of said public state’s school system.
The United States in the mid-1800s 1. did not yet span the entire width of the continent, this becomes important later and 2. could broadly be divided into two regions: the South, characterized by an agrarian economy featuring large plantations growing cash crops like cotton and tobacco via the labor of chattel slaves, and the North, with a more industrial economy that had abolished slave labor.
In the North, you get a lot of the day’s moralistic movements as they existed at the time. You see a lot of the Christian sects like the shakers, the early roots of the temperance movement, and most relevantly, abolitionism. People who wanted to see slavery abolished at the federal level. This became a popular political cause in the North and you start seeing legislation proposed.
Meanwhile in the South, slaves are where the money comes from, so obviously God says it’s the white man’s inalienable right to own black men.
Turns out there was pretty equal representation in congress about it; about the same number of Northern to Southern states, so nothing got done. Except remember earlier I said we didn’t span the continent yet? Well that was a project under active development at the time. Territory was being purchased or conquered, and new territories were drafting constitutions and applying for statehood. And what if more pro-abolition states than anti-abolition states joined the union?
We get a temporary pause with a compromise that states would be admitted in pairs, one free state in the North and one slave state in the South. You can still see the line they drew, the perfectly straight northern border of Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma. That’s why that’s like that. Notice it stops at Nevada. That’s about how far that went before war were declared.
Southern states decided to secede from the union, forming their own nation called the Confederate States of America. The South raised an army to repel what they now saw as a foreign invasion, the North deployed their army to put down what they saw as a treasonous rebellion.
During the conflict, the North passed increasingly abolitionist policy, culminating in the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order signed by president Abraham Lincoln in 1863 which declared all slaves everywhere in the nation free, and the thirteenth amendment abolishing slavery except as punishment for a crime (this has present day ramifications) was ratified.
On April 14, 1865, actor and confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln via gunshot to the back of the head while the President was enjoying a play at Ford’s theater. His motive, quoting directly from Wikipedia:
On April 11, Booth attended Lincoln’s last speech, in which Lincoln promoted voting rights for emancipated slaves;[18] Booth said, “That means nigger citizenship. … That is the last speech he will ever give.”[19]
You are correct. The only other thing that Lincoln is criticized for is suspending habeas corpus during the US civil war. I don’t know what the person you’re commenting on is on about. They may be a confederate sympathizer.
That’s the only other thing he was critiqued for? Brother, you must certainly have never opened a book before…
How do you read that from what I wrote?
My point was: he attempted or was associated with an attempt to do something less then the worst thing he could. And he was shot for it.
Ah! I see now. When you said “it’s telling that while you can’t think of something cartoonishly evil he did off of the top of your head,” I thought you were saying I was ignorant for not being able to think of something cartoonishly evil. My bad, I’m just primed to read hostility on Lemmy I guess.
I understand.
I can’t think of anything particularly bad he did, but someone will always have something to bring up. I wanted to sidestep that and just point out the reality of the office. There will never be a good American president- and it has little do to with the individuals involved.
Edit: Wait, you aren’t who I was replying to.
There’s a fascinating historical nonfiction book by Erik Larson that covers the early days of the American civil war.
The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War is mostly focused on the soldiers and officers manning Fort Sumter in South Carolina, the site of the first battle of the war. But it also includes lengthy discussions of how Lincoln was vilified for things he never said and blamed for things he didn’t actually do.
The southern states, specifically the landed elite, were very interested in starting a war so they could maintain their wealth and power so they used Lincoln as a scapegoat to rouse the masses
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Yeah. Cherry-picking can be used for good AND evil.
