Jimmy Carter too?
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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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...
Worse now, with modern tech they kill a lot more people
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 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.
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
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.
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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?
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