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
William Henry Harrison should have ate it at Tippecanoe but at least he corrected his misstep during his first month in office
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…
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!”
@Confidant6198 That’s why I like to call them the Genocidal Regimes of America.
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.
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.
Bro he literally freed the slaves.
They still have slaves. They are just in prison. That’s my point.
That’s still far from as bad.
Oh okay. I didn’t realize “a little” slavery is okay. As a treat if your white I guess.
What. Are you genuinely fucking with me or do you think enslaving a third of the population is the same level of bad as prison labor.
Do you straight up think there’s no difference between before and after the civil war.
No, I don’t think any slavery is okay at all. Do you?
the constitution even condones it. Fucked. Prisoners get paid like 70c an hour or some shit.
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.
When has art ever been objective?
True, he was a horrible painter. I’ve seen better paintings from Alex Jones
Decent architect trying to be a painter
Instead of actually working towards something better, let’s just spend our time arguing over things we can’t change. /S
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.
The settlers have always been 100% evil
It tirns out murdering people for their food, goods, and horses is something the government did not want to encourage
unless you’re a settler, then it’s called “manifest destiny”
No, they were, very much. Europeans were invaders, taking land that didn’t belong to them by force. The government explicitly encouraged murder and turned a blind eye to any abuses. If you don’t want people to defend their land and avenge the love domes you murder, maybe don’t invade and ethnically cleanse the are to begin with?
Do you also think Russia v. Ukraine or Israel’s genocide don’t have “evil” vs “good” sides?
Because if you’re invading and murdering innocent people, its a clear cut for most people.
You’re a fucking deluded moron. Educate yourself, form a realistic opinion and come back.
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.
OK, but america had already been established. You have to ask who were the groups that pushed those policies. AoC is part of the machine that invades countries doesn’t mean she advocates for it.
Something stuck out to me in your response and that’s the religious aspect of the oppression.
That’s four of them. I rather think Carter was a good human being, regardless of whether or not you think he was a good president.
I can’t really agree with that given how he treated Cambodia and supported the Khmer Rouge, as well as other crimes against humanity in the name of “opposing Communism.”
Yeah but if you ignore some of the most heinous atrocities ever perpetrated he’s a nice guy
George W. Bush’s treatment by the media in recent years in a nutshell. Thank goodness for Blowback reminding people of his atrocities.
It’s sad how lacking of recent historical context people have. They always point to Carter and it’s like… frustrating.
Absolutely, the media machine does a great job of “cleansing the records” on US figures.
The truth is that they want to see non-white people killed. They support Carter because he supported groups like the Khmer Rouge and they killed Vietnamese people. It’s just racism at its core
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Read “The Jakarta Method”
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.Defaced then refaced
Not just a mountain. A mountain holy for native americans
It’s a lot more holey now
Not pictured: the giant, shitty looking pile of rubble under them.
They just blasted chunks off the mountain and left the mess behind
Also not pictured: that the mountain is a spiritual site for the local tribes.
My wife and I found ourselves near Mt. Rushmore by happenstance durin a road trip several years back. We knew the history, but stopped in to see it for ourselves. We found it to be extremely shitty and underwhelming. The natural area behind the monument was incredible, and I absolutely understand why the indigenous people believed this place to be sacred, but the front was small, tacky, and depressing. I wish I could refund our admission and give it to some chill natives at a gas station instead.
You have to pay to be allowed to look at it?
Internet says there’s no admission, so I must have misremembered that part. We did look around the gift shop a bit.
Sadly I wouldn’t have put it past the US.
But yeah gift shops and stuff around it is the tourist norm.
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
Yeah. Cherry-picking can be used for good AND evil.
So what’s the real dirt on Lincoln? Did he snore or something? :P
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.
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…?
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.
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.
That’s the only other thing he was critiqued for? Brother, you must certainly have never opened a book before…
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
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.
I dunno, tankies will find anything to criticize one of the few decent presidents America ever had because USA = BAD.
Not really a fan of America myself but seriously the people who say this shit are the same people willing to overlook china’s fucking deranged political system and blatant lack of free speech, because apparently everything that goes against capitalism is good, even if it’s another, arguably worse, form of capitalism.
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.
Slavery was the original automation. If you wanted an educated class that thought it was a progressive society you needed slaves, and it freed up time for invention and research.
There were slaves of every race as well.
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?
Put it this way. No one in their right mind would have their healthy teeth pulled out without anaesthetic and sell them, if they had any real choice.
We know that he “bought” teeth from slaves, and that he was a slave owner, we also know that he had dentures made of other people’s teeth. No one knows for sure that the teeth he took were for his own use or from the people he enslaved himself, but it seems probable. More info here.
He had dentures made of human teeth, human teeth dentures were almost always made from slave teeth during this time.
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.
I agree with most of this, but slave owners could dream of a lot of violence.
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.
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?
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?
This is why I find it surprising when USAians say “This is not us.” When talking about Trump. No bro, it was always you, maybe you just weren’t paying attention.
Me sowing: Hell yeah this is great
Me reaping: This is not us. What a somber moment in world history 😔
As a Native American this attitude is so grating. People outside the US really don’t seem to understand that it’s 55 different states, districts, and territories, along with dozens of sovereign tribes, all being forced to pretend to be one nation. Many of us can and do claim “this is not us” in the same way many Europeans would say the same about Viktor Orban.
“Why don’t Americans just march on DC and take their country back??”
If I lived in Lisbon, Portugal, Moscow would be the equivalent distance of how far away DC is from me.
I can’t and don’t want to argue with your point, however in the faceless internet space unless you specify you speak from the name of a specific subgroup, the blanket ‘American’ is implied. It’s not a lack of understanding, it’s a lack of context.
Contrary to that Europe doesn’t have one cohesive identity, your example of Orban is multiple country borders removed from me personally. I don’t have the power to vote for/against him or influence that country in any way, where that’s different in your case.
I’m not sure why you would reply if you didn’t want to argue but okay.
Thinking that individual European countries have local identities and states or others don’t is absolutely a lack of understanding and not a lack of context.
That you seem to think that everyone in the US has the power to vote for or against the president would also seem to be a lack of understanding, I chose the leader of a specific country in Europe as my example for that reason.
Thinking that individual European countries have local identities and states or others don’t is absolutely a lack of understanding and not a lack of context.
That’s not at all what I said. It’s in fact the opposite and because of that I said I can’t argue with most of your previous points.
On your latter point, I do lack some understanding on the native reservations, but as far as I know they’re still under the governance of the US to some extent. My assumption was they can at least participate in the ‘democracy’ which affects them immensely. It’s very sad that’s not the case…
I am a little confused then as you seemed to me to be implying that American as a cultural identity precludes Oklahoman as a for instance but that European would not preclude Scottish as a for instance.
It wasn’t until 1965 that the right of non white citizens to vote was protected and it has been a constant fight since. Currently the administration is arguing that Native Americans arent citizens at all.
In the mean time it’s probably worth pointing out that nobody’s vote for president really counts for anything because of the electoral college. On top of that many of us, including myself, live in ‘winner take all’ states where the person with a plurality or majority or popular votes is awarded all of the electoral votes of that state.
In my lifetime there have been 9 presidential elections; 5 have been won by Democrats, with all 5 also winning the national popular vote. 4 have been Republicans, however only two of those elections were won by the candidate who won the popular vote.
Ah, but your regressive and racist system built by rascist white guys 250 years ago entrenches the power of regressive and racist white guys. Therefore you are a bad person.
Let’s ignore the fact that every single poll shows more Americans favoring progressive policies. Let’s ignore the systemic disenfranchisement of everyone who’s not a rich white man (and their candidates still lose the popular vote every time). Any random person in San Diego is the exact same as someone living 1600 miles away in Omaha.
Why don’t we apply the same revulsion to, idk, Belgians? King Leopold II directly killed ~10 million people in his own private colony. Doing that 116 years ago is better than George Washington freeing his last 123 slaves when he died 228 years ago?
If you don’t have the power to vote for the president, you don’t live in a democracy.
Precisely…
Yeah, uh, last I checked American territories don’t have the ability to vote in federal elections. Someone from Puerto Rico can’t vote for the US president despite being governed by the US. It’s one of many bullshit systems designed to keep the GOP-Democrat right-wing ratchet going.
Contrary to that Europe doesn’t have one cohesive identity, your example of Orban is multiple country borders removed from me personally.
Orban would probably be best compared to a state governor. Just a reminder that Texas is literally larger than the largest EU country with some space leftover for a city-state or two.
The idea that the US has a cohesive identity is just… unbelievably ignorant. I’m actually amazed that you believe that considering that no one in their right mind would say the same thing about places like Africa, Europe, or South America.
States, districts, territories are not the same as different countries. Viktor Orban is not an European leader same as Jagmeet Singh is not an American leader.
My distinctions are real, yours are just lines on a map
Typical American answer all Europeans are the same while America supposedly changes every any arbitrary distance.
I didn’t have a choice to be born here, and, had I had the option, I wouldn’t have defaced a Native American monument in the first place. This is on top of the fact that the US is currently trying to find ways of disowning/executing me (trans).
Quite honestly, maybe I shouldn’t be offended by being lumped in with other Americans, because maybe I’m not actually being included in these kinds of sweeping statements. However, it rubs me the wrong way when people imply that Americans as a whole are responsible for the things our government has and is doing.
Again, I didn’t ask to be born in the US. I don’t like that I’m “American”. No one asked me, please don’t lump people like me in with the others.
As a European, I think it’s because of all the “land of the free”, “we’re #1”, “the american dream” and “the american melting pot” bullshit.
Whatever that means when looking at history. It was only as an adult that I found out america is the villain.
Every single democracy in Europe is younger than America’s by an order of magnitude. Most have gone through 2 or 3 forms of government since it was founded. You have the luxury of not “being the villains” because your governments haven’t been around long enough to have nasty shit stick to them. They were all emphatically on board with doing vile stuff to stop the communist boogeyman, they just let America’s guns to do it.
The American exceptionalism narrative was born out of WWII, because they really were the “best” industrialized country by virtue of not being a smoking crater. Every state that has reached or is on the path to being a modern nation has blood on their hands, America just hasn’t had the chance to symbolically wash them.
Agree. I think it’s the very convenient "All of us USA #1* when it’s propaganda, but “oh it’s the BAD Americans, not us” whenever push comes to shove.
In California I don’t think I even see these so called USA #1. Maybe “I love LA” but that’s mostly cause it the fires. Pretty sure the consensus here is that Finland or Sweden or some other northern European country are #1 because they actually have socialist programs, like parental leave and real healthcare and education.
I mean, in so much as a single person representing a county goes. The first colonies were a mix of religious zealots, Virginian drug dealers (well, tobacco but that’s almost worse), and a little Dutch (who were quite active in slave trading at the time). Quickly got a few more from French and Spanish, too.
However, the US also includes annexed Mexican territory (which has its own mixed history of subjegation and torture) and slews of different immigrant populations (with their own mixed intentions). A section of my own family is here cause they tried for Scottish independence, although there’s a good chance they were sent here for being belligerent drunks.
That said, ain’t a single country on this earth without their fair share of bullshit. America is just a lovely mix of those assholes, honestly.
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.
