USA’s presidents have all been awful humans

"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.

The history of Washingtons teeth is uncertain. The evidence that those were slave teeth seems to show that the teeth were purchased.

Internet pictures with words are fucking dumb.

Washington owned slaves. He was not some moral high ground individual. The only reason why they even got independence from Britain was that Britain wanted to stop the expansion of the territory and the people in the colonies wanted to continue it and kill all the natives.

Edit:

In 1784, Washington paid unnamed “Negroes” for nine teeth. We don’t know the precise circumstances, says Van Horn: “The president’s decision to pay his slaves for their teeth may have been a recognition on his part that teeth were something sacrosanct and personal.” On the other hand, being enslaved meant that any economic exchange was inherently not fair.

He literally took advantage of enslaved people to get their teeth and you consider it as just “bought”. Top tier cracker mindset. I guess that to you it was also fair for him to own his slaves because he “bought” them.

https://daily.jstor.org/were-george-washingtons-teeth-taken-from-enslaved-people/
- I didn't suggest anything about his character, and we could probably have an entirely separate discussion about imperialism.
  
  What is important is how you source information when it comes to dental prosthetics.
- Wow that's such a dumb thing I didn't expect to read today. I can see why you would think so, but still... Wow.
Internet pictures with words are fucking dumb

Memers in shambles right now. Webcomic artists, to shreds. Researchers who use diagrams with legends in their publications, pulverized. Journalists, atomised.

A child draws a picture of his father and writes "I love you" for it is the man's birthday. He posts the picture online.

YOU FOOLS!

Yells the mother, as she beats them both to death with a large brick.

In the halls of the United Nations, an envoy reads the latest finding of his commission: "I'm afraid every character of every alphabet is ultimately a drawing."

"But that would mean..."

"Yes, I'm afraid. Every text online counts as internet picture with words. Including the meeting reports that Stephanie posts on our site." Sound of typing stops, as Stephanie looks up, aghast The discussion resumes, the tone rises and descends again, a consensus is reached. It is a hard choice, but a fair one. All the lettered people are to be buried alive.
- Walk up honey, new copypasta just dropped!
- Lulz, good points. I should clarify that internet pictures with "facts" are fucking dumb. While that wording has gaps as well, maybe we can hone in on some specificity.
I was at the museum at his estate on the potomac; the dentures were there. The plaque underneath claimed it was slaves.
- Is that not how dentures worked at the time? Any tooth you got was from someone so poor they had to sell it or who had it taken from them.
  
  Modern equivalent would be displaying shoes made in a sweatshop. Yeah terrible practice, but so commonplace its generally not a huge reflection on the character of the owner.
- Both conditions apply, was the intent. Teeth from slaves that were also purchased. My wording was unclear, sorry.
  
  It was so unclear, it seems that I am white washing racist now.
I'm 30 and this is the first I've ever heard about this. my southern Baptist homeschool curriculum told me that his teeth were made of wood and it was never something i thought to fact check as an adult.

gotta love homeschooling 🙄
- According to a documentary I watched in passing on tv some years back, he had several types of dentures and most of them caused him great pain. One could even say his need for teeth helped in small part advance denture technology in the US.
Washington's teeth were made of diamonds and you can't convince me otherwise.
- Washington, Wash.ing.ton. Six foot twenty, fuckin’ killing for fun.

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
- 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 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.

Not to mention defacing a mountain by putting a bunch of faces on it

Not just a mountain. A mountain holy for native americans
- It's a lot more holey now
Defaced then refaced
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 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?

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.

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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
Me sowing: Hell yeah this is great

Me reaping: This is not us. What a somber moment in world history 😔
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.
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.

Seems like a good time to link the list of US atrocities

All four of them carved onto a sacred natural site known to the Plains Indigenous people of the area as the 'Six Grandfathers'

I understand the point, but as an exercise, try to find four historical figures without glaring character defects. Eventually, I figure we’ll all be either judged or forgotten in time.

These are a little more than character defects... theres lots of historical figures who didn't rape and murder.
We only learn about the ones with defects, because they are the most interesting. Most people in history were fine.

One historic figure who had no known defects: Alan Turing
- Its telling that your example is someone explicitly kept out of the public eye during his life. Basically any account of Turing is from personal friends or his professional work. He was a generally good person and great scientist that helped defeat the nazis, but he's only celebrated by progressives for his persecution as a gay man.
  
  I struggle to find any major social cause he publicly championed or records of his views on controversial topics. I'd like to be wrong, but it's easy to not have a mixed record as a private citizen. Nobody was grilling him to free slaves or asking his opinion on systemic injustice.
  
  Einstein is a contemporary comparable. He was a great scientist, opposed the nazis, and by most accounts a decent guy. He was even had to flee his homeland to escape persecution as a jew. Clearly lots of parallels. The main difference being he was an idol in his own day so we have way more first hand accounts.
  
  Turns out he was a socialist with varying views on communism, had shifting support for zionism and wrote rascist shit in his travel diaries. You could probably find a quote like Roosevelt's and slap it on a picture of him, that doesn't sum up his life.
Yeah every political leader have little oopsies like being called "town destroyer" by the people which land they invaded and towns they destroyed. They also were proud of it, used it to invade even more land, and their grandpas were also called that because it's their family and nation thing to do for generations.
Who here hasn't made dentures from unwillingly donated teeth?
Obama bombed a wedding of civilians not to mention hid Afghanistan casualty reports, was a part of the death of half a million Iraqi casualties, was part of the Syrian hell that targeted mainly children with fatalities at 191,000 by 2014, then there was Yemen and saber rattling on Iran and full support of Israel. Carter sadly oversaw the East Timor genocide at 25% of the population or 170,000 killed.
- You might want to rephrase that as the East Timor genocide started while Carter was in office. Carter played no role in that genocide. The Indonesian government was responsible for it. It is odd that you are blaming Carter at all.
I dunno Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, seem to have been personally good people. That's two recent US presidents. Then I guess I would add some super low hanging fruit like Nelson Mandela, Frederick the Great, John II Komnenos, any of the Five Good Emperors, Cyrus the Great, Ashoka, and one could keep going.

To all those pestering me about how US presidents presided over criminal imperialist policies, here is my answer from down belo:

OP talked about “glaring character defects”.

These are policy failures and state crimes, arguably attributed to the American state as a whole, and the long term US imperialist policies, rather to the singular person of the president.

You might have noticed that I added Frederick the Great in the list, which tells you exactly what my understanding of the challenge was.

I'm not here to defend US imperialism, don't @ me.
- Obama?? Obama??? The Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya Obama? You must be joking, right?
- Obama was incredibly evil.
- Obama lied to the left to gain power, that's enough to disqualify him right there.
  
  Also Washington was the greatest president in our history because he willingly let go of his power. He could have been a king but he chose to step down instead to set future precedent.
- Carter supported Pol Pot and Obama was a monster to people in the Middle East, neither can be considered to be "good people."
- I mean we absolutely could call out their flaws too, someone with that much power/responsibility is going to do abhorrent things (drone strikes with Obama being an easy one to bring up). Just like the four on Mount Rushmore these things aren't what we typically call out because they either were "of the times" or not on the same scale as their accomplishments.

That would require the democrats to actually do something
- I'm picturing 200 dems walking slowly chanting "we shall overcome" on the way to brunch. George Bush is there. No one tips.
That would require democrats to have fundamentally different goals than Republicans.
- Nooo how dare you suggest the Democrats aren't on our side. You're gonna make people note VOTEE

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.
- Bro he literally freed the slaves.
- 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.

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.

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.

@Confidant6198 That's why I like to call them the Genocidal Regimes of America.

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

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...

You want to find me a head of state that wasn't or isn't?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sankara
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.

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.

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

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.
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?

Jimmy Carter too?

William Henry Harrison should have ate it at Tippecanoe but at least he corrected his misstep during his first month in office

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.

Jimmy Carter

He oversaw East Timor
- No he did not. Indonesia waged that campaign from the mid 70s to 1999. Blaming Carter is a stupid choice.
- What does that mean? The name Carter doesn't show up on the Wikipedia page for timor from what I can find.

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
- It's sad how lacking of recent historical context people have. They always point to Carter and it's like... frustrating.
Read "The Jakarta Method"
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

You could look at any country in the world and find leaders that were just as bad and even worse throughout history. I think the takeaway should be that shitty people exist. Some of it is a product of the times, some of it just being awful people. Shitty people have and always will exist.

Edit: With these downvotes it almost seems like y'all thought I was defending them. I absolutely was not defending them. :)

The US Empire is definitely one of the worst States to exist in history, though, consistently.
- Can't deny that. The ratio of good/bad presidents is definitely abysmal.
At least they didn't carve them into a mountain though?
- They absolutely would have if they had the resources to swing it
This is an ml community. Anything that praises the USA or normalizes it (that is, reducing the awfulness) is gonna get down votes.

Okay, fella - take a few breaths and relax. People are products of their times. The better ones fight for virtues and values they see as better at the time. They see an opportunity others do not and rally people around those.

Others they don't see and continue wi5h those norms, or they see the wrongs but don't believe they can rally people around fixing them.

Do not demonize people in the past who do not meet current norms. There will never be anybody who will meet those standards.

Judge them against the standards of their peers.

What if MLK did not support feminists? Would he now be considered scum, thus negating everything good he ever did?

Heck, i don't know if he had a stance on women's rights explicitly. Maybe he didn't. Is he evil if he didn't?

Do not demonize people in the past who do not meet current norms. There will never be anybody who will meet those standards.

"Nazis were just a product of their time!"
What if MLK did not support feminists? Would he now be considered scum, thus negating everything good he ever did?

he literally addressed the national organization for women in 1966 and espoused their ideals.

giving a pass to the people from history is problematic because the same ideals of progressiveness that we pride ourselves on today were present in the past and people knew that it existed; they simply weren't as popular back then as they are now and anyone espousing them back then were treated like tankies of their own time.

giving them a pass only helps to excuse regressivism and anti-progressive sentiment like both the republicans and democrats (respectively) practice today; this is a key reason why we have trump as president today and probably jd vance tomorrow.
Okay. There were staunch abolitionists across the US and especially in the UK. Many of whom were operating on the basis of equality, i.e. not the American belief that black people are a subspecies that were sent from heaven to serve whites, like all the leaders of the US though before the 1900s.

So by your own method, Washington was a disgusting human being, one would argue a demon.
- There are people today rightly pointing out the looting of the global South by the global North, and yet nobody in the north is volunteering to give it all back. What disgusting human beings, if they had any decency they'd give it back and ritually kill themselves
Lots of "what-ifs" to dismiss people highlighting historical genocidal slavers.
People are products of their times.

You hear this a lot, but then you and look at "the times" and find arguments in favor of cultural integration dating back thousand of years.

It is true that people are the products of their time, but those times are not as radically distant moral wise as it is usually assumed.
Yeah, nobody at that time knew slavery was wrong. Well, I mean, except for all the slaves, obviously, they knew, but there was no way for them to get their perspective heard because they were cut out of the political process. Who cut them out of the process? Well, uh, well you see...
There were plenty of peers, even UK and European ones, that opposed the US colonial project. Read Losurdo - Liberalism, a counter-history if you want an in-depth look at the debates of the time.
What a horrible, out of touch thing to say in response to this image and all its context
Product of the times isn't a great way to put it, but you can certainly make the argument that most people have shades of grey morality.

Science can back you up, too, as I teach social psychology and when you dig in, you find that normative human nature is pretty complex but generally very supportive for in-group and mildly empathetic even with strangers. It's only when you dehumanize a group do you get the worst behavior, and in all four cases you see that, be it slaves or indigenous people.

When you look at those times, it's people who recognized their humanity that ended up in the just side of history.

USA’s presidents have all been awful humans

YOU FOOLS!