• Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 days ago

    The modern “heroization” of Jimmy Carter by people who never experienced his presidency has frustrated many of us who did experience it. Those were difficult times. But…

    While I appreciate this dose of reality, I don’t think the occasion of his death is the appropriate time to post it. Give the man and his family some respect.

    He was a moral man who tried his best, made mistakes, and was possibly a little better person than we all strive to be. He brokered a Middle East peace treaty that was ground breaking. No need to shit on him now.

    • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      5 days ago

      Supported the invasion of East Timor by the (then) fascist Indonesian government

      Backed apartheid South Africa’s invasion of Angola and supported right-wing militias in the country

      Blocked reparations to Vietnam after the failed US invasion and occupation

      Backed fascist militias in Afghanistan in opposition to the democratic government

      Supported the destabilisation of Grenada after the election of a socialist government leading to the eventual invasion and occupation by his successor’s administration

      Facilitated and supported a fascist coup in Liberia

      Established the ‘Carter Doctrine’ which publicly asserted US imperialist designs on the Persian Gulf, particularly its oil, and has informed US neo-colonial policy in the region ever since

      Supported murderous dictatorships in Cambodia, El Salvador, Iran, Somalia, South Korea, Turkey

      He was a monster

        • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          5 days ago

          Hexbears together strong. But also fuck Jimmy Carter so much. All my Vietnamese, Cambodian, Iranian, south american in general and Indonesian homies hate Carter (I’d list more countries but these are ones I genuinely do know people from and Carter bankroll their parents lives being a brutal struggle for survival). I hope they serve Billy Beer in hell. Being a habitat for humanity guy is fucking hilarious considering how many genocidal maniacs and right wing death squads he bank rolled. Destroying habitation and humans without a shred of humanity. Can’t wait until Bush croaks so we can have people talk about his paintings or whatever.

    • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      5 days ago

      I don’t think the occasion of his death is the appropriate time to post it.

      no, this is exactly the time to post it because now is when everyone else is jacking off his corpse.

    • K1nsey6
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      5 days ago

      Fuck respect. He was as much of a war criminal as Kissinger.

        • geneva_convenience
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          4 days ago

          Normalizing Israel with Egypt without any gain for Palestinians was a massive gain for Israel and solved nothing. Israelis got handed their peace treaties which kept others from helping Palestinians. This only prolonged the issue of the Apartheid existing.

      • Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 days ago

        Presidents are faced with all kinds of choices between two bad options. They become known for the one they choose. We don’t get that kind of reckoning.

        Like, I voted for Kamala. Looking at me through the eye of history’s telescope, some would say I voted to support genocide in Lebanon. I could argue well, there was a worse option and I didn’t vote for that one.

        Do we know what Jimmy Carter was rejecting when he chose the options he did? I don’t.

        Like Pontius Pilate said to Jesus, “What is truth?”

        • AntiOutsideAktion
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          5 days ago

          I get it, you want to whitewash him because you’re whitewashing yourself. You supported genocide and it behooves you to position yourself as if that wasn’t an affirmative choice by absolving a historic monster who actually had full agency over his actions.

    • Raymond Shannon
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      5 days ago

      He was a moral man who tried his best, made mistakes, and was possibly a little better person than {most average U.S presidents} strive to be.

      That's kinda true, post-presidency, he did try to redeem himself from the U.S's usual foreign policy.

      Open to China’s rise to power

      “And do you know why? I normalized diplomatic relations with China in 1979. Since 1979 do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None. And we have stayed at war,” he said. The U.S., Carter said, has been at war for all but 16 years of its 242-year history. He called the United States “the most warlike nation in the history of the world,” because of a tendency to try to force others to “adopt our American principles.”

      Carter suggested that instead of war, China has been investing in its own infrastructure, mentioning that China has 18,000 miles of high-speed railroad.

      “How many miles of high-speed railroad do we have in this country?” Zero, the congregation answered.

      “We have wasted I think $3 trillion,” Carter said of American military spending. “… It’s more than you can imagine. China has not wasted a single penny on war and that’s why they’re ahead of us. In almost every way.

      Sympathetic to North Korea, to the point he even negiotiated with them in the 1990s to let them give up their nukes:

      “And the North Koreans suffered because the United States did everything possible to destroy their economy. And we did everything possible to boost South Korea’s economy. And so we condemn North Korea because its economy is lagging behind and its people are starving.”

      And a Chavista:

      “Electoral process in Venezuela is the best in the world." The comments were made in 2012, just three weeks before Venezuelans re-elected Chávez for his last term in office.

      “There are 92 elections that we monitor, I would say that the electoral process in Venezuela is the best in the world,” he said in an annual speech at the Carter Center in Atlanta. He stressed that the system is fully automated, which makes counting faster.

      He even admitted America’s electoral flaws

      At the time, Carter also revealed his opinion that in the US “we have one of the worst electoral processes in the world, and it’s almost entirely due to the excessive inflow of money,” he said, referring to the lack of control over private campaign donations.

      The Carter Center was one of the only Western NGOs to declare that the 2004 referendum in Venezuela (an attempted legislative coup, following the failure of the military coup in 2002) was fair and free.

      And Palestine:

      In his book Carter argues that Israel’s continued control and construction of settlements have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Middle East. That perspective, coupled with the use of the word Apartheid in the titular phrase Peace Not Apartheid, and what critics said were errors and misstatements in the book, sparked controversy. Carter has defended his book and countered that response to it “in the real world…has been overwhelmingly positive.”

      Maybe less so than FDR, but at least Carter lived to atone his former sins somewhat

      • GulbuddinHekmatyar
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        5 days ago

        Emkay… seems good

        Still doesn’t exonerate from introducing Ted Lasso liberal finance capital fascism (also known as Neoliberalism)

        Introducing the hawkish national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski who did the following

        the following

        Supporting Iraq and Nicaragua contras before Reagan did it

        Supporting Angolan anti-communists and Mujahideen Afghan rebels

        Backing China and Khmer Rouge against Soviet ally Vietnam (for what? Stopping the genocide there)

        Backing East Timor and Guatemala genocides

        But what would I expect from a white sharecropper family in a SSettler SSnake society of the Disunited SStates of Amerikkka

        But okay, I guess I’ll respect that

        • Raymond Shannon
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          4 days ago

          Well, I apologize… he wasn’t good during his term, and I guess post-presidency, what he did was too little to redeem himself from the overall geopolitical U.S hegemony’s bloody project

          Judging from what I hear over the threads