Also saying the USSR was bad and doing a ‘whataboutism’ by criticising the US for lynching black people, like KKK apologia to go along with the Nazi apologia.
My brain just cannot process someone responding to the criticism of "your shithole country has a bad habit of publicly executing black people for fun when they're bored, because they know there will never be any consequences" to "look everybody, more ridiculous Russia propaganda from uncle vlad, haha so crazy. he's probably drunk on tractor vodka again"
Our society is so racist, and racism is so normalized we can't even process it as something that can or should be fixed.
Oh god, now I'm imaging the future where liberals find this and re-write America's long history of lynching black people. They'll call anyone who points it out a Russian bot
I live in the south, white libs already decided to agree they won the war on racism decades ago
Shit I think MLK JR wrote a letter about it before Edgar Hoover started sending him fan mail and brass coated lead boat tail hollowpoint edition lifetime achievement awards
Copypasting an old comment: Reminder that "whataboutism" was literally coined (originally as "whataboutery") by some absolute cull Irish journalist who supported the British during the Troubles. He needed to invent a way to not get constantly owned by everybody around him when he'd bitch about the IRA, and people would just point out what the British forces had done that either directly spurred the retaliation he was whining about, or things the Brits did that were just blatantly worse.
I know Ben Burgis kind of sucks, but he had a good article about "whataboutism" and the abuse of crying whataboutism to get out of basic calls for moral consistency:
The original phrase was whataboutery. It was coined in Ireland in the 1970s. When supporters of continued British rule in Ireland’s northern six counties would condemn the violence of the IRA, Irish Republicans would respond by bringing up atrocities perpetrated in those six counties by the British state and allied loyalist paramilitaries, and this in turn would be dismissed as evasive “whataboutery.”
It’s true enough that the same dynamic played out in the global propaganda war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Americans would accuse the Soviets of human rights abuses, the Soviets would respond by bringing up the numerous respects in which this charge was hypocritical, and the American response would characterize this as an unprincipled evasion.
There even was a special phrase used during the Cold War to describe the Soviets’ response to criticism. That phrase wasn’t “whataboutism.” It was “And You Are Lynching Negroes”—since that was the Soviets’ go-to example.
The difference matters. “Whataboutism” is an inoffensive word that doesn’t suggest any particular example of western hypocrisy on human rights. If we were still talking about an “And You Are Lynching Negroes” “fallacy,” every use of the phrase would remind listeners that the Soviets had a point. [emphasis mine]
It’s also hard to reconcile the assumption that “whataboutism” is always a bad thing with the inconvenient historical fact that a widespread desire to deprive the Communists of exactly this kind of talking point seems to have played a meaningful role in weakening white resistance to the civil rights movement and ultimately hastening the end of Jim Crow. If anything, it would have been better if the embarrassment had run deeper. If one is annoyed by the Soviets using American lynchings to deflect criticism, the best way to end the tactic would be to stop American lynchings. Still, anti-lynching legislation consistently failed in Congress, and it was not until this year that an anti-lynching bill passed both houses.