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1. Embed this notice
   professorhank (professorhank@sfba.social)'s status on Friday, 29-Nov-2024 15:49:07 JST professorhank

   We're going to need to remember this over the next four years.

   https://bsky.app/profile/sethabramson.bsky.social/post/3lc2fcbcouk25

   • bhaugen repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     mekka okereke :verified: (mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 29-Nov-2024 15:49:07 JST mekka okereke :verified:

     in reply to

     @professorhank

     Something Black folk talk about, that white folk don't...

     When we say that "Whataboutism is bad because it's a. Soviet technique..." what were the Soviets calling the USA hypocrites about?

     And were the Soviets right?

     https://bsky.app/profile/mekka.mekka-tech.com/post/3lc2ybh4hxk2y

     bhaugen repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     mekka okereke :verified: (mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 00:51:30 JST mekka okereke :verified:

     in reply to

     • Rob Williamson

     @eswag @professorhank

     No, for several reasons.

     1. It's not derailing to bring up the very valid point that the people claiming to care about the topic, clearly don't care when they're doing it.

     2. It's only "bad" for the country that's trying to criticize others for things that they do worse.🤷🏿♂️

     3. And no, that's not the hope. The hope is to win over politicians and governments on the world stage, by showing that the US doesn't really care about the thing that it pretends to care about.

   • Embed this notice
     Rob Williamson (eswag@dju.social)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 00:51:32 JST Rob Williamson

     in reply to

     • mekka okereke :verified:

     @mekkaokereke @professorhank

     It's bad because it derails the conversation from the topic that was uncomfortable for the "whatabouter". In many (most?) instances, the whatabout topic still a valid comment on its own merits.

     In 2022, some were particularly fond of saying "what about Iraq?" whenever Russia's invasion of Ukraine was criticised. IMO the hope was to derail to "US bad". It's defensible to say that "invading is bad" and "a plague on both the US/UK's & Russia's houses for doing it".

   • Embed this notice
     AJ Sadauskas (ajsadauskas@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 01:11:03 JST AJ Sadauskas

     in reply to

     • mekka okereke :verified:

     @mekkaokereke @professorhank During the Cold War, the Russians raised Jim Crow segregation and anti-Black racism in America more broadly.

     Along with US colonial imperialism in Vietnam and elsewhere.

     Their criticisms of American hypocrisy were true.

     The US absolutely was (and still is) hypocritical in the way it condemned oppression abroad, while engaging in it at home.

     So in that sense, yes the Russian criticisms were valid.

     At the same time, the Soviet Union was a Russian imperialist empire.

     It occupied and colonised neighbouring countries and oppressed their people. Brutally.

     (Full disclosure: I have living relatives who are survivors of Siberian forced labour camps.)

     That includes under the reign of supposed moderates like Khrushchev.

     If you ever visit Vilnius, I'd strongly recommend a visit to the old KGB headquarters, which is now the Museum of Occupations: https://www.govilnius.lt/visit-vilnius/places/museum-of-occupations-and-freedom-fights

     The sick bastards were literally having parties on the top floor of that building for visiting dignitaries from Moscow while people were being tortured to death (think Gitmo but worse) in the basement.

     So the American criticisms of Russia were completely valid.

     And while the points they made in their deflection were true, the Russians were nonetheless deflecting valid criticisms if their empire.

     bhaugen repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     mekka okereke :verified: (mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 01:11:44 JST mekka okereke :verified:

     in reply to

     • AJ Sadauskas

     @ajsadauskas @professorhank

     Fair. But..

     At the height of the Gulags, the Soviet Union had 1.5 million people in prison. The US currently has 1.9 million people in prison and jails. Most of those people in US jails, are innocent.

     The state tortures and and murders inmates in US prisons too. The excess mortality of Black US folk due to racism, is about 1.6 million people a year.

     https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10189563/

     Saying "That's Whataboutism!" is the US deflecting valid criticism of its empire too.

   • Embed this notice
     mekka okereke :verified: (mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 03:01:40 JST mekka okereke :verified:

     in reply to

     • Rob Williamson

     @eswag @professorhank

     It doesn't matter if you agree with what I'm describing as Whataboutism. I'm responding to the claim in the original post, and elsewhere, that accurately describes the Soviet critique origins of the term.

     And I never said that the purpose was to criticize Russia.

     You are not the audience for Whataboutism. The audience is 3rd world countries, for the true definition of 3rd world.

     1st world: aligned with the US
     2nd world: aligned with the Soviets
     3rd world: independent

   • Embed this notice
     Rob Williamson (eswag@dju.social)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 03:01:42 JST Rob Williamson

     in reply to

     • mekka okereke :verified:

     @mekkaokereke @professorhank

     I don't agree that what you're describing is whataboutery. What I understand from what you wrote is that you're talking about bringing up another instance of a similar thing as part of the same discussion.

     The rhetoric of bringing up the USA's invasion of Iraq in response to criticism of Russia's invasion of Ukraine certainly hasn't been to support criticism of Russia, it has been to say, "but the US did it, so it's not so bad when Russia does it".

   • Embed this notice
     mekka okereke :verified: (mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 03:07:43 JST mekka okereke :verified:

     in reply to

     • Rob Williamson

     @eswag @professorhank

     Folks in the US genuinely can't understand why African countries would do business with China or Russia. "Don't you know they're the bad guys?! They will screw you over! Silly Africans!"🤡

     I'm very pro Ukraine, for obvious reasons. But I understand why the talking point of "Cool. Now say something about Iraq or Gaza." is so effective on African nations, while the US is just screaming, "That's Whataboutism!"

     For them, there is no moral high ground. Everyone is the bad guy

   • Embed this notice
     mekka okereke :verified: (mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 09:23:35 JST mekka okereke :verified:

     in reply to

     • Rob Williamson

     @eswag @professorhank

     There are things that could heal the harm done to the Iraqi people, but that's a whole different thread.

     The recency argument does work to counter Whataboutism, but we don't use it enough:

     🇺🇸👴🏻You're 100% right. Slavery was wrong. Colonialism? Wrong. Undermining democracy? Wrong wrong wrong. Wrong when we did it. Wrong when anyone does it. Wrong even when we did it recently. We call it out wherever we see it. At home, we work to make our government make better decisions.

   • Embed this notice
     Rob Williamson (eswag@dju.social)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 09:23:36 JST Rob Williamson

     in reply to

     • mekka okereke :verified:

     @mekkaokereke @professorhank agree completely. I think I misunderstood you.

     I've witnessed whataboutery used on me about Ukraine, and the purpose & technique was to attempt to justify Russia by using the US's record to claim that there are no (and by implication, can be no) good actors, so to point out & resist bad behaviour is doomed to failure & a waste of time.

     The big difference is that the Iraq war is over. Nothing can make it better or worse. Russia's crimes are happening now.

   • Embed this notice
     AJ Sadauskas (ajsadauskas@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 15:59:03 JST AJ Sadauskas

     in reply to

     • mekka okereke :verified:

     @mekkaokereke @professorhank The absolute numbers in the US are higher because the population is larger — ~330 million of whom around 45 – 50 million are black. Meanwhile there's around 3 million Lithuanians both in Lithuania itself, and the diaspora.

     And the number killed, forcibly deported, and imprisoned during the early years of the Soviet Russian occupation was around 300,000. So that's basically one-in-10 people from an occupied ethnic group:

     "On June 14, 1941, mass arrests and deportations of Lithuanians to inner parts of the Soviet Union and Siberia began.

     "According to the data of the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, the Soviets deported, killed and imprisoned about 23,000 people during the first occupation. In total, about 130,000 people were deported from Lithuania by 1953, and another 156,000 Lithuanians were imprisoned."

     https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/2297019/lithuania-commemorates-victims-of-soviet-deportations-on-day-of-mourning-and-hope

     That's excluding a host of other atrocities (including mass rapes, mass relocation of ethnic Russians into Lithuania and other occupied countries, whole cities levelled, etc) by the Russians.

     That's just the initial stages of the 1941 occupation.

     That doesn't include anything that happened later, including in the aftermath of the 1972 uprisings...

     (1/n)

     mekka okereke :verified: repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     AJ Sadauskas (ajsadauskas@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 15:59:03 JST AJ Sadauskas

     in reply to

     • mekka okereke :verified:

     @mekkaokereke @professorhank The guerilla resistance against the Russian occupation continued into the 1960s. Around 50,000 were killed.

     "In Lithuania, all told the Soviets killed about 22,000 partisans while admitting to have lost about 13,000 soldiers of their own. Another 13,000 Lithuanians were killed as suspected collaborators, while hundreds of thousands of people across eastern Europe were deported to Siberia, many of them dying in exile."

     https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/anti-soviet-partisans-eastern-europe

     Then there's the '70. The Prague Spring and the Hungarian Uprising are still widely remembered.

     What's often forgotten is that similar uprisings took place against the Russian occupation in 1972 in Lithuania.

     In that year, a young man named Romas Kalanta ended his life by setting himself on fire in a public square in Kaunas in 1972: https://www.lrs.lt/pls/inter/w5_show?p_r=8524&p_k=2

     In the following days there were mass protests in defiance of Soviet Russian authorities that were suppressed by force: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_unrest_in_Lithuania

     In the years that followed, 13 people either set themselves on fire like Kalanta or attempted to do so, including Antanas Kalinauskas in 1976, and there were other riots and mass protests.

     Some of these uprisings were reported on in the West, albeit not their full scale.

     And something else happened in 1972...

     2/3

     mekka okereke :verified: repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     AJ Sadauskas (ajsadauskas@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 15:59:03 JST AJ Sadauskas

     in reply to

     • mekka okereke :verified:

     @mekkaokereke @professorhank On 22 May 1972, a chap named Richard Nixon visited Russia.

     Kalanta set himself on fire on 14 May, just over one week earlier.

     Nixon's visit was literally at the same time Moscow is rounding up and torturing people for protesting the occupation, and sending in troops and tanks to violently crush an uprising in Lithuania.

     It's inconceivable that Khrushchev wouldn't have been briefed about it.

     So let's break it down:

     During the visit Khrushchev talks about how great life is in Soviet Russia. Knowing — and I'm being extremely generous here — that's not the full story.

     The US intelligence agencies had friends in the Kremlin. Even if not the full details, they would most likely have known something was up and briefed Nixon.

     So Nixon, rightly, raises human rights abuses in the countries Russia occupies, without directly naming the still ongoing uprising. A justified comment in my book.

     Khrushchev does his whataboutism.

     Whatabout Black people in the US. Whatabout Vietnam.

     He was simultaneously being truthful and disingenuous.

     He called out anti-Black racism and America's war crimes in Vietnam. With complete justification.

     At the same time, it was also a deflection of Russia's own mistreatment of its occupied ethnic minorities.

     Both things are simultaneously true.

     3/3