The next time someone mentions any injustice and I am tempted to say, “But what about…” I need to remember that in the scope of history I am sounding a lot like a communist propagandist:
“’Whataboutism’ was a favourite tactic of Soviet propagandists during the old Cold War. Any criticism of the Soviet Union’s internal aggression or external repression was met with a ‘what about?’ some crime of the West, from slavery to the Monroe doctrine. In the era when you could be shot for trying to leave the socialist paradise and with political prisoners rotting in Siberia, whataboutism was little more than a debating tactic.”
*this quote is from a 2008 history overview written by a Eastern European–not written in our decade or on our continent
