I know people cry "whataboutism" when these counter arguments come up, but I'm genuinely curious how all this squares up.
Most of the countries we'd hope would "stand up to China" have a poor human rights record. I don't want to say one is better or worse than the other - I don't know how you measure one group of injustices against another - but in the scale of things, generously, both have room for improvement.
If the argument is that just because country A does B+C+D, doesn't mean they can't stand up to country W for doing X+Y+Z, doesn't it just become an issue of who can yield the bigger stick or carrot? If protecting human rights is selectively applied based on might AND that same might is also used to oppress human rights, isn't that setting an dangerous precedent?
Either you’re missing an /s somewhere, or you’re arguing that a past pattern of behavior itself serves as justification of continued behavior in the same vein.
It seems as though this notion gets very subjective and gets leveraged to influence policy decisions. Libya and Iraq are the first examples that come to mind.
Get our own house in order first, then write a book about it and ship it out for free. If they don’t listen, it’s their loss. You won’t right every wrong nor mend every fence. It’s impossible, and the price you pay for constantly trying the same old failed thing is felt at home by some other minority group that could have used the resources which were squandered on faraway struggles of the cold or hot variety.
Considering the British had a huge colonial empire, the US had brutal segregation, rampant anti-Semitism ( so much so they refused ships with Jewish refugees and sent them back to their death in German occupied Europe) and eugenics experiments, and the USSR( the third main country in the Allies, mostly by necessity, but nonetheless) was pretty much as violent to their minorities as the Nazis were... What could any of them say without being blatantly hypocritical?