[thiagoharry]

Curious... Soviet union were completely right when criticizing US for lynching black people... But it is interesting how propaganda works... It's like nowadays when you point hypocrisy in the Internet, but people just yell "whataboutism" as a way to always ignore criticism and do not accept responsibility for double standards and hypocrisy in the propaganda that they spread. Of course, this happens only for criticism against US and the west, never against non-aligned countries. Nobody creates a wikipedia post about "And what about Stalin/Tiananmen Square/Whatever" trying to take away importance from criticism against communist countries calling it a "demagogical trick" like described in the above wikipedia page.

[arinlen]

> Curious... Soviet union were completely right when criticizing US for lynching black people...

...except they weren't criticizing. Much like in this case, their intention was to divert the attention on their cruel and inhumane practices by picking any distraction they could find out, with the goal of perpetuating their abuse without being subjected to criticism.

It's the same reason why nowadays you have Putin's regime posting bullshit about how the people of the UK and Germany are somehow suffering from hardship to deflect the attention from the impact that international sanctions is having in it's economy. The target and substance of their attacks is immaterial, and their goal is to divert attention.

[pksebben]

This wasn't the impression I got from op. It's perfectly valid to point out that the u.s. is also guilty of the things it imposes sanctions on other countries for - I don't believe that the argument is being made that Cuba is blameless, just that if you're going to hold someone to a standard of behavior, you should first hold yourself to that standard.

As a u.s. citizen, this resonates. I'm deeply troubled by the fact that we've been led by war criminals in my lifetime who got off scot-free.

Mind you, I'm not defending Cuba's human rights violations - I agree that things should be done to mitigate those. However, we should clean our own house first.

It's also been posted elsewhere in this thread, that sanctions haven't appeared to be effective. I think it's hard to argue otherwise, especially if you believe that the awful-dictator situation still persists, as we've had Cuba under sanctions for a while now.

[zarzavat]

Yes this is an incorrect use of “whataboutism”.

It is supposed to mean the rhetorical trick of using other’s faults to distract from and normalize one’s own wrongdoing.

It is not a general defense against accusations of hypocrisy leveled by a third party.