The word "whataboutism" is used to silence and insult opponents of U.S. imperialism. It should be embraced as a means of revealing what is too often kept hidden.
Anyone who speaks out against imperialism, capitalism, or racism with concrete examples of the terrible harm they do, can expect to be charged with the dreaded term “whataboutism.” Like clockwork, the act of revealing American crimes will result in an accusation that is used to silence dissent.
Citations Needed published a great episode about this a few years ago. There’s a sort of subconscious effort to characterize the phenomenon as somehow ‘Soviet’ or otherwise ‘un‐American’ when it’s really just a natural byproduct of noticing inconsistencies.
Despite being mentioned so frequently today, I’ve been having an extremely difficult time actually finding particular examples of Soviets dismissing accusations of human rights abuses by simply changing the subject, either to lynchings in the U.S. or something else. Supposedly they pulled this maneuver almost all the time, and yet drudging through Google Books for examples (“are lynching” + Soviet) from 1917 to 1991 reveal no relevant results — no quotations from Soviets using this rhetorical maneuver or even somebody mentioning a Soviet doing it. The Soviets did indeed discuss the phenomenon, but so far I haven’t found an actual example of them mentioning it as a means of changing the subject, even though they supposedly did this very frequently.