with an argument to prove the greater immorality of the "enemy", and therefore the justice of the Provisionals' cause: "What about Bloody Sunday, internment, torture, force-feeding, army intimidation?".
[13] In 1978, Australian journalist Michael Bernard wrote a column in The Age applying the term whataboutism to the Soviet Union's tactics of deflecting any criticism of its human rights abuses.
"[15] Zimmer credits British journalist Edward Lucas for beginning regular common use of the word whataboutism in the modern era following its appearance in a blog post on 29 October 2007,[13][7] reporting as part of a diary about Russia which was re-printed in the 2 November issue of The Economist.
"[19] Whataboutery, as practiced by both parties in The Troubles in Northern Ireland to highlight what the other side had done to them, was "one of the commonest forms of evasion of personal moral responsibility," according to Bishop (later Cardinal) Cahal Daly.
"[24] Joe Austin was critical of the practice of whataboutism in Northern Ireland in a 1994 piece, The Obdurate and the Obstinate, writing: "And I'd no time at all for 'What aboutism' ... if you got into it you were defending the indefensible.
"[25] In 2017, The New Yorker described the tactic as "a strategy of false moral equivalences",[26] and Clarence Page called the technique "a form of logical jiu-jitsu".
[7] Christian Christensen, Professor of Journalism in Stockholm, argues that the accusation of whataboutism is itself a form of the tu quoque fallacy, as it dismisses criticisms of one's own behavior to focus instead on the actions of another, thus creating a double standard.
[37] Vincent Bevins and Alex Lo argue that the usage of the term almost exclusively by American outlets is a double standard,[38][39] and that moral accusations made by powerful countries are merely a pretext to punish their geopolitical rivals in the face of their own wrongdoing.
[40] Left-wing academics Kristen Ghodsee and Scott Sehon argue that mentioning the possible existence of victims of capitalism in popular discourse is often dismissed as "whataboutism", which they describe as "a term implying that only atrocities perpetrated by communists merit attention."
[41] Scholars Ivan Franceschini and Nicholas Loubere argue it is not whataboutism to document and denounce authoritarianism in different countries, and noted global parallels such as the role Islamophobia played in China's Xinjiang internment camps and the US's War on terror and travel bans targeting Muslim countries, as well as influence of corporations and other international actors in the documented abuses which is becoming more obscured.
[43]Although the term whataboutism spread recently, Edward Lucas's 2008 Economist article states that "Soviet propagandists during the cold war were trained in a tactic that their western interlocutors nicknamed 'whataboutism'.
Any criticism of the Soviet Union (Afghanistan, martial law in Poland, imprisonment of dissidents, censorship) was met with a 'What about...' (apartheid South Africa, jailed trade-unionists, the Contras in Nicaragua, and so forth)."
Lucas recommended two methods of properly countering whataboutism: to "use points made by Russian leaders themselves" so that they cannot be applied to the West, and for Western nations to engage in more self-criticism of their own media and government.
[17] In his book The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West (2008), Edward Lucas characterized whataboutism as "the favourite weapon of Soviet propagandists".
[46] Writing in The National Interest in 2013, Samuel Charap was critical of the tactic, commenting, "Russian policy makers, meanwhile, gain little from petulant bouts of 'whataboutism'".
[52] Mark Adomanis commented for The Moscow Times in 2015 that "Whataboutism was employed by the Communist Party with such frequency and shamelessness that a sort of pseudo mythology grew up around it.
[55] In their book The European Union and Russia (2016), Forsberg and Haukkala characterized whataboutism as an "old Soviet practice", and they observed that the strategy "has been gaining in prominence in the Russian attempts at deflecting Western criticism".
[56] In her 2016 book, Security Threats and Public Perception, author Elizaveta Gaufman called the whataboutism technique "A Soviet/Russian spin on liberal anti-Americanism", comparing it to the Soviet rejoinder, "And you are lynching negroes".
[58] Daphne Skillen discussed the tactic in her 2016 book, Freedom of Speech in Russia, identifying it as a "Soviet propagandist's technique" and "a common Soviet-era defence".
[59] Writing for Bloomberg News, Leonid Bershidsky called whataboutism a "Russian tradition",[54] while The New Yorker described the technique as "a strategy of false moral equivalences".
[61] Peter Conradi, author of Who Lost Russia?, called whataboutism "a form of moral relativism that responds to criticism with the simple response: 'But you do it too'".
The mention of a commission also indicated to observers the seriousness of the incident,[70] and subsequent state radio broadcasts were replaced with classical music, which was a common method of preparing the public for an announcement of a tragedy in the USSR.
[71] In 2016, Canadian columnist Terry Glavin asserted in the Ottawa Citizen that Noam Chomsky used the tactic in an October 2001 speech, delivered after the September 11 attacks, that was critical of US foreign policy.
For example, writing for Slate in 2014, Joshua Keating noted the use of "whataboutism" in a statement on Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, where Putin "listed a litany of complaints about Western intervention.
Kirkpatrick invoked Harold Lasswell's understanding of the enforcement of an ideological framework using political dominance to analyze the semantic manipulations of the Soviet Union.
[82] Writing for The Washington Post, former United States Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul wrote critically of Trump's use of the tactic and compared him to Putin.
[26] "Instead of giving a reasoned defense [of his health care plan], he went for blunt offense, which is a hallmark of whataboutism", wrote Danielle Kurtzleben of NPR, adding that he "sounds an awful lot like Putin.
"[87] When, in a widely viewed television interview that aired before the Super Bowl in 2017, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly called Putin a "killer", Trump responded by saying that the US government was also guilty of killing people.
"[88][89] This episode prompted commentators to accuse Trump of whataboutism, including Chuck Todd on the television show Meet the Press[90] and political advisor Jake Sullivan.
[91][92][93] The tactic was employed by Azerbaijan, which responded to criticism of its human rights record by holding parliamentary hearings on issues in the United States.