Dear Americans saluting the fallen of Tiananmen Square today,
Did you salute George Floyd two weeks ago?
Did you know that police in the USA kill over a thousand people every year, and that this is undisputed?
If we assume that the worst counts of Tiananmen Square are true, this still isn’t as bad as cops in the USA. You heard that Chinese cops did a bad thing in the 1980s and you’re still talking about it. This is every single day in America right now and you feel comfortable with it.
Why?
@psychictides because showing support publicly for something doesn't require you to publicly show support for everything that might be related.
@saki Selective outrage is a thing. Expressing outrage about a thing that happened before you were born in a country you’ve never visited while expressing no interest in the atrocities happening right in your own neighborhood raises troubling questions.
@psychictides what "troubling questions" does it raise exactly? Engaging in whataboutism raises it's own set of troubling questions, such as who or what is to gain by silencing critics of an authoritarian regime, but we don't have to go into that
@psychictides no one but you has said Americans are comfortable with this. This construction that to oppose something you need to oppose everything that's like it is yours. I condemn the Tiananmen massacre. Any inferences about my views on the US based on that statement is entirely a figment of your imagination
@saki I think it’s good to ask: Who is served by condemning a government’s acts from the 1980s, in a place you don’t even speak the language, a place you’ve never set foot in once, in the terms laid out by your own government? What is the point of this? Who is served by pointing out again and again that something went wrong long ago and far away? In specifically a place that your own government is agitating for war against right now?
@saki “Whataboutism” was a term coined by Thatcherites to mock Irish people who asked “What about Bloody Sunday?”
One of the troubling questions it raises is: if China is a brutal regime, by America’s own standard, America is more brutal. So why are Americans comfortable with this?