Thread by @caitoz

When someone brings up bad things the US does in response to outrage over bad things Russia does, it's not to defend Russia. It's to get the US to stop doing bad things.

Bleating "whataboutism" at sincere attempts to get the US empire to stop doing evil things is just defending those evil things.

You're basically just saying "Shut up! Now's not the time to talk about the bad things the US power alliance does, we're on something else right now!" Okay, so when? Nothing has ever been done about the crimes of the empire. No meaningful changes whatsoever were made after Iraq.

Russia invading Ukraine doesn't magically erase the fact that the western empire has spent the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions in wars of aggression and working to destroy any nation which disobeys it. That still needs to be talked about, and still needs to end.

The murderousness, tyranny and omnicidal recklessness of the US-centralized empire is a problem of unequalled urgency regardless of what Russia happens to be doing. You can't just bleat "whataboutism" and make that go away. It's a problem that urgently needs to be dealt with.

It's an objectively good thing if more attention is brought to that urgent problem by someone saying "Oh you're upset about this war? Wait til you hear about what your own government has been doing." Any attempt to interfere in their pointing this out is facilitating mass murder.

Putin will have to work very, very hard to catch up to these numbers. Either help draw attention to this problem or stop interrupting people who are drawing attention to it with power-serving gibberish about "whataboutery".

https://twitter.com/NafeezAhmed/status/1438175494801920000

People talk about this like it's something in the past, something the US and its allies did back in history but now it's Russia doing it. No, this is happening *currently* in Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela etc, and will continue to happen unless drastic changes are made.