This one goes back a long way

Copypasting an old comment: Reminder that "whataboutism" was literally coined (originally as "whataboutery") by some absolute cull Irish journalist who supported the British during the Troubles. He needed to invent a way to not get constantly owned by everybody around him when he'd bitch about the IRA, and people would just point out what the British forces had done that either directly spurred the retaliation he was whining about, or things the Brits did that were just blatantly worse.

I know Ben Burgis kind of sucks, but he had a good article about "whataboutism" and the abuse of crying whataboutism to get out of basic calls for moral consistency:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/03/is-whataboutism-always-a-bad-thing

From the article:

"

The original phrase was whataboutery. It was coined in Ireland in the 1970s. When supporters of continued British rule in Ireland’s northern six counties would condemn the violence of the IRA, Irish Republicans would respond by bringing up atrocities perpetrated in those six counties by the British state and allied loyalist paramilitaries, and this in turn would be dismissed as evasive “whataboutery.”

It’s true enough that the same dynamic played out in the global propaganda war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Americans would accuse the Soviets of human rights abuses, the Soviets would respond by bringing up the numerous respects in which this charge was hypocritical, and the American response would characterize this as an unprincipled evasion.

There even was a special phrase used during the Cold War to describe the Soviets’ response to criticism. That phrase wasn’t “whataboutism.” It was “And You Are Lynching Negroes”—since that was the Soviets’ go-to example.

The difference matters. “Whataboutism” is an inoffensive word that doesn’t suggest any particular example of western hypocrisy on human rights. If we were still talking about an “And You Are Lynching Negroes” “fallacy,” every use of the phrase would remind listeners that the Soviets had a point. [emphasis mine]

It’s also hard to reconcile the assumption that “whataboutism” is always a bad thing with the inconvenient historical fact that a widespread desire to deprive the Communists of exactly this kind of talking point seems to have played a meaningful role in weakening white resistance to the civil rights movement and ultimately hastening the end of Jim Crow. If anything, it would have been better if the embarrassment had run deeper. If one is annoyed by the Soviets using American lynchings to deflect criticism, the best way to end the tactic would be to stop American lynchings. Still, anti-lynching legislation consistently failed in Congress, and it was not until this year that an anti-lynching bill passed both houses.

"