What About China “Whataboutism”?
Does the lens change the direction of a “whataboutism”
This is a reply to an article by Canadian Returnee
About “Whataboutism”
If you haven’t thought about the term, Wikipedia provides a good start. This is a logical fallacy, although I don’t think it is as narrow as to be seen as only a propaganda strategy but more broadly a “Tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy, ad hominem) and red herring (distraction from relevant topic of discussion)”
Not a binary
There are people I can think of where I agree with this article, but there are other people I can think of where I disagree.
There are Western Worldview loyalists who think that governance under family names such as Bush, Trudeau, Clinton, or Trump have been radically different, and they believe there was some greatness in Canadian or US institutions in the past that is now in some “decline”.
For those people, I agree that pointing to recent events or individuals within Canada or the USA, and then excusing Chinese policy can be seen as a type of “whataboutism”.
However, if we are talking about people not locked within Western worldviews, and who are taking the longer view, I believe the “whataboutism” is reversed. Discussing current events surrounding BRICS countries (especially Russia, India and China) outside of the historical context is regularly inappropriately being used to excuse UN WEOG member policies.
When analyzing a non-Western nation (whether using the Westphalian system meaning, or something closer to the Greek word genos) we need to change from a narrow western lens.
Why should nations follow the ideologies that grew out of Western Europe’s so-called “Age of Enlightenment” and its narrow fixation on individualism and Western conceptions of property rights (exclusivity without responsibility)?
This includes the highly controversial concept of statutory monopolies (some call “Intellectual Property”) that was briefly mentioned in the article. Individuality and property rights are not the only way, or even the best way, to fund creativity and innovation, and it should not be expected that all of humanity conform to Western European worldviews or policy.
Why blame China for the ongoing impacts of Clinton era policy? The Bill Clinton era US government held supremacist ideologies that believed the smartest people were “Americans”, and thus giving up manufacturing in exchange for strong statutory monopoly policies would allow “Americans” to come up with all the good ideas and for China to cheaply build it.
Oops – there are smart people in China too, so all that really happened is that the Clinton policy gutted US manufacturing as part of a US economic suicide mission.
That wasn’t the first time, nor will it be the last time, that Canadian or US institutions harm themselves over Western Eurosupremacist ideologies.
The same analysis can be done of the other areas where those within Western worldviews don’t see the self-censorship that non-Western loyalists must do in order to survive under Western governments (even western governments far away from Western Europe). They don’t see the violence that Western governments inflict on any peoples (Greek word geos) that aren’t Western, and don’t question why over 50% of the inmates in Canadian Women’s prisons are Indigenous.
Non-Western countries such as BRICS countries should be measured against their own worldviews, not Western worldviews. Obviously there are problems with these governments, but much of the complaints I see from Western Worldview loyalists are that these other countries aren’t also Western countries.
Have you read Lawrence Lessig’s books on IT and the Creative Commons? In Canada we also have Michael Geist’s work on the subject.
Really great piece. I spent decades in an industry based on intellectual property, and it was only toward the end of my career that I began to challenge its assumptions.