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Whataboutism, from Stalinism to Today: Jordan Peterson comes out for Trump in 2024
Some readers might know Jean-Paul Sartre’s remark, when he was in his Stalinist nadir:
‘Yes, Camus, like you, I find [Soviet concentration] camps inadmissible, but equally inadmissible is the use that the ‘so-called bourgeois press’ makes of them every day’.
This is a very good example of Whataboutism. It’s a sure rhetorical sign of partisanship. When a person or his cause is criticised in a way he can’t openly defend, no problem. S/he flips it right back: what about what you, he, they, did?
Whataboutism’s a way of deflecting attention and turning defence into offence. Sartre here doesn’t want to draw an inference from the “inadmissable” fact of Stalin’s crimes, although to his credit, he avows the inadmissability. This rhetorical move also ends rational debate on a subject. For it changes that subject altogether, which is why partisans love it so much, and do it so instantaneously.
Sartre’s shameful moment to Camus also shows how, before today’s Far Right perfected it, the Far Left was “whatabouting” to deflect attention from the gulag. (Putin has also made this central to his persona: it is all the West’s fault, etc.)
Amazingly, there is even a “so-called bourgeois press” in Sartre’s retort, which has…
