Showing that China is doing similar things to the US doesn’t seem like a strong argument if the thing the US is doing (in this case indefinite detention without trial in a horrible prison) is bad. Is the idea that post-federation there’s users who don’t view the US as doing bad things?

The problem is that liberals are operating on "Our country (the US, UK, a European country, etc) is better than China because of these reasons, China bad, 100 million dead" and so the idea is to first go "Actually, China isn't doing anything worse than the United States is doing" and then later on go "...and, in fact, the United States is the one that's by far the worst." Basically to cushion the blow of having their worldview swept out from under them.

So the first step is to go "Oh, is China bad because they imprison people for revealing state secrets? Then look at all these people in your own countries that have done the same."

And then the second step is to go "And, in fact, China has a lower number of incarcerated people than the United States despite having almost five times more people."

of course, then they start blubbering about "buh buh buh, they're lying and a-actually have trillions in prison and they're killing them and xi is personally beating them because he's evil and a monster and the CCP they're bad and they--" but the seed of doubt has still been established

[–] RedClouds@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Nice, reasonable explanation comrade! Just in case anyone didn't know, TheDeprogram has a good wiki page on whataboutism that covers this nicely as well.

But yeah, people will find that we communists do criticize socialist governments, past and present, and do find flaws in China's system. You just have to come to the communist subs and read around, or ask honest questions. But on platforms like this, where obvious lies, biases, and if nothing else, just one-sided reporting is rampant, we need to balance out the rhetoric. Of course capitalist countries (past and previous) have jailed journalists and those that have pushed back against American imperialism. Native Americans, Middle Easterners, Mexico, are just a short list of those that we constantly oppress.

China keeps making the news because western media keeps putting them in the news, even if it is for things that the USA or western Europe is also currently doing (You don't think the USA and Europe don't ban websites, do you? Have they ever forcefully sterilized people? Yes. Have they ever taken journalists prisoners... obviously yes... Oppressed religions? Duh.... The list goes on and on). Calling out these non-western nations for doing these things is simply adding fuel to the fire to create a monolithic opinion that the USA or Europe is the best place on earth.

If you are on Elysium, things looks pretty great, and you can look down upon the others and judge them easily, while extracting their resources and causing their struggles in the first place. Being taken out of your bubble feels really uncomfortable, but it's the first step in learning.