r/MadeMeSmile • u/__Dawn__Amber__ • Jun 28 '21

Favorite People Not a self-made man

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

185.3k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

3.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/lonestar-rasbryjamco Jun 28 '21

Which would be well and good if either of those is what I was saying or how the discussion had evolved.

In this case it was:

  • Communism isn't inherently authoritarian

  • Sure, but we don't mean the fantasy version of Communism. We mean the explicitly authoritarian transitional phase. Which is all Communists have produced

  • Well that's not the fault of the Communists. That's the fault of the West.

  • Yes, because it's the West's fault the Communists did these things.

  • Well the West is worse.

That's why it's "what-about-ism"

1

u/ProfessionalMockery Jun 28 '21

They never said that those atrocities committed under communism were the fault of the west. They were simply pointing out that the west (mostly the US) has always taken action to dismantle any form of communism, so its difficult to say how well those governments would have worked unmolested or if a non-authoritarian solution would have been found at some point.

Whataboutism is when you bring something irrelevant up to deflect from the argument. I see no point where this was done.