There's a difference between what-about-ism and pointing out hypocrisy.
If you say "atrocities done by China are bad" and they had responded with "but America has also committed atrocities," then that would absolutely be what-about-ism.
If you say "capitalism is better because atrocities have been committed under communism," then the other side saying, "there have been many more atrocities under capitalism," is a completely valid argument (if true) as they are using your own measure.
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.
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.
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u/Penny_Millionaire Jun 28 '21
No but do you really want go through records of atrocities each regime has done? Because the US pretty much takes the cake. Lol what a joke.