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Whataboutism (or whataboutery) is, according to British journalist Edward Lucas, a rhetorical tactic which attempts to discredit the opponent's position by asserting the opponent's failure to act consistently in accordance with that position, without directly refuting or disproving the opponent's initial argument. The term "whataboutism" was coined during the Cold War by western commentators. Edward Lucas, writing in the ''The Economist'' in 2007, noted it as a tactic he had observed in student debates at the London School of Economics in the early 1980s. He recalled it was an "approach by the Kremlin's useful idiots () to match every Soviet crime with a real or imagined western one. It was called 'whataboutism'". Lucas wrote in 2008 that "Soviet propagandists during the Cold War were trained in a tactic that their western interlocutors nicknamed 'whataboutism.'" He said it was a common rhetorical tactic used by the Soviet Union in dealing with criticism originating within the Western world, so that the common response to a specific criticism would be "What about..." followed by the naming of an event in the Western world.. Lucas writes that at the end of the Cold War the usage of the tactic began dying out, but that it saw a resurgence in post-Soviet Russia in relation to a number of human rights violations and other criticisms expressed to the Russian government. ''The Guardian'' writer Miriam Elder commented that Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov used the tactic and that most criticisms on human rights violations had gone unanswered. Peskov's response to this was again accused by Elder of being a ''whataboutism'', as it called into question the difficulty Russians experience in obtaining a visa to the United Kingdom. In July 2012, RIA Novosti columnist Konstantin von Eggert wrote an article about the use of whataboutism in relation to Russian and American support for different governments in the Middle East. The term received new attention during the 2014 Crimea crisis and 2014 Russian military intervention in Ukraine. It was also used by the American governmental RFERL in reference to Azerbaijan, claiming its parliamentary hearings on issues in the United States were a response to American criticism of its human rights record. == See also == * And you are lynching Negroes * ''Tu quoque'' * The Mote and the Beam * Unclean hands * Hypocrisy 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「whataboutism」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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