What about (ism) China?
On the difficulty in removing specks in others' eyes when there's a plank in one's own
By Peter Beattie
How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Luke 6:42)
And then a very smart observer called out, “Jesus, there you go with your whataboutery again! This man clearly has a speck in his eye. It is rank whataboutism to tell me not to take the speck out of his eye just because my eye may or may not have a little plank of wood in it!” (Idiot 1:1)
Earnest use of the term “whataboutism” is a dead giveaway of idiocy. It originates from the Irish national liberation struggle, when supporters of the British empire’s first foray into colonialism were made to feel bad, icky. Egads! How did this emotional horror occur? By being told that their in-group was guilty of atrocities in Ireland that justified violence in self-defense.
“Whataboutism” is close enough to an actual logical fallacy — tu quoque or the appeal to hypocrisy — for intellectual mediocrities to be fooled into thinking that by using the term, they have made a point. Let’s see how well it works in other contexts:
A: “Why, you American rebels are mass murderers, killing scores of young British men!”
B: “That’s because your king wants to keep us as his colonial possession, but we want independence, and so we are fighting a revolutionary war to be free of his despotism - and of course, soldiers kill and die in war!”
A: “Oh here we go with the whataboutery again! Just because King George has a policy you disagree with doesn’t justify your murders!”
Or, taking out the overt racism that would make this example more historically accurate:
A: “You Haitian revolutionaries are murderous beasts, executing thousands of innocent human-capital investors, plantation managers, and French peacekeepers!”
B: “You mean the people who violently kidnapped us from Africa, enslaved us, tore our families apart, raped us, tortured us, worked us to death, and killed us arbitrarily?”
A: “I see, so whataboutism is your only retort? Nice try.”
And so it goes today, with cries of “whataboutism” when anyone points out that over the past few decades, the combined crimes of the Chinese government pale in comparison to the combined crimes of the U.S. government.1 (What analogy could I use? Ah! Like a speck versus a plank.) True, it would be a logical fallacy (tu quoque) to argue that because the U.S. government is guilty of greater crimes than the Chinese government, anything the Chinese government does is good. Find me someone making that argument, and I’ll join you in pointing out its flaw.
Jesus’ point wasn’t that it’s OK to keep a speck in your eye because other people have planks in theirs. (That’s tu quoque.) His point was that to have the acuity required to remove a speck from someone else’s eye, it’s pretty important to remove any planks in your own eye. It’s good advice, and works just as well in the context of international relations.
Imagine if the U.S. government really did have a come-to-Jesus moment during WWII, and President Henry Wallace reoriented U.S. foreign policy away from pure power-maximization, and toward supporting actual self-determination and development around the world. Imagine too that 9/11 still happened (because they hated us for our freedoms, not for the actual reasons bin Laden stated — since in this came-to-Jesus counterfactual those reasons would not have existed). But instead of invading two countries and bombing several more, leading to the deaths of certainly hundreds of thousands and very likely well over a million human beings, the U.S. government treated the 9/11 atrocity as a crime instead of a casus belli. Then, today, a U.S. diplomat could address his Chinese counterparts:
We understand that you have also been the victim of terrorist attacks, and worry about the threat of future terrorism. We lost nearly 3,000 people during the 9/11 attack. What was our counter-terrorism policy? We did not start illegal wars, we turned no country into a hell on earth, kill or torture countless people, or persecute Muslims in the U.S. Of course not! We treated Osama bin Laden and his co-conspirators as common criminals, arresting them and bringing them to trial. We care about our Muslim brothers and sisters. Which is why we are asking for cooperation on counter-terrorism policy. We are concerned that your policy of casting a broad net, imprisoning hundreds of thousands in reeducation camps to eradicate jihadist ideology, is hurting innocent people and may even be counterproductive. So we hereby invite your representatives to a summit to plan a joint de-radicalization strategy, along with representatives of dozens of other countries facing challenges with their own de-radicalization programs, kindly hosted by the Cuban government at their beach resort at Guantanamo Bay, which used to be a U.S. military base during our darker days.
That’s the benefit of getting the plank out of one’s own eye before removing a speck from another’s: the job will be better done.
And since we’re imagining things here, imagine that China actually had “wolf warrior” diplomats (as opposed to sheep-in-wolf’s-clothing diplomats). Their response to Blinken or Biden blathering about their deep concern for Muslim human rights in Xinjiang would go something like this:
Bitch, are you fucking kidding me!? Let’s compare counter-terrorism policies for a second here: ours includes arresting hundreds of thousands of people who may believe in jihadist or violent separatist ideologies, and attempting to change their minds in reeducation camps. Are lots of innocent people imprisoned in the process? Do prison guards often abuse prisoners? Is the pope Catholic? Of fucking course there are injustices, but what’s your better idea to stop terrorism? Your counter-terrorism policies include illegally invading two countries and drone-bombing several more, killing over a million human beings in the process, k̶i̶d̶n̶a̶p̶p̶i̶n̶g̶ I mean “extraordinarily renditioning” people to torture chambers in your rules-based liberal international order™-loving allied countries, torturing people in your own military bases, and persecuting Muslims in your own country. Tell me, motherfucker - who has a deep concern for Muslim human rights again?
So what is my point? Am I a “tankie” who believes that China’s government is perfect or nearly so, and that contemporary China is a worker’s paradise, a beacon for the world to follow on the glorious road to socialist utopia? No, I’m merely a realist.
Years ago, I agreed with Noam Chomsky that the dissolution of the USSR was "a small victory for socialism." That is, from my perch as a young man living in the United States, I thought that the possibility of devolving power from owners and managers to workers themselves, and introducing democratic control over society’s economic surplus to provide a higher standard of living for all, was more likely now that the word “socialism” would be freed from its association with the government of the USSR.
But two things happened. Rather, one thing didn’t happen: we’re still no closer to a political-economic system in which workers have significant control over the enterprises they comprise, or in which citizens have any tangible influence over investment decisions. The “euthanasia of the rentier” is further away than even when Keynes coined the phrase (low interest rates notwithstanding). I guess that “small victory” was… just too small. In fact, it’s pretty hard to see any victory, over the 2-3 million corpses piled up as the woefully deficient “really existing” socialism of the USSR was replaced by capitalism.
Second, I studied international relations theory. I had already read Chomsky and others’ accounts of the brutalities the U.S. government inflicted around the world, in what can only be described as a Luciferian lust for more and more power. But in IR theory, instead of any sort of rebuttal, what I found was justification and rationalization for that very same lust for power. (After all, if a country doesn’t single-mindedly amass power, the IR scholar-courtier says, it flirts with extinction. It would be irresponsible, nay, immoral not to act like the meanest rat bastard on the world stage!)
IR theory, by the way, is what the U.S. foreign policy establishment studies and creates. What climate science is to U.S. environmental policy, IR theory is the opposite to U.S. foreign policy. That is, IR theory exerts actual influence.
When the U.S. became the global hegemon in the wake of WWII, it had what no other country had. It alone had the power to fundamentally change the rules of the game. The same game that humans have been playing since the dawn of sedentary civilizations: the strong do as they will, the weak suffer what they must. Better to focus exclusively on power-maximization, so you can be one of the strong. Or as Obama’s father put it:
“Men take advantage of weakness in other men. They're just like countries in that way. The strong man takes the weak man's land. He makes the weak man work in his fields. If the weak man's woman is pretty, the strong man will take her." He paused to take another sip of water, than asked, "Which would you rather be?"
Instead of using its power to fundamentally change the rules, the U.S. government made a few cosmetic changes. Now that the richest men in the U.S. were to be the world’s rulers, their government did nothing to make the game — the world system, the international order — any fairer for the weak man, or weak country.
The game isn’t pretty. Any country that isn’t the strongest in the global pecking order does not have full freedom to implement whatever policies it likes. The principle of self-determination has all the force of a letter to Santa Claus. Maximizing power is effectively an imperative for weaker countries; whereas for the hegemon, it is a choice.
I like Chomsky, and I am attracted to the morality that animates anarchists and the anarchist-adjacent. Their vision of freedom and non-domination is compelling. It even swims with the tide of human nature. But today, when I hear moral criticism of any government that is not the global hegemon, my ears perk up in expectation of a detailed explanation as to precisely what that government could and should have done, given its position in the global system. If I don’t hear any such explanation, I drift off. I can hear useless moral prattling at any number of churches, and at least there I could get a sip of wine.
When it comes to China, my position is this: criticize away, so long as you acknowledge that when it comes to making lives worse around the world, or ending them altogether, the Chinese government is a piker in comparison to the U.S. government. Better yet, make your criticism constructive: lay out alternative policies at every point, always keeping your analysis within the context of the global system and its constraints. And best of all, if you are a U.S. citizen, focus your energies instead on the government you have nominal control over, and at least try to use its position as hegemon to rewrite the rules of the game in a more humane and democratic direction. I’d love for my own government to be able to remove specks from other governments’ eyes. But first we need to remove the plank from its own.
From Vincent Bevins’ The Jakarta Method:
This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask:
“Who was right?”In Guatemala, was it Arbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?
Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right.
This isn’t contestable. Of course it would be contested by the uninformed, because, as Orwell put it: “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side” — there are always justifications: our intentions were pure, it was for democracy/freedom, mistakes were made, a few bad apples, etc. - “but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”