Why is every political discussion boiled down to a whataboutism? Who cares what the UK does when the subject is HK's obvious slide in to naked authoritarianism.
Because once upon a time it was with pride you could point out all the ways your democracy was different than “theirs”.
Now you’re just condemning what you’ve already done. Why should anyone respect it? At some point you loose respect and eventually you just look confused.
Whenever one 'side' makes a statement about the other it's often dripped in some kind of righteous indignation or other moralistic tone, so it's hard not to descend into whataboutism in those cases. The Chinese, of course, do this too, just with their own ideology baked in.
Why shouldn’t it boil down to “whataboutism”, aka comparison and putting things into context? Especially during UK’s obvious slide in to disguised authoritarianism.
One can also ask how HK ended up with English language and common law in the first place… though that wasn’t so recent.
> Why is every political discussion boiled down to a whataboutism?
Unfortunately, just like whataboutism can be a disingenuous rhetorical device, so is anti-whataboutism. Sometimes the comparison is relevant, sometimes it's not. In this case, I think it is.
Great Britain is very directly involved in a whole bunch of relatively recent messes in the Middle East, China, etc.
It's not whataboutism to point up the current messed up situation is not unrelated to the behavior of the UK, and their fingerprints are all over it. Of course things aren't static and new actors have changed the conversation, but this doesn't absolve them and they shouldn't be pointing fingers.
Since it fell from power, the UK does everything the US wants.
However, historically it set up a lot of bad things that happened in the Middle East, China, Africa, etc. The UK cannot untangle itself from it, "it's all in the past", because history is terribly influenced by things in the past, by definition.
So do you think citizens of the UK should be held accountable somehow? I honestly don’t think the UK has done much to harm other countries since the Iraq War which obviously made everything worse.
Authorities and government? Yes. Even if the current ones weren't born when history was made, it's their duty to understand the history of the country they are governing, and of how past decisions shaped the world as it currently is.
> I honestly don’t think the UK has done much to harm other countries since the Iraq War which obviously made everything worse.
The history of Hong Kong itself is deeply influenced by Great Britain's actions (as well as other world powers, of course), and it doesn't start with mainland China's takeover.
Another example of UK's actions deeply influencing the current world, unrelated to China, is Iran (and well, the Middle East in general). So the UK cannot simply point fingers at others and forget about how they helped shape the situation.
Can we not simply condemn that?