Millions of years hence, when the hard drive onto which the last human has downloaded its consciousness is found snagged in the space-cobwebs of a distant interstellar garden, the octopus that finds it and deciphers it will be amused by one thoroughly human paradox: how the internet gave us all a voice, and how we then used that voice to tell everyone else to shut the hell up.
Of course, another part of being human is the desire not to look stupid, and few things look more stupid than impotently shouting “Shut up!” at someone. Just watch those clips of Dali Mpofu or Bheki Cele and you’ll see what I mean.
Which is why we’ve invented some fairly sophisticated ways of shutting each other up, from deliberately opaque academic jargon (“Con/tested Spaces: Transc[ending] the Liminal Potentiality of ‘The Other’ by Legitimating the Contextualisation of the Hegemonic Gestalt”) to thought-terminating cliché (“Well let’s agree to disagree”).
One gagging tactic, however, is having a particularly big year. Whataboutism — the method of pointing out your accuser’s crimes to delegitimise and dismiss their valid accusations — is riding high and chiselling away at our collective morality from a billion screens.
Indeed, as Russia invaded and tried to occupy Ukraine, the whatabouters were out with renewed vigour, telling me that, as a beneficiary of colonialism I had no business criticising Vladimir Putin.
Only the victims of colonialism, I was told, could sit in judgment, and so far there really wasn’t much to judge: what I was describing as a war of imperial aggression was, in fact, the only way a persecuted and misunderstood friend of the oppressed could assert his legitimate and necessary opposition to the monstrous West, even if he asserted it into the backs of civilians’ heads at point-blank range.
I mean, if it offends white liberals, is it a war crime or is it just a long-overdue bit of conscientising?
Nine months later, the same gag squads are back, this time to defend the legitimacy of the Fifa World Cup and the impugned honour of Qatar.
As the world’s best footballers start to gambol about on the bones of thousands of dead workers, I keep being told that any criticism of Qatar’s reluctance to introduce 19th century labour laws or its official policy of homophobia is — you’ve guessed it — blatant Islamophobia.
I keep being told that any criticism of Qatar’s reluctance to introduce 19th century labour laws or its official policy of homophobia is — you’ve guessed it — blatant Islamophobia.
Here and there, the defence of Qatar has veered into pure self-parody: a number of people have told me, quite seriously, that the real villain here is Fifa, and that “Qatar is just being Qatar”, and that I should shaddap because, and I quote, “their country, their rules”. You know, the way it was wrong to boycott apartheid South Africa because BJ Vorster was just being BJ Vorster. After all, their country, their race laws.
These, however, have been fringe curiosities, easily confused by their own inconsistency. Not so the vanguard of the whataboutists, clear of eye and loud of voice, asking the familiar questions: what about the corrupt and cynical Western regimes that prop up Qatar? What about their human rights abuses, both at home and in wars of aggression abroad?
In any other context, these are fair questions and important ones. But coming from whatabouters, they aren’t honest. They don’t want to start conversations about corrupt Western regimes. They want to stop conversations about Qatar.
A few politicians, to their dubious credit, have opted for a slightly more honest approach. French President Emmanuel Macron, whose predecessor, Nikolas Sarkozy, sold Qatar $14bn (R243bn) worth of weapons, even managed to keep a straight face as he told the world that “sport should not be politicised” and that, by implication, the kiddies need to shut up and disassociate from reality in front of the shiny football on the telly so the grownups can get on with selling each other weapons.
Not everybody, however, has the chutzpah required to insist that a competition between nation states, drawing on nationalistic tropes, and hosted by whichever country is politically and economically most advantageous to the corporate backers of the politicians who control said competition, shouldn’t be politicised.
No, it takes a supreme kind of cynicism to be that honest, and clearly Fifa boss Gianni Infantino isn’t that honest. Still, you don’t get to head a cabal like Fifa without having almost infinite self-confidence, and on Saturday, Infantino took whataboutism where it’s never been before: the Stone Age.
Having first wowed his audience with the spectacle of a Swiss millionaire claiming that “today I feel [like] a migrant worker”, he lunged for a whataboutist royal flush by accusing Qatar’s critics of every crime in recorded European history, and quite a lot in unrecorded history, saying: “I think for what we Europeans have been doing the last 3,000 years we should be apologising for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people.”
The last 1,000 years? Definitely a lot of those. 2,000 years? Why not? I mean, Pontius Pilate didn’t exactly help the situation that day. But 3,000 years? What did those poor Neolithic druids and menhir-carvers do to deserve being slagged off like that?
It was absurd. It was transparent. And yet the bread and circuses roll on, and the rich get paid and the dead workers stay dead, and the whataboutist chorus scans the crowd for dissenters, gags at the ready ...
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