And you are lynching Negroes
|
"And you are lynching Negroes" (Russian: "А у вас негров линчуют", Polish: "A u was biją Murzynów") is a counter-accusation made repeatedly by the Soviet Union during the Cold War whenever the United States government criticized the Soviet Union for human rights abuses. This phrase is common in modern Russian and Polish usage to refer pejoratively to this type of rhetorical device.
Such counter-claims would be made both in propaganda for internal consumption as well as in propaganda targeted at the West. The claim made sense in the 1960s when it originated, as there were in fact lynchings of African Americans going on in some U.S. Southern states, but with the subsequent success of the U.S. civil rights movement the claim became more and more hollow as the Cold War progressed.