"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. It can be considered a type of ad hominem counter-attack in that it avoids actually addressing the substance of the issue, but instead attempts to discredit the opponent and change the topic of the conversation.
Such arguments are a logical fallacy in that they seek to derail the discussion from one topic to another one without addressing the issues previously brought up. The reasonable thing to do would be to counter accusations in a substantive manner, and present counter-claims separately.
Similar kinds of counter-claim are widely used by many people and governments when they wish to deflect criticism. An example would be a statement, often repeated in various forms by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency, saying that American criticism of crimes of the Communist regime have no merit because the United States is guilty of violating people's civil rights, of war crimes dating back to the Korean War, and of crimes and misdemeanors committed by U.S. servicemen in South Korea.
Such arguments are a fallacy if intended to exempt the accused party from responsibility. However, a valid rhetorical use is to counter the other party's claims of moral high ground, which are often used to justify their position.
A more recent and well-known example involves the use the events of Abu Ghraib scandal to discredit the American policy in the Middle East and specifically American overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the occupation of Iraq. The United States used claims of prison torture and "rape rooms" as some of its pretexts for invading Iraq, but this position was later weakened by the scandal. The Abu Ghraib incidents do not weaken arguments against the former regime on the basis of its prisons, but they do weaken arguments supporting invasion as a proper American response.
Valid counter-accusations may have long-lasting effects, weakening the position of the accused long after the offences end. This was the case with lynchings and this is the case with the Abu Ghraib incidents, according to former United States Vice President Al Gore, who said, "One of the most tragic consequences of these official crimes is that it will be very hard for any of us as Americans—at least for a very long time—to effectively stand up for human rights elsewhere and criticize other governments, when our policies have resulted in our soldiers behaving so monstrously."