Today i had the misfortune of encountering a western “leftist” on Twitter. He stans Podemos (a spanish demsoc party, very liberal and proNATO, they are now in a coalition government with the socdems and they love Zelenski). We discussed the Ukraine War and Russia. I thought he would do the typical “ok the US and NATO are very bad, but Russia is bad too!” so i brought up the NATO invasions of Yugoslavia and Libya to show how the west is manufacturing consent now with Ukraine just like they did with Yugoslavia and Libya, which i assumed he would say were bad. Well the motherfucker goes and says “akchually those invasions were good, we stopped genocides and evil dictators”. WTF. How are these people “leftists”? They are straight up NATOist warhawks. How is this “the left” now? And this is in Europe, where the left is much stronger than in the US! I cant stand this. HOW IS THIS “LEFTISM”? Im so angry right now, what a piece of shit human being, defending imperialist genocides while calling himself a “leftist”. He even had the gull of saying “you arent a leftist, you defend genocidal regimes like the USSR, Putin or North Korea, youre a fascist!”. Fucking unbelievable. Ok rant over.
Oh and he also defended finnish and baltic nazis of WW2 and said “bolshevism is just like nazism”. Plus he said holodomor was real and when i showed him that expert historians on the subject like Mark Tauger, J Arch Getty and Stephen Wheatcroft think otherwise, he said “youre wrong, the historical consensus doesnt agree with you”.
Very few proper left parties in the west. A lot of them identify as left just because they see not-white people as sort of human and don’t want to completely fuck up the climate. You’d have to actually look for workers’ rights conditions or anti-capitalist statements in their party ideologies.