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”.
I say it all the time but
The left is merely the left side of colonial discourse; thus, it is not only incapable of challenging imperialism, but is also an instrumental part of the development processes of imperialism. This is as evident today as it was in 1850.
This is why I am comfortable placing Marxism and anti-imperialism into its own scientific socialist discourse that has strategic goals that are irreconcilable with “the left.”
At university I was taught a co-opted, dogmatic, and class reductionist version of Marxism. In the next week I was taught how liberals co-opted Marxism. If a Marxism is part of the left, then it is definitively a failure because then it is only reduced to a fringe part of liberal and colonial discourses by academics and also bourgeoisie politicians and institutions.
I say this because I think it helps me make sense of the world. It is such a relief to not have the need to gatekeep the left to keep it pure when you can see it as a working part of imperial discourse. The left is literally a huge working part of the problem. Hopefully it is not overly pedantic.