Keeping in mind the passage i have quoted above, things become quite clear:

If it is correct to support even an undemocratic monarchist force when it serves a clear anti-imperialist function, surely hoping that the people of Donbass and other parts of Ukraine who have been brutalized and repressed by the Kiev junta all these years can be liberated, while striking a blow at one of imperialism’s most important proxy projects while advancing multipolarity, even if it is a bourgeois Russia doing it, is justified.

Ultimately the greatest obstacle to socialist revolutions in the present day is not bourgeois Russia, it is US imperialism and the global neoliberal system propped up by western economic and military hegemony. Anything that undermines the stability, prestige and power of these hegemonic forces is a step toward a world where revolutions can flourish again and socialist experiments can have breathing space.

I find it very sad that so many western leftists who claim to be opposed to imperialism immediately denounce any country or group that actually strikes a real blow at the imperialists and their proxies. It’s like we like the idea of resistance in theory but are too squeamish to see it put into practice. We talk of revolution but would balk at the violence, the inevitable collateral damage and the pragmatic compromises that revolutions entail.

And i foresee the same kind of attitude coming eventually toward the war that will likely be waged to liberate Palestine when the protective umbrella of the US over the Zionist regime starts to weaken. For now Palestinians are mostly seen as victims by the western left, but if and when the resistance forces in Palestine and its allies in the region finally become strong enough to seriously confront the Zionist occupier i would not be surprised to see many of the same leftists who now denounce Russia also turn on the Palestinians.

There is a disappointing lack of substantial dialectical analysis among the imperial core’s left and a hyper focus on the superficial aesthetics of a situation with no regard to the real historical and material context. And because many of us know little about the actual conditions on the ground in places outside of our western bubble, we are far too easily manipulated by imperialist propaganda when it is constructed to appeal to “leftist” sensibilities, to say the right buzzwords, to victimize the oppressor and villainize the victim when the latter strikes back at the former.