My friend, do I have some news for you.

I come from and have lived many years of my life in the so-called Global South countries. Progressive movements have always existed throughout the Global South. Incidentally, they were all crushed - directly or directly - by Western imperialist powers. Perhaps not as brutal as those were in Afghanistan or Chile, or Indonesia even a decade earlier, but they were crushed nonetheless and the situation allowed reactionary forces to take power, which again conveniently benefited the foreign imperialists. All these countries are now conservative shitholes that you’d claim to be the “bad guys” in your book.

All the left-wing leaders that ever came into power had to face economic threats that forced them to more or less commit to austerity simply to survive. The end result? Left wing governments achieved nothing and only stoked further economic despair, allowing right wing forces to exploit and come into power.

Do you think Argentinians are simply so stupid that they elected the crazy libertarian as their leader? Or do you think there is a much longer history underlying the failures of left wing reforms in the Global South?

Tell us, what are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to just “be better”? Every time we have a left wing movement growing that wants to assert sovereignty (which almost certainly means threatening the interests of the Western imperialists), they get crushed one way or the other.

At the end of the day, trust me, if you had lived in Russia, unless you are part of the wealthy elites, you’d much rather live under the stability of Putin’s rule, conservative as it is, than the absolute madness and poverty of 1990s Yeltsin era, when simply walking down the street for being a minority can get you murdered by literal neo-Nazis, when child prostitution literally re-emerged after many decades of prosperity. Ah yes, so progressive of Russia to let the Western liberals in. There is a reason why Gorbachev and Yeltsin are the two most hated leaders in Russia.

This is why there is such a stark contrast in opinion between leftists in the imperial core and the peripheral, developing world when it comes to the Ukraine War. There is a reason why all the AES countries almost immediately came to an understanding with Russia’s plight when the Ukraine War started. The people who have been victims of abuse know that if one day, another victim kills the abuser out of rage, everyone immediately understands that the abuser had it coming. Nearly every country in the Global South stood with Russia and refused to impose sanctions, despite the demands of their Western imperialist masters. Leftists who live in the imperial core and still don’t understand why this is the case simply reveal their complete ignorance of what it means to be a leftist in the Global South.