"We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports."
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/quotes.htm
For a better context, see this: https://hexbear.net/comment/3563148
It makes more sense to "support" Putin because this conflict is not happening in a vacuum and its outcome also is important to the conflict between Russia and NATO. Wagner winning would probably represent – at best – another 1993 and may in fact be much worse depending on the influence of genuine Nazis. Mutual destruction would also, much more directly, represent another 1993 because it would mean NATO can roll in whether via tanks or corporate stooges and take over.
Third campism is trot bullshit and should not be supported.
Also the comment right below that one:
To be fair, most Western leftists never read Mao so they never understand why Trotskyism will never work in the third world (yes I consider Russia to be a third world resource colony to the neoliberal West).
Mao gave a special place to the (Chinese) Trotskyists and equated them to 汉奸 (lit. Han Traitors, or traitor to the Chinese people), which is probably the worst insult you can ever get from someone like Mao.
The Trotskyists wanted the Chinese communists to do Lenin’s “revolutionary defeatism” by abandoning collaboration with the national bourgeoisie (i.e. the KMT), but instead act on defeating the KMT government right when the Imperial Japanese Army was rampaging through China. According to the Trotskyists, solidarity with the working class of other countries is all that is needed, and they were willing to let the Japanese imperialists conquer the mainland if that could lead to some universal solidarity among the oppressed class.
This is how fascism wins. The Chinese Trots were hated throughout the country and it would take until the 1970s to see a small resurgence among the Hong Kong leftists.
This is why those of us who grew up reading Chinese history just roll our eyes when we see Western leftists calling for “revolutionary defeatism” in Russia because the exact same thing happened to China more than 80 years ago! The defeat of the bourgeois government in Russia means the victory of the fascists and Western imperialists.
Once again, read Mao (start with the Selected Works of Mao Zedong).
In the context of the U.S. in 2023? Absolutely. Even Stalin backtracked on that during WWII.
He backtracked on it before that. The popular front became the dominant soviet ideology in like 1934. During the Spanish civil war and until 1939 with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact the policy of Stalin was "Ally with anyone left of the fascists to fuck up the fascists", and the policy of the popular front was taken up again after that broke down. Basically every soviet republic was ruled by popular fronts.
This place is filled with ultras who call other people ultras for being libs, which breaks my brain and heart
I think there's an element of "Marx replacing God" here, too, mixed in with a lot of quick-trigger hostility towards questioning the leftist canon due to folks growing up eyeballs deep in anticommunist propaganda.
This isn't a religion and the works of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc. are not gospel. Every one of those leaders were fallible human beings who even by internal leftist opinions each made significant mistakes. The default response to basically any social theory from 100+ years ago should be "are we sure this all remains true today, and in my specific circumstance?", not "every word of this is universally applicable in perpetuity."