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".
One thing we always have to keep in mind is how non-viable an extreme anti-religious stance actually is for a vanguard party to take in certain countries. In parts of the world you will simply not get very far by completely throwing out all religion, it is too important to people. Criticizing and opposing institutions like the church especially when they are fulfilling a very reactionary function within the status quo is necessary. But it would be tactically very unwise and counterproductive toward building a mass movement to discard e.g. Christianity in Latin America or Islam in the Middle East altogether.
As you say we should "defer to the revolutionaries of their respective areas and cultures" as they understand the cultural environment and what actually works and what appeals to the masses and does not alienate them. Worse, if we do not manage to adopt a correct stance on such an important issue as religion that is appropriate to the local conditions, religion will 100% be used as a weapon by the reactionaries against us.
During the cold war the imperialists managed to sway large parts of the global south away from the socialist block by painting the Soviets as evil atheists (even though there was actually considerable religious freedom in the USSR, especially in ethnic minority republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia).