Emergency Press Conference: The Danger of Nuclear War Is Real, and Must Be Stopped
Live Stream Scheduled for June 12 at 1 PM ET, National Press Club
On June 12, I will join Ray McGovern, Richard Black, and Helga Zepp-LaRouche for a press conference at the National Press Club where we will address the dangers we face today from the threat of nuclear war.
I will help create a sense of urgency surrounding this threat in an effort to shape public opinion in a way that injects the issue of nuclear war and the policies and weapons that make it possible become part of the public discourse leading up to the national election in November 2024.
🔴 Watch the livestream at ScottRitter.com
🕊Follow @ScottRitter
Yeah I can’t open Telegram links either, and i’m also not going to install it. OP should find another way way to link whatever it is they are trying to share.
With that out of the way, this might upset some people but i’m going to go off on a bit of a longer rant here about your last paragraph there.
I’ve never understood the obsession that a certain subsegment of US communists seem to have with this LaRouche person. I had never even heard of them before communists started accusing others in the anti-war space of associating with LaRouche. And frankly i don’t understand what the fuss is about, the whole LaRouchite sect seem to me to be extremely irrelevant as a political force.
This “guilt by association” thing is getting a bit ridiculous. If you start to look at who is connected to who and just keep extending that chain you can eventually reach almost any arbitrary person. Isn’t that what the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” meme was all about?
So what if some of their followers happen to be in the same spaces that communists and others who agree with our anti-war and anti-imperialist views are in? Why should we be so afraid of them? Are we saying that our arguments are somehow worse and less persuasive? Shouldn’t we instead see that as an opportunity to court and poach away their supporters? If we isolate ourselves in ideologically pure bubbles where no association with anyone with different ideological leanings is tolerated then we are rejecting a large part of the working class. And we are surrendering that segment of the working class to reactionaries like the LaRouchites.
That is not a way to build a broad anti-war, anti-imperialist mass movement when that is exactly what should be a top priority for communists in the imperial core right now given the dangerous state of what is happening in the world and how the US empire might lash out in reaction to its rapid decline. People in the real world are diverse in their views, many of them are very propagandized and un-/miseducated, and we have to learn to work with that reality instead of holding out for the perfect but non-existent ideal proletariat that we may wish we had.
We just have to throw our hat in the ring and spread our own message, make our own world view known and try to convince them that Marxism-Leninism is objectively and demonstrably the correct way to view the world, and more than that, the best tool for achieving the kind of change in the world that the working class needs. And to do that we have to be willing to go where the people are, even if groups that we ideologically disagree with are also there.
I gotta believe there are better, less compromised voices than Ritter’s to promote.
This is absolutely true, which is why i for one have never promoted him. But there are also much better things to criticize him for than some real or imagined “LaRouche connection”. One thing that is very obvious for instance is that he is an extremely jingoistic person, to an almost comical degree. He is the archetype of a gung-ho military ultra-patriot and he says a lot of very stupid things as a result of that.
Yet at the same time he does say some very sensible things when he isn’t in that ridiculous American jingoism mode, and a lot of people in America (and other countries) take people like him seriously precisely because of his background. We should welcome serious anti-war, anti-imperialist voices, particularly if they can appeal to a different demographic that we as communists would not normally easily reach.
If you ask me what the litmus test should be for allying with someone in the context of a broad anti-war movement, there are really three criteria: opposition to the genocide in Palestine, opposition to the NATO proxy war on Russia, and opposition to the US drive to war with China. And Ritter, for all his numerous flaws ticks all those boxes.
Personally i don’t like listening to him and i don’t seek out content with him in it. For me he is, as Jiang Zemin would say, “too simple, sometimes naive”, but i also won’t judge people who do find what he has to say useful or interesting, or think that he can convince more people to join the anti-war, anti-genocide movement.
Yeah I can’t open Telegram links either, and i’m also not going to install it. OP should find another way way to link whatever it is they are trying to share.
With that out of the way, this might upset some people but i’m going to go off on a bit of a longer rant here about your last paragraph there.
I’ve never understood the obsession that a certain subsegment of US communists seem to have with this LaRouche person. I had never even heard of them before communists started accusing others in the anti-war space of associating with LaRouche. And frankly i don’t understand what the fuss is about, the whole LaRouchite sect seem to me to be extremely irrelevant as a political force.
This “guilt by association” thing is getting a bit ridiculous. If you start to look at who is connected to who and just keep extending that chain you can eventually reach almost any arbitrary person. Isn’t that what the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” meme was all about?
So what if some of their followers happen to be in the same spaces that communists and others who agree with our anti-war and anti-imperialist views are in? Why should we be so afraid of them? Are we saying that our arguments are somehow worse and less persuasive? Shouldn’t we instead see that as an opportunity to court and poach away their supporters? If we isolate ourselves in ideologically pure bubbles where no association with anyone with different ideological leanings is tolerated then we are rejecting a large part of the working class. And we are surrendering that segment of the working class to reactionaries like the LaRouchites.
That is not a way to build a broad anti-war, anti-imperialist mass movement when that is exactly what should be a top priority for communists in the imperial core right now given the dangerous state of what is happening in the world and how the US empire might lash out in reaction to its rapid decline. People in the real world are diverse in their views, many of them are very propagandized and un-/miseducated, and we have to learn to work with that reality instead of holding out for the perfect but non-existent ideal proletariat that we may wish we had.
We just have to throw our hat in the ring and spread our own message, make our own world view known and try to convince them that Marxism-Leninism is objectively and demonstrably the correct way to view the world, and more than that, the best tool for achieving the kind of change in the world that the working class needs. And to do that we have to be willing to go where the people are, even if groups that we ideologically disagree with are also there.
This is absolutely true, which is why i for one have never promoted him. But there are also much better things to criticize him for than some real or imagined “LaRouche connection”. One thing that is very obvious for instance is that he is an extremely jingoistic person, to an almost comical degree. He is the archetype of a gung-ho military ultra-patriot and he says a lot of very stupid things as a result of that.
Yet at the same time he does say some very sensible things when he isn’t in that ridiculous American jingoism mode, and a lot of people in America (and other countries) take people like him seriously precisely because of his background. We should welcome serious anti-war, anti-imperialist voices, particularly if they can appeal to a different demographic that we as communists would not normally easily reach.
If you ask me what the litmus test should be for allying with someone in the context of a broad anti-war movement, there are really three criteria: opposition to the genocide in Palestine, opposition to the NATO proxy war on Russia, and opposition to the US drive to war with China. And Ritter, for all his numerous flaws ticks all those boxes.
Personally i don’t like listening to him and i don’t seek out content with him in it. For me he is, as Jiang Zemin would say, “too simple, sometimes naive”, but i also won’t judge people who do find what he has to say useful or interesting, or think that he can convince more people to join the anti-war, anti-genocide movement.
cannot agree more