LOL Well, being a lifetime learner, and having grandchildren helps. I’m on Mastodon too. Not Facebook though.

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.

There’s nothing wrong about wanting Peace. I admire the LaRouche organization. Ritter is an expert. I’m so sick and tired of people shooting the messenger and not paying attention. We’re in deep shit. The message is the medium!

At my age (72) and a soldier of 30 years, who has experienced much war and combat during my service, I agree 100% with the message. Elder’s need to be listened to. Let’s not fool ourselves that our government has lied to us about Ukraine SMO. Russia was never losing in this operation. It was only after a couple weeks in that a peace deal was reached in Turkey between the 2 sides. But Boris Johnson travelled to Kyviv to ensure that agreement was never implemented. AFAIC that is a war crime. Over 500K Ukrainians killed and more wounded. Haven’t enough died? If you want compromised sources, try the Kyviv.independant. It’s a pure propaganda operation. Anonymous hacked a government server and found the documents showing this to be a fact. I even posted the documents, but the folks that think Ukraine is a democracy voted it down in order to squash it. The truth has never been one of their traits.