Join Helga Zepp-LaRouche June 5, 11am Eastern/5pm CET in her Weekly Live dialogue and help usher in the Year of the New Paradigm for all Humanity. Send your questions, thoughts and reports to questions@schillerinstitue.org or ask them in the live stream.

At what point is one comforted by the argument, “Oh, they would never launch nuclear missiles at us”? Perhaps one should ask, “What is on the mind of those who make such assurances?”

If you have to ask, the answer is worse than those who provide assurances that your home values will always go up, your social security will always be there, and $35 trillion in national debt won’t destroy you or your child’s life.

Today, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov made a new contribution to the latest national sport of Russia, trying to figure out how to wake up their nuclear counterpart, the United States. Recent and sober contributions have included making a demonstration nuclear explosion, one not involving injuring anyone, just to jolt Westerners as to the physical reality of the event. Another objects that nothing less than a single, live action, tactical nuclear bomb with massive casualties, would do the trick. Russian President Vladimir Putin had responded to Britain’s latest escalation, to have Ukraine use Western weapons to hit deep into Russia, with a more limited response, that Russia will target the military facilities of the particular Western country, those inside of Ukraine and those elsewhere.

Ryabkov’s new wrinkle addressed the fantasy life in Washington, keeping those driving the country over the cliff from seeing the road. He stated: “I’d like to warn American actors against miscalculations that can lead to fatal consequences. For some unclear reason they underestimate how serious a response they could face.” American policymakers need to “spend some of their time, which they probably waste on computer games, judging by their air-headed approach to serious issues” on considering what Putin actually said.

German Gen. Harald Kujat (ret.), former Chief of Staff of the Bundeswehr (2000-2002) and former Chairman of the NATO Military Committee (2002-2005), is not one given to hyperbole. Today, interviewed by Switzerland’s YouTube radio broadcast “Weltwoche,” Kujat stated: “I fear that the war in Ukraine will become the primal catastrophe of the 21st century.” He added that everyone is simply watching and/or joining in on the incitement and warmongering. He remarked grimly: “We will simply get what we deserve.”

One U.S. Senator yesterday, David Vance, tweeted: “I think the risk of nuclear war is higher now than at any point in my lifetime. Biden is sleepwalking into World War 3.” A Politico article that got Vance’s attention explained that no matter how “limited” and “defensive” Biden’s permission to Ukraine to strike inside Russia is portrayed, it “highlighted, once again, how Biden often changes his mind on once-taboo Ukraine policy ideas after battlefield conditions shift or, most persuasively, allies move first. That was especially true when the U.S. followed Britain and France in sending long-range missiles for Ukraine to use deep behind Russian front lines.”

Today, one American, the former Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter, was off to attend Russia’s annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), to do his best in his campaign to wake up Americans as to the danger we find ourselves. The U.S. State Department, with no explanation, with no charges alleged, actually physically stopped him from boarding his plane and had his passport seized. Is there any desperation in their actions?

Have Ryabkov’s computer games—or virtual reality exercises, good, old-fashioned hard liquor, or the more popular marijuana-induced fantasy life—allowed you or your leaders to slip into the death of civilization comfortably?

Those who whisper, “We can push our enemies past every ‘red line’ they draw,” are simply saying that they have a serious, serious addiction and a desperate situation. Whatever they are selling is guaranteed poison.

Perhaps the 70,000 New York citizens who put Diane Sare on the ballot as an independent candidate for U.S. Senate, or the similar mobilization of 10,000 in the Bronx CD 15 putting Jose Vega on the ballot for U.S. Congress, as actual human beings who can think, and can lead, and are not addicted to fantasies, can inject some life in the old republic yet. One big healthy step into reality involves wrapping your mind around a solution to the misery in Gaza, to the debasement of the Israeli population: The LaRouche Oasis Plan.

The late economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche concluded his 1977 document, titled “What Really Are the Labor Committees?—The Lessons of Erasmus and Franklin,” with the following paragraph: “Let it be understood, therefore, that if you are a humanist, the Labor Committees are in that sense your organization—whether or not you are a member. If you are for technological progress in the expansion of industry and agriculture, and define the vital interests of nations in those terms, and if you regard man’s power to create and assimilate scientific knowledge for the perfection of our species as the inviolable distinction between man and the lower beasts, then the Labor Committees are an indispensable aid to the cause you espouse, whatever political affiliation you have.”

Nearly 50 years after that was written, independent candidates that have rejected bankrupt, moribund political parties, such as New York’s U.S. Senate candidate Diane Sare and Bronx Congressional candidate Jose Vega, are part of a growing international movement away from the predatory military-financial complex. Those in the trans-Atlantic sector calling for a return to advanced technological progress and an increase in the productive powers of labor, in alliance with the emerging nations of the Global South, are on the cutting edge of world politics today. War, even total war, will not stop this progress, if an international coalition for peace, linked together by a 24-hour “symposium” process, can operate as an intellectual clearing-house for policy deliberation.

Join Helga Zepp-LaRouche June 5, 11am Eastern/5pm CET in her Weekly Live dialogue and help usher in the Year of the New Paradigm for all Humanity. Send your questions, thoughts and reports to questions@schillerinstitue.org or ask them in the live stream.