Welcome to World War III

By Rick Boettger

In 2022 Joe Biden did not send us to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine because  “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”  The no-fly zone meant that NATO pilots flying NATO F-16s would have been killing Russian officers in Ukrainian airspace.  But now Biden, against the wishes of his own army command, has authorized our American technicians using American  ATACMS guided by American satellites  to kill both Russian soldiers and nearby civilians in Russia itself.  Despite Putin’s clear warnings about nuclear escalation if we do so.

I wrote the above in response to a long news article in the NYT detailing Biden’s allowing Ukraine to use ATACMS.  They published 1380 comments after their news piece on Biden’s giving the go-ahead to wield  ATACMS upon Russia itself.  But not mine.  That’s my first censored contribution to the NYT’s comments section.*

This was days after the NYT had finally turned a giant corner for the left media by, for the first time, publishing an editorial by one of their own staff in favor of negotiating an end to the war: Trump Can Speed Up the Inevitable in Ukraine.  It concluded, “U.S. management of this disastrous war [means] We want Ukraine to function as a protectorate…. A sensible, ugly strategy — tactically defensible but morally reprehensible. America is not going to save Ukraine. Maybe we need Mr. Trump — brazen and unscrupulous — to finally say so out loud and act accordingly.”

They did not accept comments or publish any letters on this–in fact the only letter ever published in favor of negotiations was a brief one by a famous Columbia professor** in August 2022.  This is because 90% of the NYT readership, at least the ones who comment, apparently don’t find proxy wars*** morally reprehensible or the threat of nuclear war to be serious.  So this alone was a very brave piece by them, the first, and risks losing readership.

But probably not, because in the same Sunday Opinion section, there were seven other pieces vilifying Trump.  Right below the pro-negotiation piece was one titled Enough, with the bold sidebar of “To suggest we should yield even a little to Trump’s odious politics is unacceptable.”

The pro-negotiation column did NOT mention our promises never to expand NATO after perestroika, or Zelinsky’s autocracy, worse than Orban’s in Hungary.  Pointing out any such historical or current fact makes you a “friend” or “agent of Putin.”  It just pointed out the war is unwinnable and we’re just killing six figures of Ukrainians in order to kill even more Russians, while destroying Ukraine’s infrastructure, society, and economy.

But hooray, they allowed comments after the ATACMS piece.  The * above means that actually I have had two other comments censored but not for being pro-negotiation, but for revealing the proportion of their readership taking sides.  Which I can do here under the generous First Amendment penumbra of Konk Life.

That’s where I get the 90% figure, from counting the sides the commenters take, and the “recommendations” they can check on each others’ comments.  The number one most popular comment out of 3800 on the new bombing illuminated the readership’s hearts:

It’s about time. Ukraine has been relentlessly bombed into dust for the past two years — and now, North Korea has entered into the fray. Time to even up the playing field. And all those who think this is an escalation, don’t realize the escalation began when Russian troops entered the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.

1193 Recommend

There are 9 decreasingly top-ranked letters like that before we come to the first pro negotiation:

This is a reckless escalation at the end of the Biden Term to force Russia to escalate (Putin recently changed the national retaliatory doctrine for when Russia is hit in such a way), An escalated war will now be left in the hands of Trump, making it harder for him to achieve peace and stop this insane war going nowhere but the end of Ukraine as a state. Extremely bad move for Ukraine, for European security and indeed global security.

10 Replies 133 Recommended

Note that he got 10 replies.  The same proportion, 9, assailed him, e.g., You have obviously been influenced by or are actually an agent of Russia.

So we get Ukraine to kill more Russians with our most fearsome missiles and most lethal, immoral ground ordinance while we hit the bunkers in Kiev, closing our Embassy, rightly fearing the ballistic missile reprisals we’ve provoked. Aboveground, we are courageously fighting, as they say, “to the last Ukrainian.”

Footnotes:

*As above, excepting commenters statistics

**Jeffrey Sachs

***Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters in Poland a couple of months after the invasion that the United States wants to see Russia “weakened.” The comment suggested that the United States would weaponize Ukrainian patriotism, and spend Ukrainian lives, because a prolonged war — even a war that could probably not be won — suited U.S. interest in chipping away at Mr. Putin’s staying power.

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