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To the editor: In his response to my letter "What Distortions?", fellow Chief reader Michael J. Gorman asked if I think capitalism is as great a threat to democracy as communism.
But his first question is whether we should have fought against the Confederacy in the civil war and the Axis nations in World War II, all of which were capitalistic nations. He asks whether the U.S. should have an important role in protecting Taiwan from China and South from North Korea. These are separate issues.
He has been writing nuclear saber-rattling letters against Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin. Russia has not been communist since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. All the parties, Russia, Ukraine and the instigator of all this, the U.S., are capitalist. The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, never intended to dismantle communism. He also had a non-aggressive foreign policy.
There have been aggressive nations led by brutal tyrants throughout recorded history, way before Karl Marx published a single book. Few countries today are communist. So to describe communism as the greatest threat to peace and freedom is a stretch.
Richard Warren
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