‘Too Many Contras’

As America ended a weekend celebrating the anniversary of the beginning of this country’s violent overthrow of the tyranny of a foreign power, you published an editorial (July 8), “Too Many Contras,” which arrogantly sniffs at the efforts of the peoples of Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan and other countries to throw off the Soviet-supported Marxist dictatorships in those nations.

With only a few minor changes, your editorial could have been published 209 years ago, entitled, “Too Many Minutemen,” suggesting that their presence would only justify more redcoats, lamenting the “terrorist” attacks on the British, condemning French assistance to the colonists as “mischievous,” and encouraging the Continental Congress to attempt to negotiate its independence from the British Empire (in cooperation with neighboring nations, of course). That course would have been as doomed to failure as the policy that you advocate today for people in similar circumstances.

Ignoring the lessons taught to the world’s democracies by Hitler and by the expansion of communism in the postwar world, your editorials have argued for appeasement rather than opposition to Marxism and the inevitable political and economic bondage it has brought to every nation where its adherents have seized power.

On our Fourth of July weekend, those who cherish freedom in the United States and in the embattled nations of the world could be thankful that the editorial philosophy of The Times was not American policy in 1776 and is not American policy today.

DANIEL M. LIVINGSTON

La Crescenta