Extremism and Oklahoma Attack

* Re “The Allure of Malignant Ideas,” Opinion, April 30:

Just when I had come to believe that something had finally happened that could be unequivocally attributed to the right wing, i.e., the Oklahoma City bombing, along comes nothing less than David M. Kennedy’s unbiased, dispassionate and informed (what else could one expect from a Stanford history professor?) Opinion piece to shatter any illusions that the left (a.k.a. liberalism, counter-cultural McGovernickism, Oliver Stoneism, etc.) could finally be exculpated from ultimate responsibility for everything wrong in America.

While the professor admits that right-wing Sen. Joseph McCarthy was “reckless” and “left a malignant legacy,” including the “radical right” and “gun-toting ‘militias,’ ” whose ideology of United Nations conspiracy to take over the land of the free led to the bloodiest terrorist incident in the nation’s history, he seems forced to conclude that it was really the “lethal social poison” that “metastasized” from the “moral posturing and brainless sloganeering” of the “60s left” that “infected the right with special virulence,” meaning, I suppose, that the left, already responsible for the excesses of the arts, the media, the universities and government bureaucracy, is also responsible for the excesses of the right wing! While this kind of analysis might carry the onus of being, as the professor characterizes the thinking of the left, “unfettered, even unhinged, in its febrile and phantasmagoric theorizing,” were it to appear in any other venue, one expects that it must be free of such criticism when presented as the headline piece of The Times Opinion section.

SPENCER CARLSEN

Granada Hills

* I’m concerned by the reactionary rhetoric prompted by what may be the motives of those who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City.

Capital punishment is revenge. I know of no better way to foment feelings that revenge is justifiable than to advocate it.

There is no need to surrender our constitutionally protected rights and freedom. The right to keep and bear arms exists only within the context of a well-regulated militia, which exists in the form of the National Guard, and our right to be protected from search and seizure applies only to unreasonable search and seizure.

I’m as angry as anyone, and if the bombing was directed against the United States, then I take it as personally as anyone, but whatever the motives, this is a time for considered action, not reaction.

RONALD WEBSTER

Long Beach