U.S. Righteous Self-Image

* Re “Our Righteous Self-Image Is a Myth,” Commentary, May 21:

The column by Benjamin Schwarz was nothing less than a diatribe by an intolerant Anglophobe who surprisingly, as a historian, appears to have only PC knowledge of, and little respect for, this country. His reference to “Americans of Anglo descent who dominate and impose their own culture on the country,” reveals only a race-based pathology in his own psyche, and flies in the face of reality.

Does he detect any trace of the heritage he despises in Shalikashvili, Panetta, Kantor, Feinstein, Eisenhower, Colin Powell, Roosevelt, Brzezinski, Kissinger, Schwarzkopf or even Stephanopoulos?

His whole article was one of total disparagement of this country, its manifest greatness and innate goodness, which is acknowledged around the world.

With so many immigrants striving to become citizens of the U.S., we are clearly unlucky to have been saddled with Benjamin Schwarz.

PAUL S. McCAIG

Dana Point

* I liked the piece by Schwarz and agreed right up to the point where he talks about the stolen “two-fifths of the Republic of Mexico,” which only existed since 1821, and was actually the home of the Comanche, Apache, Navajo, Chumash and Shoshone, to name but a few. “Mexico” is a purely European mental construct; there were never any Aztecs in L.A., and all that turf was “Mexico” only because it was stolen from the locals by Spain. NORMAN FRAHM

Corona Del Mar

* More nonsense again from the so-called political experts! By comparing America’s past with events now happening in Bosnia and Chechnya, Schwarz is comparing apples with oranges.

In his opinion we should not cast stones at aggrandizing Serbs or Russians, because, he quotes: “Every dominant race is guilty of imposing its own culture upon the minority peoples.” It just so happens that Serbs are the ones in the minority in Bosnia as well as in Croatia, as are also the Russians in Chechnya. Minorities do not have the right to impose their rule on the majority, and especially not within century-old borders.

Most importantly, these are the closing years of the 20th Century, not the Wild West days, and one would hope that civilization has progressed to the point where aggression cannot be tolerated.

H. M. FOLEY

Santa Ana

* Schwarz is one of those rare people today who will challenge American foreign policy as it relates to Bosnia and Chechnya. I only wish that more historians and analysts had his level of understanding of these complex issues.

We Americans seem to want to impose our “democratic values” in Bosnia when our own development as a nation is not really different from what has happened in Bosnia, as his article so eloquently shows. We Americans need to be more concerned with the problems we face in our own country than imposing our self-righteous values on other nations.

MICHAEL ROBERT KRAL

Long Beach