History is subject to poor interpretation

Re “Those vile good old days,” Opinion, Oct. 16

I found the attempt by Nicholas Goldberg to trivialize, apply simplistic Cold War rhetoric and titillate by painting rape as a wartime collateral event by an evil enemy (communist/Soviet Union) shameful.

Rape is virtually never about sex. It is often about revenge (how many Russian women were raped by the marauding German soldiers who ravaged the Soviet Union on its way to Moscow?) or demoralizing a perceived opposing community, which, for example, was one of the methods used against the indigenous native American population and imported slave women stolen from the African continent. And I suppose we shouldn’t talk about the similar experiences of Vietnamese women in the 1960s and 1970s at the hands of American soldiers?

Goldberg is welcome to his distorted opinions as is his right under the Constitution. But they merit condemnation, for his interpretation of history is lousy.

F. DANIEL GRAY

Los Angeles

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The ruthlessness of Stalin’s Red Army invasion of Germany, with the massive rapes and thievery, could have been greatly reduced if, at the time, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower did not hold back the U.S. Army’s advance in Germany. This allowed the Russian army to advance and was the cause of splitting Germany into two parts. At the end of World War II in Europe, the U.S. became an instant enemy with the Soviet Union, which would not allow us to travel through the part of Germany the Soviets controlled. Thus came the Iron Curtain and the Cold War.

BOB A. GREENE

West Hollywood