Firsthand experience counts

This is a reaction to “Giving is a personal choice” (Letters, April 22). George Waldref’s opinions of El Salvador are founded on his frequent visits to that country, and I don’t think he needs lectures by the likes of Carol Bacon about “Marxist guerrillas.”

Were Archbishop Romero, the six Jesuit scholars and their assistant all brutally murdered by criminals trained in the School of Americas “setting up totalitarian regimes”?

Bacon’s reference to social justice in connection with Stalin is pathetic. If somebody wants to know what Stalinism was all about he/she should read and try to understand Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago.” Total disregard for human life, happiness and fulfillment all “validated” by some “higher purpose” – that was Stalinism. And that you can see right here in the United States: The attitude of the owners of the coal mines, who consider violations of safety standards “normal business,” who push for increased production no matter what the human cost is. Those people are no better than Stalin’s ruthless “commissars.”

And as for the cliché of redistribution to the poor (which of course is Stalinism) what about redistribution from the poor to the rich that took place in El Salvador? Is that acceptable?

Peter C. Dolina

Veradale