Nixon on U.S. Power

As a citizen of the European Economic Community I am bemused to learn from Nixon (“Keep Our Eyes on Their Freedom,” Jan. 6) that I live in an unfree area of the world. “It would be a great tragedy if the newly liberated nations of the former Soviet Union gave up on freedom and turned toward democratic socialism.”

Is Nixon unaware that in nearly every Western European nation a social democratic party forms either the government or the main opposition party? Or does he imagine that Americans enjoy substantial freedoms that Western Europeans do not? Absence of gun control? Absence of an affordable health-care system?

“Democratic socialism is a fashionable fraud.” No explanation is given for this summary dismissal of half the spectrum of democratic political activity. What truly is a fraud though is the incantation of “freedom” by the American right. Theirs is the freedom which abroad has supported death squads and terrorism in Latin America and which at home has created an ever-increasing inequality of wealth and concentration of power with those who perceive no public duty beyond increasing their own personal fortune.

PAUL BOWER, Ojai