The American Spectator

Reader Mail

(Page 7 of 11)

br> -- Ken Shreve br> New Hampshire /p> p> FIVE ON ONE br> Re: Kurt Schori's letter ("Swiss Miffed") in Reader Mail's Consumer Reports : /p>

I appreciate Kurt Schori's response to Chris Mark's letter ("The Old World's Choice") in Reader mail's Boat People. From it one can see that he put a lot of effort into it. Nonetheless it contains numerous errors:

Mr. Schori assails the United States because "There are at least 50 major trouble spots and many smaller ones worldwide, and we don't see YOU giving help in all of them." So it must be our responsibility to be everywhere and to fix every problem in the world? Kind of unrealistic, don't you think, even for a nation as powerful as the United States? I mean, can't you Europeans handle anything by yourself?

He then follows with the example of Serbia, where Switzerland is building infrastructure. Well, that's great, and I commend the Swiss Federation for doing it. But for Mr. Schori to resent us for not participating in every single foreign aid project is ridiculous. Besides, we've got thousands of troops in the Balkans keeping the peace, and in fact there would have been no opportunity for the Swiss to do anything in Serbia had the United States not stopped the fighting and ethnic cleansing there. The Europeans, he might recall, were powerless to do anything about it until we took the leadership role. As to the 50 trouble spots in the world, in may interest Mr. Schori to know that we have military forces providing security in over 100 countries across the globe. But I suppose Mr. Schori will glibly dismiss those efforts as Americans being "aggressors."

Yes, we Americans do believe that we saved Europe from itself on several occasions, because it's true. But to imply that we do not credit our British (or Canadian) allies is just wrong. We also give great credit to the Soviet people, notwithstanding the fact that we also had to later defend Europe from the Red Army and all the concomitant horrors of communism. But the fact is that Europe, despite its own sense of cultural and moral superiority, has a penchant for self-destruction characteristic of more primitive societies, and which it can only blame on itself. Perhaps as a Swiss, living in a well-run but small nation that is armed (properly) to the teeth to protect itself and has managed to avoid armed conflict for centuries, Mr. Schori cannot appreciate the responsibilities of a great nation the way an American or a Briton can.

To call us exterminators is truly beyond the pale. To make such an accusation without any proof is more than irresponsible, it is despicable. (Some left-over ordinance in Laos doesn't quite come up to the level of "extermination.") Again, what did the continental Europeans do when Hitler exterminated the Jews and Gypsies, and Milosevic "ethnically cleansed" the Kosovar Albanians and Bosnian Muslims?

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