Sir, - Jack Lewis (December 17th), has to avoid with scrupulous care all efforts to excuse successive governments of the United States for repressing North America's original inhabitants, seizing half of Mexico, the Philippines, part of Cuba, Guam and various other territory, continual interference in the affairs of the small states of Central America and the Caribbean, genocidal conduct of war in Vietnam, the blatant, deliberate thwarting of development in the United Nations - of which the US is a member, though miserly about paying its dues - of a policy which might have spared the East Timorese vicious persecution by the US ally Sukarto of Indonesia (of which the US ambassador to the UN has actually boasted), and other barbarities typical of the whole history of US foreign policy. To these, as he expressed an interest in maritime history, may I add the utterly contemptible literal bullying of Australian naval authorities to force them to put blame on HMAS Melbourne for the notorious collision in 1969 between that ship and USS Frank E. Evans, which was manifestly at fault? Sir Hugh David Stevenson, KBE, Vice-Admiral in the Australian navy, who died recently, admitted he had to accept the US version of the event "as the way it has to be" for political reasons.
Unfortunately, the idealism and self-sacrifice of tens of thousands of North Americans working for good causes, as cited by Jack Lewis, cannot excuse, and should not be let hide, the perfidy and cruelty of the government in Washington.
An alarming result of official US arrogance is a tendency among many US citizens to believe they have the right to behave like their government. I can cite many examples from both ends and the middle of a long life, starting with the harshness and contempt with which, I was astonished to see when in banana ships in 1930, the locals in Caribbean ports were treated by the lordly officials of the United States fruit company for which we loaded the bananas. Recently I witnessed an incident when a Lisbon-Madrid train stopped at the Spanish frontier. The peace of the compartment I was in was shattered by two voices shouting to a train official "SPEAK ENGLISH", followed by the irruption into the compartment of two individuals cursing as "scum" the unfortunate Spanish official. I have seen British and French imperially minded citizens shout at natives, but never anything so crude as these two North Americans, who declared themselves to be professors, shouting their bottomless contempt for the language of Cervantes and Lorca. - Yours, etc., John De Courcy Ireland,
Dalkey, Co Dublin.