What is it about the rampant America-bashing going on around the world and even, incredibly, in the United States itself?

I would like to challenge those people, if they have even a rudimentary knowledge of history, to imagine our world as if the United States of America never existed.

We surely would all live under autocratic governments and dictatorships, specifically under totalitarian regimes of either Nazi or Soviet communist persuasion.

The Iraqi people would still be condemned to live under the barbaric regime of Saddam Hussein with its mass graves, tortures of unimaginable proportions, oppression of women and more.

The same applies to Taliban Afghanistan.

We are now experiencing the spectacle of anti-American propaganda making the U.S. and President George W. Bush the arch-villain and main terrorist in the world and this is the face of the unsurpassed barbarism exhibited by the Islamo-fascists exemplified by the Sept. 11 massacre, the gruesome ritual slaughter of the innocents, deliberate killing of men, women and children, and the same barbarities committed by self-declared jihadists against the Jewish people in Israel.

My love affair with America started in Hitler’s Germany during my childhood and teenage years listening to the Voice of America with its message of freedom, liberty, decency and respect for human dignity, continuing through 12 years of Soviet communism, East German style.

During those dark ages of Hitler’s nazism and Soviet communism, America was the only beacon of hope for a suffering mankind, and it remains so today.

Klaus D. Kuck, Lewiston