To the editor:

In rebuttal to a previous letter of mine, one Bob Gent attempts to foist most of history’s injustices onto conservatives and their political beliefs. However, Mr. Gent’s position fails upon critical examination.

It is simply not true that Hitler, et. al., victimized most of their populations; in fact, they selectively targeted certain minorities as scapegoats. For Hitler it was the Jews, a traditionally conservative minority whose moral beliefs formed the antithesis of National Socialism. Stalin targeted the Kulaks for starvation. The Kulaks formed an independent conservative bastion against socialist statism. Most directly, Mao Zedong conducted an actual campaign of murder entitled “the anti-rightist campaign.” It is clearly the conservatives who have fought for human and individual rights while the left has stained the pages of our history with its bloody swath.

Finally, as a white man married to a black woman, I note the recent passing of the inveterate racist, Lester Maddox, former governor of Georgia. Governor Maddox and his fellow Jim Crow governors all belonged to the Democrat Party. It was they who unleashed ax handles and water cannons on a decent people yearning to be free.

Were it not for our first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, who conducted an unremitting war of liberation (while suspending civil liberties) against the South, my wife, son and daughter would not enjoy the freedoms they do in our great state of Kansas. No one seriously doubts Lincoln’s conservatism and no one seriously doubts his effectiveness as the “Great Emancipator.”

Matthew M. O’Connell,

Topeka