S1R,-Mr. Kenneth MacKenzie (December 31) rightly feels that different opinions
about important political issues should be featured fairly by the information media, but he is mistaken, surely, to suggest that 'western' or 'right-wing' wickedness is given far less prominence in literature or on television than that of other countries and interests.
The prominent ideology in the west today is that which James Burnham has described as 'liberalism,' more at home 'with its cousins of the left than with the strangers of the right,' and its influence seeps into current writing and broadcasting. Do not newspapers, books and broadcasts, for example, still concentrate far more on German wartime atrocities, fiction and non-fiction, than upon the innumerable crimes against humanity committed by Communists in many lands during a half-century?
Do not the complaints of those Negroes, who find life irksome in southern areas of the US and Africa, receive greater publicity than those of the victims of racial or tribal or religious violence in (say) Rwanda, Congo, Sudan? Are the murders, mutilations and acts of tyranny that occur fre- quently in Afro-Asian regions merely 'capitalist lies'? Or is it just that this human suffering somehow deserves less attention?
Slips naturally occur in estimating the relative importance, interest and support for various views. Perhaps this explains the contrast between the time given by the BBC to the substantial section of British parliamentary and public opinion, repre- sented by Mr. Amery, and that allowed to London spokesmen of the small nationalist groups, ZAPU and ZANU.
Like Mr. MacKenzie, I read the Daily Worker (along with the rest). It was there that 1 recently saw a statement, actually suppressed by the 'imperialist press,' from one of these rival repre- sentatives, who solemnly informed us that the Rhodesian government had launched a war of 'racial extermination' against the African people!
While I do not take such a favourable view of Communist politics and writers as Messrs. O'Brien and MacKenzie, I would agree that the British pub- lic should not be deprived of treats such as this.
DAVID ASH ION
9 Richmond Avenue, London, E4
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