ANTI-AMERICAN ATTITUDES
SIR,—Starbuck has missed the whole point of the complaints about the BBC programme on anti- American attitudes, which is simply that all the con- tributors were so obviously pro-American that they could only give a second-band account of the ideas they were asked to discuss. No doubt Constantine FitzGibbon and his colleagues 'all knew America,' but the programme was meant to be about anti- Americanism, which is a different thing, and it' turned out to be about pro-American reactions to anti-Americanism, which is a.. different thing again. ; r
The accusation is not so much that the programme was biased as that it was misleading and irrelevant, just as a symposium on unilateralist attitudes in which all the contributors are multilateralists—or vice versa—would be misleading and irrelevant (just; When the Kissing had to Stop or Anthony Hat* account of the New Left and CND in last week's Spectator is in fact misleading and irrelevant). Of course hostile evidence is invaluable, but the first task in such a discussion is to establish what is being discussed, and the only people who can really give voice to an emotive attitude like anti- Americanism (or unilateralism or whatever) are the people who feel it—just think what the pro- gramme' Would have been in the hands of Rene Cutforth.
Incidentally, I am not anti-American, nor are my socialist, anarchist, pacifist and unilateralist friends. OT AS WA! TFR 43 Aberdare Gardens, NW6
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