Up (Some) Rebels
SIR.—May I comment on Mr. Alfred Sherman's riposte? I am against all double standards, whether from the left or the right. I am aware that I am not immune. However, I belong to a tradition which has been too powerfully influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Popper to accept claims to simple objectivity too quickly. I am not saddling Mr. Sherman with all the sins of the British press but I am concerned to point out that his lop-sided evalua- tion of 'left-wing occupational hazards' in Dr. O'Brien's book is very maladroit just now when there is so much collective right-wing double-thinking over Rhodesia.
Mr. Sherman writes as if Dr. O'Brien had neither expounded nor defended academic freedom while still in Ghana—which he did, as at least one other reviewer has pointed out. (I am referring to Raymond Williams in the Guardian). Neither does Mr. Sher- man come out into the open with even a brief interpretation on the UN in the Congo
Mr. Sherman accuses me of not making out a case and at the same time comments on only one of the nine or ten examples of contemporary right-wing double-think which I chose. I think that I might possibly find some common ground with him in his survey of the 1934-53 period (although circulation figures are at least as relevant as the number of organs) but I cannot say that I am exactly deafened with 'the sound of chipping from our side also' in the present. I suggest that he should give some critical attention to the featuring in our society this month of such themes as the Tr-Continental Anti- Colonial Conference at Havana, the Pugwash Con- ference at Addis Ababa, Peking's post-mortem on its failure to influence non-aligned independent Africa, Professor La Pira, etc.
St. Colas College,
K ENNETH MaCKENZIE
23 Inverleith Terrace. rdinhurgh 3
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