“I believe [Manning Clark’s Order of Lenin] was conferred on him in secret by the Soviet ambassador at the Soviet embassy in Canberra.”
That’s Peter Kelly from last Friday’s Australian.
The opinion pages at the Oz provide a convivial home for folks who believe all manner of wonderful things — climate change isn’t happening, the Iraq war was a great idea, etc. But, even in that company, Kelly’s particular credo still stands out.
As Tim Lambert notes at Deltoid, back in 1996, Oz editor Chris Mitchell, then at the Courier-Mail, scooped the world with revelations that Manning Clark had received an Order of Lenin from the Soviet Union, a story the paper adorned with a digitally altered photo of a sneering Clark got up in a Russian peasant smock.
“Clark was indeed a Communist,” the Courier-Mail explained. “No, more than that, he was, until today, an undiscovered member of the Communist world’s elite, a man who would come to be covertly honoured with the highest award the Soviet Union had to bestow, the Order of Lenin.”
Peter Kelly was the primary source of this remarkable discovery. Kelly claimed that the late Geoffrey Fairbairn had seen Clark sporting his Order of Lenin (as one does) at the Soviet Embassy. He produced supporting evidence in the form of poet Les Murray, who’d apparently witnessed a bemedaled Clark back in 1970 (“I didn’t take a heck of a lot of notice at the time but it shocked me afterwards”).
Unfortunately for Kelly, the story quickly fell apart under the weight of its own idiocy. Though Mitchell attempted to morph the Courier-Mail’s coverage from insinuations of espionage to a more general smear about Clark as a bad historian who hated Australia, the Australian Press Council upheld the numerous complaints against the paper:
The newspaper had too little evidence to assert that Prof Clark was awarded the Order of Lenin — rather there is much evidence to the contrary.
[…]
While the Courier Mail devoted much space to people challenging its assertions, the Press Council believes it should have retracted the allegations about which Prof Clark’s supporters complained.
Yet Mitchell never retracted — and so, in response to Geoffrey Bolton’s recent review of Brian Mathews’ Manning Clark biography (in which Bolton described the 1996 episode as “mischievous”), Peter Kelly, like the proverbial dog with a taste for its own gastric juices, uses cut and paste (“the following is a truncated version of a story I wrote in 1996”) to regurgitate the same discredited allegations.
As in his original yarn, Kelly blurs the distinction between the Order of Lenin, an award of some significance, and the Lenin Jubilee Medal, a decoration given to Clark alongside thousands of other Moscow visitors. In Suspect History, Humphrey McQueen points out that Les Murray’s detailed “eyewitness” account becomes rather less impressive when we learn that he claimed to be unemployed at the time (he wasn’t) and couldn’t remember whether the encounter happened in daylight or at night. These slip-ups in an incident recalled years after the fact render Kelly’s triumphant declaration that “there is no gainsaying the fact that [Clark] wore [an Order of Lenin] seen by Fairbairn and Murray” about as troothy as those “9/11 was an inside job” websites.
What makes the whole story even more bizarre is that, while Clark was, in his later years, close to the ALP, he was never the firebreathing Bolshevik of Kelly’s imagination. Clark’s history famously concentrated on the character flaws of significant individuals, a methodology about as removed from Marxism as one could imagine. He sat on the advisory board of Quadrant in its early years; he was friendly with its original editor, the fanatically anti-Communist James McAuley. In 1965, Bob Menzies described Clark as an “eminent historian” to the new American ambassador and recommended he read his work.
But who knows? Perhaps Menzies was an agent of influence, too. I vaguely remember seeing him with a medal once…
What is it with Mr Sparrow. He cannot ever mention the events of 11 September 2001 without some dig at “9/11 truthers”. Has he ever bothered to acquaint himself with the facts? Can he explain how WTC buildings 1, 2 and 7 fell at near freefall speed which is literally impossible other than in situations of controlled demolitions? Can he explain how the designated scapegoats were able to organise for the US air force to stand down from normal operating procedures for up to two hours? There are literally dozens of other questions that the official conspiracy theory does not explain. Perhaps he derives a measure of comfort from not confronting awkward questions.
He is entitled to live in his science free bubble and feed off official fairy stories. He probably believes that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nut gunman who killed JFK. He can take similar comfort from that fairy tale as well. What I suggest he should not do is use his position to cast cheap shots at those who bother to explore the hard questions and demand proper answers.
I am in the Brisbane phone book Mr Sparrow. If you want to debate the matter in a rational manner feel free to call me.
And what a fascinating page of the Oz it was on Saturday. We had Peter Kelly, “freelance journalist” but presumably the same red-baiting pot-stirrer who dates back to the late Max Newton and the late Billy McMahon (don’t the spear-carriers ever follow their principals into the back-numbers of history?). On the same page we had Christopher Pearson sanctifying Max Teichmann, who has actually passed on to wherever side-changing intellectual tarts go. Teichmann was a nice enough guy as a leftie (he taught me at Monash in the sixties) but even in those days he gave the impression that his best was behind him. It was sad to hear that he had taken the Windschuttle path (I knew him slightly also when he was some sort of Maoist) and become a court jester for the Right. These thinly disguised promo pieces for the Quadrant crew really need to carry a health warning. But then the same could be said for the whole paper!
The whole Clarke as spy assertion is doubtful primarily because Manning Clake was an academic first at the University of Melbourne and subsequently at ANU till Clarke retired in 1974. Clarke therefore did not work for the federal government directly and could not personally have had access to the confidential information which would have been of interest to the Soviets. Unless he was running a network of moles in the federal public service then all Clarke could have reported to Moscow was gossip from the faculty tea room. I doubt this would have earned Clarke the Order of Lenin although I daresay Paul Kelly will continue to believe otherwise.