By Bill Mason
BRISBANE — The vicious smear campaign mounted by the Brisbane Courier-Mail newspaper against respected historian Professor Manning Clark over the past few months has been demolished by revelations from the Russian government that Clark was awarded a commemorative medal, not the Order of Lenin as alleged by the newspaper.
Russia's ambassador to Australia, Alexander Loskuyov, told the Canberra Times on November 6 that the now deceased Clark had received a commemorative medal to mark the centenary of Lenin's birth during a 1970 visit to the Soviet Union.
Loskuyov also said Clark was not a Soviet "spy" or "agent of influence", as implied by the Courier-Mail in a bizarre series of articles published over a number of weeks.
Loskuyov said Clark, a member of the USSR-Australia Friendship Society, had been invited to Moscow as a prominent Australian scholar. "In this capacity he was awarded this medal like thousands of other people around the world." Loskuyov said speculation about Clark being a spy or agent of influence was "simply stupid."
The Clark family welcomed the Russian ambassador's statements, saying, "If the Courier-Mail has any regards for professional standards it will issue a full retraction and apology on the front page ... As for [editor] Chris Mitchell ... if he has any residual regard for professional ethics or basic human decency, he will immediately tender his resignation."
The grotesque red-baiting campaign against this respected historian is part of a more general ideological offensive to rewrite history and engineer a new, reactionary "political correctness". The offensive is being spearheaded by PM John Howard, who recently told the John Laws radio program, "I sympathise fundamentally with Australians who are insulted when they are told that we have a racist, bigoted past".
The attack on Manning Clark is intended to discredit his generally progressive viewpoint on Australian history, and to undermine a truthful account of Australia's origins as a colonial-settler state based on the forceful and genocidal dispossession of the Aboriginal people.