But is the Guardian completely blemish-free when it comes to Dubious Opinions From The Past?
Here’s the Guardian in 1919, getting an interview with Lenin. The Guardian finds him “pleasant” and “refreshing”. This, of course, is the same pleasant refreshing Lenin who, alongside the humorous, delightful Stalin and the wryly charming KGB pleasantly refreshed 30 million Russians into their graves, in a decades-long campaign of torture, starvation, imprisonment, slave labour and brutal purges.
But maybe that was a one-off? After all, anyone can be taken in by a dictator with a really nifty goatee.
Well, no. Here in 2007 is Guardian writer Neil Clark hurling rose petals at agreeable, kitten-saving Slobodan Milosevic. Yes, that Slobodan Milosevic – the one who, six years before Clark’s article, was brought to The Hague, accused of savage war crimes and racialised slaughter.
According to the Guardian’s Neil Clark, however, Milosevic was just a victim of nasty western neo-liberal discrimination. I’m not joking. These are Clark’s very own words in The Guardian, after Slobo’s death in prison: “Milosevic was mourned not just in Serbia, but throughout the world: in China, Africa, Asia and South America, as a hero of the anti-imperialist, anti-globalist struggle.”
The Guardian’s refreshingly pleasant tolerance of unusual journalists does not begin and end with Clark. They are also happy to hire enemy spies who work constantly to undermine Britain, in fact, I understand they positively prefer it. For instance, in the 1930s their Chinese correspondent was Agnes Smedley, an enthusiast for all things communist, and a big, big fan of that affable Chairman Mao. Trouble is, in 2005, it was proved she was actually a secret agent working for the Soviet Union and Comintern.
