Swedish human rights activist Anna Ardin is glad Julian Assange is free.
But the claims she has made about him suggest she would have every reason not to wish him well.
Ardin is fiercely proud of Assange’s work for WikiLeaks, and insists that it should never have landed him behind bars.
“We have the right to know about the wars that are fought in our name,” she says.
Speaking to Ardin over Zoom in Stockholm, it quickly becomes clear that she has no problem keeping what she sees as the two Assanges apart in her head - the visionary activist and the man who she says does not treat women well.
She is at pains to describe him neither as a hero nor a monster, but a complicated man.
I dealt with that as a kid with Roald Dahl because he was super antisemitic, but he also wrote amazing children’s books. I guess for me it depends on how much they put such ugliness into their work. Lovecraft, creative as he was, had no problem being racist in his writings and I just can’t read them even though I love the mythos. Dahl didn’t do that.
Card and Rowling are somewhat different cases because they didn’t start by writing terrible things, but they got to the point that their ugly beliefs began to seep into their books.
Dahl is another great example. I loved his book as a kid, and still read them to my kid now.