The latest WikiLeaks release of confidential US diplomatic documents alleges Russia is rife with corruption and crime. And it goes right to the top.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's spokesman has said US diplomats are spreading unverified information and compared them with tabloid newspapers.“The allegation made by the American diplomats is not just that Russia is a victim of corruption and crime, but instead – that corruption and crime in Russia is being controlled by the government and that Russia is a mafia state, at the head of which is Vladimir Putin,” says John Laughland, Director of the Institute for Democracy and Co-operation.“This [WikiLeaks story] does lift the curtains on the American mentality, on America’s fundamental intellectual incapacity to deal with the outside world in any other way than by dividing it up into good guys and bad guys. For me it is a message, that there is an incredibly immature and, frankly, dangerous attitude on the part of American diplomats to categorize the world only in terms of whether people are friendly towards America and whether countries want to be like America,” he told RT.“This shows the real intellectual flaw at the heart of American foreign policy, because it shows that America – at least the State Department – is the victim of a sort of political autism. In other words the political inability to deal with the other,” Laughland added.