(LSE) Imagine a world stripped of the basic elements of human decency, honesty, and honour, a world where the primordial instinct of greed, accumulation, avarice, and lust for endless power trumps any countervailing moral compasses or institutions that humanity have thought of to constrain and channel the base instincts of the primitive man.
Navalny’s video of Putin’s palace, watched over seventy million times, has given us a glimpse of that world – a world where vulgarity and naked gluttony of gargantuan proportions are only matched by the vast apparatus erected to defend and shelter Russia’s kleptocracy against the citizen.
Western leaders have been complicit throughout in the perpetuation of the feast. They have become enablers – turning a blind eye to the visible and the not so well concealed “hidden” in plain sight edifices of theft that the Russian rich have erected, purchased, and laundered across Europe. Political leaders and the business class have been complicit by not robustly going after this corruptly acquired wealth and strangling the hydra personalised by Putin. […]
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