The WikiLeaks saga is a most entertaining one. It is fun to read, a treasure trove of inside and background information and an obvious exposé of character and guile. In reality, though, it is mostly what certain Americans (because there are good-natured and well-meaning Americans we cherish as friends) think about non-Americans, very much like what the Romans did and thought about non-Romans so many centuries ago. He’s OK to bribe with a few pieces of silver, senator, but he’s all right to be crucified.

These same Americans, after all, have long been telling us who is democratic and who is not, who is poor and who is not, whose economy is failing and whose isn’t, whose banks need to fold up and whose needn’t, who is a terrorist and who is not, who is free and who is not. A lot of the mud thrown just melts away into the gutter of time, but some, possibly because it happens to be veracity-based, sticks, as we have seen – and been confirmed by most Maltese families – with Moody’s negative evaluation of the state of our economy and the way it is being mismanaged by the Gonzi administration.

But most assessments are of course made using a star-spangled filter that is as thick as the bottom of a beer bottle. The Western media, rich and influential as it no doubt is, finds them much more interesting than important Third World development and success stories emanating from such unlikely – for them – places like Brazil, India and China.

There is the inevitable backlash to all this. People still running genuinely successful economies at a time of world recession have rightly been asking why they should listen to American verdicts on their and other nations’ performance when the Americans themselves have been struggling so helplessly to survive, to the extreme point of almost plunging their own Administration into bankruptcy.

Not surprisingly, the same people have also been asking why the oscillating US dollar should still be the common denominator in international trading when stronger and safer currencies are available and, given the circumstances, why not, instead, have a system of rotation that could and would work better?

At the end of it all, political and economic power seems to give one the freedom to pass judgement on the rest of the world. Like the imperial Romans and the colonising Brits, Germans, Russians and French of the past, Americans merely enjoy playing the master guru while policing the world.

American diplomats are human too and their personal views of people and things non-American included in their briefs to Washington make entertaining reading. In the world of diplomacy, I guess, it is accepted as fair to smile away at your guest while thinking you can’t wait to see his or her back. Then rush to your PC and let the Washington laundry do the stuff.

Molly Bordonaro, the ex-US ambassador to Malta, once took umbrage during brunch at my comment about Americans policing the world and almost threw up the cereal she had just eaten to hotly deny that Americans did anything of the sort. Of course, I took her word for it, safe in the knowledge that anything I said was hardly important to report back to Washington, but as we have seen, Sant, Gonzi and Muscat did not have and still do not have that privilege. I am sure she couldn’t wait to see the back of me, anyway.

Americans blatantly enjoy being critical of others. We only got to know, for example, the amusing story of John F. Kennedy’s lecture about Malta’s history to our then Prime Minister George Borg Olivier after their “historic” 20-minute meeting, and it came from the American camp.

This business of saying things behind people’s backs is an old thing. Shocking new interview tapes recently unveiled in the US involve Kennedy’s own widow, Jackie. Behind the elegance and the pomposity, there was this venomous streak that showed another side of her character during the time she was First Lady at the White House.

According to her, Martin Luther King, for example, was a “phoney” and a “terrible man”, views she formed after being told of secret FBI wiretaps that suggested he was trying to organise a “sex party”. At the time they must have had a different term for Berlusconi’s bunga bunga.

In the 47-year-old interviews she had given a few months after John F. Kennedy’s assassination and which are being made public for the first time, Mrs Kennedy describes then French President Charles de Gaulle as “spiteful” and an “egomaniac”, while Indira Gandhi, who would become Prime Minister of India, was a “bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman”. I wonder what she said about the prime minister of a Mediterranean island the size of the cabbage patch in her back garden.

Incredibly, the seven-part series of interviews being aired on US television and released as a set of DVDs, hardly mention the 1963 assassination of Jackie’s husband or anything about his well-known serial infidelities.

With wave after wave of further WikiLeaks revelations, it is obvious the world has not changed since and Americans feel free to continue judging the rest of us. It is both hypocritical and deceitful for US leaders and politicians to claim the WikiLeaks affair is endangering people’s lives when they are directly responsible for illegal or UN-sponsored wars, the murder of individuals and innocent populations they consider their enemies, and secret military operations, better described as invasions, in foreign lands.

Modern history is replete with such bloody and fateful events, certainly far more serious than the revelation of information which shows American diplomats playing “favourite politicians” and “guess what” games.

Diplomats are flesh-and-blood men and women too, whichever nation they represent, and it is to be admitted that the embarrassing, sometimes even comic stories and wrong perceptions abound. One with a local touch that comes to mind is that of a fellow journalist who happened to be at Delimara when Dom Mintoff, then Prime Minister, was having his daily dip in those lovely waters.

The journalist, part of Mintoff’s famous band of loyal friends, happened to notice another figure in the water and asked: “Who is that boy swimming nearby, Prime Minister?”

Mintoff looked at him with restrained anger while others around the Prime Minister shushed him. “Shush... that’s Jalloud, the Libyan Prime Minister and second-in-command.” This was the early 70s and Abdessalam Jalloud, he of the small physique, was still very young, boyish-looking and presumably enjoying his swim in a still-chimneyless Delimara environment.

As journalists we often get to hear these amusing stories and at the time no one bothers to give them an iota of importance. It is expected to have diplomats or politicians who cannot wait to see the back of other diplomats and politicians.

WikiLeaks has simply opened the floodgates.