Chris Hedges gave this talk on American Sadism at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, New York on Sunday June 27.

Sadism defines nearly every cultural, social, and political experience in the United States. It is expressed in the unchecked greed of an oligarchic elite that has seen its wealth increase during the pandemic by $1.1 trillion while the country has suffered the sharpest rise in its poverty rate in more than 50 years.  It is expressed in the wanton killings by police of unarmed citizens in cities such as Minneapolis. It is expressed in the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the CIA at secret black sites, Guantánamo Bay, and our prisons at home. It is expressed in the separation of children from their undocumented parents, where they are held as if they were dogs in a kennel. 

It is expressed in the pornification of American society, where women are tortured, beaten, degraded, and sexually violated, often by numerous men, in porn films, and then discarded after a few weeks or months with severe trauma, along with sexually transmitted diseases and vaginal and anal tears that must be repaired surgically.  It is expressed in the “incel” movement that perpetrates violent assaults against women by men who say they have been spurned or ignored by women. 

It is expressed in the predatory health care system where, as Steven Brill writes, a trip to the emergency room for chest pains that turn out to be indigestion can exceed the cost of a semester of college, simple lab work done during a few days in a hospital can be more expensive than a new car, and a drug that requires $300 to make and that the manufacturer sells to a hospital for $3,000 to 3,500 can cost the patient to whom it is prescribed $13,702. It is legally permissible in the United States for corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents bankrupt themselves to save their sons or daughters.  

This sadism is expressed in payday loans, for-profit prisons, the privatization of public education and public utilities and the rise of for-profit mercenary armies.  It is expressed in the cultural glorification of violence by mass media, the state and the entertainment and the gaming industries. It is expressed in the nihilistic mass shootings at schools, including elementary schools, and workplaces. And it is expressed in the murderous and futile wars we prosecute or support in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen.

The historian Johan Huizinga, writing about the twilight of the Middle Ages, argued that as things fall apart sadism is embraced to cope with the hostility of an indifferent universe. No longer bound to a common purpose, a ruptured society retreats into hedonism and the cult of the self. It celebrates, as do corporations on Wall Street or popular reality television shows, the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. Get what you can, as fast as you can, before someone else gets it. This is the state of nature, the “war of all against all,” Thomas Hobbes saw as the consequence of social disintegration, a world in which life becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It is a world in which the powerful, men like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, reduce the bodies and selfhoods of their victims to nothing.

We know what this sadism looks like. It looks like Derek Chauvin nonchalantly choking to death George Floyd as his police colleagues watch impassively. It looks like Andrew Brown Jr. shot five times by police in North Carolina, including once in the back of the head. It looks like Abner Louima, who had a broomstick pushed up his rectum by police in a bathroom at the 70th Precinct station house in Brooklyn, requiring three major operations to repair the internal injuries. It looks like Navy Seal Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher randomly shooting to death unarmed civilians and using a hunting knife to repeatedly stab to death an injured, sedated 17-year-old Iraqi prisoner and then photographing himself with the corpse. It looks like Iraqi civilians, few of whom had anything to do with the insurgency, naked, bound, beaten and sexually humiliated and raped, and at times murdered, by army guards and private contractors in Abu Ghraib. It looks like the prisoners in Abu Ghraib who were routinely dragged across the prison floor by a rope tied to their penises and were sodomized by chemical lights or had the lights snapped open so the phosphoric liquid could be poured over their naked bodies. The leaked pictures from Abu Ghraib are the true face of America, the hooded Man, a dark-caped figure standing on a box, arms outstretched, wires attached to his fingers or the naked leashed man lying at the feet of the female American soldier in camouflage pants who holds his leash, one end wrapped around his neck, in her hand.

Why is the malaise of a dying civilization expressed through sadism rather than a kind of righteous anger? Here we must turn to Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche warned that those who are humiliated and disempowered are poisoned by ressentiment. Because they have been stripped of agency, they lack the power to harm those who they believe harmed them.  In short, there is no cathartic release. Ressentiment is bred from damaged self-esteem. It festers and corrodes the soul.  The powerless, and here Nietzsche is writing about Christianity as a slave religion, must expresses their ressentiment obliquely and surreptitiously, hence the coded racism, Islamophobia and supposed yearning for a return of the traditional family and “Christian” values.  Ressentiment is produced by feelings of inferiority, failure, and worthlessness.  And this ressentiment, fueled by self-loathing, expresses itself through sadism, what Nietzsche calls “wrecking the will” of those who are weaker or more vulnerable.  Nietzsche understood that this “wrecking the will” of others imparts a perverted, sadistic pleasure.  He writes in On the Genealogy of Morals,that “to see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more. . . . Without cruelty there is no festival . . . and in punishment there is so much that is festive!”

The ressentiment in American society, the political scientist Wendy Brown writes, is born not only from feelings of powerlessness and worthlessness, but feelings of dethronement and lost entitlement.  It explains what she calls the “permanent politics of revenge, of attacking those blamed for the dethronement white maleness—feminists, multiculturalists, globalists, who both unseat and disdain them.” For this reason, the rage cannot, as it could be in Christian theology, sublimated into self-abnegation and a call to love of thy neighbor. There is, in short, nothing to mitigate or redirect this ressentiment.  It’s pure expression is nihilism and sadism.  Trump embodied this dark ethic.  Revenge is his sole philosophy of life. Those gripped by ressentiment no longer are able to create.  They can only destroy.  They gleefully ignite their own funeral pyre.

Laws, institutions, and bureaucratic structures are deformed to serve the interests of a tiny cabal, a rapacious elite, which enriches itself at the expense of everyone else.  All are made to bow before the dictates of what Max Weber called the “inanimate machine.” The inanimate machine forces the vast majority into the mass, but it allows a selected few, willing to do its dirty work, to rise above the multitude. These privileged few are given the license and authority to carry out the acts of sadism that have become the primary forms of social control. These enforcers do this work vigorously, for their greatest fear is being pushed back into the mass.  The more these foot soldiers for the elite insult, persecute, torture, humiliate and kill, the more they seem to magically widen the divide between themselves and their victims.  This is why Black police and corrections officers can be as cruel, and sometimes crueler, than their white counterparts.

The sadism eradicates, at least momentarily, the sadist’s feelings of worthlessness, vulnerability and susceptibility to pain and death. It imparts feelings of omnipotence.  It is pleasurable. I was beaten by Saudi military police and later by Saddam Hussein’s secret police when I was taken prisoner in Basra shortly after the first Gulf War. Those who beat me enjoyed their work. I could see it on their faces. Israel’s abuse of the Palestinians, the assaults of Muslims and girls and women in India and the denigration of Muslims in the countries we occupy are part of the scourge of sadism in service to an “inanimate machine” that has become global.

Feminists have long understood that sadism runs like an electric current through male sexual desire.  Pornography is about the fantasy of men who are omnipotent, who have the power to torture and physically abuse girls and women who in porn beg to be degraded. “Sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history,” Andrea Dworkin writes. “The private world of sexual dominance that men demand as their right and their freedom is the mirror image of the public world of sadism and atrocity that men consistently and self-righteously deplore. It is in the male experience of pleasure that one finds the meaning of male history.”

Women, of course, are not immune from acts of sadism. Ilse Koch, known as the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” with her husband, the commandant of the death camp, used to throw prisoners into bears’ cages to watch them get ripped apart and devoured.  The Chilean Adriana Rivas, facing extradition to Chile from Australia, reportedly tortured prisoners by strapping them to metal bunk beds rigged with electrical current and sending shocks throughout their bodies or suffocated them to death with plastic bags during the regime of August Pinochet. But Dworkin is right to highlight sadism as inherent in male expressions of total and unaccountable power, which is why sadism is the chief characteristic of imperialism. 

Jean Amery, who was in the Belgian resistance in World War II and who was captured and tortured by the Gestapo in 1943, defines sadism “as the radical negation of the other, the simultaneous denial of both the social principle and the reality principle. In the sadist’s world, torture, destruction, and death are triumphant: and such a world clearly has no hope of survival. On the contrary, he desires to transcend the world, to achieve total sovereignty by negating fellow human beings—which he sees as representing a particular kind of ‘hell.’”

Amery’s point is important. A sadistic society is about collective self-destruction. It is the apotheosis of a society deformed by overwhelming experiences of loss, alienation and stasis. The only way left to affirm yourself in failed societies is to destroy. Johan Huizinga in his book “Waning of the Middle Ages” noted that that the dissolution of medieval society provoked “the violent tenor of life.” Today, this “violent tenor of life” drives people to carry out wanton police murders, evictions of families, court-ordered bankruptcies, the denial of medical care to the sick, suicide bombings and mass shootings. Sadism imparts the rush and pleasure, often with heavy sexual overtones, which lures us towards what Sigmund Freud called the death instinct, the instinct to destroy all forms of life, including our own. When enveloped by a death-saturated world death, ironically, is embraced as the cure.

Joseph Conrad saw enough of the world as a sea captain to know the irredeemable corruption of humanity. The noble virtues that drove characters like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness into the jungle veiled the abject self-interest, unchecked greed, and murder that defines all imperial projects. Conrad was in the Congo in the late nineteenth century when the Belgian monarch King Leopold, in the name of Western civilization and antislavery, was plundering the country. The Belgian occupation, which turned the Congo into a rubber plantation, resulted in the death by disease, starvation, and murder of some ten million Congolese.

In Conrad’s short story “An Outpost of Progress,” he writes of two white, European traders, Carlier and Kayerts, who are sent to a remote trading station in the Congo. The mission is endowed with a great moral purpose—to export European “civilization” to Africa. But the boredom and lack of constraints swiftly turn the two men into savages. They trade slaves for ivory. They get into a feud over dwindling food supplies, and Kayerts shoots and kills his unarmed companion Carlier.

“They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals,” Conrad wrote of Kayerts and Carlier:           

whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and   principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to  the crowd; to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one’s kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one’s thoughts, of one’s sensations—to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike.

The Managing Director of the Great Civilizing Company—for, as Conrad notes, “civilization” follows trade—arrives by steamer at the end of the story. He is not met at the dock by his two agents. He climbs the steep bank to the trading station with the captain and engine driver behind him. The director finds Kayerts, who, after the murder, committed suicide by hanging himself by a leather strap from a cross that marked the grave of the previous station chief. Kayerts’s toes are a couple of inches above the ground. His arms hang stiffly down “and, irreverently, he was putting out a swollen tongue at his Managing Director.”

Sadism is carried out in the name of a moral good, to protect western civilization, “Christian” values, democracy, the master race, liberté, égalité, fraternité, the worker’s paradise, the new man, or scientific rationalism.  Sadism will mend the flaws in the human species.  The jargon varies. The dark sentiment is the same.

“Honor, justice, compassion and freedom are ideas that have no converts,” Conrad writes.  “There are only people, without knowing, understanding or feeling, who intoxicate themselves with words, shout them out, imaging they believe them without believing in anything else but profit, personal advantage and their own satisfaction.”

“Man is a cruel animal,” Conrad wrote. “His cruelty must be organized. Society is essentially criminal—or it wouldn’t exist. It is selfishness that saves everything—absolutely everything—everything that we abhor, everything that we love.”

Bertrand Russell said of Conrad: “I felt, though I do not know whether he would have accepted such an image, that he thought of civilized and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.”

Kurtz, the self-deluded megalomaniac ivory trader in Heart of Darkness, ends by planting the shriveled heads of murdered Congolese on pikes outside his remote trading station. But Kurtz is also highly educated and refined. Conrad describes him as an orator, writer, poet, musician, and the respected chief agent of the ivory company’s Inner Station. He is “an emissary of pity, and science, and progress.” Kurtz was a “universal genius” and “a very remarkable person.” He is a prodigy, at once gifted and multitalented. He went to Africa fired by noble ideals and virtues. He ended his life as a self-deluded tyrant who thought he was a god.

“His mother was half-English, his father was half-French,” Conrad writes of Kurtz:

All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by-the-by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had   entrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. . . . He began with the   argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, “must  necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might as of a deity,” and so on, and so on. “By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,” etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence—of words—of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: “Exterminate all the brutes!”

The violence and exploitation, which has long defined imperial projects abroad, now defines existence a home. Empires, in the end, cannibalize themselves. The tyranny we long imposed on others we now impose on ourselves. The dark pleasure derived from exploiting others is all that is left. As Nietzsche wrote in On the Genealogy of Morals:

Let’s clarify the logic of this whole method of compensation—it is weird enough. The equivalency is given in this way: Instead of an advantage making up directly for the harm (hence, instead of compensation in gold, land, possessions of some sort or another), the creditor is given a kind of pleasure as repayment and compensation—the pleasure of being allowed to discharge his power on a powerless person without having to think about it, the delight in “de fair le mal pour le plaisir de le faire” [doing wrong for the pleasure of doing it], the enjoyment of violation. This enjoyment is more highly prized the lower and baser the debtor stands in the social order, and it can easily seem to the creditor a delicious mouthful, even a foretaste of a higher rank. By means of the “punishment” of the debtor, the creditor participates in a right belonging to the masters. Finally, he himself for once comes to the lofty feeling of despising a being as someone “below himself,” as someone he is entitled to mistreat—or at least, in the event that the real force of punishment, of inflicting punishment, has already been transferred to the “authorities,” the feeling of seeing the debtor despised and mistreated. The compensation thus consists of a permission for and right to cruelty.

Social sadism and murder, as Friedrich Engels noted in his 1845 book The Condition of the Working-Class in England is built into the capitalist system. The ruling elites, Engels writes, those that hold “social and political control,” were well aware that the harsh working and living conditions during the industrial revolution doomed workers to “an early and unnatural death.”  The formation of unions and socialism were in direct response to these malevolent forces.  As Engels wrote:

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live—forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence—knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely   as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more  one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.

The ruling class devotes tremendous resources to mask this social sadism and murder. It controls the narrative in the press.  It floods our screens with friendly, feel-good images and propaganda, perfected by the public relations and advertising industries. These electronic hallucinations distract us from the limitations of our own lives. They obfuscate the fundamental nature of corporate capitalism. They attack our self-esteem and create an embarrassing self-consciousness about our appearance, social standing and bodily functions.  They falsify science and data, as the fossil fuel, animal agriculture and tobacco industries, have for decades. They create, as Guy DuBord writes, the “spectacular commodity society” that is a seductive substitute to participatory democracy.  This entrepreneurial tyranny reduces political choice to the sadistic prescriptions provided by corporate power.  It creates a society where there is an absence of nearly all positive social and political constructs.  Even social change, reduced to identity politics and multiculturalism, has been effectively emasculated by corporate propaganda.  A sense of agency, personal power and social status comes almost exclusively from, as Nietzsche foresaw, serving the sadistic machinery.

Enron energy traders, in a dialogue that could have come from any large corporation, were caught on tape in 2000 discussing “stealing” from California, sticking it to “Grandma Millie.” Two traders, identified as Kevin and Bob, dismissed demands by California regulators for refunds because of the company’s constant price-gouging.

Kevin: So the rumor’s true? They’re fucking takin’ all the money back from you guys? All those money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?

Bob: Yeah, Grandma Millie, man. But she’s the one who couldn’t figure out how to fucking vote on the butterfly ballot.

Kevin: Yeah, now she wants her fucking money back for all the power you’ve charged  for fucking $250 a megawatt hour.

Bob: You know—you know—you know, Grandma Millie, she’s the one that Al Gore’s fightin’ for, you know?  

Later in the same conversation, Kevin and Bob denigrate Californians.

Kevin: Oh, best thing that could happen is fucking an earthquake, let that thing float out to the Pacific and put ’em fucking candles.

Bob: I know. Those guys—just cut ’em off.

Kevin: They’re so fucked and they’re so like totally . . . 

Bob: They are so fucked.

The obscene avarice of the very rich now dwarfs the hedonism and excesses of the world’s most heinous despots and wealthiest capitalists of the past. In 2015, shortly before he died, Forbes estimated David Rockefeller’s net worth was $3 billion. The Shah of Iran looted an estimated $1 billion from his country. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos amassed between $5 and $10 billion. And the former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe was worth about a billion. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are each worth $180 billion.  

Yes, the decorum of the Biden presidency differs from that of the Trump presidency. But the underlying mercenary exploitation and sadism of American society remains untouched.  Biden’s American Jobs Plan will never create “millions of good paying jobs—jobs Americans can raise their families on” any more than NAFTA, which he supported, would, as was also promised, create millions of good paying jobs. His mantra of “buy American” is worthless. The vast majority of our consumer electronics, apparel, furniture and industrial supplies are made in China by workers who earn an average of one or two dollars an hour and lack unions and basic labor rights. His call to lower deductibles and prescription drug costs in the Affordable Care Act will never be permitted by the corporations that profit from health care. His promises of fair taxation, despite the world’s richest men—Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, Michael Bloomberg and George Soros—paying a true tax rate of 3.4 percent will not be altered. The corporate subsidies and tax incentives he proposes as a solution to the climate crisis will do nothing to halt oil and gas fracking, shut down coal-fired plants or halt the construction of new pipelines for gas-fired power plants.  His money for infrastructure projects is destined for large corporations and state governments. 

The health system will remain privatized, meaning the insurance and pharmaceutical corporations will reap a windfall of tens of billions of dollars with the American Rescue Plan, and this when they are already making record profits. The profits the big banks, Wall Street and the predatory global speculators make from the massive levels of debt peonage imposed on an underpaid working class, including those who owe student loans, will continue to funnel money upwards into the hands of a tiny, oligarchic cabal. There will be no campaign finance reform to end our system of legalized bribery. The giant tech monopolies will remain intact.  The censorship imposed by digital media platforms, the obliteration of our civil liberties and the wholesale government surveillance will continue to be enforced. Biden’s request for $715 billion for the Defense Department in fiscal year 2022, a $11.3 billion (1.6 percent) increase over 2021, will exacerbate the military provocations with China and Russia, the endless wars in the Middle East and the bloated defense industry. The industries that were shipped overseas and the well-paying unionized jobs will not return. The 81 million Americans that struggle to meet basic household expenses, the 22 million that lack enough food and the 11 million that can’t make their next house payment are about to hit a wall as the meager benefits from the COVID relief bills run out and the moratorium is lifted on evictions and foreclosures. The grinding machinery of predatory capitalism, and the sadism that defines it, will poison the society as mercilessly under Biden as it did when Trump was conducting his Twitter presidency. These so-called reforms have no more weight than those peddled by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who Biden slavishly served and who also promised social equality while betraying working men and women.

Biden is the epitome of the empty, amoral creature produced by our system of legalized bribery, those who built our culture of sadism. His long political career in Congress was defined by representing the interests of big business, especially the credit card companies based in Delaware. He was nicknamed Senator Credit Card. He has always glibly told the public what it wants to hear and then sold them out. He was a prominent promoter and architect of a generation of federal “tough on crime” laws that militarized the nation’s police and more than doubled the population of the prison system, the world’s largest, with harsh mandatory sentencing guidelines and laws that put people in prison for life for nonviolent drug crimes, even as his son struggled with addiction. He was a principal author of the Patriot Act. And there has never been a weapons system, or a war, he did not support.  Nothing substantial will change under Biden, despite the hyperventilating about him being the next FDR.

The Biden administration resembles the ineffectual German government formed by Franz von Papen in 1932 that sought to recreate the ancien régime, a utopian conservatism that ensured Germany’s drift into fascism. Biden is bereft, like von Papen, of new ideas and programs. He will keep the machinery of repression well oiled, a machinery he was instrumental throughout his political career in constructing. Those that resist will be attacked as agents of a foreign power and censored, as many already are being censored, through algorithms and deplatforming on social media. The most ardent dissidents, such as Julian Assange, will be criminalized.

The established elites pretend that Trump was a freakish anomaly. They naively believe they can make Trump and his most vociferous supporters disappear by banishing them from social media. The ancien régime, will, they assert, return with the decorum of its imperial presidency, respect for procedural norms, elaborately choreographed elections, and fealty to neoliberal and imperial policies. But what the established ruling elites have yet to grasp, despite the narrow electoral victory Joe Biden had over Trump and the storming of the capital on January 6 by an enraged mob, is that the credibility of the old order is dead. The Trump era, if not Trump himself, is, unless we break the stranglehold of corporate power, the future. The ruling elites, embodied by Biden and the Democratic Party and the polite wing of the Republican Party represented by Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, is headed for the dustbin of history. 

The growing ressentiment of the dispossessed is stoked and fed by a mass media that has divided the public into competing demographics. Media platforms target one demographic, feeding its opinions and proclivities back to it, while shrilly demonizing the demographic on the other side of the political divide. This has proved commercially successful. But it has also split the country into irreconcilable warring factions that can no longer communicate. Truth and verifiable fact have been sacrificed. The Democratic Party, in a desperate bid to control the media narrative, has built an alliance with social media industry giants such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Patreon, Substack and Spotify to curtail or censor its critics. The goal is to herd the public back to Democratic Party allied news organizations such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. But these media outlets, which service corporate advertisers, have rendered the lives of the working class and the poor invisible. They are as reviled as the ruling elites themselves. 

The loss of credibility has also given rise to new, often spontaneous groups, as well as the lunatic fringe that embraces conspiracy theories such as QAnon. They traffic in emotional outrage, often replacing one outrage with another. They provide new forms of identity to replace the identities lost by tens of millions of Americans who have been cast aside. This emotional outrage can be harnessed for laudable causes, such as ending police abuse, but it is too often ephemeral. It transforms political debate into grievance protests, at best, and more often televised spectacle. These flash mobs pose no threat to the elites unless they build disciplined organization structures, which takes years, and articulate a vision of what can come next. This is why I support Extinction Rebellion, which has a large grassroots network, especially in Europe, carries out effective sustained acts of civil disobedience and has a clearly stated goal of overthrowing the ruling elites and building a new governing system through people’s committees and sortition. But this emotional outrage, which put Trump in the White House, can also stoke the fires of American sadism, especially among a white working class that feels dethroned and abandoned.

The breakdown of our society is not only political.  It is ecological. Scientists have long warned that as global temperatures rise, increasing precipitation and heat waves in many parts of the world, infectious diseases spread by animals will plague populations year-round and expand into northern regions. Zoonotic diseases—diseases that jump from animals to humans—such as HIV/AIDS, which has killed approximately 36 million people, Avian flu, Swine flu, Ebola and COVID-19, which has already killed some 4 million, will ripple across the globe in ever more virulent strains, often mutating beyond our control. The misuse of antibiotics in the animal agriculture industry, which accounts for 80 percent of all antibiotic use, has produced strains of bacteria that are antibiotic resistant and fatal. A modern version of the Black Death, which in the 14th century killed between 75 and 200 million people, wiping out perhaps half of Europe’s population, is probably inevitable as long as the pharmaceutical and medical industries are configured to make money rather than protect and save lives.

Even with vaccines, we lack the national infrastructure to distribute them efficiently because profit supersedes health. And those in the global south are, as usual, abandoned, as if the diseases that kill them will never reach us. Israel’s decision to distribute COVID-19 vaccines to as many as 19 countries while refusing to vaccinate the 5 million Palestinians living under its occupation is emblematic of the ruling elite’s stunning myopia, not to mention immorality.  

What is taking place is not neglect. It is not ineptitude. It is not policy failure. It is social murder. It is murder because it is premeditated. It is murder because a conscious choice was made by the global ruling classes to extinguish life rather than protect it. It is murder because profit, despite the hard statistics, the growing climate disruptions, and the scientific modeling, is deemed more important than human survival. 

The global elites thrive in this system, as long as they serve the dictates of what Lewis Mumford called the “megamachine,” the convergence of science, economy, technology and political power unified into an integrated, bureaucratic structure whose sole goal is to perpetuate itself. This structure, Mumford noted, is antithetical to “life-enhancing values.” But to challenge the megamachine, to name and condemn its death wish, is to be expelled from its inner sanctum. There are, no doubt, some within the megamachine who fear the future, who are appalled by the social murder, who worry what will happen to their children, but they do not want to lose their jobs and their social status to become pariahs.  

The U.S. military—which accounts for 38 percent of military spending worldwide—is, of course, incapable of combating the grave existential crisis before us.. The fighter jets, satellites, aircraft carriers, fleets of warships, nuclear submarines, missiles, tanks and vast arsenals of weaponry are useless against pandemics and the climate crisis. The war machine, which is spending $ 1.2 trillion to modernize our nuclear arsenal, does nothing to mitigate the human suffering caused by degraded environments that sicken and poison populations or make life unsustainable.  Air pollution already kills an estimated 200,000 Americans a year while children in decayed cities such as Flint, Michigan are damaged for life with lead contamination from drinking water.  And, on top of all this, the U.S. military emitted 1.2 billion metric tons of carbon emissions between 2001 and 2017, twice the annual output of the nation’s passenger vehicles.

Future generations, if there are any, will look back at the current global ruling class as the most criminal in human history, willfully dooming billions of people to mass death. These crimes are being committed in front of us. And, with few exceptions, we are being herded like sheep to the slaughter.

 The radical evil that makes this social murder possible is perpetrated by the colorless bureaucrats and technocrats churned out of business schools, law schools, management programs and elite universities. Demonic nonentities. These systems managers carry out the incremental tasks that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death work. They collect, store, and manipulate our personal data for digital monopolies and the security and surveillance state. They grease the wheels for ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They write the laws passed by the bought-and-paid-for political class. They pilot the aerial drones that terrorize the poor in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan. They profit from the endless wars. They are the corporate advertisers, public relations specialists and television pundits that flood the airwaves with lies. They run the banks. They oversee the prisons. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps and medical coverage to some and unemployment benefits to others. They carry out the evictions. They enforce the laws and the regulations. They do not ask questions. They live in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without color,” the poet writes. “Paralyzed force, gesture without motion.”

These systems managers made possible the genocides of the past They kept the trains running. They filled out the paperwork. They seized the property and confiscated the bank accounts. They did the processing. They rationed the food. They administered the concentration camps and the gas chambers. They enforced the law. They did their jobs. These systems managers, uneducated in all but their tiny technical specialty, lack the language and moral autonomy to question the reigning assumptions or structures.

The Russian novelist Vasily Grossman in his book “Forever Flowing” observed that “the new state did not require holy apostles, fanatic, inspired builders, faithful, devout disciples. The new state did not even require servants—just clerks.” This metaphysical ignorance, a product of an educational system that is primarily vocational, greases the cogs for the culture of sadism and social murder.

We will not extract ourselves from predatory capitalism and its culture of sadism with meager government handouts. We will not extract ourselves because Biden’s slick speech writers and public relations specialists, who use polls and focus groups to feed back to us what we want to hear, can make us feel the administration is on our side. There is no good will in the Biden White House, the Congress, the courts, the media—which has become an echo chamber of the privileged classes—or corporate boardrooms. They are the enemy.

We will extract ourselves from this culture of sadism the way the dispossessed extracted themselves from the stranglehold of crony capitalism during the Great Depression, by organizing, protesting, and disrupting the system until the ruling elites are forced to grant a measure of social and economic justice. The Bonus Army, World War I veterans who had been denied pension payments, set up huge encampments in Washington, which were violently dispersed by the army. Neighborhood groups, many of them members of the Wobblies or the Communist Party, in the 1930s physically prevented sheriff departments from evicting families. In 1936 and 1937, the United Auto Workers union carried out a sit-down strike inside factories that crippled General Motors, forcing the company to recognize the union, raise wages and meet union demands for job protection and safe working conditions. Farmers, forced into bankruptcy and foreclosures by the big banks and Wall Street, founded the Farmer’s Holiday Association to protest the seizure of family farms, one of the reasons bank robbers such as John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde and the Barker Gang were folk heroes. The farmers blocked roads and destroyed mountains of farm products, reducing supply, and raising prices. 

The farmers, like unionized auto workers, endured widespread government surveillance and violent attacks from the FBI, company goons, hired gun thugs, militias, and sheriff’s departments. But the militancy worked. The farmers forced the state to accept a de facto moratorium on farm foreclosures. Mass demonstrations outside state capitals at the same time pressured state legislatures to block the collection of overdue mortgage payments. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the south unionized. The Department of Labor called their collective action a “miniature civil war.” The unemployed and the hungry throughout the country squatted in vacant homes and on vacant land forming shantytowns that were known as Hoovervilles. The destitute took over public buildings and public utilities. This constant pressure, not the good will of FDR, created the New Deal. He and his fellow oligarchs eventually understood that if there was not reform there would be revolution, something Roosevelt acknowledged in his private correspondence.

It is not until people are reintegrated into the society, not until corporate and oligarchic control over our educational, political and media systems are removed, not until we recover the ethic of the common good, that we have any hope of rebuilding the positive social bonds that foster a healthy society. History has amply illustrated how this process works. It is a game of fear. And until we make the ruling elites afraid, until a terrified Joe Biden and the oligarchs he serves look out on a sea of pitchforks, we will not blunt the culture of sadism and social murder they have engineered.

Rebellion, however, must be its own justification. It is a moral imperative, not a practical one.  It not only erodes, however imperceptibly, the structures of oppression, it sustains the embers of empathy and compassion, as well as justice, within us that defy the sadism that colors every layer of our existence. In short, it keeps us human. Rebellion must be embraced, finally, not only for what it will achieve, but for what it will allow us to become. In that becoming we find hope.

Read more:

https://scheerpost.com/2021/06/29/chris-hedges-speaks-on-american-sadism/

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Medhurst told RT said that he “literally did a double take” upon seeing Assange during the High Court preliminary hearing on Wednesday, which he was connected to remotely.

“I couldn’t recognize that it was Assange, he looked extremely old,” Medhurst declared, adding that the WikiLeaks founder looked so “awful and ill” that it took him a “minute” to realize it was Assange as medical witnesses testified that his “health has deteriorated and he’s been tortured” while in detention.

Assange’s voice also “did not sound very well,” according to Medhurst, who noted that “this is absolutely normal given the fact that he’s locked up in solitary confinement” and has been in “arbitrary detention now for seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy, two years in Belmarsh Prison.”

“This is a journalist who’s not serving a sentence, he’s not a criminal, and he’s in a maximum-security prison in Britain’s Guantanamo Bay,” Medhurst protested, calling Assange’s imprisonment “completely unjust,” “a crime against press freedoms,” and “an affront against his personal health.”

On the process of the preliminary hearing, Medhurst explained that the United States “already won in January when Judge Baraitser ruled in their favor” and said that she agreed with all of the US government’s “political charges” against Assange, including charges under the Espionage Act and conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.

Because of this, these charges are no longer being debated in court and the discussion has pivoted purely to Assange’s health and whether it is safe enough to extradite him to the US.

“There’s nothing about press freedoms here, even though there are dozens of lawyers, historians, journalists who testified at the extradition hearing,” Medhurst said, pointing out that “some of the biggest intellectuals and experts in their respective fields” have all said in court “that this is an affront on press freedoms.”

Assange’s prospects are looking “even worse now because the United States was granted three out of five grounds to appeal regarding Julian Assange at the High Court and today what’s happened is that this decision has been overturned, so it’s not three out of five, it’s all five,” Medhurst explained. “So now they can go into the High Court in October and they can question the validity of these psychiatric evaluations.”

They can say, ‘Well we don’t think he’s depressed, we don’t think there’s a heightened risk of suicide,’ even though the judge…blocked his extradition in January precisely because there is a high risk of suicide if he’s extradited to the United States given the horrendous prison conditions, given the steadfast guarantee he’ll be convicted and found guilty unfairly.

Medhurst concluded by emphasizing that the case is ultimately “about press freedoms” and “being able to do your job as a journalist and publish evidence” of government crimes and human rights violations.

“He’s not allowed to do that job. They’re trying to make an example out of him,” the journalist warned. “And it doesn’t necessarily have to result in a conviction in the end. The whole process is the punishment.”

“The fact that he’s been in arbitrary detention for seven years and two years in Belmarsh, this could be dragged out for decades, and this is what they want. They want to torture Assange and make an example out of him.”

Watch the full interview: https://www.rt.com/news/531766-richard-medhurst-assange-case/.

The US an the UK are so sick, full of the sociopathic virus, that we have to expose daily, hourly, all the time... Joe Biden is an ARSEHOLE. Boris Johnson is an arsehole. The judges in this case are ARSEHOLES for doing the work of the US and UK devils, not in accordance to the law, but at the mercy of the whim of the American and English ARSEHOLES. They do not have an ounce of ethics, morality nor any Christianity such as Biden professes. They are fakes. Dangerous fakes who are bringing in shame on all of us.

This case has PROVEN to every person of goodwill that the UK and the US governments, including their appendages like the Pentagon, are populated by rabid dangerous psychopaths. Not even Russia in the days of Stalin would have gone this far... And please don't mention the "Navalny case" or the Canadian now in prison for spying in China. 

These have nothing to do do with the immorality of the real culprits, Joe and Boris presently. Sign the release form forthwith and you might get some points towards redemption, not from god who is an idiot, but from the people of goodwill, who are better forgivers.

“People should never be used as bargaining chips,” the secretary of state [Blinken] said. Yes well... If there was a worse psychopath than Biden, Blinken would be it... That guy is the pits of hypocrisy in an impeccable suit.

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BY Chris Hedges

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Merrick Garland and those who work in the Department of Justice are the puppets, not the puppet masters. They are the façade, the fiction, that the longstanding persecution of Julian Assange has something to do with justice. Like the High Court in London, they carry out an elaborate judicial pantomime. They debate arcane legal nuances to distract from the Dickensian farce where a man who has not committed a crime, who is not a U.S. citizen, can be extradited under the Espionage Act and sentenced to life in prison for the most courageous and consequential journalism of our generation.

The engine driving the lynching of Julian is not here on Pennsylvania Avenue. It is in Langley, Virginia, located at a complex we will never be allowed to surround – the Central Intelligence Agency. It is driven by a secretive inner state, one where we do not count in the mad pursuit of empire and ruthless exploitation. Because the machine of this modern leviathan was exposed by Julian and WikiLeaks, the machine demands revenge. 

The United States has undergone a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion. It is no longer a functioning democracy. The real centers of power, in the corporate, military and national security sectors, were humiliated and embarrassed by WikiLeaks. Their war crimes, lies, conspiracies to crush the democratic aspirations of the vulnerable and the poor, and rampant corruption, here and around the globe, were laid bare in troves of leaked documents.  

We cannot fight on behalf of Julian unless we are clear about whom we are fighting against. It is far worse than a corrupt judiciary. The global billionaire class, who have orchestrated a social inequality rivaled by pharaonic Egypt, has internally seized all of the levers of power and made us the most spied upon, monitored, watched and photographed population in human history. When the government watches you 24-hours a day, you cannot use the word liberty. This is the relationship between a master and a slave. Julian was long a target, of course, but when WikiLeaks published the documents known as Vault 7, which exposed the hacking tools the CIA uses to monitor our phones, televisions and even cars, he — and journalism itself — was condemned to crucifixion. The object is to shut down any investigations into the inner workings of power that might hold the ruling class accountable for its crimes, eradicate public opinion and replace it with the cant fed to the mob.

I spent two decades as a foreign correspondent on the outer reaches of empire in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans. I am acutely aware of the savagery of empire, how the brutal tools of repression are first tested on those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” Wholesale surveillance. Torture. Coups. Black sites. Black propaganda. Militarized police. Militarized drones. Assassinations. Wars. Once perfected on people of color overseas, these tools migrate back to the homeland. By hollowing out our country from the inside through deindustrialization, austerity, deregulation, wage stagnation, the abolition of unions, massive expenditures on war and intelligence, a refusal to address the climate emergency and a virtual tax boycott for the richest individuals and corporations, these predators intend to keep us in bondage, victims of a corporate neo-feudalism. And they have perfected their instruments of Orwellian control. The tyranny imposed on others is imposed on us.

From its inception, the CIA carried out assassinations, coups, torture, and illegal spying and abuse, including that of U.S. citizens, activities exposed in 1975 by the Church Committee hearings in the Senate and the Pike Committee hearings in the House. All these crimes, especially after the attacks of 9/11, have returned with a vengeance. The CIA is a rogue and unaccountable paramilitary organization with its own armed units and drone program, death squads and a vast archipelago of global black sites where kidnapped victims are tortured and disappeared. 

The U.S. allocates a secret black budget of about $50 billion a year to hide multiple types of clandestine projects carried out by the National Security Agency, the CIA and other intelligence agencies, usually beyond the scrutiny of Congress. The CIA has a well-oiled apparatus to kidnap, torture and assassinate targets around the globe, which is why, since it had already set up a system of 24-hour video surveillance of Julian in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, it quite naturally discussed kidnapping and assassinating him. That is its business. Senator Frank Church — after examining the heavily redacted CIA documents released to his committee — defined the CIA’s “covert activity” as “a semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies and consorting with known torturers and international terrorists.”

All despotisms mask state persecution with sham court proceedings. The show trials and troikas in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The raving Nazi judges in fascist Germany. The Denunciation rallies in Mao’s China. State crime is cloaked in a faux legality, a judicial farce.

If Julian is extradited and sentenced and, given the Lubyanka-like proclivities of the Eastern District of Virginia, this is a near certainty, it means that those of us who have published classified material, as I did when I worked for The New York Times, will become criminals. It means that an iron curtain will be pulled down to mask abuses of power. It means that the state, which, through Special Administrative Measures, or SAMs, anti-terrorism laws and the Espionage Act that have created our homegrown version of Stalin’s Article 58, can imprison anyone anywhere in the world who dares commit the crime of telling the truth.

We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to fight against powerful subterranean forces that, in demanding Julian’s extradition and life imprisonment, have declared war on journalism. 

We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to fight for the restoration of the rule of law and democracy. 

We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to dismantle the wholesale Stasi-like state surveillance erected across the West. 

We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to overthrow — and let me repeat that word for the benefit of those in the FBI and Homeland Security who have come here to monitor us — overthrow the corporate state and create a government of the people, by the people and for the people, that will cherish, rather than persecute, the best among us.

You can see my interview with Julian’s father, John Shipton, here.

NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

READ MORE:

https://scheerpost.com/2022/10/09/chris-hedges-the-puppets-and-the-puppet-masters/

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One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union between Intelligence and Organized Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein (Volume 1 & 2)

Whitney Webb
Trine Day, 2022

“Far from being an anomaly, Epstein was one of several men who, over the past century, have engaged in sexual blackmail activities designed to obtain damaging information (i.e., “intelligence”) on powerful individuals with the goal of controlling their activities and securing their compliance.”[1]

Jeffrey Epstein is dead and Ghislaine Maxwell is locked away in prison, and the thought-makers of our world seem keen to let the more explosive parts of the scandal dissipate from the public consciousness. As far as the mainstream media is concerned, Epstein and Maxwell were little more than well-connected socialites who ran a sex-trafficking ring for the rich and the powerful, and the focus has shifted instead to the criminal and civil cases seeking to achieve redress for the victims of sexual abuse.

On occasion some newspaper articles will mention the hidden cameras littered across Epstein’s properties, others the reams of CDs and hard drives found within them during the FBI raids. Altogether missing from the Netflix documentaries (Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich [2020] and Ghislaine Maxwell: Filthy Rich [2022]) or the articles that spend their time narrowly focusing on the links between Epstein and Bill Gates, is the acknowledgement of the true nature of Epstein himself and the ultimate purpose of this sex-trafficking of minors — a sexual blackmail operation.

Not everyone is cowardly enough to let these controversial aspects lie untouched, as the newly released two-volume book One Nation Under Blackmail by independent reporter Whitney Webb seeks to blow wide open this media-enforced blackout. Utilizing primarily open-source information (that is, publicly accessible information such as books, newspapers articles and government reports),[2] Webb’s book delves into the life and times of Jeffrey Epstein and his deep ties to Jewish billionaires and Israeli intelligence. The intersection of sexual politics with Jewish power has long since been of interest to this writer, and the case of Jeffrey Epstein is easily one of the most damning instances, as evident by the large amount of popular interest in the story. A selection of other books on the Epstein/Maxwell case has appeared in bookshops over the past two years, but a cursory glance through their pages and at their appendices, where the words ‘Israel,’ ‘Jewish,’ and ‘Zionism’ are conspicuously lacking, shows you how surface-level they are in comparison to Webb’s book.

As Webb details extensively throughout the first volume, using sexual blackmail[3] to achieve political ends is far from being an Epstein innovation; it is almost certainly a tactic he learned from others in the murky world where crime meets intelligence. Nor is it something exclusive to Jews. But one can’t help but notice a consistent ethnic pattern in the known major perpetrators of this sort of behavior in Western countries. I have previously written about the Australian variety, where Jewish underworld figure Abe Saffron acquired compromising pictures of prominent Australians (more often than not with underage prostitutes) and leveraged this for his own nefarious ends. Webb (in Chapter 2: Booze and Blackmail) outlines in detail the blackmail operations ran by mob-linked figures Lewis Rosenstiel and Roy Cohn from a bugged suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Other non-Jews that Webb identifies as running parallel schemes, such as Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi or Craig Spence, were likewise deeply enmeshed in the same circles (Khashoggi in fact worked for Israeli intelligence).

Ultimately what is most frightening about the Epstein case, and what makes it stands out from the rest, is the sophistication of the operation, the high profile of the targets—from sitting US presidents to senior members of the British Royal Family—and the extraordinary lengths gone to in order to protect Epstein and avoid the true nature of his activities being exposed. It was as if there was something important at the heart of it all, something worthy of being protected by those in power, with lots at stake lest it be brought into public view. On a number of occasions Webb points to the underreported comments attributed to Alex Acosta, the attorney who gave Epstein his infamous plea deal in 2007, who allegedly told the Trump White House transition team that he backed off upon being told that Epstein “belonged to intelligence.”[4] At every stage where Epstein came under scrutiny, from his first legal conviction, to his second arrest and the questionable circumstances of his death, and even in the post-mortem coverage of his indiscretions, forces seemingly moved in the background to obscure and obfuscate, to clean up the mess and avoid as much detail be allowed to come to light as possible.

Like many books published by small dissident publishers with limited resources, both volumes would have been improved with editing for a more streamlined narrative, as neither makes for easy reading. Without a familiarity with the major events and actors described throughout each densely-packed chapter, the connections and the significance of the interactions between people are sometimes difficult to comprehend. Webb’s sources are conveniently compiled in endnotes at the conclusion of each chapter, and she uncovers a level of detail that makes it a worthy resource for your bookshelf that you will inevitably return to when trying to remember a name or make sense of a connection. Nevertheless, as this review concludes, the book falls short of providing a satisfying answer to the questions that readers of The Occidental Observerwould go into it having, and shies away from responding to the most glaring aspects of the Epstein case of all.

ONE NATION UNDER BLACKMAIL

The central thesis of the book is that there has historically between a connection between organized crime and intelligence agencies in America, where the two are in some cases so intensely interwoven in their activities that it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. This thesis, Webb claims, allows us to understand the nature of Jeffrey Epstein and his mysterious life, and that Epstein is one of many such nefarious actors who have operated on the margins of legitimacy. Volume 1 begins in the first half of the twentieth century, where Webb argues that the first connection between intelligence and organised crime was forged in America during the midst of World War II, in an undertaking known as Operation Underworld. This collaboration, specifically between the National Crime Syndicate (an alliance between the Italian and Jewish mobs) and the forerunners of the modern intelligence apparatus, came out of a sort of national security necessity that reaped geo-political dividends and continued after 1945 and into the Cold War.

Though intriguing, many of the chapters of Volume 1 deal with events and personalities of more limited relevance to the main Epstein blackmail story, covering the web of intrigue and scandal surrounding things such as Watergate, the BCCI, the China Lobby, and more obscure events like Billygate and Koreagate. Those chapters dealing with the spiritual forebears of Jeffrey Epstein are the ones that provide the most context and are the most enlightening to read. Webb presents a wealth of information about the history of the Jewish mob and other powerful Jewish figures during the middle years of the twentieth century, when wider Jewish political and cultural influence was beginning to solidify within America and the West. The cast of Jewish characters implicated in major American criminal, financial and political scandals, especially those with a direct line of descent to the Epstein blackmail operation, is staggering: the Bronfman family, Roy Cohn, Bruce Rappaport, Meyer Lanksy, Lewis Rosenstiel, Marc Rich, Max Fisher, Edmond Safra, and Robert Maxwell.

In Chapter 3, “Organised Crime and the State of Israel,” Webb underscores that much of the support given to the Zionist paramilitary groups that operated prior to the foundation of Israel—in the form of smuggled arms and funding—came from criminal networks. Canadian-Jewish liquor barons the Bronfman family, who participated in bootlegging during prohibition, financed the purchase of weapons for Haganah troops. Other Jewish mob figures with Zionist sympathies donated large sums and aided the Zionist cause during Israel’s formative years. This criminal collusion was, in Israel’s case, ongoing throughout its history and was “baked in at the very foundations of, not only its intelligence services, but the origins of the state itself.”[5]

Chapter 9, “High Tech Treason,” introduces us to Robert Maxwell, British media mogul and Israel’s Superspy, another figure of importance in Epstein’s younger years, who jumped almost seamlessly between the roles of organized crime associate and intelligence agent. Webb explores Maxwell’s involvement with the Eastern Bloc mob, including when he lobbied Israel to grant Semion Mogilevich an Israeli passport, allowing him access to the US financial system, and the PROMIS scandal, whereby Maxwell helped Israeli intelligence sell bugged computer software to governments and corporations around the world.

When MI6 attempted to recruit Maxwell for the service, it concluded, after conducting an extensive background check, that Maxwell was a “Zionist—loyal only to Israel.”[6]

Chapter 10, “Government by Blackmail: The Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era,” brings Volume 1 to a close, where many of the cast of disreputable characters revealed in earlier chapters come home to roost during the Reagan administration and the Iran-Contra scandal. The familiar figure of Roy Cohn appears again as a “political fixer” for the Reagan campaign, but Webb notes that Reagan’s intimacy with powerful Jewish figures with organised crime links goes all the way back to the very start of his career, with his mentor Lew Wasserman, the long-time president of Hollywood’s MCA, Inc. and “arguably the most powerful and influential Hollywood titan in the four decades after World War II,” acting as a political patron.

JEFFREY’S SHIKSES

Volume 1 sets the stage for Volume 2, where the interwoven networks of people introduced come together to contextualize the world that Epstein sprang from. Webb covers the underreported early years of Epstein’s financial career in the 1970s and 1980s, which are filled with just as much criminal intrigue as his later years as sex criminal, including his role as a “financial bounty hunter” allegedly working for Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi. His years as an investment banker at Bear Sterns, where he was seemingly brought directly into the company by Alan Greenberg,[7] sat for many years under a cloud of suspicion that he participated in an insider trading scheme carried out by the Bronfman-owned company Seagram. Epstein’s involvement with Steven Hoffenberg in what was at the time the largest uncovered Ponzi scheme in American financial history, Towers Financial Corporation, is yet another fascinating detail largely ignored elsewhere.

How and when Epstein was inducted into the world of intelligence cannot be accurately deduced, but Webb offers a number of potential scenarios, relating to his proximity to people such as Maxwell and Khashoggi. Elsewhere she points to the direct relationship Epstein seemingly had with the highest levels of the Israeli government. Former Israeli Prime Minister and military intelligence figure Ehud Barak, another close Epstein associate, claimed that he was first introduced to Epstein by none other than Shimon Peres.[8] Webb pins the beginning of the sexual blackmail scheme to some point in the early 1990s, around the time Ghislaine Maxwell latched onto Epstein following the death of her father.

Chapter 18, “Predators” deals with the nuts and bolts of the operation, exploring in detail the various methods both Epstein and Maxwell used to recruit and procure girls. Sometimes it was through friendships with the owners of modelling companies, other times it was as simple as Maxwell approaching a girl on the street and recruiting them for “massages.” Even literally purchasing underage Slavic girls from Eastern Europe was apparently a possibility for Epstein.[9] Their relationship with Les Wexner (Epstein was Wexner’s long-time money manager) also proved fruitful, using their connection with the popular Victoria’s Secret fashion chain—a brand owned by Wexner—to pose as recruiters.

Webb first came to my attention when she conducted an interview with Maria Farmer, considered the earliest Epstein victim to report him to the authorities. The interview is long, upwards of three hours, but well worth a listen, especially when Farmer begins to discuss how she was treated by the powerful Jewish figures surrounding Epstein:

I don’t know any White supremacists, but I know a lot of Jewish supremacists…They made is very clear that I was a servant [to them] because I was White.[10]

Farmer may be unfamiliar with the word shikse, but it perfectly describes how Epstein and Maxwell considered these young gentile girls ensnared in their net of abuse. The supposed “trope” of the Jewish man lusting after the shikse finds in Epstein yet another real-life example, with underage blonde girls being his victim of choice when satisfying his own urges. Former Ghislaine Maxwell friend Christina Oxenberg, quoted in the book from an at-the-time anonymous source, relayed a conversation she once had with Maxwell about who these women were that she was “recruiting.” Maxwell reportedly dismissed them with ease: “They’re nothing, these girls. They are trash.”[11]

On the other side of the operation was of course the hidden cameras and the recording equipment. The presence of these hidden cameras in Epstein’s properties is independently confirmed by a number of eyewitnesses, court documents and early newspaper articles that detail this curious addition to Epstein’s properties, and the existence of the CDs and hard drives to store the footage is a matter of public record, including from the latest FBI raid of Epstein’s New York mansion in 2019:

Per photographs taken at the time of the raid, hard drives were found inside a safe forced open by the FBI and numerous large black binders were found in a closet that contain “CDs, carefully categorized in plastic slipcovers and thumbnails with photos on them.” When shown in court, the “homemade labels” were redacted, as judge Alison Nathan had ruled that they contained “identifying information for third parties.” Did that information involve only the names of underage girls, the names of blackmail victims, or both?[12]

The FBI conveniently lacked the warrant to seize these items, and upon returning four days later with the correct warrant, the CDs and hard drives were gone. They were later handed over by Epstein’s lawyer, but having not had the chance to view what was on them, we can only assume that this was more than enough time to delete any incriminating files.

Much has been made of the relationship that existed between Epstein and Donald Trump before they allegedly fell out with each other in 2004 over a property dispute in Palm Beach, Florida, but as Webb exposes in Chapter 16, “Crooked Campaigns,” Epstein and Maxwell had a far more politically intimate relationship with President Bill Clinton that coincided with his time in office and his early post-presidency years. Epstein visited the Clinton White House 17 times, and was apparently a prominent figure in the formation of the Clinton Global Initiative, which saw Clinton as a regular passenger on Epstein’s infamous plane, the “Lolita Express.” Webb refers to other attempts of sexual blackmail against Clinton, including in 1998 when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apparently threatened Clinton with tape recordings Israel had obtained proving outright that he had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, using them to pressure Clinton to pardon Israeli spy Jonathon Pollard.[13] It seems the Clinton White House, which was seeking a peaceful solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, was of key interest.

Chapter 21, “From PROMIS to Palantir: The Future of Blackmail,” finishes off Volume 2 with the chilling insight that perhaps one the reasons Epstein’s sexual blackmail operation collapsed was because it was allowed to collapse—it had become outdated and irrelevant. The advent of the permanent internet connection has brought about opportunities for far more widespread and even more intimate forms of blackmail, instead conducted and collected via electronic means. A technological panopticon whereby the cameras once placed by Epstein throughout his properties are instead now placed by big tech and social media companies in our own homes, omnipresent in our lives. After his 2008 conviction, both Epstein and Maxwell seemed to be shifting away from sexual blackmail and were making inroads in Silicon Valley and mixing with data-harvesting IT companies. Epstein’s previous ties with higher-ups at Microsoft and his financial support for John Brockman’s Edge Foundation gave him an in with plenty of big tech leaders, and he had re-branded himself as a tech investor, starting a company focused on collecting genetic data. Ghislaine’s siblings in the Maxwell family also have pedigree in the tech industry going back to the 1990s. As noted by Webb, “in a world where blackmail is overwhelmingly electronic, people like Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell become liabilities to be silenced, rather than assets to protect.”[14]

WHO, WHAT AND WHY?

Upon finishing Volume 2, I found that many of the questions raised by Webb still remained open. Who or what is “the system” that enabled Epstein and protected him from justice? If so many people knew, why was there such an institutional resistance to speak out about Epstein? And the most important question of all: what was goal behind collecting this sexual blackmail? Why were Epstein and his benefactors trying to control these victims? Unfortunately, Webb’s book does not provide a satisfying conclusion.

Webb does not shy away from pointing the finger at Israel or from discussing wider Zionist motivations and groups like B’nai B’rith. However, she stops frustratingly short of the obvious conclusions. Granted the reluctance is one that all those knowledgeable on the Jewish question are familiar with, and perhaps she simply avoids the discussion for the sake of keeping her book on Amazon and appealing to a wider audience, rather than have it be relegated to the ADL’s banned book department. But for an answer to the questions most readers are likely after, we are given nothing more than a few measly sentences concluding that the Epstein operation was instigated by Israeli intelligence and that those in the “power structure” and “the system”—the same people that made Epstein untouchable—have now strengthened their stranglehold over America. Ultimately, readers are given the impression that this blackmail was collected as control merely for the sake of control, power merely for the sake of power, without a deeper underpinning goal.

Upon being challenged during an interview by Jewish podcaster Adam Sosnick on the obvious Jewish identity of the key players, Webb retreats to the safe position: By referring to Israeli intelligence or Jewish criminals, one is not referring to all Jewish people, and one cannot conflate the Epstein network or powerful billionaire Zionists with the whole Jewish community, or ascribe any wider group motive to them. Sosnick also exhorts the listener to avoid speaking of groups and instead only of individuals, lest it breed hate.[15]

One is of course allowed to speak of the Chinese or Catholics or Russians in general terms and in a political sense as behaving out a sense of group identity and a sense of group interests, and it is sophistry to claim that the speaker is referring to every single Catholic in the world or every single Russian in the world. Regardless of which sociological theory of power you ascribe to, what is clearly being referred to is the organized community, the power structure that represents the wider in-group and operates towards a unique ingroup goal. In the case of the Russians, this is currently Putin and the Russian state apparatus, supplemented by the Russian military, media and business elite that do not dissent from achieving Russian strategic interests as determined by the state apparatus. For Catholics, it is the Vatican and the international network of dioceses, bolstered by the Catholic Universities, think tanks and charities. People are not forced to declare “not all Catholics” when dealing with the allegations of a cover-up of child sexual abuse within the church.

When one speaks of the Jews, it stands to reason that the same scenario should apply. That is, it quite reasonably refers to the organized Jewish community, including organizations like the ADL; the powerful figures in Israel and in the diaspora, as well as the religious and intellectual leaders, the business figures and the lobbying groups. Sure there are dissenters and outsiders, and of course there is internal debate and a difference of opinion on the best means for meeting its goals, but the organized Jewish community exists just the same, and remains firm in its fundamental goal of ensuring the security and survival of the Jewish people and the state of Israel.

Herein lies the problem for Webb and the reason behind the demand to treat Epstein as a mere “Jewish individual.” The network of powerful Jewish figures and institutions chronicled throughout Webb’s book is a network that is intimately connected to Jeffrey Epstein or to his blackmail operation: Robert Maxwell, the Pritzker Family, Larry Summers and Alan Dershowitz, Ehud Barak and Israeli intelligence, the world’s wealthiest Jewish families that formed the Mega Group (the Bronfman, Lauder and Wexner families). The list goes on and on. These are not powerless fringe figures or outsiders who are scorned by Jewish leaders or the wider Jewish community. They arethe leaders of the organized Jewish community, some of whom practically direct Jewish-American cultural, political and even religious life. To remove them from the equation of power would be the equivalent of removing half of the highest-ranking members of the Vatican from the Catholic Church or leading members of the Chinese Communist Party from the Chinese state.

Using the phrase “the Jews” cuts the Gordian Knot at the heart of Webb’s attempt to understand Epstein, whom he was working for, and how he so effortlessly moved among the elite strata of society, why it was covered up, who stood to benefit from this blackmail operation, and what its ultimate aim was. With those two words, all the jumbled euphemisms of “elites” and “Zionists” melt away, and the confusing mix of organized crime and intelligence, legitimate and illegitimate enterprises seemingly working in unison with each other starts to become intelligible. The ease with which Epstein and Maxwell abused and then dismissed these young girls as mere “trash” makes more sense when you know the meaning behind the word shikse (an unclean abomination). The reason for the legal cover-up and the inhibition of the mainstream media to run the story, even when they have no direct connection to the Epstein network, is obvious when you know who the proprietors of most mainstream American media outlets are, and with whom both cultural and institutional power in the US now lies. All this interwoven association is merely two sides of the same coin—a system constructed to ensure the security of Israel and the survival of the Jewish people. To talk openly about Epstein’s true activities is to talk openly about the nature of Jewish power, and for that reason alone most will not do so, for fear of the Jews. In all, Webb has picked up the puzzle pieces and assembled them neatly on the board, but she refuses to take that final step back and honestly contemplate the picture she has pieced together.

What are we to make of the institutional silence and protection, and the dishonest shifting of the narrative to a mere sex-trafficking ring? What can you conclude from the attempt to declare anyone who dares point out the clear ethnic goal at the heart of this vile sexual blackmail operation an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist? The only reasonable conclusion is that Epstein functioned with the support and backing of Jewry’s most powerful figures, and that the organised Jewish community is willing to conceal a criminal conspiracy of frightening proportions if it serves to benefit the Jews or would otherwise negatively affect them (by creating more anti-Jewish sentiment) if the American public knew the truth.

Had Epstein’s personal indiscretions not become too big to ignore and had it not all unravelled so spectacularly due to the pressure of the #MeToo movement, would Epstein also have been buried in honor like Robert Maxwell, with Israeli Prime Ministers and dignitaries lining up to give a tearful goodbye to yet another faithful servant to the Jewish people? If he had been released early from a prison sentence, would he also have been welcomed back to Israel with open arms like Jonathon Pollard? Epstein had already once been professionally rehabilitated by Jews after his first conviction, there’s no reason why it couldn’t have happened again.

READ MORE:

https://www.unz.com/article/jeffrey-epstein-a-jewish-individual/

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