Three hundred years ago, a highly placed public person made an indecent proposal. He suggested that, in order to prevent the poor people in Ireland becoming a burden to the public, that they should sell their infant children to the rich, as food for their tables. This public minded person was the great satirist Jonathan Swift, and his suggestion was The Modest Proposal. Its aim was to expose the entrenched social inequity that existed in his time, in his part of the world, and the terrible indifference the elite felt towards those most vulnerable in the social hierarchy.
This was an extended metaphor of callous objectification and exploitation. Swift was a Dean of the Anglican Church of Ireland. He was not endorsing cannibalism! Yet the eating of human flesh by other humans has been identified as part of tribal culture and ritualistic practices for hundreds of years. It is believed by some tribes and cabals that ingesting another person is a way of incorporating their specific energy. For example, if you admired a person’s strength, you would feel that by eating him you would develop those qualities yourself.
There are carnivores, and there are vampires. And there are other, equally appetite-driven kinds of predation: sexual and financial. All of these predation are found occurring with most impact on girls and women, and especially women from impoverished backgrounds and unstable families.
Conspicuous consumption cannot be better represented than by images of the dining tables and menus of the wealthy. But when we look at the way that human greed has amplified, over the last thirty to forty years, since the excessive 1980s, and the vociferous consumerist culture that has developed, driven by the desire for wealth, ownership, control and recognition, we can see that the Epstein Files are going to condemn not only the gross acts of individuals, but the systems which enabled and even celebrated them.
Enough evidence has come out already to show the multiple channels of self-enrichment that this man set up, to cater to but also entrap the rich and famous people he recruited and enticed into his networks. Once they were in his orbit, like a kingpin drug dealer he catered to their demands, on a quid pro quo basis. Some saw or felt the danger of getting what they wanted delivered by catalogue, by one of the greatest ‘fixers’ of all time, but many did not. He was an expert at compartmentalization. What we now call houses of horror were no doubt just seen on the surface as pleasure palaces by many of the people that went there, due to the way he selectively presented what people wanted to see. He recruited resources, human resources, and channelled and corralled them into designated sections of his enterprises.
I have a suggestion of my own: It is not ‘Lolita’ people should be reading, to understand what motivated this self-professed ubermensch. It’s ‘Brave New World’.
Because the whole system he built was not about sex, but about money and power. Each of his various homes was a nexus for unnatural appetites. I’m sure a lot of the people he targeted had no idea of each other or the other uses he had for other people in other venues. He seems to have compartmentalised and channelled them: some for bartering, some for medical experimentation, supermodels whose reproductive organs could be used to form a master race, enticed many celebrity associates across different spheres of knowledge, acclaim and expertise to create the impression of credibility, authority and power, and used hundreds of young girls as bait or honey traps. He would give people who could be of use to him exactly what they needed, and keep them in servitude through delayed delivery of what he promised them. He used drugs as well as coercive control to trap many people. And he used the greed and needy self-indulgence of people like Andrew and Fergie to destroy not only them but the societies and structures around them.
What characterizes his system of exploitation was the way it utilized and weaponised narcissistic self-indulgence, hierarchy and transactional modes of social interaction, and the way he preyed on the vulnerable to cater to the appetites of the elite.
Think of the opening of Huxley’s novel: ‘The principles of mass production at last applied to biology’.
The trafficking of underage girls was part of his business network. The espionage and surveillance work, the sex and child trafficking, was how he made connections and kept his properties running via blackmail and compromat. He called it ‘investing in people’. But I believe his ultimate goal was to flood the world with what Aldous Huxley called ‘ Alphas’, created in part with his own genetic material, fused with that of the most beautiful young women he could find. The opposite of a family man, in many ways, he wanted to see himself as a generous provider to the people he used. A narcissist, he wanted to extend himself beyond all known limits. Look at the names he gave his ranch in New Mexico: it is called ‘Zorro Ranch’ but it was also called ‘Playboy Ranch’. And the private plane he used was named ‘Lolita Express’.
Playboy as a brand was affiliated with pornographic objectification of women, through their glossy magazines and the hedonistic lifestyle of their gross CEO, Hugh Hefner, with his ‘Playboy Mansion’ and ‘Playboy Club’ filled with young women he called ‘Bunnies’. Like Hefner, Epstein surrounded himself with a bevy of what Huxley calls in his book ‘pneumatics’ - physically gorgeous-looking girls, trophies in the world of consumerist culture. This harem master style conduct was part of Epstein’s brand, and his brazen evocation of Nabokov’s novel ‘Lolita’, which details the predatory exploitation of an underage girl, was clearly a celebration of this lifestyle he created, to salt the mines he was offering to the powerful men he wanted to attract for his money-making schemes.
Epstein apparently ran his schemes for more than two decades, enabled by procurers, who themselves were often women who had emotional attachments to him, which he exploited. Attracting many through promises of fame and recognition in the glamorous worlds of modelling or acting, he was on record as saying that women over the age of 22 were not sexually attractive to him. This ‘preference’ he had in common with Harvey Weinstein, as most of the many women who spoke out in accusation of him were all 22 or 23 when he first tried to proffer movie roles or opportunities in films in exchange for ‘massages’. I suggest that this ‘ageing out’ process applied by these predators, which was apparently accepted as normalized by the victims of Epstein, was not a reflection of their loss of value due to ‘ageing’, but rather the fact that a woman in her twenties is far more able to think for herself and act independently of coercive control than a girl or a child.
Epstein’s most vocal accuser, Virginia Giuffré, details the way she was recruited and lured into his network, and states that the sexualised massage sessions was a prominent feature of his recruitment strategy, enabled by his friend and associate Ghislaine Maxwell, whom Giuffré describes as an ‘apex predator’. Just as the victims of Weinstein spoke up à few years ago and created the ‘Me Too’ movement, several victims of Epstein’s conduct banded into a group of advocates identifying as survivors of Epstein, and comparing the histories of their experiences with Epstein and Maxwell.
Through these comparative stories, and the unrolling of millions of documents from the so-called ‘Epstein Files’ in the public domain, we can see the way the systems operated simultaneously. Many commentators have noted the extensive range of the social network Epstein tapped into, encompassing politics, celebrity, intellectuals, scientists and economists, as well as billionaire tech bros, and the decision-makers in global politics and economics. He advised them on their finances, on legal matters, on PR matters, on which vitamins and STD medications to take. He impressed them and befriended them.
Horror stories abound of some of these elite people enjoying the various activities Epstein facilitated for them, including but not limited to pornography-fuelled sex, the indulgence of hedonistic or taboo sexual activities such as torture, lesbian or group sex, all emphasizing the objectification and degradation of girls and women, and the enjoyment by perpetrators of the fear of victims - who were not only ornamental but forcefully subjected to coercive control, and forced to participate in acts which degraded themselves as well as others. There were reputedly barbaric hunting parties conducted, where victims were forced to run for their lives while being shot at by Epstein’s guests, and we should look in horror, with this knowledge, at the maze which was constructed in the grounds of the infamous ranch in New Mexico, in the light of these revelations. This was not ornamental landscaping. There were animal stalls at the ranch where girls were blindfolded and bound and auctioned off to buyers. There were photographs of girls surrounded by pigs, who are well known to eat all kinds of food. The visual equation is repellant.
Code words related to food, especially all-American snack foods such as ‘jerky’, ‘pizza’ and ‘cream cheese’ and ‘Oreo’ biscuits were used in numerous email exchanges, to describe what was on the menu at these social gatherings organised by Epstein at his various properties. The menu presented to the guests was clearly not only a sexual one, with the consumption of people being metaphorical, but apparently and horrifically encompassed the actual killing and digestion of human babies, and the invocation of defiance of the blood libel accusations many Jewish communities have been accused of over the last 1000 years at various times.
Some members of the elite, trafficking in the occult, participated in rituals to gain personal power, as presented in Stanley Kubrick’s film ‘Eyes Wide Shut’. Faustian deals were made, in pursuit of money, fame and power. Blood sacrifice was performed to invoke and channel this power. Several of the buildings on the two islands bought by Epstein, one to screen the activities on the other, were designed to evoke and emulate, in architecture and decor, the esoteric and religious worship of various dark gods and entities. There have been satanic or demonic statues and paintings found throughout the buildings, including a myriad framed photos and paintings of children, prominent among them the ‘Slaughter Of The Innocents’.
These buildings, viewed as a whole, were located in remote areas, which were difficult to access. Victims once lured there via the town houses and apartments in New York and London and Paris, could not leave without endangering their lives, with Epstein controlling access and exit points and modes of transport. Underground in these locations there were, according to the reports of witnesses, dormitories and laboratories and operating theatre facilities where disturbing dental procedures were performed on children to ensure they could not use their teeth during sexual acts, and harvesting of the body parts of young women took place, for the purposes of experiments in eugenics. Bodies of girls strangled during fetishic sexual abuse are reportedly buried in the grounds of the ranch, where there is also located what is believed to be a large incinerator, like the incinerators used to destroy human bodies in the death camps in Nazi Germany. On the islands, there were metal hatches large enough to fit human bodies, built into the walls and floors directly to the ocean below. Some survivors state that many girls never came back alive from these terrible places, and that even those who did had been so tormented and drugged and damaged that their testimonies were likely to be disbelieved.
I think Epstein was using Nazi anti-Semitic concepts, but reversing them, to empower himself: especially the idea of the master race, and eugenics. As an overtly pro-Zionist Jew, this would have satisfied his ethnic desire for a reversal of historical roles. As he himself came from a historically victimized community, these activities were designed to position himself as a master controller, and a powerful and charismatic man: it was an orchestrated and renewable self-assertion. Might is right. Hurt people hurt people. There is evidence that every act of victimization he perpetrated on vulnerable girls and children brought him temporary relief.
I do not think Epstein stopped at cryonics. The fact that he was interested in this, and in trans humanism, and had the funds to pursue these interests, strongly challenges the ‘death by suicide’ theory. I think he expected to be pardoned by members of the current government, because of the information they mutually have on each other. Just as Maxwell is hoping she will be. I believe he wanted to live forever, as the master of the universe he believed himself to be.
Fundamental to these terrible activities of violence against vulnerable individuals was the belief of the perpetrators, headed by Epstein and shared by his friends and associates, that these victims were of no value. They were poor, defenceless, and easily manipulated. They belonged, according to this materialistic and hierarchical view, to an underclass, which the perpetrators felt entitled to utilize and exploit, in every way. The elite, the ‘1%’, felt themselves to be superhuman. And like all fascist sympathizers, they looked down upon the weak.
Epstein’s activities were made possible because of the misogyny and the cruelty of wider society, which enabled him to operate often in plain sight, and even for many years to be admired or lauded for the persona he created. His ‘girls’ were his victims and his prey, and he continually devalued and discarded them once their term of usefulness had expired. Maxwell called them ‘trash’, and he called them ‘goyim’. He treated them all, and in fact everyone he knew, in varying degrees, as objects and instruments for self gratification and self enrichment. He reduced the victims, the lowest in the hierarchy, to the limits of the perceived worth of their bodies, in the marketplace of the world, where women’s and children’s bodies are so often used and abused.
The most important aspect to learn from the mass exposure of these activities is that we can learn from this that the objectification of people is a prerequisite for their degradation. Choices are made at every stage when associating with people like Epstein. He is not the only one. Every time a person enslaves another or coerces those who are vulnerable to them, they place themselves on this spectrum of inhumane conduct. As so often in human history, the weakest link breaks the chain. And the weakest and most vulnerable and defenceless are the women and children.
This may seem like dark fantasy. But writers like Anne Bishop and other creative artists and activists have been trying to open our eyes to it for years.
On this International Women’s Day, let us honour survivors of all kinds of opportunistic cruelty. May they evolve beyond the abuse which has been inflicted on them, and may their experiences enlighten us and open our eyes to the predators that operate amongst us.
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