The declassified Epstein files are confirming the most outlandish conspiracy theories describing the structure of the modern world: a cabal of deranged and unaccountable elites controlling the corridors of power through exclusive networks, sex trafficking, blackmail and a vast amount of accumulated wealth.
The revelations have shattered the myth of a ‘civilised West’ premised upon enlightenment values and human rights. Instead, we are confronted with a global system carved out by an alliance between corporate elites, powerful politicians and predators, operating in cahoots with some of the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world.
The contempt and disdain that the system has shown for the weak and marginalised is shocking. The US Department of Justice has identified at least 1200 girls who were victims of the sex trafficking ring run by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, in which depraved elites from across the world participated.
What is more horrifying is how this grotesque practice allowed elites to influence global politics. For example, the files show discussion over possible collaboration between Epstein, MI6 and Mossad to gain access to Libya’s frozen assets after the Nato-led war destroyed the country. Another memo by the FBI claims Trump is “compromised” by Israel, insinuating damning secrets of the US president held by Mossad.
We are then not looking at a small cult operating at the margins of society. We are facing a network that is propelling the system at the highest echelons of power, shaping foreign policy, wars, economy and domestic politics. To make sense of how power operates in the modern world, one can no longer rely on classic Enlightenment texts that speak of reason, justice or rights. These are fictions the West likes to tell itself about its own genesis. Instead of this rhetoric, one must examine the historical development of the contemporary global elite to grasp the dehumanisation at the heart of the ruling order.
‘Trafficking’ bodies was central to the development of the modern world. The transatlantic slave trade, one of the most lucrative businesses of the 17th and 18th centuries, was central in building modern capitalism and constructing the ‘New World’ of the Americas, a world constructed over the rubble of systematic genocides of indigenous populations. The trafficking of human bodies from Africa not only ruptured the lives of 12.5 million Africans who were uprooted from their homes and sold into slavery, but also retarded African development by depleting it of its human resources.
This was the same period where poverty and misery were imposed upon Indian and Chinese societies through Western colonialism and the opium wars. Utsa Patnaik has shown how the British stole $70 trillion (in current value) from the Subcontinent, exposing the charade of a European ‘civilising mission’ when compared to the reality of colonial rule.
Sexual exploitation is an integral part of the decadence arising out of a combination of extreme opulence, dehumanisation of other human beings and unaccountable power. It is often the most powerful expression of ‘conquering’ the enemy, as exhibited with the fall of the Soviet Union. While Western narratives framed Moscow’s defeat as a victory for ‘freedom and democracy’, the reality was far from it.
The Shock Doctrine imposed on Russian society, which witnessed the appropriation of the country’s public resources by a small oligarchy in the name of privatisation and ‘free market’, led to the deaths of at least three million people due to poverty, a fact aptly termed The Neoliberal Holocaust by Pawel Wargan. It is not surprising that this economic destruction was supplemented by a sex trafficking network that led 500,000 Russian women into prostitution, with another 175,000 joining this clandestine industry from Eastern Europe.
The Soviet Union, which once boasted full employment for women and promoted their advancement into the fields of science, arts and the military, now became the hub for predatory local and global elites to exploit women through illicit trafficking networks. This was freedom, Washington style!
There is now vast literature on how US military bases have been instrumental in promoting sex trafficking across the world, particularly in the Asia Pacific. Private military contractors have also been investigated for being involved in the smuggling of minor girls through US bases. Eugenia Weiss and Annalisa Enrile have termed these practices the ‘US military-prostitution complex’, referring to the various government and non-governmental actors embedded within US military bases that benefit from the lucrative transnational network of trafficking minor girls. The revelations of the Royal Air Force jets being used to facilitate the Epstein network confirm the intimate ties between Western elites, war machines and sexual predators.
It is also pertinent to remember that countries with a serious sex-trafficking problem, including Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, were once bastions of left-wing movements with strong participation of women in feminist organisations. In each instance, the US supported military coups and CIA-led counterinsurgencies to destroy any mass resistance to elite capture or empire. The most devastating counter-insurgency was orchestrated in Indonesia, where the US-supported military dictatorship of General Suharto killed almost a million people in 1965 as part of its battle against ‘communism’, an event conveniently pushed to the margins by the dominant Western narratives on the cold war.
Marx noted that the 19th-century European bourgeoisie could no longer act rationally, as the relentless pursuit of profit accelerated the exploitation of human beings and nature. It produces a class that not only becomes a parasite on society, but its propensity to capture, exploit, subjugate and alienate others creates a deranged outlook in which dehumanisation plays a decisive role. The horrors of colonialism have to be viewed from this lens, where the dismissal of entire societies as ‘barbaric’ opened the gates for the ruthless forms of barbarism unleashed on the colonised world, including slavery and genocide.
This historical structure of the modern world has produced a ruling elite that speaks in the name of justice, democracy and women’s rights, while indulging in grotesque forms of exploitation, colonial wars and sexual violence. They have pushed war and regime change on countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, brutally exploiting their resources while condemning hundreds of thousands of people to their death without any remorse.
It is not a coincidence that Libya, once the most developed state in Africa, became a centre of sex-slave trade and trafficking across the region. These same elites have obfuscated decades of scientific research into the existential threat posed by climate change, making humans and the planet disposable as they plan an escape into outer space.
The Epstein files show that we are dealing with a ruling elite which is not only morally bankrupt but also deranged in how it views human beings and societies outside its inner circle. The alienation of this ruling cabal from the rest of society is palpable, even as it maintains its parasitic control over the politics and the resources of the world. While shocking, it was nonetheless not inconceivable that a ruling order that was built on slavery and genocide and that only recently fueled the mass killing of children in Gaza was also involved in the trafficking of children.
Capitalism’s contemporary crisis has become a civilisational crisis, undermining even the formal rules that undergirded an exploitative global order. We have entered the reign of sociopaths who have no empathy for humanity. Everyone can see that the emperor is both naked and a vile predator.
The case against Western imperialism has never been stronger, and the need to break the power of the global elites has never been more urgent. We owe this to our children.
The writer is a historian, the general secretary of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party and a member of the Tehreek-e-Tahaffuz Ayin-e-Pakistan.
