Unleash the power of the Epstein files

All our gang, onto ... whom? Who’s in our gang, and who are we onto?

Image: 21 May: the Circassian Day of Mourning. An annual remembrance march of the Circassian genocide by the Circassian diaspora in Turkey.¹

The basic understanding about any policy, health for instance, is that, when we get sick, we can go to hospital to get better, that medicines will be available for helping us get better, and there will be doctors and nurses to tend to us, ambulances to bring us to where we can be cured, and that the whole thing is designed to get us back to work or to our families as soon as possible, in order to make way for the next patient. That is the understanding. And, that, on the whole, is how it works. It is not deceptive. So that, if it takes a while to get seen by the doctor, or if the ambulance takes a few hours in coming, or if someone makes a mistake and you die as a result, that’s no one’s fault. These things happen—to err is human. That is pretty much how we explain the blips on our charts away. Fundamentally, everything works as it is supposed to work, and occasionally it goes awry.

Sometimes, someone will come along and make wild claims as to how much, exactly, is going awry. Sticking with the medical example, there are theories that the injections many of us had administered during the Covid-19 pandemic were not only needless, but contained molecules that provoke cancers.² Or that lock-downs and face masks did nothing to stem the spread of the virus. Or the somewhat obvious observation that, in a health situation where lots of patients get sick, the careers of doctors are secure and, if junior doctors’ pay is kept at a pitiful level, so few will become medics that the professors and consultants will tighten their control over the profession. Every profession has its winnowing-out procedures, after all, and not every criterion for acceptance into the higher echelons in any sector is based on knowledge of the craft and excellence in its execution. Other criteria can just as easily play a role, and so many doors are opening in our world at this time that the flood of light being shed on professional practices, including politics, is making it difficult for our eyes to attune. At the moment, we are all a little blinded by the light.

The big revelation we are trying to drink in right now is, of course, Epstein. I have myself watched the Steve Bannon interview of Jeffrey Epstein, in part at least, and I’ve seen analyses of it and it’s all very interesting. Dull, but interesting. My own view, and it’s only my view, is that the financier Jeffrey Epstein was no financier. He didn’t have the first idea about high finance. I’m pretty sure he enjoyed sex with young girls, and I’m pretty sure that there was some kind of trafficking going on, although not quite in the backs of articulated lorries.

The e-mail revelations in the last document drop point to two kinds of correspondents: those who wanted Epstein to provide them with sex, and those who wanted him to provide business contacts. Some, perhaps both. But what the correspondence revealed so far does not seem to indicate is any blackmail relationship. The third parties seem, by contrast, to be gagging to have contact with Epstein (with the possible exception of Sarah Ferguson, who accuses him of befriending her only to get at AMW). If we’re to make a choice between whether JEE was a lazy Susan (a) of child sex or (b) of financial chicanery, and if we could choose only one of those, my money would be on (b). I think we’d be silly not to follow the money. The child sex was not unimportant, but if you turned up to a negotiating meeting and there was orange juice on the table to refresh your palate, that’s the kind of importance the child sex would ultimately represent: a very nice cherry on the cake. Like business gifts, complimentary biros, perhaps a bottle of champers for the road home, all to smoothen the cogwheels of money.

In his book Everybody Loves Our Dollars, Oliver Bullough talks about a train journey he made to an outlet village in Bicester in Oxfordshire. He noticed that nearly everyone on the train was Chinese. Travelling to an outlet village to buy, at no small price, goods of which most had in fact been manufactured in their home country. He put the figure of sales, based on what he saw in his own carriage, the length of the train and the rail schedule to Bicester and back, at daily sales of £6 million. Just by rail, not including coaches and other forms of transport. He made a point of it to a source of his in the police.

“Well, a lot of them obviously just like shopping, and it’s true that you can buy cheap designer stuff there,” he said. “But the rest of it is money laundering.”

Image: Laundry day.

Unlike with regular laundry done in public (like on the River Ganges), money laundering is, if it’s to be successful, discreet. Unseen and unnoticed. That’s because it’s illegal, of course. But murder is often committed in public precisely so that everyone knows you’ve done it. Like in Gaza. Money-laundering does not get displayed so spectacularly. Its purpose is that it should remain undetected.

Regular readers will appreciate how vindicated I felt when, as I read Bullough’s book, I encountered this parallel:

You can think of those three stages [of money-laundering] as loosely equivalent to the three Godfather movies: in the first instalment, Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone makes his mark; in the second he builds up his business; in the third, he goes legitimate.

You will learn a lot about our present-day world by watching those three Godfather movies. There are two scenes in that trilogy that involve sex:

• where Pat Geary, the Nevada senator, finds a dead hooker in his bordello bedroom and can’t remember a thing about how she got there;

• where a bunch of contacts and Michael get taken by Michael’s brother Fredo to a live-sex floor show on Cuba.

With Geary, the sex is a device that allows the Godfather to control the senator. In the Cuban sex club, Michael has zero interest in what’s happening on the stage. He pays attention to his brother, and what his brother says ultimately gets him killed, for treason. Sorry, high treason.

In The Godfather, sex is a means to control, and can be a means to detect dishonesty. But sex is not there for pleasure. If you think that I’m making this up and that The Godfather is nothing but a well-made piece of fiction, I would advise you to sit for a while in a quiet place and think back on your own sex life.

The recent heist at the Louvre Museum in Paris, where royal jewels were stolen in a brazen break-in using a lift truck, is a bit of a riddle. It was very daring and a lot could have gone wrong. But the jewels have not been recovered. I said before that this is because either the thieves haven’t the first clue what to do with them, or they have been very well fenced. I personally don’t think you carry out such a stunt and then sit and wonder what to do with the loot.

If you want to know how a simple observation about the quantity of goods purchased in an English market town by foreign tourists translates into a conclusion that something like the amount spent by governments worldwide on defence is represented by the quantity of cash that gets money-laundered each year (about two to five per cent of GDP), then read Bullough’s excellent book, but his reaction to the police contact’s conclusion was this:

I would like to say this was like one of those moments when a cartoon character has a blinding insight and a bulb flicks on above her head. But it was actually the opposite of that … The insight was not into how much I knew, but how little.

For the average man and woman in the street, the retort will be Tell me, how much do I need to know? That is the more germane question. Whether as cavemen, serfs, industrialists, politicians, labourers, farmers, inventors or whatevers, besides the certainty of rain and taxes we can add one other: as the Scots football manager Bill Shankly once said on camera, “We wiz robbed.” And many people don’t mind being cheated every now and again as long as:

1. they remain unaware of the fact; and

2. they are left with enough to buy the things in life that they deem make life worth living.

So, if you’re pretty well off and don’t need to worry about how you’ll pay your bills, that’s number 2 taken care of, so all we need to do is ensure that you never find out how much money-laundering is going on. If that’s you, then forget Oliver Bullough’s book. And if you practise money-laundering, you can forget it as well, since you already know what’s in there. The rest of us are left with a quandary, however: if we were to read Bullough’s book, and understand it and get righteously indignant about the state of the world he describes, what, then could we do about it? To this there are three answers:

1. nothing, but at least I will die a wiser person;

2. nothing, not about money-laundering in particular. But I will join the throng of those who seek accountability, not just in politics or banking or tourist shopping, but throughout the systems of our world. I will want to change the system.

3. I can go and string myself up from a rope.

Money laundering is the most effective example of trickle-down economics. Daft, isn’t it? Most of us will simply say that we know it goes on, can do nothing about it, but it is part of a system that secures our livelihood, so what’s to knock it? Well, remember when I said that people only care about pollution when it affects the river they swim in?³ But they get angry at paedophiles and want to see them punished, without actually spending much time thinking about the victims? What makes Epstein different is that this blasé attitude to money-laundering may yet turn to a tidal wave of anger, but not in and of itself at the money laundering, the cake as it were, but at the cherry, the child molestation that accompanies it.

Money laundering gets shrugged at so often because the general public cannot see itself as being the victim. Once it is the victim—of any crime—they will seek to punish the perpetrator. But, until then, it gets shrugged at, like with pollution and the river they swim in. But child molestation is a crime that makes the general public want to punish the miscreant, even if they don’t know the victim. There is in fact little concern for the victim, all focus is on the criminal. The Epstein case may just, who knows, move people to want to punish the perpetrators of money-laundering, of which they are themselves the ultimate victims even if they are unaware of the fact, because in that case their desire to do so stems from the associated crime of child molestation, which focuses on the criminal, and not the victim. The trouble is that, up to now, the public does not have much evidence. And the government they voted into power, which does have the evidence, doesn’t want to release it or to act on it. The lack of evidence, as it were, leads many to conclude that, just like medicine, everything works the way it should, just with the odd blip.

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When we arrive at a conclusion that so many things are going wrong that something else is afoot (we don’t know what, except that other considerations start to impinge on that understanding that everything works), most of us feel like boats set adrift on the ebb tide: whither we shall float is all a matter for the eddies and currents that carry us along, as well as the anchor to which we thought we were lashed. No one likes to float with the tide, so we tend to lend credence to the Occam’s Razor explanation (i.e. the simplest): that our well-being is in good hands and all we need to do is exactly what we’re told to do.

These are the two mantras with which I was brought up:

• keep your nose clean and your room tidy;

• look after number one;

and it was never suggested to me that doing the one might be incompatible with doing the other. Those who micro-manage us are said to tell us which finger to pick our noses with, but so much of our world has now become so confusing that we ourselves ask which finger we should be using. Or we go and ask a group of strangers, who tell us to use our big toe, to which we respond with, “I knew I was being led up the garden path all that time!”

My own approach to group chat is to assume that the consensus is not necessarily wrong, but it does make me pause to ask why it is the consensus. This process started a few years back when an acquaintance posted about two Frenchmen in Australia:

In 2019, two French tourists, young men in their late teens or early twenties, captured a wild animal in Australia and set fire to it. They were arrested for their offence against the law, tried, fined approximately 4,000 Australian dollars, and required to leave the country. They were set to return home to France. And that was that. The animal victim of their crime was beyond recovery and Justice had meted out her justice to the two miscreants, from which, it was hoped, they had learned a lesson in life, that being the purpose of punishment.

Someone within my “friends” circle on Facebook saw a report of the incident and highlighted it in a post, drawing attention to these “despicable French tourists.” I commented: “Why does it matter where they came from?” I received the courtesy of a reply: “So that people know where they are.” She called upon all and sundry to compound the judicial punishment administered to the two men with social ostracism once they had arrived back on French territory. My retort—that justice had already been done by the Australian courts—was not happily received, and the person in question maintained that it was only right and proper that the men should be made to feel the disdain of society at large back in their home environment. This provoked a comment by a hitherto uninvolved party to the discussion, that “Injustice can be a feature of justice as administered by the courts; when administered by the mob, it always is.”

Now, I find the explanation so that people know where they are a tad disingenuous. The two men were French nationals and there’s a high likelihood their homes were in France, but France is actually a pretty big place. I’m not sure knowing where they are is made materially more specific by knowing even the country they live in. I think it smacked of xenophobia—anti-Frenchness—and, as the third party said, an incitement to mob violence. The person in question owns a four-storey town house in a select area of … I shall refrain from naming the location, lest you know where they are … and holds various degrees from top universities: wealthy, educated, refined, gaily pleasant company, and an inciter to mob violence. Moreover, the virulent reaction to the men’s act was, to their mind, entirely understandable, and the post was intended to garner messages of support. They did not appreciate my questioning of their motives, especially my allusion to the fact that the law of Australia had already dealt with the matter to the extent deemed necessary by the law: a fine, and expulsion from the territory.

Was I wrong to swim against this person’s stream of vindictiveness, above and beyond the law? Or should I have commented, “Quite right! Let us all take up cudgels and thrash these boys properly, not like the lily-livered, namby-pamby courts of Australia!”?

Back at junior school, we nine- and ten-year-olds would link arms around shoulders and form a human line, and we’d march like a weather front around the playground chanting “All our gang onto —” whoever’s name it was to be that time. All our gang. You joined the gang not because you especially wanted to be in it. You joined it because you didn’t want your own name to be how the chant ended.

I’m older now.

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Military leaders in Germany and the United Kingdom are telling us that we need to appreciate the moral necessity for intensifying our investment in defence, so as to face up to the threat posed by Russia. I agree. We should all be intensifying our investments in defence in preparation for the threat posed by Russia. If there’s a threat from Russia, that is.

We have been preparing ourselves against the Russian threat since 1945. Since they helped us, the British, the Americans and the other Allies, to win the Second World War. Once the war was won, Russia became the enemy and the Allies got together to sign the North Atlantic Treaty in order to secure Europe (that was the aim) against Russia. Russia is leading Richard Knighton and Carsten Breuer to talk of it as an uncomfortable truth about Europe’s security that presses a moral case for rearmament of the continent against the Russian peril. It’s not warmongering, they say.

I suspect that, if either one of these chiefs of defence, the one British, the other German, had issued their press release alone, it might have fallen on deaf ears, dismissed with a sceptical wave of the hand. But when both their names are emblazoned on the masthead, we sit up and take note. Chiefs of defence are, after all, there for our defence.

Why does Europe not like Russia? It sounds like a naive question and, to those for whom the answer is so blindingly obvious as to invoke a similar dismissive wave of the hand, it is. Why was Britain so keen to wrap its arms around the shoulders of America and chant all our gang onto …? In fact, why was it that we even went to war with Germany?

The fact that the capitalists in the west and the communists in the east joined forces to defeat Germany would indicate that the Allies were moved by ideological considerations, which puts fighting fascism up there with child molestation. Not, by far, the same level of morality, but the same motivation at source: because we think it’s a right thing to do, something we’re entitled to do. Some people wage war for money, some people molest children for money, but most people who fight fascism do so for the same reason that people molest children, which is simply because they hold it to be a worthy goal, something that they want to do, driven by their innate desires (N.B. a twisted innate desire is still an innate desire).

But fighting fascism when there’s nothing in it for you is harder to reason than even child molestation: what money is there to follow in doing that? The Soviets did expand their ideology after the war. There was Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, the Caucasus. So did the Americans, in Indonesia, Grenada, Chile and the aforementioned Korea and Vietnam. All the while, the west was convinced they’d backed the right horse, and I think they probably still do, despite mixed messaging from Secretary Rubio of the United States at Munich.

But Russia has been dismissed as the bogeyman of Europe, against whom we are all to link arms and parade in a line, chanting all our gang. After all, it’s they who invaded our bosom pals in Ukraine, so that makes things easy to decide. Doesn’t it?

It’s true that the U.S. was heavily integrated into European defence post war, strategically and financially, and that, after the fall of the U.S.S.R., eastern European countries sought protection within the shadow of the U.S. and N.A.T.O.; that most defence spending was by the U.S., in the U.S.; and that that which was spent outside the U.S. was spent in the U.S. ultimately. But why was the U.S. so keen on Europe’s security? For some benevolent reason? Because they held it to be a worthy goal? And why does the U.S. now seem to want to both abandon its European allies whilst there is a European war ongoing with the arch-enemy of old, and woo European allies to join some kind of fundamentalist crusade for the behoof of white Christian supremacy?

For many ordinary citizens, it remains incomprehensible that their governments should have actively resisted opposition to the genocide in Palestine. In fact, it is not difficult to comprehend that level of governmental insouciance at all. In another article to be put up here in a short while, I want to talk about three historical episodes that I believe demonstrate how some governments have in the past reacted to outrages in foreign parts: the Gadsden Purchase, Rhodesia and Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland. That article will look at why governments reacted the way they did to foreign events. In the case of the Gaza Strip, the question is why they didn’t. En masse, they didn’t, especially in light of U.N. Resolution 2803 of 17 November 2025.

The only faint opposition to that resolution came in the form of abstentions by China and Russia, each of which came with a memorandum explaining why they abstained. If you look for hope for Gaza, then forget it. Resolution 2803 hands Gaza to Donald Trump as definitively as the Berlin Conference of 1884 handed the Congo to King Leopold II of the Belgians. If you look for hope in humanity out of that resolution, then there is some to be had and it may pain you, but it is again to be had from the fact of those memoranda by China and Russia. I will not say that the west’s hopes should be invested in those two nations, but those two nations have given a glimmer of hope, not for Gaza, but in humanity. A glimmer that the rest of the world denied to Gaza.

Genocides are not frequent occurrences, but they are not rare. The French have been guilty, in Cameroon. The Germans have been guilty, with the Holocaust and in what became Namibia. The British were guilty, in Kenya. The U.S. were guilty in their own country. The Belgians were guilty in the Congo. The Russians were guilty in Circassia, the Burmese with the Rohingya, and the Turks in Armenia. You can read the narratives of these genocides: in particular, the elimination of 2 million Circassians by the Russian Empire was a catalogue of horror that translates into a playbook for genocide (the Winter Olympic stadium in Sochi, Western Circassia’s former capital, is built on thousands of dead bodies from that 80-year campaign against the Circassian people):

• decapitations, with heads displayed on pikes

• wholesale destruction of villages and infrastructure, crops and forests

• poisoning of water sources

• disembowelling of pregnant women

• targeting of children and infants

• burning victims alive

• authorised rape and mutilation

• trophy collecting of heads and other body parts

• starvation and famine

• organised deportation: 1,800 miserable people to a coffin ship, of which but a fraction arrived alive at the destination, in Turkey or elsewhere, if the vessel didn’t first founder in inclement weather

• artillery bombardment of defenceless citizens

• spreading of sickness and disease

• etcetera, etcetera

The Circassian genocide started in 1799 and went full power in 1864. That’s the significance of the date displayed by the marchers in the photograph, above. It was over by 1878. Fourteen solid years of murder. Out of the initial population, around three per cent were left. Around 1.5 million were killed, and about a half million perished whilst fleeing. The Circassians even sent a letter of petition to Queen Victoria, personally, begging for her intervention to stop the massacre.⁴ It went unheeded. The west has been committing, aiding and abetting genocide for a very long time. We need not be surprised at Gaza in the slightest.

But, like money laundering, the slaughter of foreign peoples does not affect us. We are not the victims, and so we care not for the victims. Even genocide cannot move us to want to question, investigate and punish the perpetrators. Only child molestation has that feral power.

So, with Epstein, let that power be unleashed.

1. By own - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15298465.

2. https://substack.com/inbox/post/165083544.

3.

4. In the name of God, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful.

Our most humble Petition to Her Magnificent Majesty the Queen and Emperor of England is to the effect that –

It is now more than eighty years since the Russian Government is unlawfully striving to subdue and annex to its dominions Circassia, which since the creation of the world has been our home and our country. It slaughters like sheep the children, helpless women, and old men that fall into its hands. It rolls about their heads with the bayonet like melons, and there is no act of oppression or cruelty which is beyond the pale of civilisation and humanity, and which defies description, that it has not committed.

We have not, from father to son, at the cost of our lives and properties, refrained from opposing the tyrannical acts of that Government in defence of our country, which is dearer to us than our lives. But during the last year or two it has taken advantage of a famine caused by a drought with which the Almighty visited us, as well as by its own ravages, and it has occasioned us great distress by its severe attacks by sea and land. Many are the lives which have been lost in battle, from hunger in the mountains, from destitution on the sea-coast, and from want of skill at sea.

We therefore invoke the mediation and precious assistance of the British Government and people – the guardian of humanity and centre of justice – in order to repel the brutal attacks of the Russian Government on our country, and save our country and our nation together.

But if it is not possible to afford this help for the preservation of our country, and race, then we pray to be afforded facilities for removing to a place of safety our helpless and miserable children and women that are perishing by the brutal attacks of the enemy as well as by the effects of famine; and if neither of these two requests are taken into consideration, and if in our helpless condition we are utterly annihilated notwithstanding our appeals to the mercy and grace of the Governments, then we shall not cease to invoke our right in the presence of the Lord of the Universe, of Him who has confided to Your Majesty sovereignty, strength, and power for the purpose of protecting the weak.

We beg Your Excellency [Sir Henry Bulwer] to be the medium of making known to the great British Government and to the glorious British nation our condition of helplessness and misery, and we have therefore ventured to present to Your Excellency our most humble petition. A copy of it has been submitted to the Sultan’s Government and to the Embassies of other Powers.

Signed by the People of Circassia. 29 Sheval, 1280 [7 April 1864]