Beneath the uniforms, costumes of power or the suits of fashionable exuberance lurks naked flesh. Often flabby and unimpressive. The victims of such know the putrid stench on their breath, the sickly odour of sweat, the repulsive effluent of discharge as it penetrates where it’s unwanted. The predators are human. Nothing more. Government, wealth and ‘the system’ suggest otherwise. To their victims, whose bodies quiver in innocent disdain, blood running from where they have been stabbed, there is seldom justice. Wealth, power ensures such.

When an individual man, the unexceptional, pins and takes their victim, the brutal act is generally easier to punish. The paid agents of government do so with a self righteous assertion, ‘justice is done.’ Should the brutal act involve power, the rich, the anointed important, then those same uniformed paid agents of government will bury, redact and make sure the indignities are lost or forgotten.

The system, government is too important. The power base itself requires preservation, so those slobbering beasts from within, are generally protected, or act with confident recklessness because they, unlike their victims and the commoner, understand the nature of power. It’s absolute. Not because of law, or because it’s enforced by mostly men with guns. Because it’s believed to be so. Too many profit from it, they are dependent upon it. Morality or the pretence of it is purchased or willed away, with context. Bribery and blackmail or simply belief ensures justice is blind at seeing some victims because of who the violator is.

Humans can scroll past a dead child, knowing a sanctioned justification for their death. The child is not an individual but a member of a prescribed demographic, a “them.” Those killing the child are doing so with writ of law or the weight of policy on their shoulders. The killer may belong to a collective of familiars. “Look what you made our warriors do.” Or just as easily, “They deserved it.” They being a child unborn when the political wrong was conjured up.

When it comes to the rape of the innocent, most understand that taking a child against their will, or coercion itself is wrong. Except when politics, or religion or some perceived greater good is involved. It’s how countless people were able to look the other way and placate the lusts of Jimmy Saville and his peers as they went on decades long orgies of pillage. The ruination of lives a calculated cost the government, royalty and those profiting from his brand could tolerate.

From within the church, Catholic and otherwise, the many victims disregarded and those who would harm and abuse with unpious acts of rape and torture did so with official knowledge. The message of religious doctrine and importance of the church higher than the innocent victim. The faithful see any allegations as a slur against the faith, not that a bad man with wet penis in hand, their victim whimpering to a god who never hears their prayer. Apparently only his. How many Hail Mary’s per child?

Youth detention is polluted with the weeping “children” or “juveniles” incarcerated by the state, many abused and molested by the officers guarding them. The under age status of the youth is fluid, depending on their crimes, they are both too young to consent, or have the ability to make decisions for themselves but can also be punished and treated as if they should have known better. Any sexual violence they suffer, a shrug of indifference or a sigh of “fuck around find out,” as though justice is being served with each penile baton into their young bodies.

A fighting age male, is anyone old enough to hold an AK-47. Boys as young as ten, to be tortured or killed under the assumption they are warriors. Their existence in the proximity to a war zone, or any region map pointers conjure up, is enough to at times terminate them or validate their termination with the pretence, “fighting age male.” Governments at war drop the moniker of child when it comes to their victims. Is it now hate speech to bear witness to IDF soldiers killing children or to read about those raped by them?

Whether the Heiner affair, or the Franklin scandal or the ‘Family” killings each indulgent conspiracies bound close to uncertain facts. The mystery and intrigue of each is a miasma of legendary knowledge for school children to share. Adults expressing with confirmed authority. Cops and prison officers openly discussing, as if the very entity they protect and serve is complicit, that power and wealth owns justice. It’s a known fact, whether confirmed or not. Yet, they show up. The public still trusts. Even if they know what they don’t know. What they do know is that children are fodder for the powerful. Or predators. But so long as the predators are deemed important or attached to that which is most important, the government, then there is nothing to be done. So injustices become folklore and legends to be whispered.

In the Soviet Union, the terrible reign of NKVD head Lavrentiy Beria, was notorious. He was responsible for the suffering of countless victims of rape, torture and murder. Comrade Stalin, the dictator himself warned his own daughter to avoid Beria. Well aware of Beria’s predilection for children. Beria was useful to Stalin and the regime of terror that was the Soviet Union. Because of his usefulness, he and his agents could do as they pleased. Beria only met his justice once Stalin died. Suddenly cowards and fellow predators who had served and enabled found the bravery to kill him. Not out of any justice for the many victims, rather as an act of political self interest.

There are ominous images and footage of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, taping the shoulders of young girls and women. It is alleged his body guards and goons would take the girls where he could rape them. Over his forty plus year reign it’s unknown how many of such victims he “took”. It’s the domain of dictators to take victims, eating them as Idi Amin or Papa Doc were said to have done. The power of government giving these men absolute rule, what they may do with intimate terror, liberal democracies through the power of an executive or vote, can do en masse. Bombing cities, starving millions and waging war, is an impersonal act of savagery, except for the victims. Those in the distance see themselves as better, cleaner and more moral than a tinpot dictator who would carve his victims with his own sword. It’s more civilised to order a drone to blow a family to pieces from afar. Children included, their brutalised bodies draped with the words, “collateral” if any one cares to notice them at all.

The status of innocent is fluid. A child’s blood can be washed or cried over, depending on how it serves power and authority. People will vote for politicians whether they kiss babies, kill them or fuck them, so long as the politician promises the voting masses welfare and bullshit jobs, or whatever can buy ignorance.

Which brings us to the many allegations and claims surrounding Jeffrey Epstein and those who he provided facilities and the innocent for. Such people are able to do what they do because of the institutions of power allowed them to circumvent the magical realm of legalese and obligations government beats their populaces with, choosing to ignore whenever it suits a particular regime, or personality. The latest “dump” has outlandish claims, condemning, such as email exchanges to reports from witnesses who have made allegations in the most severe and extreme.

What is known is that law enforcement and legal masters sat and concealed this information. The apparatus of government protecting those considered too important and wealthy. Like the church, the reasoning perhaps being that distrust and a loss of faith among the masses is far worse than any need for justice. It’s such reasoning as to why whistle blowers are pariah and journalists face greater violence and legal coercion than ever. Why freedom of speech is under further attack, why the state is obsessed with not only censorship but surveillance. It’s with some hubris those claiming such measures are crucial in order to protect children or, to go after terrorists-criminals. Time and time again such measures are often used to target human rights organisations. And kids continue to be starved and blown to pieces in their endless wars.

Remember, “he didn’t traffic to anyone,” meaning to anyone like you. But above all else, justice is told to drop a case, because the violators of the innocent are above it’s pay grade.

The new information coming out will be used as content fodder by those interested and those who are only concerned with engagement. The nature and volume of such allegations and information can muddy the waters as to what is actually factual, and what’s a claim or a false witness statement. The very real evidence will be marginalised and down played. Or, dismissed. But let’s for a moment pretend all of it and more is true, absolutely and irrefutable, clear footage and images and credible sources blaring us all in the face. The fact that cops, and the legal lords and government covered it and enabled it. The fact that those named are important according to wealth status and political stature did such repugnant things. Would change what exactly? Is your government any better than those who served Stalin or Qaddafi?

There is a moment in history, a glimmer of optimistic reality. During his tyrannical narcissistic rant Nicolae Ceausescu, the head of state of Romania experienced the mob turn on him and his regime. The wider backdrop, the Cold War had been lost, the Soviet benefactor was sick and in it’s own death spirals. The mob booed. Then, he and his wife were shot. The same soldiers and cops who had terrorised in his name, who had made his rule absolute and had lived above that very mob, turned on the dictator. The tides had shifted. It turns out, power only exists because the common person allows it. The mob frightens the powerful, that’s why they must pay cops to protect them, surveillance and censorship exists to manipulate and deter. Welfare and debt, a means of bribery and dependency. Division between collectives incited to suggest the common person should hate one another, to be ruled over. The powerful, respond to the boos of the mobs, the disobedient dignity of the people, the proletariat is really where the power lays. But, few realise this. So, we tolerate indignities, injustices and the destruction of innocence.

Turns out, no matter how many bombs are dropped on kids. How many children are raped. How many are tortured. People go to work for the violent monopoly, so long as they get paid. More hands reach out for the welfare, because its all most know to do. The belief in the system remains, even if shaken. Just like a catholic must reason after mass, how many rosaries must one recite to pretend no boys were buggered against their will? Faith kept them in power. Devotion made them mighty. The innocent were failed, everywhere. In every country, because this is not just an Epstein related event. On smaller scales, or in the case of prison regimes like North Korea, a larger one, victims of power exist everywhere. But because the rapists are important and because the system, regime or church is so absolute and permanent, it will continue. And not even Jim can fix that. I doubt you would even want him to.

It’s hard to enjoy the writings of Franz Kafka, though in some of his story telling we find a reflection of the contemporary or perhaps a dirty glass panel into the past. In his book, The Trial, we experience a bureaucracy of inhumanity through the eyes of an unnamed man. He is arrested and prosecuted for an unspecified crime, taken on a journey where he has no rights or agency and is one in many victims of an oppressive system. To live in a world where one does not know or understand the law, and where the layers of administration are so great one is not even considered human, no longer seems a fiction. Then again, it did not then either for some places of the world.

When a fiction writer gives us these portraits we understand the context by which to view them, even if there is a similarity to our world. The story becomes allegory or even imitator of life. Many Soviet writers depicted the harsh incompetence and relentless misery found beneath the tyranny of the communist regime of Russia. There is no joy or satisfaction for the characters, let alone reader. These stories act as both warning and record. The truth of a reality, that even some today crave, so long as they are the managers and elites, not the peasantry and worker.

George Orwell sought to experience the world among the blades of grass and by knowing the people, common and real of the world. He was a child of the British empire, and in his youth joined the imperial service to know how it was administered. He hated imperialism because of it. In his time spent in the mines and factories of Wigan Pier, he came to know an England so close, but far from the aristocracy of rule and academic abstracts of illusory delusions. He felt in his hand the whip while in Burma imposing empire on the natives, his fingers and skin had been thick with coal and dirt in the Britain of the common person.

While fighting as an adventurer in Spain, he saw first hand the violence of war and the putridness of ideologies. In fighting the fascists, his comrades the Anarchists, Socialists, Syndicalists and whatever other left-wing reactionaries formed at the time, exhibited hypocrisy. Giving him a tasteful hatred of politics. These experiences culminated into his writings, Animal Farm and 1984. In this day we see how claimed principles and values are exchanged brutally in the need to ‘win’, or get revenge. There never was principles, just political struggle for power.

When Animal Farm was first published in 1945, during the war, it was received with modesty. Few publishers wanted to have anything to do with a book criticising their soviet allies. Ukrainian dissidents came across the book and requested to have it translated. Orwell granted them the rights for free and soon the book spread among the Eastern European territories. The US military authorities however confiscated copies and handed them over to their Soviet allies, along with thousands of Soviet and non-Soviet citizens, whose fates were shared with the copies of Animal Farm. To be destroyed.

It was most likely Orwell who first coined the term Cold War, and it was only once the former allies fixed their positions and settled into a frosty arrangement of belligerency that his writings became fashionable among the apparent liberal West. Other writers penned their warnings about the police state and authoritarian dangers, such as Ray Bradbury and his Fahrenheit 451 or Phillip K Dick’s Minority Report. Bradbury’s book warning about the destruction of books and words, much like Orwell did in 1984. While Dick introduced us to the concept of pre-crime. Where our intentions, thoughts and words can be used to predict whether we are criminals and threats to the State.

In the years before World War Two, when fascism was a brilliant idea to academics and intellectuals, books supposed a vision of the future when central planners and genius minds could steer and control society into a united vision. Just as others tinkered or fell in love with communism, those who benefited from state planning, wanted more of it. So long as others died while toiling over the shovels or choked in the factories, the proletarian dream was in fact a nightmare. Not in their fictions however, when minds revel in abstracts and make believe realities, the consequences are far from them. Many academics imagine such a world while their limp wrists and soft hands avoid the blistering necessity to make their plans come true.

After the second world war it was hard for those in the liberal West to make a serious argument for totalitarianism. When H G Wells wrote The Shape of Things To Come, the black shirts of Europe and America were intriguing and a counter balance to internationalist communism of the Bolshevik’s or the unfocused nature of liberalism. To be read after the war, most understood it to be a book of it’s time. Fashions change, even ideologically. It seems that fashion sense has returned.

The trend for dystopian fiction carried on into the late twentieth century, turning into a popular young adult genre up into the 2010s. And, just as the term young adult was retired to be the now all encompassing “child”, dystopian fiction has disappeared as a popular genre. Books warning us about the rise of police and surveillance states to the destruction of individual liberty became a fashionable dignity to be dropped. Passe to concern one self with the rights of others and self.

It’s cliché to claim the present is a reflection of the past fictions, to use terms like Orwellian or invoke Kafka. They are useful tools, even for those who have not read them, but still understand the gist of the concept. The trade off made when critical thinking and reason is dropped for comfort and dependency, is that we no longer have choices or even agency. Instead we are ruled by agencies, and governed as subjects and not as those who are supposed to have power over the government.

It turns out it was all a lie, like most stories we tell ourselves, just a myth to satiate an inability or unwillingness to change. Hannah Arendt, the historian and philosopher in her extensive research and writings on the subject concluded that authoritarian rule comes about when there is an erosion of freedom in the pursuit of stability, predictability and comfort. There is also a need in authoritarian systems to be in a struggle, to have an enemy. Whether this is racial, class or external, it’s a necessity to justify a powerful state and to constantly strip away freedoms.

Maybe people gave up on reading dystopia’s because a lot of them stopped seeing them as a bad place to be. Or, they only need to look into the screens of their devices, while they still can, to see feeds reminding them of the current outlawed words, actions or items. Or, to watch police killings, extrajudicial executions or forever wars. The fictions did try to warn us, and give us the language and concepts to frame an awareness and understanding of where things generally lead. Now as we leave our homes to be monitored by cameras, our messages read and our everything controlled, it’s called normal and apparently ‘the price to pay to live in a free society’. An Orwellian expression if their ever was one.

As I wrote in my previous blog on cinema, the story can still be told. Just as it may now, in the pages of unread or forgotten books and short stories. Surely the future is not for the robots to consume our literature and to devise thoughts and understandings of what could have been, to dream of electric liberty and dissent. Even Peter Thiel and Alex Carp refereed to fiction for their technocratic corporation, Palantir. It’s unlikely when Tolkien wrote his books which gave these men their surveillance and police state regime’s name, he could understand how far humanity would decay with it’s critical thinking and wisdom into an unheroic journey of dependency and obedience.

As is the case in fictional writings, all great villains need to believe that they are the good guy. That their ambition is the greater good, it’s for the betterment of all. At least, they claim or, or maybe originally did once believe. In reality, it’s less like this. The truth is, power and coercive institutions attract those with the worse kind of ambition. They are rewarded for it. We don’t need to open the pages of a fiction any more to read dystopia, or imagine the nightmare. We were wide awake when the blood dripped over the pages that tried to warn us all.