This week has seen two instances of what I’m inclined to refer to as “devil-related news.” It’s a rarity in our secular age, but there’s good reason to think that devils may be making a comeback.

It wasn’t long ago that psychologist and author Steven Pinker was assuring us that the “better angels” had taken over the reins of history and were leading us into a neoliberal utopia devoid of violence. A quick glance at the news should convince us that Pinker’s better angels have unequivocally yielded power to a host of fallen angels. You could say that Puritan poet John Milton was a prophet, who in his epic poem, Paradise Lost, described the triumph of the archangel Lucifer who, after leading a third of the angelic host in rebellion, successfully revolted against the divinity and established his headquarters in the underworld. From that infernal vantage point, with no other weapon than a forbidden fruit, he successfully corrupted the entire human race (which at the time consisted of two individuals: Adam and Eve). Ever since then, as the original couple went forth and multiplied (from two to eight billion), for Lucifer and his cohort of devils, it’s been business as usual.

This week’s hellscape began with a focus on the diabolical and is ending with the demonic. Monday’s infernal scoop turned around a deceased individual, sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Friday’s story from hell addresses a vaster and more serious, but not unrelated, demonic issue: I’ll call it “nuclear neo-liberalism.”

This week, the US Department of Justice released 3.5 million pages of the famous “Epstein files.” The world was finally treated to the first batch of an explosive trove that every official in the Trump administration and even a CNN data analyst had dismissed last year as “a nothingburger.”  The media are now feasting on the heavily redacted but nevertheless abundantly revealing titbits spread across the platter. And there’s plenty to digest, even if much of it appears nauseatingly indigestible.

Bannon and the Devil

One of the more spectacular morsels that has emerged is the video of a two-hour interview conducted by Steve Bannon. Most people remember him as Donald Trump’s evil genius back in his first US presidential term in 2017. The two-hour conversation was just a starter. It appears that Bannon recorded a full 15 hours of video with Epstein. These sessions were recorded shortly before the sexual predator and all-purpose spy was arrested in 2019. And therefore shortly before Epstein met a fate similar to that of his former mentor Robert Maxwell. According to one of Epstein’s own emails, though it was officially declared a suicide, Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell’s dad “was passed away” by his friends at Mossad.

The major passage from the interview that interests this Devil’s Advocate appeared at the very end, when Bannon confronts Epstein with the question: “Do you think you’re the devil himself?” Epstein blinks twice nervously before trying to dodge the challenge by making a joke about possessing a mirror. He then asks Bannon, “Why would you say that?” Some might perversely interpret that as meaning: “How did you find me out?”

The troops of the investigative media have begun a massive quest to determine just how Satanic Epstein may have been. But the real issue the more serious commentators wish to focus on is more complex. It concerns the level of complicity of all those prominent members of the cosmopolitan elite who fraternized with Epstein. Although many of the names have been redacted, it includes some unlikely suspects, including serious thinkers and academics such as Noam Chomsky. There’s even a connection with the promoter of our “better angels,” Pinker, who, apparently out of ignorance, contributed to Epstein’s legal defense that preceded his conviction as a sex offender in 2008.

The serious question many wish to see answered is this: What are the systemic forces in politics and the economy that enabled Epstein to bring all these people together, who thus appear to form a secret, self-protective geopolitical oligarchy motivated by greed, power and manipulative pleasure? Yes, Trump appears as a major player, as does Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and even Britain’s Labour Party political Svengali Peter Mandelson. His patent complicity with Epstein may well bring down the United Kingdom’s current prime minister, Keir Starmer. Epstein’s links with Israeli intelligence are now undeniable, but the influence and surreptitious activity he engaged in stretched across continents.

The public is finally becoming aware of how a class of visible and invisible power players have crafted and are running a system designed for their comfort, pleasure, greed and narcissism. We now need to look beyond the anecdotal and seek to discover and describe how their power articulates with what we still believe to be the legitimate political authority of our liberal democratic institutions. Democracy, like beauty, may well be in the eyes of the beholder, but we can see more clearly today that it’s also in the tight grasp of an invisible oligarchy.

Going nuclear: from the diabolical to the demonic

Diabolical characters like Epstein fascinate the public. That’s why the media will continue — for weeks, months and years to come — to milk the Epstein files for all they’re worth. Characters who appear as devils in disguise driving the plot of a suspenseful drama have always been popular. Just think of the character called Vice in the medieval morality plays and Shakespeare’s Iago in Othello. Or more recently, Keyser Söze, Kevin Spacey’s character in the 1995 movie, The Usual Suspects. Fun fact: Spacey had his own connections with Epstein.

But beyond the world of entertainment,  the world is facing a truly demonic and truly existential drama that has none of the sensationalism associated with Epstein’s circle of friends and associates. For that reason, it hasn’t managed to draw most of the media’s attention. The Financial Times is a notable exception. In Monday’s edition, it featured an article with the title, “A world without nuclear arms control begins this week.” A satirical journalist versed in black humor writing for Private Eye (UK) or The Onion (US) might be tempted (by the devil, of course) to append a subtitle after “…begins this week:” “And may end next week.”

Such satire would be no exaggeration. Every day, we hear serious analysts warning that within the next 24 hours, Trump may launch his threatened assault on Iran, whose government entertains a strategic global relationship with two well-equipped nuclear powers: Russia and China. It has two declared enemies, both nuclear powers: the United States and Israel. Who today can afford to forget the price paid for the assassination of a mere archduke a century ago?

In its coverage, FT offers some cold analysis of the drama we might expect once the last remaining brake on nuclear proliferation disappears. It outlines the history of the failed relationship between the world’s two most prominent nuclear powers throughout the course of the Cold War. Though many are tempted to focus exclusively on the question of the economic cost of a renewed arms race, the deeper issue of what FT calls “great-power atomic brinkmanship” concerns the increasingly fragile psychological state of a world that seems to have lost interest in maintaining guardrails of any kind.

This is where the link with the Epstein story becomes visible, on a cultural and psychological level. The serial sexual predator and so-called financial wizard epitomizes the kind of person who believes that his elevated status dispenses him from any of the constraints or limits that bind ordinary people’s behavior. The quest of such people for wealth, prestige and pleasure appears to them its own justification. It defines them as superior beings not subject to most social and legal constraints.

Though the scale is very different, there is a factor that links Epstein’s diabolical insouciance to the existential threat facing humanity due to the failure of today’s nuclear powers to defend historical guardrails. The FT article cites this common factor multiple times without reflecting specifically on its importance. The concept is quite simply “trust,” a traditional component required by every human culture, without which it will implode. Let’s examine some significant passages in the article:

“The treaty cessation brings to a close more than half a century of Moscow and Washington attempting, with varying levels of mistrust, to limit their respective arsenals.”

Note the author’s acknowledgement of “varying levels of mistrust” that obtained over the decades of the Cold War. Today, all “levels” have been abandoned. Mistrust alone has established its reign.

“Russian President Vladimir Putin has suggested that both sides could voluntarily continue to adhere to current limits when it expires. Donald Trump…has yet to formally respond.”

Mistrust has thus become the default position. When the hope of trust can only be “voluntary,” mistrust defines the norm.

“You cannot have a treaty that is better than the general status of your relationship. So the fact that there is no treaty is a reflection of what’s happening.”

This observation reflects the simple fact that we have reached the zero degree of trust. No one is surprised.

The article quotes former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, known for his extreme but often brutally realistic rhetoric.

“There have obviously not been enough positive signals from the American side. Better not to have any [new agreement] than one that just covers up the mutual lack of trust and sparks an arms race in other countries.”

Pavel Podvig, director of the Russian Nuclear Forces Project, appears hopeful but even when expressing his optimism concerning what is possible and systemically required, he appears to acknowledge the absence of trust.

 “It requires a fairly high degree of co-operation and trust and mutual respect. That is a good thing in this system.”

Matt Korda, associate director for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, sums it up in similar terms.

“The expiration of New Start is not really about New Start. It is about a broader pattern of mistrust and disinterest in arms control in general.”

Podvig understands the true stakes while noting that what he calls “the good thing” has been largely dismissed or forgotten.

“The value of New Start was not in the caps themselves but in this whole system of inspections, data exchange and notifications… It requires a fairly high degree of co-operation and trust and mutual respect. That is a good thing in this system.”

Have the kind of people who surrounded Epstein and who today exercise influence and power inside and outside our democratic institutions have even a vestigial notion of the value of trust? It doesn’t seem so. Trump’s “trusted” adviser, Stephen Miller, recently stated what he correctly describes as the philosophy of the Trump administration. He invokes what he sees as “the iron laws of the world” and explains that he’s talking not about our concept of governance and democracy, but about “the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” That may appear to violate traditional “American ideals,” but even among those who regret the open assault on democracy, it’s a sentiment that is widely shared. US President Joe Biden’s policies in many ways reflected the same belief system. Its allergy to diplomacy, which Trump has attempted to attenuate, demonstrated a profound lack of interest in building trust. 

Miller isn’t wrong in his analysis. It’s unlikely that Epstein, if he were alive today, would dream of contradicting him. Nor would Iago or Keyser Söze, if they were real people. The devils will have their day. Like Epstein’s fortune, they can assert that “they earned it.” For the rest of the world, as nuclear midnight approaches, we can sit back and wonder if our days aren’t numbered.

*[The Devil’s Advocatepursues the tradition Fair Observer began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more ofthe Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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