I owe my earliest seduction by literature not to classrooms or curricula, but to dog-eared paperbacks passed from hand to hand like contraband. That was until I started to earn money to satisfy an (unto today) insatiable desire to read and collect books.
James Hadley Chase was among the first to smuggle me into the intoxicating republic of words. Alongside Nick Carter’s pulp bravado, Barbara Cartland’s confectionery romances, and Agatha Christie’s clockwork whodunit mysteries.
Chase taught me that prose could be muscular, unsentimental, and ruthlessly observant of human vice.
I borrow the title of this piece from the man I learned used the street maps of American cities he never visited, not as nostalgia, but as a literary tool.
Chase wrote about a world stripped of its self-serving, self-constructed illusions. As I have written ad nauseam, Europe today deserves no gentler treatment.
When the latest tranche of court materials linked to Jeffrey Epstein was unsealed, the “respectable” classes of the West tried to yawn. “Nothing new,” they said. “Old allegations,” they muttered through their pliant media.
And that is precisely the point here. Whichever way we throw it around, there is something profoundly revealing about how little shock remains when the ruling elite of the West is caught fraternizing with moral sewage, and their predatory pedophile is revealed to the world.
Jeffrey Epstein was a convicted sex offender who, in 2008, secured a grotesque non-prosecution agreement that insulated unnamed “co-conspirators.” In 2019, he was arrested again on federal sex trafficking charges involving minors. He died in custody under circumstances so convenient that the phrase “institutional failure” now sounds like gallows humor.
His associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, a high-class socialite, was convicted in 2021 for sex trafficking and grooming underage girls for Epstein.
The documents were unsealed after a long battle, and to say it is shocking is an understatement. The venality revealed a banality of evil.
The names of people at the top echelons of Western societies were shown to be among the lowest in depravity. Disgraced Prince Andrew of Britain quietly settled a civil sexual assault lawsuit brought by Virginia Giuffre while denying the allegations. Bill Clinton, whose flights on Epstein’s plane were documented, denied knowledge of criminal conduct. Donald Trump, who once publicly praised Epstein and whose social interactions with him are part of the record, also denied involvement in wrongdoing. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, photographed entering Epstein’s townhouse, equally denied knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.
Europe lectures the world about the “rule of law,” yet when one of its own princes found himself entangled in the largest sex trafficking scandal of the century, the British establishment closed ranks. Andrew’s title was trimmed, his public appearances reduced, but the monarchy survives untouched. The system absorbed the scandal the way an old sponge absorbs spilled wine. The brother of the British king, allegedly involved in necrophilia, was never prosecuted in a country where shouting “Free Palestine” will get you a jail term.
His “Princeship’ was merely removed, and he reverted to a bombastic Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.
Epstein’s network was not an isolated carnival of depravity. It was the very corridor of power. Billionaires, politicians, Nobel laureates, intelligence-linked financiers, men and women who shape domestic and foreign policy, markets, war, and narrative, passed through the doors. Young girls from broken homes were trafficked into rooms where the most powerful elite of the Western world indulged in shocking Satanism that would shock a nation of savages.
The same West that moralizes and wax lyrical about “child protection” in Africa could not protect children in Manhattan, Palm Beach, London, Virgin, or Little St. James Islands, or Paris.
In the West, when ordinary men commit crimes, they are paraded in handcuffs, and sometimes footcuffs; but when the powerful and well-connected are implicated, they hire crisis managers and deploy their PR to control the media. When evidence surfaces, documents are sealed. When documents are unsealed, they are redacted to a ridiculous extent. When outrage cannot be contained, attention is redirected by telling us to move on or by rattling the saber against Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela.
Europe’s crisis is not simply geopolitical decline; it is moral insolvency. The post–Cold War European Union constructed an identity as a “normative power,” a garden of enlightenment surrounded by sheer barbarism. When Josep Borrell said openly, “Europe is a garden, the rest a jungle,” it was his colonial reflex that slipped out like a Freudian confession.
What kind of garden cultivates oligarchs who dine with child traffickers? What kind of civilization exports lectures on gender equality while shielding pedophile predators within aristocratic bloodlines and political dynasties?
We should not regard the rot in the Collective West as episodic; it is systemic.
As we have written in many articles on this blog, the West should hold no more allure for us in Africa; the Collective West has lost its shine.
Just look at the Ukraine war, where brainless European Nomenklatura outsourced hard power to Washington but wants to continue to posture as a moral and military superpower.
Even as Europe’s economies wheeze and citizens endure inflation while defense budgets swell, its leaders perform solidarity rituals and continue to dance to self-generated lullabies. Just look at Merz and Macron at the ongoing Munich Security Conference. Complete uneducated morons pantomiming world leaders.
The spectacle one sees about European leaders is a managerial class without sovereignty, and a moralizing class without moral authority. How could people with the integrity of famished hyenas give lectures on morality?
The Epstein affair is not an American scandal alone. It is a mirror held up to the transatlantic elite. The aristocratic British connection. The European financiers. The Davos circuit. The NGOs and think tanks are funded by the same philanthropic networks that insist they are guardians of virtue while ruthlessly trafficking children as sex objects.
Yet, the sanctimonious hypocrites continue to sanction African states for “governance failures.” They continue to issue travel advisories about corruption while their own corruption stinks to high heavens. They fund documentaries about exploitation in the Global South while their own capitals housed a trafficking ring that preyed on minors for years.
And where were the investigative titans of European journalism? Where was the moral clarity that erupts so quickly when the accused wears darker skin? Not surprisingly, the citadel of pedophiles, the BBC, which likes to pose as the great truth seeker, went to sleep as the Epstein scandals evolved.
Africa does not need lectures from a continent that has not reconciled with its colonial crimes, its racial hierarchies, its virulent racism, or its elite impunity. Asia does not need sermons from economies whose prosperity was fertilized by centuries of extraction. Latin America does not need governance tutorials from capitals that engineered coups and then call it stabilization.
When Europe’s record is tallied, Europeans will find that the cookie did not crumble because others envied it. It crumbled because it was baked with arrogance, ignorance, impunity, and the unshakable belief that consequences are for lesser men. It happened in the colonies. It is now happening in the heartland.
The rest of the world can listen to and respect Europe only when Europeans learn how to be honest and learn what integrity means. We are tired of duplicitous people giving u sanctimonious sermons.
Let’s end this piece with this lengthy quote from my GoTo foremost geopolitical analyst, Alistair Crooke: “After Epstein, nothing can continue as before: Neither the post war ‘never again’ values – reflecting sentiment at the end of bloody wars – and the widespread yearning for a ‘fairer’ society; nor the bipolar economics of extreme disparities in wealth; nor trust – after the exposed venality, rotted institutions and perversions that the Epstein files have shown to be endemic amongst certain of the western elite.
How to speak of ‘values’ against this background?
At Davos, Mark Carney made clear that the ‘rules order’ was but a tawdry Potemkin façade that was thoroughly known as false, yet the façade was maintained. Why? Simply because the deceit was useful. The ‘exigency’ was the need to hide the system’s collapse into radical, anti-values nihilism. To hide the reality that the élite circles around Epstein operated beyond moral, legal, or human limitations, to decide between peace and war, based on their base appetites.
The élites understood that once the hoi polloi knew the rulers’ complete amorality, the West would lose the architecture of moral stories that precisely anchor an ordered life. If the Establishment is known to eschew morality, why should anyone else behave differently? The cynicism would cascade down. What then would hold a nation together?
Well, only totalitarianism, most likely.
This mechanical way of thinking has played a large part in the third tier to the ‘Davos Rupture’ (after the intellectual demise and the collapse of trust in the leadership). Mechanical thinking based in a deterministic pseudo-scientific world view led to economic contradictions which prevented western economists from seeing what was under their nose: a hyper-financialised economic system placed entirely at the service of the oligarchs and insiders.
No failure of our economic modelling, however great, “has weakened the vice-like grip of the mathematical economists on the policies of governments. The problem has been that Science, in that binary cause-and-effect mode, could not cope with either the chaos or the complexity of life” (Aurelien). Other theories – other than Newtonian physics – such as quantum or chaos theories, largely have been excluded from our mode of thinking.” – https://strategic-culture.su/news/2026/02/09/the-slow-epstein-earthquake-the-rupture-between-the-people-and-the-elites/
©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀ (1st Dan)
(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Geopolitical Analyst.)
My Mission: Ignorantia et stultitia delendae sunt / Ignorance and stupidity must be destroyed.
I am an unapologetic Pan-Africanist who is unconditionally opposed to any form or manifestation of racism, fascism, and discrimination.
I thank you for reading my articles and watching my podcasts. I will continue to make them free, and I will not accept advertisements. But you can show your appreciation by pledging a future subscription. You won’t be charged unless you enable payments.
Your support is invaluable. If you enjoy my articles and podcasts, I would greatly appreciate it if you would subscribe to my Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com to support my work and help me continue providing you with detailed, well-researched, and thought-provoking content like this. Help post URLs to my articles in the comment sections of your favorite YouTube channels, podcasts, and blogs.
