Best thesis I’ve read to explain this facet of oligarchy. Thanks also for sharing Gambetta’s work. Jon Elmer was right, with respect to your diverse thinking. I think this unofficial anti-genocide academy, here, is led and followed by diverse thinkers.
On rituals of humiliation, Syme wrote “Behind every monarchy lurks an oligarchy.”
The oligarchs don’t want a competent and independent monarch? Right, the peasants will bypass the oligarchs in desperation and appeal to the king. He can only do so much, he’s not a communist, and if he does anything he risks being killed or overthrown. And that’s why the Roman Republic was founded, despite what oligarchic propaganda would have us believe. Same principle applies to modern rulers in the West.
To tie your article to the resistance, now we all know why certain leaders are demonized. Anti-monarch and anti-oligarch leaders who refuse rituals of humiliation. A revolutionary. I’m neither Muslim nor communist. Maybe I should be! Thank you Mao, Lenin, Ayatollah, Castro, Kim il Sung, Al-Assad (senior especially, junior too), Nasrallah and Sinwar for refusing the West’s poisonous gifts, arming your people, and fighting the empire. I tell you the West really hates a colonial people who is not only decolonized but capable of fielding a conventional army to drive their mercenary hordes and fanatical auxiliaries into the sea. Honored to have visited south Lebanon to pay my respects to Nasrallah’s shrine in Dahiyah, who was assassinated for being impossible to humiliate.
No, I can't! In the UK, most of those elites(?!) go to boarding schools where those humiliation rituals take place, meaning they're exposed to those rituals from very young. On top, they don't grow up with their families. I don't think that you can expect them to act based on usual sense of love, compassion, empathy or moral even. This is not to justify their actions, but as you said, they are "0" competent, nothing more than ego maniac. Very harmful beings on the earth.
Justin has cleverly compiled the relatively well documented tip of the iceberg (English boarding schools, Epstein's Lolita Express cottage industry...) of elite depravity.
Packaged in the tried-and-true Mafia theory of ... well, the oligarchy as a whole. What's not to like?
Now there is a temptation to extrapolate the rest of the iceberg from these examples... There is a certain aesthetic to it, Sopranos meet Bond villains, "Wolf of Wall Street" kind of vibe.
It is really hard to dismiss this and I certainly won't ;-). Still, it is all too easy to imagine an underlying organisation, even a kind of intentionality behind all of this depravity: "This is an elite that wants nothing more than [...]".
That's the part I'm not so sure about. We just established that this elite is an inbred mediocracy that values incompetency. Thus the rest of the iceberg likely is merely more and pettier depravity: sordid? yes, but too banal enough even for Hollywood. coordinated? maybe not so much (unless someone suggests taxing their wealth).
I am reminded of an essay by David Graeber prompted by the MeToo movement:
For context, at the time Dominique Strauss-Kahn was director of the IMF ["the enforcer of the creditors" -> more Mafia language...] and made noises about reforming it for the benefit of the people. At this very point the IMF, that paragon of ethics, coincidentally had to to sack him over his involvement in a sex scandal. I'll just quote the beginning paragraphs:
"A week or two after the then IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for sexually assaulting a chambermaid in a posh New York hotel in 2011, there was another case when an Egyptian businessman was briefly arrested for a similar assault at another such New York hotel. This first struck me as puzzling. It could hardly be a copycat crime; considering the drama surrounding the arrest and travails of DSK, it was inconceivable that anyone would see this and say: “Oh good idea, I’ll attack a chambermaid as well.” Then it dawned on me.
The only logical explanation was that businessmen, politicians, officials and financiers rape, or attempt to rape, hotel workers all the time. It’s just that normally, those assaulted know there’s nothing they can do about it.
In DSK’s case, someone – for whatever complex political reasons – must have refused to make the usual phone call. There was a scandal. As a result, when the next assault took place, the survivor must have said to herself, “Oh, so does this mean we actually are allowed to call the cops now if a customer tries to rape us?” and acted accordingly. And sure enough this is precisely what turned out to have happened. (In the end, both women were silenced, and neither man convicted of any crime.)"
The gangs “maras”in El Salvador, children in the street rape, kill in order to belong. This was at the beginning and the tattoes.
Then the drug lords made good use of their hierarchy and inner organization.
Ik keep wondering …..
I heard mohammed El Kurd say: that jews must disentangle judaism from zionism. It is no one else’s task.
From this thought i tell myself that christians need to disentangle christianism from zionism; that is our task. And this brings me back to your comment. How big a scandal i a child life’s worth?
What has the catholic church done that it will fall apart if it openly denounces israel and calls people to action( BDS).
Complicity in this genocide by the christian institutions is undeniable and I am not even talking of the crazy xionists evangelicals.
Unhurd (https://unherd.com/2025/06/musk-has-lost-his-maga-gamble/) published an editorial about how Elon was lucky at the business equivalent of Russian roulette. Typical for the anti-Russian fever of the UK, the author completely missed the point that wealth is like body armor, the more one accumulates, the more bad luck streaks don't matter, until one buys so much armor that the political system fixed the game so there are no bullets when it's your term, and all the cambers are full when it is your opponent. Clueless. Luck is an absolute requirement below a certain line, and above it it quickly fades. (edit: Most of the class listed in the article are more or less around the 0.0001% give or take a zero, they got to the point of needing this sort of humiliation cum Fratboy hazing by the arrangement of luck and armor. The 0.000001% are there by ancestors who knifed Noah and threw his family overboard so they could seize so much of it at the basement floor pricing, what's a little pederasty compared to recreational genocide every century or so).
Riffing on your note about Jeffrey Epstein. As a Mosad asset, his customers were buying more than just illegal sex, they also got extra protection, depending on how valuable they could be to Mosad and the real, top line elites in the USA and Israel exerting influence on Mosad. Sometimes, ala Robert Kraft, they'd get a kick to the groin for going off campus for sex because that threatened the investment.
All kind of doors opened and dirty deeds done to protect the investment, money matters not. The current vocal acts of Law Firms and Investment Banks (ala Ackman) to blackball brightest and best Ivy League graduates if they even have a whiff of pro-Palestine about them, regardless of the long term negatives on their firms profit margin demos that these rent extracting barons despite their billions are still servants to even richer, deeper interests.
Among all the commentaries I have read in recent years about the power structures in western societies, this is perhaps the most chilling … real nightmare fuel
"A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor - other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness."
Best thesis I’ve read to explain this facet of oligarchy. Thanks also for sharing Gambetta’s work. Jon Elmer was right, with respect to your diverse thinking. I think this unofficial anti-genocide academy, here, is led and followed by diverse thinkers.
On rituals of humiliation, Syme wrote “Behind every monarchy lurks an oligarchy.”
The oligarchs don’t want a competent and independent monarch? Right, the peasants will bypass the oligarchs in desperation and appeal to the king. He can only do so much, he’s not a communist, and if he does anything he risks being killed or overthrown. And that’s why the Roman Republic was founded, despite what oligarchic propaganda would have us believe. Same principle applies to modern rulers in the West.
To tie your article to the resistance, now we all know why certain leaders are demonized. Anti-monarch and anti-oligarch leaders who refuse rituals of humiliation. A revolutionary. I’m neither Muslim nor communist. Maybe I should be! Thank you Mao, Lenin, Ayatollah, Castro, Kim il Sung, Al-Assad (senior especially, junior too), Nasrallah and Sinwar for refusing the West’s poisonous gifts, arming your people, and fighting the empire. I tell you the West really hates a colonial people who is not only decolonized but capable of fielding a conventional army to drive their mercenary hordes and fanatical auxiliaries into the sea. Honored to have visited south Lebanon to pay my respects to Nasrallah’s shrine in Dahiyah, who was assassinated for being impossible to humiliate.
Thanks for writing your article. Very helpful.
No, I can't! In the UK, most of those elites(?!) go to boarding schools where those humiliation rituals take place, meaning they're exposed to those rituals from very young. On top, they don't grow up with their families. I don't think that you can expect them to act based on usual sense of love, compassion, empathy or moral even. This is not to justify their actions, but as you said, they are "0" competent, nothing more than ego maniac. Very harmful beings on the earth.
Justin has cleverly compiled the relatively well documented tip of the iceberg (English boarding schools, Epstein's Lolita Express cottage industry...) of elite depravity.
Packaged in the tried-and-true Mafia theory of ... well, the oligarchy as a whole. What's not to like?
Now there is a temptation to extrapolate the rest of the iceberg from these examples... There is a certain aesthetic to it, Sopranos meet Bond villains, "Wolf of Wall Street" kind of vibe.
It is really hard to dismiss this and I certainly won't ;-). Still, it is all too easy to imagine an underlying organisation, even a kind of intentionality behind all of this depravity: "This is an elite that wants nothing more than [...]".
That's the part I'm not so sure about. We just established that this elite is an inbred mediocracy that values incompetency. Thus the rest of the iceberg likely is merely more and pettier depravity: sordid? yes, but too banal enough even for Hollywood. coordinated? maybe not so much (unless someone suggests taxing their wealth).
I am reminded of an essay by David Graeber prompted by the MeToo movement:
https://davidgraeber.org/articles/i-didnt-understand-how-widespread-rape-was-then-the-penny-dropped/
For context, at the time Dominique Strauss-Kahn was director of the IMF ["the enforcer of the creditors" -> more Mafia language...] and made noises about reforming it for the benefit of the people. At this very point the IMF, that paragon of ethics, coincidentally had to to sack him over his involvement in a sex scandal. I'll just quote the beginning paragraphs:
"A week or two after the then IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for sexually assaulting a chambermaid in a posh New York hotel in 2011, there was another case when an Egyptian businessman was briefly arrested for a similar assault at another such New York hotel. This first struck me as puzzling. It could hardly be a copycat crime; considering the drama surrounding the arrest and travails of DSK, it was inconceivable that anyone would see this and say: “Oh good idea, I’ll attack a chambermaid as well.” Then it dawned on me.
The only logical explanation was that businessmen, politicians, officials and financiers rape, or attempt to rape, hotel workers all the time. It’s just that normally, those assaulted know there’s nothing they can do about it.
In DSK’s case, someone – for whatever complex political reasons – must have refused to make the usual phone call. There was a scandal. As a result, when the next assault took place, the survivor must have said to herself, “Oh, so does this mean we actually are allowed to call the cops now if a customer tries to rape us?” and acted accordingly. And sure enough this is precisely what turned out to have happened. (In the end, both women were silenced, and neither man convicted of any crime.)"
Brilliant! Very clever analysis 👏👏👏
"Can they be trusted to solve the problems of the world?" Might this be why so many problems of the world persist even?
Pedocracy™️
The gangs “maras”in El Salvador, children in the street rape, kill in order to belong. This was at the beginning and the tattoes.
Then the drug lords made good use of their hierarchy and inner organization.
Ik keep wondering …..
I heard mohammed El Kurd say: that jews must disentangle judaism from zionism. It is no one else’s task.
From this thought i tell myself that christians need to disentangle christianism from zionism; that is our task. And this brings me back to your comment. How big a scandal i a child life’s worth?
What has the catholic church done that it will fall apart if it openly denounces israel and calls people to action( BDS).
Complicity in this genocide by the christian institutions is undeniable and I am not even talking of the crazy xionists evangelicals.
Thanks Justin!🌻🌻🌻
Is Tulsi Gabbard a good example of someone who is willing to gradually humiliate herself in public to get to the top?
Unhurd (https://unherd.com/2025/06/musk-has-lost-his-maga-gamble/) published an editorial about how Elon was lucky at the business equivalent of Russian roulette. Typical for the anti-Russian fever of the UK, the author completely missed the point that wealth is like body armor, the more one accumulates, the more bad luck streaks don't matter, until one buys so much armor that the political system fixed the game so there are no bullets when it's your term, and all the cambers are full when it is your opponent. Clueless. Luck is an absolute requirement below a certain line, and above it it quickly fades. (edit: Most of the class listed in the article are more or less around the 0.0001% give or take a zero, they got to the point of needing this sort of humiliation cum Fratboy hazing by the arrangement of luck and armor. The 0.000001% are there by ancestors who knifed Noah and threw his family overboard so they could seize so much of it at the basement floor pricing, what's a little pederasty compared to recreational genocide every century or so).
Riffing on your note about Jeffrey Epstein. As a Mosad asset, his customers were buying more than just illegal sex, they also got extra protection, depending on how valuable they could be to Mosad and the real, top line elites in the USA and Israel exerting influence on Mosad. Sometimes, ala Robert Kraft, they'd get a kick to the groin for going off campus for sex because that threatened the investment.
All kind of doors opened and dirty deeds done to protect the investment, money matters not. The current vocal acts of Law Firms and Investment Banks (ala Ackman) to blackball brightest and best Ivy League graduates if they even have a whiff of pro-Palestine about them, regardless of the long term negatives on their firms profit margin demos that these rent extracting barons despite their billions are still servants to even richer, deeper interests.
DSK ...
Among all the commentaries I have read in recent years about the power structures in western societies, this is perhaps the most chilling … real nightmare fuel
"A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor - other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
They are degenerates… all military people need to stand down