Poor Prince Andrew

I have never been particularly interested in the going-ons of the British royal family, having managed to escape the fascination that many of my fellow countrymen (or more correctly, countrywomen) developed in their early years. 

Like most children growing up in a far corner of the British Empire, my earliest contact with anything to do with the “family” was having to stand up at the end of each morning’s school assembly and belt out the words of “God save our gracious King”. My most lasting memory of those days comes from the time when I got “six of the best” from a senior prefect for not mouthing the words with sufficient enthusiasm. I can’t even claim that my failure was a deliberate rebellion, because I wasn’t conscious of my behavior, being rather lost in my happy memories of the previous day, when I had biked five miles up to the main road that led from the airport to join a crowd of thousands of flag-waving and cheering kids trying to get a glimpse of the real king, as a cavalcade of open limousines carried Danny Kaye on the way to his hotel in the city.

So, my sudden interest in the latest headlines dealing with the stripping by his brother of all Andrew’s vestiges of royalty comes not from any sense of affection or loyalty, but instead is coming from my long-lasting interest in how people’s minds can become obsessed with trivial subjects when there are far larger issues that are screaming out for attention and action.

The question I am asking is “What makes any connection with a private individual like Jeffry Epstein so much worse than sanctioned behavior by people who have real moral and legal authority?” All over the “enlightened” world, men and women who were directly invested with official endorsement from churches and schools have performed far worse acts than anything Epstein and his followers did, and rather than being prosecuted and thrown into jail, the relevant authorities turned their eyes away and both knowingly allowed the actions of the people they were in charge of to continue, and took deliberate actions to hide them from public view. Cardinals and bishops about whom there is irrefutable evidence of prior knowledge and cover-ups remain in office all over the world. Unlike Andrew, their family and friends haven’t been besmirched or vilified merely from their association with these criminals.

The levels of this immoral behavior are mind-boggling. Priests who have been caught “in flagrante” have been shunted around to different locations so that their bosses could hide themselves from the on-going crimes. Nuns who were charged with caring for unwed mothers and their children were systematically murdering them and hiding their bodies in mass graves, without ever being asked to account for the sudden disappearances of hundreds of people who have been charged to their care. I have to ask again and again – what makes Epstein such a special case?

It’s not possible to emphasize enough that Jeffrey Epstein was a vile and despicable person, who preyed on the vulnerability of young people who were drawn into his world of glitz and glamor that seemed to promise them a way out of their own ordinary and uninteresting lives. They were drawn like moths into a blazing light, surrounded by the people of power and influence who associated with him. And those people, rich and famous, had some psychological disease that allowed them to justify their own sick behavior that anyone with a good conscience would have recognized and been repelled by.

But what Epstein and his cohorts were doing was only a tiny dot on a far larger picture of sexual abuse that had been going on not just for a few years, but for decades. And while Epstein could never claim that he had some form of social endorsement, there were thousands of other men and women who had been invested with real authority who deliberately used their positions of trust to pull vulnerable children into their web of desire and gratification.

My own view of this runs on a parallel track with the narrative of Israel’s “crimes against humanity” and “genocide” in the was against Hamas. The world has fixed its gaze on this subject, gladly blocking out far more credible evidence of massive and more serious cases of mass murder, willful starvation, gender and child abuse in many countries. Just like Epstein, Israel is the “bad boy” that the media is glad to jump on. Just like the bishops and cardinals, the world turns its eyes away from facts that embarrass them, preferring to stare at a single point on the larger picture that satisfies some urge that they need to feel morally justified.