ONE NATION UNDER BLACKMAIL pt. 1 - WHITNEY WEBB

Alright, now we’re talking. Getting into a year of long books, this one was 450 pages and is only part 1 of a series. And, really, this is an intro volume. The nominal topic of these books, Jeffery Epstein, doesn't really appear in this volume at all. After Epstein’s bizarre death in 2019 I, like many people, was deeply interested in what was going on with that guy, the deeper you looked into him, the stranger and stranger it got. His involvement with both Clinton and Trump are on the surface, but when you’d look further you’d find connections to Bill Barr and his father, Alan Dershowitz, basically all of Harvard and MIT, Chris Tucker, Adnan Khashoggi, Victoria’s Secret and the Limited, Too (big brands from the malls of my childhood), The Mossad and CIA, the list got longer and longer the more you looked into it the weirder and darker it got. Sadly, the whole affair has been basically ignored and shit-coated with right-wing conspiracy stuff that just adds his death to the #clintonbodycount and this gets non-right wingers to dismiss the whole thing, but I think there is a general consensus that something fucked up was going on with him that, briefly, gave us a window into the parts of the world we’re not supposed to see or understand. One was always hoping that someone would try to make sense of the whole thing, put all the pieces together into one place. Well, Whitney Webb is the first to try and, boy, did she come out swinging. Like I said, this book doesn't even really get into the Epstein stuff directly, instead, it begins around WWII and tries to trace various networks and overlaps between intelligence, both national intelligence agencies as well as private firms (which, as we see, significantly overlap), and organized crime. She starts with opium dealers who supported the KMT in China and the help they received along with Operation Underworld and the wartime collaboration with the Jewish and Italian Mafias to fight the Axis powers. The book follows these threads through Iran/Contra, the Inslaw affair, various drug running schemes, the Franklin Scandal and much more. Most importantly, it shows how these various scandals include the same interlocking cast of characters and, given the Epstein focus, it pays special attention to sexual blackmail. The stuff about various parties, from the Mafia to Trump Mentor Cohn having photos of FBI director Hoover sucking dick in a dress is a good example of this. There was a lot in the book that I knew about but much, much more that I did not. It is basically an encyclopedia of deep politics, and almost too handspinning to read straight through. The number of characters to keep straight and interlocking plots is tricky to handle, the book is constantly mentioning someone then saying that they will be discussed further in chapter so-and-so which makes the whole picture tricky to put together. However, that seems to be the point, all of this stuff can go on precisely because it is so complex and inter-locked, there’s a fantasy that there’s a grand-boss at the top pulling all the strings and if we could just understand them we’d have the whole thing figured out. Sadly, the truth is that there are hundreds of people and institutions all with competing interests and outlooks, all fighting and teaming up and backstabbing and blackmailing and scheming to increase their power and wealth. Webb has done a great service here, this book will be great to use as a resource to look up folks whenever one comes across a news story that seems “deeper” so to speak. Like I said, as a stand-alone book it’s a bit unfocused, jumps around a lot. As I understand it, it was supposed to be only one book but it would have been too long at ~900+ pages so this part is basically the background, giving a hint at the milieu that Epstein arose from. So maybe it will be possible to just read part 2 by itself, we shall see. Either way, I’m excited to read part 2 and get into the actual Epstein stuff.