Afrasianet - When a major crime of the weight of the Jeffrey Epstein case, of which nearly three million classified documents have finally been released, explodes, it should not be called "Epstein" alone, because it goes beyond its perpetrators, who are distributed in all Western scientific, political, and cultural institutions, and in European royal palaces, and its victims may even go beyond what is more serious.
The Western civilization, despite all its material achievements, scientific and technological achievements, and the consequent material well-being, has been and is still in a position of civic power, there is no doubt that it is now witnessing a decline in moral standards.
In contrast to the doubling of the unbridled preoccupation with material-sensory self-gratification to express the reality of the Western society, which has been overshadowed by the values of consumption and instinctive gratification.
Corruption, drugs, street crimes, moral depravity and cultural falsification practiced by the means of information and media space, especially television and internet sites, are widespread.
However, this is radically different from the culture and moral values of the East, although the West tries to market its corruption and degeneration through various means.
The expression "forest" applies, even if it is unfair to its inhabitants, as there are many animals of the forest that stop hunting or killing when they feel full, while Western man is no longer satisfied with anything after possessing the possessive instinct enshrined in Western culture.
The impasse and its manifestation
Indeed, the West's weakness lies in the moral dilemma it is living in, and the contradiction between the lessons and lectures it offers on values and its actual practices, a predicament that is worsening day by day and is unfolding to an increasing number of people who are deceived and fascinated by the West and its values that it has long monopolized for itself, which it does not transmit outside its territory.
As described by the Algerian thinker Malik Ben Nabi in his famous saying, which has been proven true by the days and showed the power of Ben Nabi's observation and the sincerity of his foresight and intuition.
If the son of the Prophet lived a long time, he would discover that monopoly is an essential feature of the Western world in the world of values and matter together, and that monopoly is one of its most important tools in controlling and controlling others, and its urban, economic and scientific progress has only been based on the practice of monopoly at various levels, as it monopolizes the sources of knowledge, the secrets of science and technologies, and confiscates the right of others to obtain it by various means and various pretexts, all in an artificial moral garb !
One can enumerate countless evidence of contradictions and hypocrisy in talking about the values and morals that the West practices in its relations with others, so that one can fill books and books.
The values we are talking about here are those related to human rights, justice, the promotion of democracy and good governance, the fight against financial corruption and political tyranny, as well as the declared quest for the liberation of peoples and their empowerment to self-determination in order to regain their freedom, whether from occupation or from the oppression of local autocrats.
The West has sung about these values and shown its keenness to spread them as universal values and standards by which others are measured closer and farther from the Western example, and on the basis of which certificates of good conduct and behavior are granted to countries and organizations.
But this keenness has not been translated into practical support in supporting the movement of peoples who yearn to live under these values as they live and practice by the peoples of the West itself.
Over the years, the Western effort goes beyond issuing periodic reports and statements on the state of rights and freedoms in what it calls developing countries, accompanied by cold repetition that does not support the oppressed or deter the oppressor.
The culture of colonialism has never been absent from the West, although it is now practiced convincingly and under different names.
While we have not heard or read about a colonial country originating in the East, and the example here may apply to Russia, which was not a colonial country in any way, some may argue that the period of the Soviet Union was similar to the period of French, British, Spanish, Portuguese and other colonialism.
But the truth is that the countries that were in the Soviet film received a large share of the deep-rooted civilization and preserved their moral values and were not subject to plunder, but witnessed a process of civilization building whose effects are still present. Visible.
In fact, the biggest moral dilemma that the West has faced is the double standards in the application of these values, as while it revolts and mobilizes to support some political and human rights opponents in the Arab world and elsewhere, especially those who cross paths with it in the liberal orientation or hold Western nationalities.
It does not move when it comes to those who adopt the opposition from a political and intellectual perspective that does not adopt the Western vision, even if this type of opposition is persecuted and horribly annihilated.
Collaborating with regimes and crying over the oppression of peoples
It is not unfair to say, based on the evidence of history and the evidence of reality, that the West seeks to consecrate the bitter reality of the peoples who have been robbed of their will and whose wealth has been plundered, in order to sustain its superiority and remain the master of the rest of the world.
The evidence, and even the facts, indicate that the West is colluding with the autocrats to prevent these peoples from possessing the tools of independence and the factors of advancement, whether political, economic, defensive or scientific.
The West does not accept and does not approve of the elections coming with those who do not guarantee their interests, and then it does not hesitate to support the coup against the results of those elections and does not allow any party to build an economic power away from its domination, even if it is an ally of it.
It is not only the struggle against the leaders in some countries who tried to rise and become independent nationals away from the path set for others!
The peoples themselves have suffered from the "veto" of the quest for liberation and the attainment of political and economic rights as a result of the alliance of the West and the tyrants, just as countries have been prevented from possessing the tools of advancement and development, tricks between the peoples and the means of liberation such as free and fair elections and types of peaceful protest.
Whether in protest or in protest against the policies of their rulers The provocations of the West to its religion and values, and perhaps the condemnation of France, represented by its President Macron and its Foreign Ministry, of the boycott campaign that targeted it in response to its insult to Islam and its ordering an immediate halt to that campaign – perhaps this is not only a reference to the extent of the tutelage and arrogance of the rulers of the capital of "lights".
But also another proof of the predicament of the contradiction that the people are living in and their constant standing to prevent the peoples from using any means to break free from the control of the West and its proxies.
A reproach on Western civil society
Unfortunately, this double standard and the lack of serious action in support of the oppressed, the removal of injustice from the oppressed, and the honor of the steadfast struggles, is not limited to the official Western authorities, but the forces of civil society in the West, human rights organizations, bodies supporting rights and freedoms in their human rights and freedoms, and the well-established media institutions are not in a better situation.
Continuity, which makes the support statements and reports they issue ineffective and have no tangible impact on the regimes' behavior towards their people.
It is neither fair nor objective to make judgments or generalize in issuing them, but the contradiction in the West's political behavior towards other nations no longer needs evidence, as it is an objective fact that the researcher can highlight without embarrassment or risk, and this does not require him to be blind to his right or not to admit some of the credit in a different answer.
These are some of the manifestations of the West's contradiction in its foreign policies that have been revealed over the years, but at home, it may be no less bad, although the stereotype of the just West, which races to help the oppressed and seeks to spread the values of democracy and human rights, continues to dominate the world's imagination due to the power that the internal structure of the West and its various countries still enjoys.
But the COVID-19 crisis at its beginning showed the fragility of one of the most important values that has always enabled Europeans in particular to subjugate others, that value is unity People still remember the early days of the epidemic and how each country retreated from it and refrained from providing aid to the member states that were most affected by the crisis, such as Italy and Spain, until the voices of the people of these two countries rose to demand withdrawal from the European Union, whose countries failed them at the first juncture when they needed help and support.
Which for the first time constituted a challenge to the stable stereotype of European unity and called for the continuation of the European Union as a cohesive force As for the crisis of values within each individual country, it may be more severe, perhaps the phenomenon of racism, xenophobia and the inhumane treatment of immigrants and refugees , especially in the United States of America, where black citizens still suffer from the harshest types of racism.One of the most prominent examples of this is this.
It is the right of the West and its politicians to pursue its interests, consolidate its superiority and sustain its survival as a reference for the world, but it is provocative that this West is behind all the problems and disasters that the peoples of the South have been exposed to for a century, and that it hinders any movement of its peoples to regain their independence and freedom, and then continues to give lessons and lectures on values, morals and concepts that it practices completely opposite!
Chronic moral crisis
The West sometimes hits the West by hurricanes and kills thousands of them, as well as waves of extreme heat or extreme cold, or a new virus appears in them that they have never known before, such as the AIDS virus, bird flu, and the latest Zika virus, and the West is sometimes affected by earthquakes and floods, and all these natural disasters and dangers represent a threat to the European society.
But the fastest deadliest in Europe and in nations, civilizations and countries is the moral and moral decline that contradicts the origin of the human mountain, which threatens Survival and accelerating the wheels of fall and this is what Western society is suffering from today.
The author of the book (The West from the Inside, Dr. Mazen Salah Mutabqani, and the origin of the book is Studies of Social Phenomena in the West), says: "I tell this story that was told to me by a friend and a virtuous professor who has been living in the Netherlands for more than twenty years.
In summary, this friend went to a gas station to fill the tank of his car, and the worker at the station found him in a state of disarray, so he asked him, "Two people came to me a little while ago and tied me up and took everything in the box."
The customer said to him, "What makes you sad is that the insurance company is responsible for paying what was stolen. "That's not what matters to me," he said, "but if there was an effective penal system , I wouldn't have done it."
If we look around us, there is no doubt that we will realize the vast gap between the progress reached by European countries and their degenerate and destructive political and human values, which are killing humanity The experimentation of the most lethal types of weapons on the heads of children, the elderly and women, and the consecration of pornography and sex outside the institution of the family, where families are horribly disintegrated, is this not the height of moral decay and decay?
The church continued to support the feudal system, and was one of the largest landlords in the Middle Ages (European) and social relations existed in this system, namely, that the feudal lord had a sacred right under which he demanded services and other things from his followers.
Nixon acknowledges that U.S. courts have tried to impose race-based quotas in college admissions, hiring, and promotion, and have condoned discrimination in public and private sector jobs and contracts with the government, making universities and some jobs less efficient to cover race-specific quotas.
Mamoun Fandi says in his book "The Cultural Roots of American Foreign Policy Towards Arabs and Muslims" in 1996, that Western racism was clearly visible in Somalia, where Italian, Danish, and other European forces practiced colors of torture against unarmed Somalis, and it is strange that these were among the international forces called "Restoring Hope";
The scandal of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is still the most prominent title of that degradation, and its memory will remain a resounding cry in everyone's minds, and hardly any of the followers doubt that this degeneration is systematic and was not a coincidence, and there have been reports of forced nudity practices in detention centers in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
In Abu Ghraib prison, it was the most heinous and heinous according to interviews with victims of these heinous acts, reports from human rights groups, and according to testimonies from detainees and soldiers.
If we talk about the corruption of values and morals within European societies, gather evidence of this, quote their confessions, and enumerate the proportions of violent crimes, murder, kidnapping, rape, homosexuality, spinsterhood, divorce, human trafficking, suicide, and all that indicates the corruption of values in terms of tendency and deviation from nature.
The scope for this would not have been widespread, and many researches and studies have been published in this that the researcher can refer to, and it is enough for us to prove this Everyone is aware that progress in the material aspect alone is not enough to rise and rise, and they decide that it is necessary to return to values and morals, so James Peterson and Peter Kim say that 80% of Americans support teaching moral principles and values in American schools, and many believe that moral decadence is the problem that the country suffers from.But that won't happen.
When a major crime explodes in the weight of the Jeffrey Epstein case, of which nearly three million classified documents have finally been released, it should not be called "Epstein" alone, because it goes beyond the perpetrators of it, who are distributed in all Western scientific, political, and cultural institutions, and in the palaces of the European monarchy, and its victims may also go beyond what is more serious.
The "scandal of Western civilization" raises many question marks, and leads everyone to ask whether what has emerged is the hidden face of an immoral system that ordinary people did not see, or whether we are facing a historical transformation that has changed the nature of morality itself.
The so-called "Jeffrey Epstein scandal" refers to hundreds or thousands of crimes committed in front of the eyes of regulators and the judiciary for many years, which raises the question of how they will continue within the Western moral system.
The Western modernist project presented the world with its moral face first, and then came the technical side. At the heart of that project was the idea that the human being is the center of value.
The West was inspired by John Locke, who wrote about natural rights that precede power, and asserted that the function of government is to protect the individual and his freedom.
Immanuel Kant crystallized the idea that the end is human dignity, and that morality stems from the duty to respect man as a human being. John Stuart Mill made freedom a condition for the flourishing of truth.
From this philosophical background, she painted a rosy picture of an ethical system that promises transparency, boasts of the rule of law, and presents its most prominent feature, which is its ability to correct its mistakes from within.
What Western intellectuals presented was not just academic treatises, which became a general culture in education, media, literature, and political discourse only, but were translated into slogans such as "no one is above the law" and "institutions are stronger than individuals." This was seen as a promise and a horizon to be pursued.
Less than twenty years into the twentieth century, the promise evaporated. The major shifts came in the form of two world wars, the rise of totalitarian regimes, and then the Cold War protracted the marriage of the discourse of values with the logic of power.
The Cold War is over, neoliberalism is attacked, the influence of money is growing, the weight of the state in front of the market is changing, and the boundaries between the moral and the useful are beginning to erode.
Alliance of Money and Knowledge.
The Western project has given knowledge an almost absolute moral authority since Francis Bacon wrote his famous phrase "Knowledge is power," and here "power" has been nothing but that ability to organize the world and improve the conditions of life.
Therefore, the university, the laboratory, and the research centers have acquired a high symbolic status, as entities that not only produce the truth, but also give moral legitimacy to those who approach them.
In this context, money had only one function, "support," and that support was not provided in public discourse as a tool for gaining influence or control.
It was not the presence of money near knowledge that was the catastrophe, but the ease with which "support" turned into a polish for the supporter, especially when funding is accompanied by a refined human language, and when relations are encapsulated by the slogans of "supporting science" and "serving humanity."
The dilemma is that the language of values itself invokes the beautification of power, and uses words such as "progress," "innovation," and "humanity" as symbolic shields.
As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote, symbolic capital is capable of "transforming power into legitimacy, domination into acceptance."
If the scandal had exposed the misuse of knowledge, it would have been much less, but it has exposed the erosion of its ability to criticize when it has been integrated into a network of influence that masters the language of morality.
How did silence turn into understandable, rational behavior within a system that claims to defend values?
From Shock to Doubt
The first shock caused by the Jeffrey Epstein case was not purely moral shock, but narrative shock. The audience, who have long been raised on a ready-made story about a world governed by transparent institutions and a law that does not discriminate between individuals, found themselves confronted with facts that did not fit with the story they knew, and each of them asked himself: How did I not see him?
Western cultural discourse relies on reassuring the public that individual deviations, no matter how serious, will be corrected within the system.
As the philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote in his talk about narrative and identity, societies need "believable stories" to maintain their moral cohesion.
But when events that do not have a convincing conclusion are repeated, the trauma turns into a crack in trust in the narrative itself.
In the years since the case was exposed, Western journalists and observers have clearly expressed this shift. One New York Times commentator wrote that what happened was not "a failure of a person or a prosecutor's office," but "a collapse of the idea that the system works automatically when tested."
The Guardian described the case as having left a general feeling that "justice exists as a procedure, and does not seem to represent moral certainty now".
These phrases do not express fleeting anger, but rather a psychological and cultural transition from trust to suspicion.
Doubt begins when the public realizes that the language they are used to hearing, the language of transparency and accountability, does not explain what they see.
This is what the sociologist Zygmunt Baumann warned against, when he wrote that late modernity produces a state of "moral uncertainty," in which rules remain in place, but confidence in their justice is eroded.
In this climate, failure is no longer an exception, but rather a sign of a deeper flaw in the overall narrative. This skepticism does not always take the form of a vociferous protest, but slowly creeps into the public's consciousness, turning into a cold distance from official discourse.
This is reflected in a simple, sarcastic, and deplorable question, which is repeated in comments and analyses about the feeling of surprise "every time", an implicit acknowledgment that the narrative is no longer convincing, and that what used to be an aberration is read as a possibility.
In this moment, the scandal becomes a moment of cultural revelation rather than just a moral failure or individual deviation.
It shows how a system can maintain its value language while losing its ability to convince its audience.
Hannah Arendt writes that the most dangerous thing facing modern societies is not lying, but "indifference to the truth."
Doubt does not represent the end of the story, but rather the beginning of a phase in which doubt becomes the origin of our own perception of ourselves.
Values in the Service of Money
It is a moment of convergence between a scandalous reality and an ancient philosophical critique that warned against the fragility of modernity's claims.
Decades before any scandal, philosophers warned that the modernist project, which promises rationality and emancipation, carries within it the susceptibility to deviation when values become tools of management.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno write in their book The Dialectic of the Enlightenment that the Enlightenment, as it seeks to free man from superstition, may turn into a instrumental mind that reduces values to utility and control.
In this perspective, morality is not explicitly abolished, but rather reformulated to serve the system, so that the moral mantra becomes part of the mechanism, rather than a criterion for holding it accountable.
Michel Foucault expanded this criticism when he saw that modern power does not work by direct repression, but by producing a discourse that seems reasonable, humane, and advanced.
This is a situation in which the system does not need to hide its contradictions, so it is enough to manage them linguistically, and the "game" continues in a recurring cycle in institutions and among individuals.
Jürgen Habermas argued that modernity could be saved, but warned of the danger of "colonizing the world of life" when the moral and communicative space was dominated by economic and administrative systems.
At that time, values lose their critical capacity, and turn into actions that are managed instead of discussed. This idea illuminates the post-traumatic moment, as the issue is not met with a public dialogue that rebuilds trust, but rather with a series of actions that close the file without restoring meaning.
In a darker diagnosis, Zygmunt Baumann wrote of a "liquid modernity" in which norms dissolve, and morality is no longer a fixed framework, but a circumstantial choice.
In such a world, the question is not about the wrongdoer, but about who has the ability to escape, and here philosophical criticism converges with the cultural experience of the public, which sees values as present in discourse, moving in practice.
The Epstein scandal is not read as a sudden breach of a sound modernist project, but crises that philosophers have warned about, crises that confirm that what has collapsed is not morality, but confidence in its ability to survive when managed by the logic of influence.
Public skepticism turns from an emotional reaction to a conscious cultural attitude toward modernity.
The discourse of moral superiority is no longer a tool for correcting modernity, but a means of defending it. Values are invoked to minimize its symbolic impact, and to convince the public that "the system works," even when evidence to the contrary abounds.
This is what Zygmunt Baumann described when he saw that modern societies are experiencing a crisis in the ease of coexistence with their contradiction
Do not be tempted by the political, social and economic progress that Europe has reached today – ostensibly – because there is something that this civilization hides in terms of excessive bloodshed and abhorrent racism that bears the signature of the white man's superiority.
The signature that the West has inherited today from its previous civilizations is shaping the political and populist orientation of the Western nation.
Anyone who consciously follows the march of the contemporary West will find that it is a distorted embryo of the civilizations that preceded it, which sought to get rid of any civilization that approached it and did not accept the so-called dialogue of civilizations, as some promote, in oblivion of the miserable history and the colorful reality, a civilization that does not accept anyone else as influential and with absolute power.
The attentive reader of history sees the exclusivity of Western civilization throughout its long history as exclusionary, which does not see the other from a participatory perspective as much as it sees it as a bitter rival and a potential enemy. History is a witness that does not lie.
This is evident when Europeans arrived in Australia, for example, where only traces of indigenous peoples remained, so that they began to study them as folklore and anthropology.
You can say that about the Native Americans in America when they were completely and bloodily exterminated and about slavery and racism you can read hundreds of reports that talk about how many Africans were enslaved and transported from Africa to America that are said to have reached more than 13 million people.
Read the history of the genocide of the Andalusian Muslims at the hands of European civilization in the Inquisition to discover beyond doubt that it is a civilization based on bloodshed, exclusion and the expulsion of the other.
