Afrasianet - Hossam Shaker - A merchant named Grigor Samsa woke up one morning to discover that he had become an insect, and he began to feel this amazing transformation.
This is what Franz Kafka portrayed in 1915 in his short fiction translated into Arabic as "The Metamorphosis" or "Transformation", called "Die Verwandlung" in German.
The Kafkaesque imagination can now be replaced by other mutants inspired by Epstein's Island, which has been hidden from view a century later, where a leading global elite has taken refuge in order to transform directly into a different style that is contrary to its publicly known image.
It must be acknowledged that this astonishing torrent of scandals does not in essence mean that something new has happened to the ethics of the privileged elite at the center of the "free world", but what is likely to be new is the awareness of the masses everywhere of something hidden from their reality.
Epstein's gruesome files offer a rare opportunity to snoop on installments of the reality of the concubines and concubines, which has long lurked in the epicenter of the "enlightened modern world."
Rather, they reveal a shameful and astonishing moral reality in which a privileged global elite has colluded to take a long time before and afterward, without any of them being moved by a public confession or legal complaint for several years.
The people were not holy before and have since become sinful, for the discovery of their reality means that this is the case in its perceptual and widespread, although it is necessary to refrain from generalizing despite the fact that the Epstein scandals are gnawing at the American elite and some Western and non-Western elites: political, capitalist, societal, artistic, cultural, academic, and others.
It may be difficult for the global audience to grasp a fact that is evident to those who look through the Epstein window: that a broad and prominent elite globally has perpetuated and accustomed to all this moral abyss, values, and lawlessness, and has normalized with it, and neglected their societies, systems, and institutions, and refrained from operating principles, downloading slogans, and adhering to the law in their spaces that are "outside the scope of coverage."
These scandals paint a rare approximation of the lifestyle of the "One Percent" society, represented by the extensive sample referred to in the Epstein Reports, numbered in millions, as disclosed by the U.S. Department of Justice in Qatar.
It has become apparent how the men and women of the concubine elite lead a serene lifestyle that exceeds the expectations of "99 percent of society," as the Occupy Wall Street protesters put it, which took place in New York Squares in the fall of 2011.
However, Epstein's scandals represent a sample of a hidden reality that may store other foci in a way that no one has been accounted for, and today's fertile imaginations, with or without Kafka, have the right to guess at what is in the spaces of the obscured from other astonishing facts of one kind or another.
There are slippages outside the field of vision that those who know and are involved in them collude to cover them up, even though they are declared among them, so how can it be true in Epstein's case that the rogue disgrace was an applied secret, and all these facts and events were involved in it under the spotlight?
One of the shocking aspects of this case is that it is not the scandal of a sinful individual who has been dictated by a fleeting whim in a hideout; it is a tale of frequent and intertwined collusions across a spectrum of elites leading in various fields over the course of a thousand and one nights that have deceived Americans and the peoples of the earth.
What happened in Epstein's presence, which took a long time to change ages, without one or another of the vast crowd saying a word of disclosure, or moving his conscience with a public confession at the center of the modern world before these files came out in the public domain to slap the claims of "transparency," "disclosure," and the effectiveness of the "rule of law."
There is a relatively similar sermon from 2017 when the scandal of Harvey Weinstein, the influential Hollywood dinosaur, exploded, as it quickly became clear that the artistic, financial, and societal elite who scream at receptions and applaud at the Oscars, as well as some of the political elite around them, colluded to ignore the horrific exploitation of girls who aspire to the glory of the screens that the famous producer has committed for years.
The scandal exploded after its facts and files were amplified, overcoming the barriers of disclosure and disclosure restraints, and went beyond the intimidation of influential people in society, money and the media, victims of brutal exploitation.
The "Me Too" campaign was launched that exposed the pervasive traditions of exploitation and harassment in art, film, media, culture, and parliamentary life on both sides of the Atlantic, and the European Parliament, which was crowned with moral slogans and strict controls on the exploitation of women and girls.
That season exposed the behavior of ignorance applied to common and unspoken excesses, and the pervasive tradition of ignoring horrific violations that take place in the ranks of the elite in modern "free" societies crowned with slogans that invoke women.
There is another obscurity in this way, the tails of which are revealed every season, the refuges of the vast money with which the world's elite in the Maghreb and the East hide from view, such as the leaks of the "Panama Papers" in 2016 and the "Pandora Papers" in 2021, and other details that explode in the face of oppressed peoples and crushed classes, without fundamentally changing the reality after that.
The trend of the explosion of astonishing facts in people's faces is not undying from the emerging network phenomenon that has allowed the monopoly of governments and the media industry to overcome the vast privilege of mass broadcasting, creating active communities that generate interests and interact in a way that humanity has never had before.
The moment of WikiLeaks' emergence in 2006 ushered in an era of resounding leaks that revealed a hidden world with its own language, expressions, and slides that evade the limelight, and Julian Assange had to be hunted down and punished for daring to enable the world's masses to eavesdrop through thick walls.
One of them carries a detective lamp and illuminates dark bands of the obscured to discover through his data folder a hidden world that does not agree with his appearance, and some of the world's most prestigious figures are manifested in the form of mutants who have turned away from their sober form in the depicted scenes.
Since the Epstein case is considered a package of scandals about which the elite of the world's most influential elite is tainted, this refers due consideration to the concept of scandal itself, in that it is the exposure of a hidden or hidden reality, for what is new is the public's knowledge of the obscured and not the existence of the obscured reality that was realized belatedly.
However, what leaks out of the spaces of the obscured remains part of the whole, suggesting that what is visible is almost no more than the top of the iceberg.
Epstein's scandals revealed the tradition of veiling, whereby nefarious practices are closed to them, so that they take refuge in a closed place that allows the design of a world for those privileged and concubines, cut off from the sight of their audiences, so that the people take refuge in a walled palace, a carefully guarded hotel suite, or on an island surrounded by water from all sides, to prevent eavesdropping or snooping.
Sin may be rampant even in monasteries that are hidden from view, as evidenced by the scandals of Hoot's claims of virtue and moral superiority of a sinful and authoritarian priestly elite that is supposedly detached from pure worship.
The privileged elite has spaces that it has allocated to cut off from the world of the people, and it may want it as an earthly paradise for its wild whims.
This disconnection from the visible would confuse the regimes sponsored by some of them, declare compliance with them, or hold others accountable for the inferiority of what they commit, as the terrestrial system of control and accountability has scopes that do not go beyond them, allowing nefarious practices to escape beyond its control, such as a ship throwing polluted materials on the high seas due to the absence of surveillance cameras on the surface of the water.
It should be noted that modern democratic nations have not gone beyond the tradition of their influential elite being cut off from the masses in private spaces, and in some of them the elite decision-makers and influencers may gather in a way that sometimes represents a monopoly meeting of wealth and power in a single corridor;
The world's knowledge of the extent of the astonishing degeneration that lies hidden from the eyes of the masses after the Epstein scandals does not make this reality emergency or new, because what is urgent is to be aware of reality – or some of it to be precise – and what is new is to overcome a state of ignorance of it and nothing else.
The Epstein files should be considered as a moment that reveals a large sample of the reality of the global obscured or some of it at the levels of the elites who hoard concentrated privileges, and they point to the illusion of principled compliance, value superiority, and moral excellence in our world if human beings are content to count what is visible in the visible space alone, which is also not absolved of defects.
Let's imagine what the colonial elite was doing in colonies far from the centers, for example, what kind of chaos was taking place at that time in the absence of documentation, photography, and networks?!
The reality of the world's leading elite has not been exonerated from this outrageous apocalypse, and books, studies and narrations have observed terrifying episodes of it, but our world today gives relatively unprecedented views of some hidden reality, as it has cameras that capture, devices that store, and networks that carry some hidden objects to the masses of the earth.
In this vein, leading elites in prestigious "humanitarian" and "charitable" organizations, crowned with "governance" and "codes of honor", are still complicit in committing exploitative violations, some of which are documented in published reports, against the communities of "beneficiaries of their services" in environments of misery far from their centers in the northwest, according to concerted reports that are pushed every season.
The conclusions are mistaken if the Epstein files are considered an expression of a new decadence, because it is the knowledge with its astonishing content that has occurred, and it is a short, truncated and delayed knowledge in one of the various foci that is stored in the reality of the influential concubines in a world that fails its lofty values and professed slogans.
The conclusion is that the reality of the influential global elite has not finally fallen into the pit of sin, it is basically at the bottom of it.
Hossam Shaker - Researcher and author, media consultant, writer and analyst on European and international affairs, social issues and media issues.
