Reddit on the oft-repeated assertion that Islam “preserved” classical knowledge and then graciously passed it on to Europe

"The oft-repeated assertion that Islam “preserved” classical knowledge and then graciously passed it on to Europe is baseless"–Accurate?
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It’s a great discussion that follows, very illuminating, which boils down to: yes, Arabic translators had a minimal effect on the transmission of Classical knowledge, which was mostly translated from Greek into Western languages via Constantinople; all scholars know this, and there is no real debate on the point; however, there’s the claim that the contrary is true and Arabic translators saved Classical knowlege, a popular misconception fueled by the media.

Since I’m pretty worried that Reddit will eventually delete this, I will copy and paste it all below:

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“The oft-repeated assertion that Islam “preserved” classical knowledge and then graciously passed it on to Europe is baseless”–Accurate?

From The Myth of Andalusian Paradise. Having a discussion online and this issue came up. It is a common trope that Muslims preserved classical knowledge that would have been lost otherwise, so it was a bit of a surprise first time I read his book.

I’ll provide a fuller quote so Fernández-Morera can speak in his own words:

The oft-repeated assertion that Islam “preserved” classical knowledge and then graciously passed it on to Europe is baseless. Ancient Greek texts and Greek culture were never “lost” to be somehow “recovered” and “transmitted” by Islamic scholars, as so many academic historians and journalists continue to write: these texts were always there, preserved and studied by the monks and lay scholars of the Greek Roman Empire and passed on to Europe and to the Islamic empire at various times. As Michael Harris points out in his History of Libraries in the Western World:

The great writings of the classical era, particularly those of Greece … were always available to the Byzantines and to those Western peoples in cultural and diplomatic contact with the Eastern Empire.… Of the Greek classics known today, at least seventy-five percent are known through Byzantine copies.

The historian John Julius Norwich has also reminded us that “much of what we know about antiquity—especially Hellenic and Roman literature and Roman law—would have been lost forever if it weren’t for the scholars and scribes of Constantinople.”

The Muslim intellectuals who served as propagandists for Caliph Al-Mamun (the same caliph who started the famous Islamic Inquisition to cope with the rationalism that had begun to infiltrate Islam upon its contact with Greek knowledge), such as al-Gahiz (d. 868), repeatedly asserted that Christianity had stopped the Rum (Romans—that is, the inhabitants of the Greek Roman Empire) from taking advantage of classical knowledge. This propaganda is still repeated today by those Western historians who not only are biased against Christianity but also are often occupationally invested in the field of Islamic studies and Islamic cultural influence.Lamenting the end of the study of ancient philosophy and science upon the presumed closing of the Athenian Neoplatonic Academy by Emperor Justinian I in 529 is part of this narrative. Yet this propaganda does not correspond to the facts, as Speros Vryonis and others have shown, and as evidenced by the preservation and use of ancient Greek knowledge by the Christians of the empire of the Greeks.

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level 1XenophonTheAthenian·3yLate Republic and Roman Civil Wars

This propaganda is still repeated today by those Western historians who not only are biased against Christianity but also are often occupationally invested in the field of Islamic studies and Islamic cultural influence

No historian, classicist, philologist, or linguist with any credentials argues that Muslim translations of Greek and Latin texts preserved any significant number of classical texts that would not have been extant in either the Greek east or the Latin west. Regardless of the truth of the claim as a whole the polemic nature of this and other statements is immediately obvious, and it should be clear that this is not an objective analysis. The author speaks of “many academic historians” arguing that classical texts would have been unknown to the west without Islamic scholars–yet I can think of not a single reputable scholar who actually argues this

The issue here, both in the treatment above and the “popular” understanding of the transmission of classical texts, is essentially an ignorance of how texts are actually transmitted. Texts prior to mechanical printing are usually not lost in massive conflagrations, they are lost because people stop copying them over time. Moreover, because of the way texts were copied in the Middle Ages, texts could be “lost” without actually disappearing in all known copies. Classical manuscripts were copied with quasi-religious (sometimes even explicitly religious) attention by medieval scribes. Many of these texts were used as teaching texts for Latin or, in the Greek east, Greek–our most plentiful texts (Homer, Caesar, Virgil, etc) are known to us in part because of the enormous quantity of school texts. Other times the texts were copied out and all but forgotten, sitting in some monastery somewhere and only brought out to be recopied when the old copy was showing its age. Much of the work of Renaissance humanists was to go to remote monasteries like Monte Cassino and actually search for unknown texts–Tacitus re-entered literary prominence when Boccaccio brought Annales 11-16 from Monte Cassino to be recopied at Florence. Large numbers of classical texts were of little interest to medieval scholars and remained ignored, even though there were copies of them available if one looked hard enough.

Muslim scholars, however, were greatly interested in classical texts, especially Greek medical and philosophical texts. They generally translated these into Arabic and distributed them widely. Importantly, they wrote copious quantities of commentaries, often real philosophical works in their own right, that were also distributed. Many of these Arabic translations were then translated into Latin by western scholars who got their hands on them (mostly through Iberia). The impact of these Latin translations of Arabic translations of Greek is hard to understate. Greek was lost in the west until the Renaissance (excepting Ireland), and often these Latin translations of Arabic translations–or sometimes only the commentaries on them!–were all that was available in the west of authors who, although known by name, did not have any readable texts available. The case of Aristotle is probably the most important and best known. Although a couple of Aristotle’s works had been translated into Latin in late antiquity, most of Aristotle’s surviving Greek corpus (known and studies in the Greek east) was unknown to the west as actual texts for most of the Middle Ages. Knowledge of Aristotle arrived peacemeal, but often from Islamic sources. The so-called “Recovery of Aristotle,” which took place around the 12th and 13th centuries, in large part from Arabic translations that were translated into Latin, along with their Arabic commentaries. Averroes’ Arabic commentary, translated into Latin fairly early on, was considered the commentary on Aristotle in the Latin west, and Thomas Aquinas, the great Aristotelean scholar, called him “the Commentator.”

From this the popular imagination assumes often that Greek texts were only known to the Latin west through Arabic translations, to the extent that we even have people thinking that our Greek texts are actually translations from Arabic into Greek (not trying to shame the user or anything, it’s a good question given the popular perception of textual transmission)! While many Greek texts were known only in Latin translation, often from Arabic, for most of the Middle Ages, the texts as we have them now are available mainly due to the work of Renaissance scholars, at least their efforts in compiling and identifying them (obviously the scribes are the ones who preserved the texts). The Renaissance was punctuated by a growing interest among humanists in going out to find copies of ancient texts which had been “lost,” as well as an influx of Greek texts from the east, which had been unknown to the Latin west. As far as preserving Greek for us, then, the contributions of Arabic scholars are, while not trivial, not especially significant. These texts would have existed and likely would have been reintroduced at some point even if Muslim scholars had never translated them, and with only a handful of exceptions (in fact, none that I can think of off the top of my head) the texts which were translated to Latin from Arabic translations are known to us in their original language from independent copies. Nevertheless, their influence in reintroducing these texts to the medieval west cannot be understated. Moreover, the intellectual tradition derived from the work of Muslim scholars like Averroes is still felt in the discourse–so much of the opinion of Thomas Aquinas (who had never read Aristotle in Greek), for example, was based on what Averroes had said about him, and thus the influence is felt on later scholars. The popular misunderstanding about the way texts are transmitted means that the statement that we wouldn’t have Greek if not for Muslim scholars is, taken strictly like that, absurd. But that does not mean that Muslim scholars did not have a crucial impact on the reintroduction of the content of these works or on rekindling interest in them in the west. That alone is significant, even if the actual texts as we have them are handed down to us largely independent of Muslim scholars.

In other words the argument above, while strictly true, is arguing against a strawman, and the author’s use of inflammatory language (propaganda? In the 13th century?) suggests to me that he knows it. No scholar actually thinks that we wouldn’t have Greek if not for Muslim scholars, that’s not what the importance of Muslim classical scholars on the west (much less to us now) was. Moreover, it should be noted that while the Greek east preserved classical Greek texts they did not generally make these texts available to the Latin west. While we ourselves have Greek texts derived from the copies available to Byzantine scholars, the Latin scholars of the Middle Ages did not have access to these copies, and could not read them anyway. To the scholars at the time of the introduction of translations from the Muslim world that was all they had to work with. Byzantine copies would not become available in any significant quantities until the Renaissance98Give AwardShareReportSavelevel 2TanktopSamurai·3yInteresting Inquirer

Moreover, it should be noted that while the Greek east preserved classical Greek texts they did not generally make these texts available to the Latin west

Why is that?9Give AwardShareReportSavelevel 3XenophonTheAthenian·3yLate Republic and Roman Civil Wars

Lack of interest in the west? Lack of desire in the east? Inability? Refusal? All of the above? I’m no medievalist, and I’m not especially excited to step on anybody’s toes talking about things that I’m not really up on.

Still, I think it’s safe to say that Byzantine scholars and western scholars simply did not communicate with each other. To this we might add (or explain by reference to) the relative lack of movement between the east and west, the religious differences, the fact that Latin scholars could not read Greek, etc. Some of these are not circumstances peculiar to the Greek world. The safe, efficient transport of the Principate at peace was long gone, and just as trade rapidly breaks down in the Mediterranean in the third century so too does the trade of books and other scholarly materials. Already by late antiquity the volume of books available to any one scholar was much lower than it had been in the past, and the interest in written materials was greatly diminished. Medieval scholars were hardly solitary wizards working at their arcane tomes in secluded towers, cut off from the rest of the world and from each other, but the networks that had connected Roman scholars and writers to each other had long since broken down. Individual monasteries maintained copies of texts lost in the rest of Europe, yet scholars elsewhere didn’t actually know that those texts were there. Moreover, knowledge of what was in the Greek world was fairly restricted to western Latin scholars. Athens, for example, was of course known by name to the west, but until the fifteenth century no actual description of the city was available for western scholars, even despite the fact that the city had been ruled by Franks for a time. The relative isolation of Greek and Latin scholars is compounded by the fact that Latin scholars had largely lost the ability to read Greek. Greek letters were still used for numbering and stuff, and we find a few Greek texts bouncing around (often transcribed into Latin characters so the pronunciation could be read aloud, regardless of meaning), but true reading knowledge of the language had more or less disappeared among literate westerners. By the thirteenth century or so a few stumbling attempts had been made to introduce teaching materials for Greek, but these were unsuccessful and in some cases simply wrong–Greek (or rather, individual Greek words used as jargon to pepper one’s writing, without knowledge of grammar and syntax) as it was taught in the Middle Ages in the west was a corrupted form of the language, where declension and conjugation were done away with to make all nouns and verbs end the same way. Among Italian traders some knowledge of Greek was preserved, or more accurately reintroduced, by their dealings with the Greeks in the east, but introduction of the language was dreadfully slow and only rarely did scholars try to take advantage of Italians who sort of knew Greek. John of Salisbury in the twelfth century was one of the few who tried to learn Greek from Italians, without much success.

By contrast, the Muslim world was, somewhat paradoxically, more accessible to Latin scholars. Even if, as Fernández-Morera argues, Muslim Spain was no “paradise,” the close proximity of several cultures to each other, one of which had a rich tradition in using the living classical texts translated into its own language, meant that information spread much more rapidly. One also suspects, though it’d take a true medievalist to determine if it’s more than just a hunch, that the proximity of Spain to the centers of medieval Latin culture in France, Britain, etc. might have helped. The Byzantine world was far away and largely closed off, and even what entered through Italy was still often fairly distant. Information traveled slowly in the medieval world, more slowly than it had at the height of the Principate.20Give AwardShareReportSavelevel 4alriclofgar·3yPost-Roman Britain | Late Antiquity

I think it’s safe to say that Byzantine scholars and western scholars simply did not communicate with each other. To this we might add (or explain by reference to) the relative lack of movement between the east and west, the religious differences, the fact that Latin scholars could not read Greek, etc.

This very much depends on where and when you are talking about. There was a school in 7th century Anglo-Saxon England (in Canterbury) where Byzantine Monks taught English students to read Greek, for instance, and early medieval English literature (particularly, the Latin riddles of Aldhelm) show traces of this Greek education. This is merely one of many ongoing connections between the east and west during the early middle ages–a topic that /u/shlin28 can comment on in much greater detail than me, should they so choose.10Give AwardShareReportSavelevel 5XenophonTheAthenian·3yLate Republic and Roman Civil Wars

I’m happy–eager, even–to be brought up to speed on the knowledge of Greek in the Middle Ages, especially since for decades it was more or less doctrinaire among classicists that Greek was lost in the west. It’s my understanding that contact between Greek scholars in the east and Latin scholars in the west broke down severely after the Great Schism, which would naturally be after this. Is that in fact the case?3Give AwardShareReportSavelevel 6shlin28·3y·edited 3yInactive Flair

I’m afraid that I can’t really help with the linguistic side of things, since I look more at the movement of individuals. Nor can I help really with the later period, since I only really look at the sixth and seventh centuries. My thoughts below are very much only thoughts and should not be taken as anything reliable – we’d need a proper Byzantine intellectual historian for that!

I think my first point would have to be that Byzantinists have increasingly downplayed the significance of the Great Schism in 1054; theological disputes rarely, if ever, lead to divisions to the extent that contacts between cultures were visibly curtailed. If anything the centuries afterwards saw an exponential increase in exchange, since westerners now had a foothold in the western Mediterranean, while the number of easterners travelling westwards also increased, whether to take part in councils or to beg for support from western powers. Tia Kolbaba’s chapter on Byzantine disputes with western theologians in the Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium (2017) is very good on this, particularly on the shift from traditional Byzantine condescension towards western intellectuals to a more complex relationship when Latin polities were on Byzantium’s doorstep.

But I think it’s also useful to look at knowledge of Greek from below. People constantly moved across Christian Europe, which must have involved an understanding, no matter how hazy, of their destination. Pilgrims and mercenaries are the best attested, all of which are clues to how westerners were aware of the Greek empire and its language. There was, for example, a Byzantine recruiting bureau in England in the eleventh century, as Peter Frankopan has suggested based on the presence of Byzantine seals. We also know of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian mercenaries who served in Constantinople as members of the Varangian Guard. In 1066 in England, for instance, there was one king in England who must have been conversant in Greek – Harald Hardrada of Norway, thanks to his service under Emperor Michael IV. After the Norman Conquest, refugee Anglo-Saxon warriors also found a place in the East, to the extent that the Byzantine author Kekaumenos was annoyed that strangers from England were favoured by the emperor. A later English visitor to Constantinople (c. 1090) even discovered, to his surprise, that his friends from home were now in the imperial household and, more importantly, were willing to help the pilgrim to steal some relics for his monastic community in, er, Kent.. Perhaps a decade later, a Byzantine embassy arrived in England, including a native of Lincoln who took the opportunity to donate a relic to Abingdon Abbey. I’ve also collected a few possible examples of Greeks in tenth/eleventh-century England here. All this tells us nothing about scholarly exchange, but it does, I think, give us a hint of how a working knowledge of mundane daily-life Greek was more widespread than what most people have imagined it, which could perhaps also impact on our understanding of the quantity of the exchange of manuscripts. Of course, the individuals noted here were far from intellectuals, but they are nonetheless examples of how Byzantium was not a sealed bubble from the outside world – least of all in the age of the Crusades.

The same goes for the earlier period I’m more familiar with. As /u/alriclofgar noted, in the seventh century there was a school in Canterbury that taught Anglo-Saxon students Greek, alongside eastern approaches to exegesis, under Theodore of Tarsus, precisely at a time when Mediterranean unity was supposed to be breaking down and the East and West’s paths diverged. Particularly on the issue of western knowledge of Athens, Theodore himself may have been educated in Athens (as well as in Antioch and Constantinople), but the evidence is shaky – still, there is a slim possibility that we have a scholar lecturing in ‘Dark Age’ Canterbury while drawing on his personal experiences of Athens, which is pretty cool. Anyway, based on this, I was therefore quite struck by your line that westerners don’t have access to descriptions of Athens – I wonder where I can read more about this? At first glance, I’m unconvinced (since there must have been people who knew it quite well, if only by word-of-mouth?), but the Middle Ages do have a tendency to surprise me… I’m also not a classicist, so I’d be eager to know what would be the main surveys of this issue from their perspective?8Give AwardShareReportSavelevel 7XenophonTheAthenian·3yLate Republic and Roman Civil Wars

I was therefore quite struck by your line that westerners don’t have access to descriptions of Athens

This is mainly from the New Pauly, which has a whole bunch of stuff in its bibliography about the medieval reception of Athens. At the very least it appears that no surviving textual or visual description of Athens as it actually existed exists in the west before Cyriacus of Ancona in the fifteenth century and especially the sketches of the early modern period. As the New Pauly puts it, “depictions of Athens…[they mention a couple, admittedly fifteenth century, examples] are visual topoi of Gothic style without any specific details of the place and are not based on any close and rigorous examination.” Now it’s my understanding that most maps in the Middle Ages were not especially interested in depicting what cities actually looked like, even for cities as important as Jerusalem. But apparently at least one scholar, Martin Crusius, as late as the sixteenth century questioned whether Athens had ever existed at all and whether it wasn’t just some elaborate allegory of classical authors. That’s as far as my understanding takes me; it would seem that although there was no shortage of people (especially in Italy) who had seen or knew about Athens for one reason or another descriptions of the city were not written down5Give AwardShareReportSavelevel 7qed1·3y12th Century Intellectual Culture & Historiography

Sorry I’m so late to this party, but I thought it was worth adding one point about transmission. (Also /u/XenophonTheAthenian) If we take the reception of Aristotle as representative, there are translators working from both Arabic and Greek in both the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. However, translations from Greek were more widely used than translations from Arabic.

To illustrate the point, here is a list of the number of surviving manuscripts of the major Latin translations of all of the works of Aristotle. (This is somewhat out of date, as it is drawn from the Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy. It should nevertheless be representative and can be cross-referenced with the updated list of translators in the more recent Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy.)

JV = James of Venice [fl. ~1125-50] (Working from Greek in Constantinople)

GC = Gerard of Cremona [~1114-1187] (Working from Arabic in Spain)

MS = Michael Scot [~1175-1232] (Working from Arabic in Sicily)

WM = William of Moerbeke [~1215/35-1268] (Working from Greek in Constantinople)

x* = translated from Arabic

Posterior Analytics

JV: 275

GC: 3*

WM: 4

Physics

JV: 139

MS: 65*

WM: 230

De Caelo

GC: 101*

MS: 36 *

WM 185

De generatione et corruptione

Anon. [c12]: 118

GC: 8*

?WM: 190

Meteorologica

Henricus Aristippus/GC: 113(*)

WM: 175

De Anima

JV: 175

MS: 62*

WM: 268

De sensu

Anon. [c12]: 94

WM : 161

De memoria

JV: 115

WM: 160

De somno

Anon [c12]: 102

WM: 162

De logitudine

JV: 101

WM: 158

De iuventute

JV: 4

WM: 157

De respiratione

JV: 4

WM: 149

De morte

JV: 5

WM: 151

De animalibus

MS: 69*

WM: 237

Metaphysics

JV: 5

Anon [c12]: 24

MS: 126*

Anon [c13]: 41

WM: 217

Nicomachean Ethics

Anon [c12]: 48

Anon [c13]: 40

Robert Grosseteste: 33

Anon [c13]: 246

Eudemian Ethics (incomlete)

Anon [c13]: 139

Politics

WM: 107

Oeconomica

Anon [c13]: 15

Durandus de Alvernia: 79

Rhetoric

Anon [c13]: 5

Hermannus Alemannus: 3*

WM: 100

Rhetorica ad Alexandrum

Anon [c14]: 1

Anon [c14]: 1

Poetics

WM: 25Give AwardShareReportSavelevel 6alriclofgar·3yPost-Roman Britain | Late Antiquity

My grasp of medieval intellectual history after the 11th century is, I’m afraid, pretty basic. If shlin28 chooses to enter the conversation, perhaps they can help us out.1Give AwardShareReportSavelevel 4TanktopSamurai·3yInteresting Inquirer

Thank you very much for your answer!

I have another question. A common contributors to science is said to be Greeks scholars fleeing the Ottoman conquests, especially the Fall of Constantinople. Is it as significant a factor as it commonly said? If it is, how does this fit with your response?3Give AwardShareReportSavelevel 5XenophonTheAthenian·3yLate Republic and Roman Civil Wars

At this point we’re rapidly exiting the scope of my particular understanding. I’m not sure when precisely the idea that Byzantine scholars fleeing the sack of Constantinople “touched off” the Renaissance emerged, but I don’t think it stands up to actual examination. While a number of important Greek scholars made their way to Italy in the fifteenth century, their influence can be easily overstated. Byzantine Greek scholars played an important role in the rediscovery in the west of several Greek authors (notably Plato) and made knowledge of Greek more readily available. But at the same time Greek scholars still usually worked to translate their texts to Latin, and the influence of the fall of Byzantium seems only coincidental if you actually look at who was coming over when. Such important scholars as Gemistus Pletho, George of Trebizond, and John Argyropoulos had come to Italy and entered the Italian academic world well before the fall of Constantinople in 1453. In fact, all three of those scholars had come over to Italy in 1438 for the Council of Florence, which brought Greek scholars into contact with western scholars in much greater numbers and proximity than the scattered refugees from the capture of Constantinople. Some returned to the east for a few years before coming back, but many (if not most) of the most important Greek scholars of Renaissance Italy stayed in Italy. Gemistus Pletho never returned to Greece and died either just before or just after Constantinople was captured. George of Trebizond either went to Italy with the Council of Florence or nearly a decade earlier at the request of a Venetian friend and did not return to the east. John Argyropoulos did permanently settle in Italy after fleeing from Constantinople, but he had already spent significant time in Italy, arriving for the Council of Florence and only returning in 1443 after completing a doctorate at Padua. A handful of scholars, like Theodorus Gaza, were driven to Italy directly by the action of the Turks. But note that Theodorus Gaza came to Italy in 1430, fully two decades before the capture of Constantinople, because his native Thessaloniki had been retaken by the Turks. By the time of Constantinople’s capture Greek scholars had already been in Italy in large numbers for over two decades, some of them for even longer. And the introduction of Greek scholarship into the Latin west was not, as I have already pointed out, entirely a sudden affair. Italians had been acquainted with Greek since the twelfth century or so, and steadily increasing contacts were made between the Italian and Greek literate classes throughout the later Middle Ages. It’s also worth noting that the availability of material does not necessarily mean much of anything. Cicero’s letters to Atticus, which in the Middle Ages were not even known by scholars ever to have existed at all, were discovered by Petrarch in 1345 in Verona, where they had just been sitting ignored. The case of Tacitus I mentioned earlier is also striking: Monte Cassino is a little over a day’s walk from Rome, yet its manuscript of Tacitus was wholly unknown until Boccaccio moved it to Florence in the mid-fourteenth century. The increase in Greek material in the early fifteenth century would have been more or less worthless without the humanist habit of searching out classical texts from where they were stored and reading them in the original that long preceded it. The fact that the Council of Florence even took place and invited so many scholars from east and west is in part due precisely to the humanist influence, and a parallel “Renaissance” that took place in the Byzantine east.6Give AwardShareReportSavelevel 2TsegenOP·3y

Regardless of the truth of the claim as a whole the polemic nature of this and other statements is immediately obvious, and it should be clear that this is not an objective analysis.

Fernandez-Morera is quite clearly polemical in tone, but he casts himself as responding to a set of motivated tropes and errors. It’s difficult for a non-historian to know just how seriously to take him in this regard. I found it suspicious on reading but didn’t want to dismiss the chance that he was dealing with something real.

Anyway, thanks for clearing up the question in the OP!6Give AwardShareReportSavelevel 3alriclofgar·3y·edited 3yPost-Roman Britain | Late Antiquity

It’s difficult for a non-historian to know just how seriously to take him in this regard.

A very good trick, when you’re not an expert on the topic and want to figure out if they’re biased or not, is to see who published the book.

Rigorous scholarship is usually published through a press affiliated with a university (Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Harvard, Cornell–you get the idea). If a book is published with a university press, you can be confident that it has gone through a process of peer review by other scholars to ensure that the claims it makes are based on rigorous research. You can also be confident that the author has credentials (usually, a PhD). Books published with university presses can still have biases or agendas, of course, but they must nevertheless meet a set of standards that reign these biases in, and the biases belong solely to the individual author. A university press publishes books based on the quality of their research, not the agenda of the writers.

The book from which you are quoting was published, according to amazon, by a press called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. This press is clearly not affiliated with a specific university (else, it would be in the name), but it sounds kind of credible? However–if you visit the press’ website, you will read the following on their “about” page:

ISI was there when the American conservative movement started sixty years ago. …

The page (https://home.isi.org/about/about-isi ) continues to describe a specific political agenda that the press is trying to advance (including a list of six principles that they believe in, all of which are very politically Conservative). This makes it clear that the ISI is not publishing books that try to be unbiased works of scholarship. Instead, they publish books that further their politically Conservative agenda (this isn’t wrong per se–lots of groups have agendas; but it’s important to recognize that this influences the material they produce).

To know whether and how this agenda distorts the facts communicated in their books you’d need to be an expert on the subject (thanks to /u/XenophonTheAthenian for jumping in to our rescue!). As a non-expert, however, identifying that a publisher has explicit biases is a quick way to raise a red flag.

When in doubt, seek out books from university presses. They have quality controls and their goal is good scholarship rather than partisan politics.16Give AwardShareReportSavelevel 3WOLF_ALICE·3y

Also crucial to note that his framing of this issue is quite seriously linked to contemporary debates on ‘Islam’ and of its compatibility to western, enlightenment concepts of society. He has framed his argument in this way as it looks to severe ties and interaction between Western civilisation and Islamic society and religion.4Give AwardShareReportSavelevel 1CptBuck·3y

The Muslim intellectuals who served as propagandists for Caliph Al-Mamun (the same caliph who started the famous Islamic Inquisition to cope with the rationalism that had begun to infiltrate Islam upon its contact with Greek knowledge)

It’s also perhaps worth noting that this is a flat-out incorrect description of the Mihna—the Caliph Mamun’s inquisition.

The Mihna had absolutely nothing to do with the “infiltration” of “rationalism” into Islam “upon its contact with Greek knowledge”.

The primary point of dispute was over Mamun’s desire to enforce the doctrine of the createdness of the Quran. The entire dispute sounds incredibly obscure to modern ears, but it was supported by the “rationalist” Mu’tazilites. In other words it was an inquisition in favor of the “rationalists” against the religious traditionalists.

Now, calling the Mutazalites “rationalists” is itself a gross oversimplification, but this simply a point on which the author is so far off the mark as to have his bass completely ackward.11Give AwardShareReportSavelevel 2MaximiliionPegasus·3y

I have read about Mutazilah and Cabriya. Can I ask what you know about them?1Give AwardShareReportSave

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Many Albanians Were Killed in the Making of this Tale (In Memoriam, Ismail Kadare)

(All events depicted in this tale are fiction, and all the characters are fictitious, bearing no resemblance to any real people, alive or dead)

Tirana, the capital city of Albania, emerged from World War II with a single touch of class: a white, neoclassical building down in Skanderbeg square, erected by the Italian administration that occupied the country for much of the war, with a grandeur and poise very much at odds with the rest of the city.

The building, not far from the old Grand Mosque that is still the main architectural leftover from six centuries of Ottoman rule, had a purity in its lines, a distinction in its deceptively simply façade that locals couldn’t fail to admire. It had started life as a social club for Italian army officers (“Il Club della uffizialita”) and during its heyday it had been the site of elegant balls and not-so-elegant long nights with booze and billiards. It had later been converted into a hospital for countless Italian troops wounded by the Allies in multiple Italian defeats, from Greece to northern Africa and then Sicily. By 1960, just over a decade into Albania’s long slide into Real Socialism, the White House of Tirana was the headquarters for Albania’s League of Writers and Intellectuals.

Yusuf Vriuna had then been two years out of jail when he met Ismail Kedaro in the White House. Vriuna was a crumpled, ugly, small bald man who looked much older than his actual age of 44. Kedaro was a handsome 24, taller than average, with a full mane of dark hair; Vriuna immediately recognized his eyes: they were the eyes of power, the eyes of confidence, the ones that looked at men with no fear, because they felt themselves safe. The eyes of nomenklatura.

“So they tell me you are the best translator there is in all of Albania,” Kedaro told Vriuna, by way of introduction.

Vriuna shuddered on his chair as he peered at the younger man; he only attended the White House because, as a translator, he was allowed in there. And because the tea was cheap. Food was known to be available at discreet rates, from time to time. There were sound reasons to spend time in the White House. Talking to strangers, especially potentially dangerous strangers like the young Kedaro, with his prying, confident Communist eyes, wasn’t one of them.

“People lie all the time,” Vriuna coyly responded.

“It’s not always because they want to. They often do it when they don’t know the truth.”

“But the truth is elusive sometimes.”

Kedaro smirked. Vriuna felt the air escape his lungs, the blood evade his face: he had spent eleven years in detention. Plainly it hadn’t been enough to contain his urge to express himself; plainly he had to do more time, and learn to be more esoteric, more of a modern Communist man; but, as he felt like a young man despite his age and the rest, he thought he would die if that ever happened.

“Not in this case,” Kedaro eventually said, a grin slowly breaking his thin lips. “I have good sources.”

*

An unequal friendship developed, in which Kedaro provided enthusiasm, earnestness, an ambition to build up a literary career, and an ability to secure transportation to interesting places, such as the sandy beaches on the Adriatic, just north of his native town of Gjirokaster. It was while walking on one such place (a white shirt for Kedaro, unbuttoned near the neck, the better to show off some of his somewhat hairy chest, an uncovered head so that his hair is ruffled by the breeze; a thin, zipped jacket for Vriuna, always prone to catching colds, all the more so ever since he got out of detention, and a solidly-set brimmed hat) that Vriuna got to trust his new friend. They had obviously seen the ugly, large bunkers recently built up by the regime along the shore, and Vriuna withdrew comment. Not so Kedaro, who noticed at some length the shoddy craftsmanship, the excessive expense.

“Defense measures are always a loss, until you get attacked,” Vriuna very carefully conceded, feeling that a small, cautious response was required.

“These ones will be profitable, in that case,” Kedaro snapped. “They are not here to defend the Party from the imperialists, but from the internal enemy. The Americans were not stopped by much better fortifications along the French coast. These only come to show this is a regime that will do anything to stay in power, even if takes spoiling beautiful places by pouring concrete for no good reason, instead of building useful buildings. These bunkers are giant warning signs for the defenders, not the attackers.”

Vriuna’s contribution to the friendship was his cosmopolitan experience: the old, colorful images lodged in his brain. Like others from Gjirokaster, Kedaro didn’t accept that any other place could be better in any meaningful sense, in the whole of Albania. But he still was impressed by Vriuna’s birth and upbringing in the nearby Greek island of Corfu, where Vriuna’s father, a prominent politician during his time, had been exiled on account of his differences with the old King Zog, long since deposed. Even more impressive, from Kedaro’s point of view, was Vriuna’s later stay in Paris, where he had studied for years, eventually getting a decree from the marvelous-sounding Sorbonne, and a perfect command of French that nobody could match in small Albania.

“There’s a very interesting word in French,” Vriuna said over lunch at a communal dining room in central Tirana where Kedaro was allowed access (together with one companion) to the superior, meat-rich Number One meal category for high party officials. “It’s ‘enviable’ and it means ‘something you can or should be jealous of.’ It’s a very strange word. It doesn’t exist in Albanian, Greek or Italian, and I believe it doesn’t exist in German either.”

“We need that word imported immediately,” Kedaro said. “I’ll see that this is taken care of.”

A joke: a crass sign of rank-pulling in Real Socialism, where the wrong people might end up behind bars for anything they said. People like Vriuna didn’t tell jokes; only those like Kedaro did.

“It tells you a lot about the French mentality,” Vriuna went on, undisturbed, “that they find things to be ‘enviable,’ that they are not afraid or embarrassed to be jealous on occasion, as long as the object of jealousy is one of the finer things.”

Vriuna knew Kedaro treasured every scrap of his Frenchness, faded and frayed as it was, since Vriuna had left France in 1939, never to return. Kedaro himself had had a good education in Gjirokaster, and in Tirana university, inasmuch as any Albanian education could count for much (and it was here at this point in his train of thought when the alarm bells often sounded in Vriuna’s head: never get arrested again; never think such thoughts again) but he only knew one foreign country: the Soviet Union, where he had spent a few months conducting post-grad studies at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow. Kedaro didn’t speak much about those days, other than to make offhand references to awful food and worse weather. He clearly preferred to long from the outside world on the other side of the Iron Curtain: France, even Italy, even Corfu.

Kedaro was a rare writer in one sense. He didn’t care for his work to be translated into Russian, the common dream and aspiration of so many scribblers in the White House. He wanted Vriuna to translate it to French.

*

Kedaro’s early poetry wasn’t of much value, but his first novel Vriuna found worthy of translation. The General of the Army of Hell came out in Albanian in 1963, and was an immediate hit among local cognoscenti. It told the story of an Italian general who looked for the graves of Italian soldiers in Albania, and ended up meeting a German general doing much the same for his own fellow dead countrymen.

Kedaro was enthused by Vriuna’s version. He knew little French, despite his best attempts at studying, but praised Vriuna to heavens. The novel was favorably reviewed in France—a first for any Albanian work of any kind in living memory. A party official took the time to write Vriuna a letter expressing the appreciation of Albanian People for his work to further popular culture in foreign lands. Vriuna held the letter in front of his unbelieving eyes for a long while, trying to stop his hands from trembling; he saw the dusk fall on Tirana behind the white paper, thinking of jail.

Having obtained such an early triumph, Kedaro unavoidably thought his obligation lay with Truth and Beauty now. He was a good Communist of the kind who thought collectivism and atheism were just the right medicines for a country long afflicted by tribalism and religion; but he wasn’t blind, and over Vriuna’s objections he made his next novel, A People’s Monster, a not-so-veiled, smart critique of everything that had gone wrong in Albania since the end of the war.

When the novel came out in the country’s top literary magazine, things weren’t so swell. A long negative critique of A People’s Monster was published in page three of The Popular Albanian, the party’s newspaper available all around the White House, in large piles that party officials expected to see gone by the end of the day. Vriuna noticed glares, and locked himself in his apartment for a full week, eating toasted old bread and drinking tea. He burnt a few pages of a French translation of the novel he had just started.

Kedaro was cocky and tried to have the novel published in book form; he then went away for several days. When he came back, he was paler and not cocky at all. Vriuna was stunned to see Kedaro’s hand trembling—if only briefly—while he lit himself a cigarette, and explained that A People’s Monster had been banned by the censorship; all copies of the literary magazine would be pulped, and the book was never to be discussed again.

“What, in public?” Vriuna asked, purely for clarification.

“By anyone, ever. I never wrote that book, indeed.”

Kedaro said this last sentence with a sad grin, of the kind Vriuna knew from experience: from jail. He didn’t ask where Kedaro had been during detention. Or how he had got out. He knew Kedaro’s father had some pull in the party, and the young man had a nice resume. He had put Albanian literature in the French map: that had to count for something.

Over the next few months, Kedaro put himself to work again, and Vriuna barely saw him. He didn’t know what the new novel was about. But, against his best counsel, he noticed things: there were two writers who used to frequent the White House, that Vriuna stopped seeing. They needed the cheap food, and appreciated the literary company: they were somewhat verbose, proud members of that writerly brotherhood that finds solace in speaking in lot in lieu of writing a lot. They were somewhat careful. And yet now they were totally gone, Vriuna noticed.

*

Vriuna translated Kedaro’s next novel, his second (yes, Kedaro said as much when he handed him a copy of the manuscript, and he said little else). “The Marriage” was a plodding novel, properly written, with a Socialist plot and Socialist characters living Socialist lives within Socialist constraints; Socialist frustrations, Socialist water, etc. Kedaro had got the message, Vriuna understood. His talent was still there. But he had buried it out of sight, almost completely. Vriuna felt that Albania had lost what could have been a great writer, but he was relieved for Kedaro the man. And he was still worried for those two who had disappeared into oblivion.

The French publishers of “The Marriage,” good Reds and fellow travelers as they were, ensured that the novel got some publicity and good reviews in some French magazines and newspapers. But the praise was tepid, a bit forced. You can tell when people go through the motions, and nobody’s heart is in it, Vriuna thought.

Years went by. Vriuna found other work to translate to French: the French socialists had a moderate appetite for tracts on Albanian collective farms, the heroic deeds of Albanian Reds during the War, and the Great Conductor’s thoughts and speeches. He didn’t see Kedaro much; the young man married a girl from a good Gjirokaster family and had a daughter, then another. He wrote reviews for The Popular Albanian now, and had little time for good old Vriuna, always from his apartment to the White House, and back.

Kedaro’s “The Fortress” came out in 1970 and was an instant success. Experience had given him a way to wrap an intriguing tale around proper Socialist themes, while avoiding the awful banality and didacticism that pretty much every other Albanian novel was destroyed by. Vriuna was impressed, and his French translation sold surprisingly well. “A history of Stones,” a similarly smart novel, had a similar success both at home and in France.

All of a sudden, Kedaro was becoming the best-known Albanian in the world, other than the Great Conductor, a very important man. He “won” a seat in the country’s parliament, and the next day a picture of him shaking hands with the Great Conductor was published in The Popular Albanian; the caption: “The country’s foremost writer meets the Secretary General of Albania’s People Party.” Vriuna became resigned to being left behind. Kedaro, now with access to the parliament’s canteen, rumored to contain delicacies beyond the dreams of any Albanian, had no good reason to ever step back in the White House, unless it was for official ceremonies and general adoration purposes.

Still, Kedaro returned. The commotion was notable in White House, the hushed comments a quiet, droning, scared thunder sneaking round the corridors, up the library with its Che Guevara biographies and the Complete Works of Comrade Stalin, where Vriuna was surprised to see his old, younger acquaintance—he certainly had no claim on friendship with such an elevated man anymore, if ever had—approach him to ask about the volume that Vriuna had in his hands.

“Anatole France?” Kedaro asked, his old smirk back in full force.

“A perfectly progressive writer. This is actually a decent novel about the French Revolution.”

“I suppose he had to do something to offset the effect of that surname of his.”

“It was a lifelong battle he had to wage, to stop himself from turning into a marble bust before his own death.”

“I hear he didn’t really succeed,” Kedaro sighed, handing Vriuna the book back.

And thus, Vriuna’s let’s-call-it amicable tie with the Second Greatest Albanian alive strengthened again. Parliament was an unexciting place, Kedaro explained, and he missed the White House, the comradeship of powerless writers with grand literary aspirations. He said he disdained the whole notion of keeping oneself in touch with the roots—what with the many easy metaphors that leaving “roots” behind allows: to better fly away, to be lighter on your feet, to be able to see the world, and so forth. No, his return to old friends and old customs had more to do with plain selfishness. He didn’t care for roots, Kedaro said. He only cared for leaves soaking up the sun, the anxious little apparatchiks of the vegetable world.

“What about flowers?” Vriuna asked.

“Flowers are deceptive,” Kedaro said.

*

The parliament’s canteen be damned, Kedaro went on a tourneé of Western Europe. The country’s literary star had to be showed off, and so he was: he gave lectures, speeches and interviews across Western Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium and then France. Of course, his wife and two daughters remained behind in Kedaro’s flashy-by-local-standards Tirana apartment; it was understood that every man needs an incentive not to do something really stupid when confronted with the dirty temptations of capitalism.

Vriuna believed that Kedaro was still in their beloved Paris when one other White House regular disappeared quietly. When he saw Kedaro next, he took him for a walk through a big, quiet park away from eavesdroppers.

“People say you gave interviews in capitalist newspapers and TV, praising our great Socialist system,” Vriuna said.

“I only told the truth, that things are never black and white. Capitalists have as many preconceptions about us as – well, let’s say they have very many preconceptions.”

“But sometimes things are black and white.”

“Only in old movies, for lack of coloring technology, my dear friend. Anyway, who said that about my interviews? I thought our local media reported little about my trip.”

“You know the construction of Socialism, day by day, is more important than any trip, no matter how talented the artist is. No, the people who said that were just chit-chatting. People in the White House, they probably heard rumors from other people. You know how that works.”

“I would like to know better how that works,” Kedaro said, glancing up at the overcast sky. “How information, both false and true, sneaks through the cracks this way and that – Now, there’s a novel there somewhere.”

Another tour, this time to countries in the Eastern bloc, coincided with one other disappearance: a bearded poet, whom rumors said had been sent straight to detention for ongoing work on some sort of Albanian wanna-be Doctor Zhivago novel, that he kept in coded scraps of paper in his apartment. Vriuna knew the poet well, but not as well as Kedaro, who had befriended the man in previous months. The poet was a shy boaster, the kind who would like to find a confident he can trust, so that all the beans he’s carried with him can be properly spilled. Kedaro, the well-known writer with a smile and an affable manner toward lesser intellectuals, might have looked like the appropriate container, Vriuna thought, resigned to strain the metaphor. The poet might have been tempted to tell Kedaro about a novel he might have to smuggle in the luggage of a prominent Socialist known to travel abroad, so that a trusted exile could handle publication in the West. Or so Vriuna thought, because in reality he knew nothing about such things, and he had to remind himself that such thoughts were improductive and even dangerous.

Kedaro went to China, and four other writers went away. This time, their trials were publicized in The Popular Albanian: they confessed to slandering the Great Conductor in private meetings and to the creation of a secret, unauthorized meeting group of intellectuals potentially open to contact with foreign powers, which included—oh, horror of horrors—pro-Russian elements at the worst possible time. Relations with Moscow had been worsening for some time, and China was Albania’s best friend in the world now. How lucky that Kedaro himself, who spoke some Russian and had studied in the Soviet Union and had friends and contacts among Albanians who had been there, was right then in China, and could remain perfectly isolated from the whole affair. Vriuna didn’t want to think anymore, he really didn’t, but his brain just went off on these directions sometimes. Shut up, he would tell himself in French and then in Italian, shut yourself down.

*

Kedaro eventually found himself in trouble again in 1975, when he decided to publish a satirical poem in a small, new literary magazine. Copies of the magazine were made to disappear by police, but not before they were hoarded by the starved literary masses, and passed on from hand to hand. Vriuna received one from an excited Kedaro admirer who gave it to him in the manner that believers pass relics on to each other.

Vriuna found the poem bad and light on contentious content; and the police slow in removing it from circulation: oh, the thoughts again. He hoped that Kedaro wouldn’t ask him to translate it, and Kedaro didn’t. In the end, Kedaro was slapped with a three-year publication ban, and yet he wasn’t stripped of his parliament seat. Just a few months later, Kedaro was off on a tour of friendly countries in Southeast Asia, which had a sole stop in Cambodia, then picturesquely ruled by the Khmer Rouge—a name that sounded like a good name for a line of French lingerie, he told Vriuna when he arrived back in Tirana.

“You don’t seem very troubled by the ban,” Vriuna said.

“It’ll give me time to do a better novel next time.”

“Broken May” and “The one-arched bridge” came out one after the other in 1978, just as the ban expired. There was great acclaim in the local press, and not a reference to the expired ban, or the reason for that ban. Kedaro had long been, and remained, the Second Most Popular Albanian in the world, and off he went to France as soon as Vriuna delivered both translations for publication there.

Kedaro’s life was obviously charmed; Vriuna was glad to have an apartment, a reasonable amount of food, and tea. He had a small cigarette allowance that he traded for other things: over time, cigarettes had paid for a lampshade, a Soviet radio, some half-decent clothes, a trip to the scenic mountain border with Macedonia. All of that thanks to the fact that he, forcibly, had given up smoking while in the camp; as he had given up so many other things.

A warm day in August, an official in a ugly suit approached Vriuna while he walked to his apartment. Vriuna knew the man: he was something important in the League of Writers and Intellectuals, a person to be taken into consideration, a person he should talk to if such was that person’s desire.

“You are an appreciated translator, Vriuna, a man who has paid his dues to Socialism despite your earlier mistakes. You are also friends with Kedaro, for some reason nobody can quite comprehend. But Kedaro has taken advantage of your talents to promote himself recklessly in the West, and he’s given you only crumbs for your work. Mere crumbs. Kedaro is in parliament, has a chauffeur he can call to drive him around, he has a young lady he keeps in a nice apartment in Gjirokaster. He buys her French lingerie and other French commodities. Did you know that?”

“Commodities,” the man had said. Commodities, as in oil or sugar. That was what Vriuna had grasped in that sentence: the way such people talk. They make it a rule, when they notice everyone is mocking them for speaking like that, that such speak will be the only one approved from now on; and that is the way they control things.

“No,” he said.

“He’s not fair with you, or with anyone else in the League of Writers and Intellectuals. Many suspect he’s been informing on people, he’s giving Internal Security names and damning evidence that he himself creates by cunning, by tricking people into speaking and confessing things to him. He makes them do things and then he denounces them. So they let him write whatever he pleases. And then they let him travel around the world, fornicating and drinking, and he says he defends Socialism because he gives interviews in which he tells the French that not all of us are beasts and murderers. You know this, don’t you?”

Vriuna had lived under Socialism long enough to know this was what in other societies would have been called a cry for help. Or a request for assistance. He knew how to respond, he had been prepared to respond for quite some time, and he hadn’t even noticed.

“He’s written a few good books,” Vriuna said. “That’s more than many of us can say.”

Vriuna knew the retort was there for the taking. In another place, another time, the official would have said something like: “he has also sent good men to prison, to torture, and maybe to awful deaths. All to protect himself, and what you call his art.” But both the official and Vriuna knew that was not the Socialist thing to be said by a Socialist official in a Socialist country. That was not the kind of sentence you wanted reported on some transcript prepared by Internal Security. And so Vriuna stared at the man, and wondered: in another time, another place, would the official had uttered the right response? Or was the construction of Socialism of such a nature that such people could never ascend to the middling heights of officialdom that man inhabited? Did he have a conscience that stopped him from speaking, in any case, out of respect for those he, the official himself, had sent to prison, to torture, to death?

So many thoughts, Vriuna thought. That year, 1980, there were Olympic Games in Moscow. Vriuna had spent 22 years out of jail. So many years with so many thoughts, he pondered; some liberty this is, this being out of prison.

*

Things moved slowly in Albania, on account of everyone being focused on constructing Socialism. But they did move. It was only two years and four Kedaro novels later, that the head of the League of Writers and Intellectuals gave what local press described as an “important” speech during a meeting with Party intellectuals and activists, in which he savagely attacked Kedaro.

That top official was, of course, the immediate superior of the man who had fruitlessly approached Vriuna: a bad-tempered, frustrated hedonist, one of those who spent decades in a simmering rage over the meager gains made by their absolute allegiance to a Party that had promised honey and milk when they were younger–and yet had only delivered mediocre Bulgarian beer and inedible Chinese snacks for the important occasions.

The way this worked, Kedaro wasn’t mentioned by name even once in the speech. He was a “well-known writer of international fame,” he was a “passive member of this League who never deigned to help in lower-level Party work,” he was “one who had taken advantage of a career driven and supported by Socialism to sneer at those building Socialism from his ivory tower.” The key criticism, however, was a single charge: that (Kedaro) avoided political work through his literary activity by writing folk tales about people disconnected from Socialist reality, a way to subtly sabotage the actual effort made by those doing real political work by writing proper Socialist novels and plays.

This was, obviously, not a literary dispute over the merits of Socialist literary work, about which nobody gave a hoot, Vriuna understood. It was a coded attack against Kedaro, a way of searching a weakness that could be exploited in order to let the top Party hierarchy that the League of Writers and Intellectuals was fully in the know about Kedaro’s snitching and wanted it stopped.

The politburo took the issue seriously. The times were changing: the Great Conductor was known to be in poor health, China was worryingly moving away from Socialism, Solidarity was growing in strength in Poland, and this time it wasn’t an empty slogan, but an anti-Party political movement. After a meeting, the politburo issued at statement in which it announced that Kedaro was stepping down from his parliament seat. Days later, an acquaintance in the White House handed Vriuna a smuggled Italian magazine, containing a long, detailed analysis of the Kedaro spat by an Italian analyst—a poor man’s equivalent of the Kremlinologists who read the tea leaves blown off from Russia; a Blockologist, since the Great Conductor lived in a cordoned are in Tirana known as The Block? Vriuna wondered. The analysis presented naive Italian readers with an astounding conclusion only arrived at by those initiated in the mysteries of Albanian politics: that the criticism against Kedaro (“shocking in its naked directness,” the well-polished Italian analyst wrote) was a sign of an internal political struggle between “hard-liners” and “reformists” within the politburo, and evidence that the hardliners had carried the day, by forcing out of parliament the well-known reformist Kedaro, through shrewd use of their clout in the League of Writers and Intellectuals.

Vriuna sighed. It probably wouldn’t be worth pointing out that Kedaro was bored sick of parliament and that the whole brouhaha had been a great opportunity for him to get rid of the obligation to sit and listen to the awful speeches. Not worth pointing out that all of it had probably been a fig-leaf placed in front of the country’s naked genitals, so that everyone could go about their own business undisturbed, and wait and see what happened elsewhere in the Socialist world. The politburo needed Kedaro, its direct connection with the West, the man who was a living example that not everything coming out of Albania was rotten and foul-smelling and laughable; the League of Writers and Intellectuals needed some members to stay out of the camps. Much better to leave foreigners have excited dreams about hard-liners and reformists and secret plots.

*

The Great Conductor finally died in 1985, leaving a crony to replace him: nothing like the events in the Soviet Union, where a young man with a large red spot on his bald head became the new Party leader. Vriuna was 69, a rickety 69, but still worked at his usual steady pace; the change of guard atop the Party gave him more to do, with new volumes of speeches and new biographies and more important advances of Albanian Communism to be presented to the French-speaking world.

Kedaro mostly stayed away. His traveling to the West continued (he was revered there, like a small rock star with literary groupies in several countries) and Vriuna heard that he spent a lot of time with another, younger lady friend in Gjirokaster.

No novels sprung forth from the mighty pen until The Play came out in 1988; as usual, Vriuna noticed, Kedaro had been a careful follower of the prevailing winds, and many in France and elsewhere hailed Vriuna’s translation of the novel as a definitive work of glasnost and perestroika, the buzzwords coming out from reform-minded Russia. Kedaro had pushed the envelope just so: some Socialist characters in the novel were imperfect, drunk or had mistresses; but it all fizzled out in the end with no clear message, and occurred in an otherworldly environment that could be understood as a Socialist Anyplace, an area open for any criticism from the reformist camp in Russia or Poland, or from the conservative camp in Romania, or from the Socialism-with-Chinese-Characteristics in Beijing, or from Vietnam, if one cared what they thought about European novels there.

The next Kedaro novel arrived in Vriuna’s hands in 1990, and the world was a very different place by then. The Berlin Wall had been smashed down the year before; Socialism was waning all over, and even Albania was preparing an election that would included non-Socialist candidates for the first time since time immemorial. Kedaro had moved to France, and would tell anyone there that he was an exile from Real Socialism, there to bear witness to the terrible things he had seen. He was now able to speak his mind openly, he told the adoring French.

*

Vriuna didn’t do so bad in his later years, either. But that’s how these things work: God, or Fortune, or the fickle public gives you champagne when your mouth can’t taste shit anymore. After capitalism arrived in Albania, Vriuna became the Director of something called “the Albanian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights.” He was truly surprised to see that everyone thought he was an intellectual hero now: people cited his years as a political prisoner and his refusal to betray his friend Kedaro when the hardliners went after him as key milestones in an immaculate career of commitment for freedom. He bought himself a color TV.

Albania being Albania, not everything was swell, of course. In 1997, there were massive riots caused by discontent with the fact that not all democratic politicians are angels in heaven, and that capitalism doesn’t turn everyone into Silvio Berlusconi, regrettably enough. Vriuna was too old for rioting, and besides it caused problems in the local TV headquarters that led to programming changes that he didn’t appreciate. He had become very fond of “Ally McBeal,” the American show about wacky lawyers, and was using it to teach himself English; he hated disruptions that would make him miss episodes. In addition, the riots presented the question: so you spent decades wishing you could go to Paris, you old fool, and now that you can just go you stay put in Tirana?

Vriuna moved to Paris, and was glad to see the French thought Kedaro’s translator to French was an important person too. He was awarded the title of Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1998, and he finally thought to himself: now, I can die in peace.

It so happened that a young woman reporter from Tirana visited Vriuna in his apartment in downtown Paris some time after that. She wanted to interview him, and he was accommodating. The interview was same-old, same-old about the sins of the past and Vriuna’s personal courage and his standing up for what he thought was right and such nonsense. But at one point the reporter stopped herself, changed tack completely so that even the tone of her voice shifted. She explained that, in addition of all his worthy achievements, Vriuna was also well-known in Albania as the best friend of Ismail Kedaro, the greatest writer in Albanian history. And he had become part of a controversy involving Kedaro in Albania: there were some, the reporter said, who thought Kedaro was wrong to present himself as any sort of dissident from the regime, when he had been a member of parliament, a feted artist who traveled around the world on official trips, a man who had access to luxuries few Albanians ever dreamed of.

“And there are also rumors that Kedaro was at some point as informer for Internal Security, and he helped send literary rivals to detention camps,” the reporter added. “What do you think of all of that?”

Vriuna nodded to himself. He didn’t really know even how to start to respond to that question. His old habit remained, having become part of his nature: he really struggled to think about things he knew he shouldn’t have thought about, at least until 1990 or whereabouts. If he thought, and then he expressed his thoughts to that reporter, would they make sense? Would they be misunderstood? Would they be worth anything at all? Kedaro was still alive and, being much younger than Vriuna, would probably survive him for some time. Vriuna didn’t really see the point, here.

“I think all of that is the past, and I don’t like to think about the past,” Vriuna said. “Will you have more tea, dear?”

Yusuf Vriuna died in Paris in May 2001.

Slavoj Zizek on the Transhumanist God

In “The indivisible remainder” (1996), perhaps his least-known book, Slavoj Zizek describes the idea of the human-derived God of transhumanism, referencing the works of the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling:

The unavoidable conclusion of (Schelling’s) ‘Philosophical Investigations’ is therefore that God, in so far as He is himself engaged in the process of Creation, becomes actual God only through man’s free decision for Him – it is not difficult to discern here the echoes of the old theosophical idea sustained by, among others, Meister Eckhart, according to which God Himself is born through man. Man gives birth to the living God from within himself – that is to say, he accomplishes the passage of the impersonal, anonymous divinity into the personal God. This, of course, charges man with the burden of a terrible responsibility: the fate of the entire universe – and, ultimately, of God Himself – depends on his acts. Every human victory over Evil, every emergence of a community of believers, contributes to the formation of the mystical body of God Himself; and, vice versa, man’s choice of Evil asserts God’s Selbstheit, His contractive force – Schelling describes Hell as the ‘consuming fire of the divine egotism’. Here he inscribes himself in the lineage of the revolutionary messianic theology whose most outspoken representative in Marxism is Walter Benjamin (see his Theses on the Philosophy of History) : history is an ‘open’ process, a succession of empty signs, of traces which point towards the eschatological moment to come in which ‘all accounts will be settled’, all (symbolic) debts will be set off, all signs will acquire their full meaning’ the coming of this moment is not guaranteed in advance, but depends on our freedom. The outcome of the struggle for freedom will determine the meaning of the past itself: in it, it will be decided what things ‘truly were ‘. We can see how only a thin, barely perceptible line separates this messianic revolutionary logic from the most extreme fatalism according to which everything has already happened and things, in their temporal process of becoming, merely become what they always-already were: the past itself is not fixed, it ‘will have been’ – that is to say, through the deliverance-to-come, it will become what it already always-was.

Later, in a footnote in the same book, Zizek adds another highly transhumanist touch:

Vittorio Hosie (in Praktische Philosophie in der Modernen Welt, p. 44) provides an extremely ingenious solution to the contradiction between Kant’s thesis, taken over by Schelling, according to which the world was created in order to become the battleground for the moral conflict between Good and Evil, the conflict whose happy outcome – i.e. the final victory of the Good – is guaranteed by God as the necessary postulate of pure reason, and today’s threat of humanity’s self-destruction by means ‘ of a nuclear or ecological catastrophe: the necessary existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. That is to say, if the possibility of this catastrophe is serious, does not this render the universe meaningless, and thus expose the impotence (or, even worse, perversity) of God’s act of Creation? The only consequent solution is to take seriously and literally Kant’s repeated insistence that the moral imperative holds not only for humans but for all other finite rational beings which perhaps, unbeknown to us, exist on other planets, and to draw the conclusion that these ETs, which will prolong the battle for morality in the event of humanity’s self-destruction, have to exist… The way to avoid this conclusion is to abandon its key premiss, absolute determinism: according to Hosie, God is all-powerful, He foresaw everything, including humanity’s (eventual) self-destruction – in this case, of course, the creation of the universe and of humanity with the full foreknowledge of its future self-destruction is a meaningless, perverse act. Schelling, on the contrary, remains radically ‘anthropocentric’: man’s fate is open; he can – but not necessarily – sink into self-destruction, and thus bring about the regression of the universe to the rotary motion prior to Ent-Scheidung: consequently, what is at stake in man’s struggle for the Good is the fate of God Himself, the success or failure of His act of Creation.

Giulio Prisco, whom we might call the patriarch of the Turing Church for technological resurrection, has often written about this theme, which I find absolutely fascinating.

How Constitutions Came to Rule the World

Let’s make a list of the coolest, greatest countries on Earth, by order of coolness points:

Wait, what? You mean to say that the number of approved constitutions doesn’t equal coolness points? You must be kidding.

I confess to having designed the aforementioned chart above myself. That’s why it’s so ugly. But it’s truthful: there’s a strong correlation between constitution writing, death and misery. So, why so many people are in love with constitutions?

Jenny Uglow, in the impeccably progressive New York Review of Books, which was for Stalin before Stalin himself was for Stalin, wrote an informative review of a recent book by historian Linda Colley on the history of constitutions. And, let’s say, it’s not a pretty one, even though Uglow really tries to make it shine:

The initial lever for political change, she argues, was the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), which spread beyond Europe to India, North and South America and the Caribbean, Senegal, and the Philippines. In the aftermath of this and later wars and revolutions, constitutional thinking developed both as a means of shoring up entrenched power and of turning successful rebellions into legitimate governments.

In the most basic terms, a written constitution is a single document that stands above the law, clarifying the relationship of the executive, legislature, and judiciary, as well as the duties and rights of citizens. One enduring notion is that such a document should embody certain values considered immutable, such as liberté, égalité, fraternité. Sadly, in practice, when regimes are concerned with asserting their power, “liberty” and “justice” come low on the list. But the belief in universal values goes back to the Enlightenment origins of this “new political technology,” as Colley calls written constitutions. Thus she shows Jeremy Bentham, queried by the German law professor Eduard Gans in 1831 on the relationship between lawmaking and local history, exploding, “Do you actually value history?… This upholder of mindlessness, this page on to which intellect and stupidity are equally written.” Furiously, Bentham asserted that written constitutions should instead, as Colley explains, “embody rational principles of liberal justice and rights that were of universal application.”

Colley’s account contradicts Bentham’s bluster. Taking us at different points to Corsica, Japan, the US, China, Venezuela, Sierra Leone, and many other nations, she shows how historical events and local traditions have always been crucial to constitutional development. The geographic sweep and legal complexities are daunting, but Colley makes them accessible by employing a human scale, evoking settings and individuals—from the “white-haired, trim and restless” Bentham, strolling round the gardens of his London house, to the Japanese prime minister Itō Hirobumi at the end of the nineteenth century, wearing Western dress and then reverting to his kimono, “a white or pale one in summer and a black one in winter.”

In this vein, she opens not with the French Revolution or the American War of Independence but with the thirty-year-old Pasquale Paoli, soldier and Freemason, returning to Corsica on April 16, 1755, determined to free his native country from Genoese rule and French encroachment. That November, by then a successful rebel leader, he drafted a ten-page constitution, declaring that the representatives of the people, now “legitimate masters of themselves” after having regained Corsica’s liberty, wished “to give a durable and permanent form to its government by transforming it into a constitution suited to assure the well-being of the nation.” Paoli drew ideas from the classics, from contemporary writers, and from his father’s own local attempts at reform. A decade later, all Corsican men over twenty-five could vote and run for a seat in the diet, the island’s parliament—a higher proportion than anywhere else in Europe. But enfranchisement was less an assertion of principle than an acknowledgment of the need for willing troops: If a man had no political rights, asked Paoli, “what interest would he take in defending the country?”

The models for early written constitutions, even those born of revolution, were not necessarily republican. Paoli, scribbling his constitution in Corte, “a fortified town high in the granite heart of the island,” is set against Henry Christophe in Haiti fifty years later. Christophe used his 1811 constitution, modifying earlier constitutions of Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, to declare himself a hereditary monarch. Posing for his portrait in military dress against a background of rolling clouds, he presented himself as “a soldier king valiantly engaged in defending a realm whose very independence had been secured by Black warfare.” A monarchy, Colley points out, could be revolutionary, if claimed by “an uneducated Black artisan, turned drummer boy, turned innkeeper, turned butcher,” then a general and a self-proclaimed king.

Established rulers too, nervously reestablishing control after the Seven Years’ War, embarked on constitutional projects. In 1765, three years after her coup and the death of her husband, Peter III, Catherine the Great spent eighteen months—rising every morning between four and five, enduring eyestrain and headaches—compiling her Nakaz, an agenda for modernizing the laws of the Russian Empire. Among her many borrowings were sections of important Enlightenment texts—Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments (1764), the Encyclopédie, and Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws (1748), which she called “the prayerbook of all monarchs with any common sense.”

Catherine needed to bolster her position: as “a female usurper” who faced sexual innuendo and personal as well as political threats, she ruled a country overextended in war and consumed by debt. Yet while the Nakaz reaffirmed her power to make and repeal laws, the Legislative Commission that discussed it was stirringly innovative, gathering delegates from across the empire, including women landowners and “state peasants”; Colley observes that “in sharp contrast with the men of Philadelphia in 1787, not all of the Moscow deputies were white, and not all of them were Christian.”

That’s a very American observation to make. I guess she refers to the occasional Central Asian delegate, which may or may have not existed. Or is her point that Caucasians are not White? Startingly enough, Colley is British (although she lives in the US).

Other European rulers engaged in similar projects, notably Frederick II of Prussia and Gustav III of Sweden, whose Form of Government, proclaimed as “a fixed and sacred fundamental law,” was published in 1772 with the provision that both king and people were “bound to the law, and both of us tied together and protected by the law.” Catherine and Gustav had their documents printed and distributed at home and abroad. (The Nakaz was censored as “dangerous and advanced” in France.) From then on, the printing press, as much as the pen, was a powerful driver in circulating different constitutional possibilities.

At the same time, the Persian ruler Nadir Shah Afshar was waging war from the Caucasus to India, and the Qing Dynasty was annihilating the Zunghar-Mongolian Empire. The Chinese conquests contributed to the “blizzard of new paperwork” across the globe. An army of scholars and officials worked for eighteen years on the Qianlong Emperor’s Comprehensive Treatises, a reference source for officials in the newly conquered lands, as well as a propaganda exercise to demonstrate his power; they were published in 1787, the same year as the drafting of the American Constitution.

Subjects, as well as rulers, pondered constitutional issues. Colley argues that this was particularly true in Britain, where “because of the limits on royal power, such developments were less top-down and more diverse.” Royal prerogative had already been circumscribed by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the Bill of Rights that followed ensured free elections and certain civil rights. Yet Tom Paine, one of a growing number of excise officers raising the money needed to pay for the Seven Years’ War, was convinced, in Colley’s words, that “monarchies were congenitally addicted to warmongering,” and he became a powerful advocate for written constitutions. Paine looked not to contemporary texts but to earlier charters such as the thirteenth-century Magna Carta, the object of a revived cult and the foundational “liberty text” that was repeatedly cited by radical groups fighting for more rights, including the Chartists of the 1830s and 1840s.

In Colley’s narrative, Paine “the charter man” stands for three crucial features: grassroots involvement, the authority of the past, and the bold transmission and recycling of ideas—another example of the power of print. In Common Sense, published in 1776, two years after he landed in America, Paine recommended that a congress, with two members for each of the thirteen states, should “frame a CONTINENTAL CHARTER, or Charter of the United Colonies; (answering to what is called the Magna Carta of England).”

Twelve years later, in the long, hot summer of 1787, many of the delegates gathered in Philadelphia to amend the Articles of Confederation drawn up during the Revolutionary War referred to the earlier charters for the different American colonies. Once the draft of the Constitution was published, Colley argues, print was essential to its ratification. This was bolstered not only through the Federalist Papers of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton (which stressed that the Constitution would defend the new nation against armed threats from abroad and insurrections from within, more than they celebrated its new beginnings), but through its dissemination by newspapers, magazines, and broadsheets all across America and the world.

When the Cherokee people, alarmed by white invaders, held a convention in 1827 and adopted a constitution setting out the borders of their territory, it was quickly declared illegal by both the US government and the legislature of Georgia, where most of them lived. In the following decade the Cherokee were driven from their lands. “The opportunities and ideas made available by print,” Colley notes, could be quickly “pushed to one side by those in possession of superior levels of power.”

When the early constitutions laid down a franchise, they almost always excluded certain categories, particularly women, Blacks, and indigenous peoples. The exceptions stand out. One was the Plan de Iguala, issued in Mexico in 1821 as an intended blueprint for the country. It selected some elements from the American Constitution, but it also specified that “all the inhabitants of New Spain, without any distinction between Europeans, Africans, or Indians,” would be citizens, with “access to all employments according to their merit and virtues.” It was widely published, and its inclusiveness (though still limited to men) was quickly picked up by campaigners in other parts of the world, from Irish writers concerned at the lack of Catholic Irish representation in the Westminster Parliament to the remarkable James Silk Buckingham and Rammohan Roy in Calcutta, who campaigned for improved liberties and rights for India’s indigenous peoples. Colley writes powerfully about those who lost out or were excluded, noting that until World War I the treatment of women often became more rather than less restrictive as constitutions were amended.

“Superior levels of power,” though, trumped any drive for wider liberties. Napoleon, whom Colley sees, in a slightly forced trope, as a model for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—both as a monster fond of reading about the founding of ancient republics and as a scientist whose experiment lets loose lasting violence and chaos—declared that “conquered provinces must be kept obedient to the victor by psychological methods” and by changes in “the mode of organisation of the administration.” But his greatest influence in this field came not with his new Cisalpine and Westphalian republics, swept away by conflict, but almost by accident. Before defeats at sea limited his global imperial ambitions, Napoleon’s Statute of Bayonne, drawn up in 1808 after the invasion of Spain, envisaged a constitution applicable to all of Spain’s overseas territory.

This spurred the opposing Spanish cortes, which met in Cádiz in 1810, to draft a rival constitution. The Cádiz constitution granted a measure of citizenship to all ethnicities in Spanish territories from the Philippines to Chile. Although Spain’s empire collapsed, the Cádiz constitution proved “massively influential, even game-changing.” The fact that it came from a Catholic nation (so far, most constitutions had been published under Protestant regimes) encouraged priests in Mexico, for example, to support their country’s new constitution in 1824, ensuring its widespread dissemination and acceptance. Yet in the newly liberated South American states, many constitutions were born and died with startling rapidity: “Our treaties are scraps of paper,” sighed the liberator Simón Bolívar (who recommended aspects of the British system), “our constitutions empty texts.”

The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen traces these shifts and abounds with subtle arguments grounded in expertly marshaled sources, generously acknowledged. But perhaps the book’s most impressive aspect is its mobility, felt not only in the fluid narratives but in the movement of constitutional ideas themselves. Hurried on by war, political and legal theories and models jump from nation to nation, continent to continent, carried by newspapers, books, and official documents, expressed in speeches, thrashed out in congresses, and argued over by exiles and dissidents. Endlessly adaptable, once published they could provide regimes “with an exportable and sometimes charismatic manifesto and vindication.”

Even small, ad hoc examples could be seeds for change. In 1790 the mutineers from HMS Bounty took refuge on tiny, volcanic Pitcairn Island with eighteen Tahitian companions, mostly women. When Captain Russell Elliott landed there in 1838, he found one hundred “predominantly non-white, mixed-culture” people. Listening to their anxieties about the arrival of missionaries, American whalers, and traders, and their fears that they had no flag and no government and that their island was easy prey, Elliott handed out a spare Union Jack and drew up “a few hasty regulations.” These ranged from protecting their scant resources (the first example of a constitution attending to the environment) and making children’s schooling mandatory to planning the election of their “magistrate and chief ruler,” who could assume no power “without the consent of the majority of the people.” Furthermore, all native islanders and long-term residents over eighteen, male and female, would have “free votes.”

This startlingly democratic constitution, sometimes written off as a “picaresque episode,” a utopian whim on Elliott’s part, was, Colley argues, no marginal venture but an inspiration across the Pacific. Other Pacific islands would develop texts to cement local unity and ward off other powers. These included the political code of Pomare II of Tahiti and Hawaii’s constitution of 1840, designed to show the island as a modern state and “therefore not an appropriate target for imperial takeover,” which enabled it to fend off American annexation until 1898.

Ideas spread like ripples. The Hawaiian model “of calculated repositioning and defensive modernisation” may, Colley argues, have influenced the Tunisian constitution of 1861, the first written constitution of an Islamic state, which was, she notes, at once ambivalent and lastingly significant. While granting no voting rights or freedom of expression or assembly, it accepted all residents as equal before the law, since they were all “creatures of God.” And although the ruling bey was confirmed as a hereditary prince, he was now required to act through his ministers and council. Other Muslim states took note. Even the Ottoman sultan accepted a constitution modifying his powers in 1876, and the influence of this early assertion of the possibilities of political change turned possession of a written constitution into an anticolonial statement, a spirit that could still be felt in the new Tunisian constitution of 2014 that followed the Arab Spring of 2011–2012.

The 1860s, like the 1750s, were another decade of crushing wars: the US Civil War, the Crimean War, the War of the Triple Alliance (Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay) against Paraguay, and the crushing of the Taiping Rebellion in China. Once again, conflict was followed by constitutional change in several widespread parts of the world. The American Reconstruction Act of 1867, for instance, which granted voting rights to Blacks, inspired the New Zealand government to grant rights to the Maori male population, and prompted James Africanus Horton in Sierra Leone to draw up proposed constitutions for independent West African nations.

Toward the end of the century, however, attention turned from the West to the East, where the new constitution of Meiji Japan, a deliberate constitutional leap into the modern world, was of major significance. “A large polity which was not situated in the Western world, which was not Christian, and which was not inhabited by people who viewed themselves as white” had, Colley notes, produced a document combining Western provisions, many gleaned in London, with historical continuity and a (very limited) embedding of popular rights. National and international opinion linked Meiji victories against China in 1895 and Russia in 1905 directly to this embrace of change. The Japanese, said one Turkish commentator, “are fighting for a country where they are free.”

Colley’s far-reaching account ends, as it began, in conflict, with World War I and the shaking of the old imperial powers. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Soviet Republic’s Fundamental Law, with its opening “Declaration of the Rights of Labouring and Exploited People,” provided a new, socially aware reference point for constitution writers. Many of these post-1918 constitutions failed—that of Germany’s Weimar Republic perhaps most memorably—but World War II and the waves of civil wars that gained momentum after the 1950s brought yet more. Since the 1990s, Colley notes, “the rate of flux and constitution-manufacture has only quickened.”

Preserving constitutions can become a cult, making them lumbering vehicles at odds with changing times: Colley suggests that the difficulty of amending the American Constitution is one reason for the “political dysfunctionality and hampering divisions” that have marked the US in recent decades. Today only a few countries—including Israel, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom—lack a written constitution.

The Jeffrey Epstein Case: Nasty Details and Names you Didn’t Know About

The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating peek into the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the shady financier who operated in the US and a pedophilic island of the Caribbean that looks very much like a “honey pot,” probably run for the benefit of Israeli intelligence.

The US attorney for the South District of New York, in charge of looking for Ghislaine Maxwell, is fired. Eleven days later, she's found. Boy, do I love the Jeffrey Epstein case https://t.co/60yihTenSh

— David Román (@dromanber) July 5, 2020

The biggest reveal in the WSJ report is that the US’ spy chief, a longtime college president and top women in finance were involved in Epstein’s group of acquaintances. In the end, the circle of people who associated with Jeffrey Epstein — years after he was a convicted sex offender — is wider than previously reported, according to a trove of documents that include his schedules.

William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency since 2021, had three meetings scheduled with Epstein in 2014, when he was deputy secretary of state, the documents show. They first met in Washington and then Mr. Burns visited Epstein’s townhouse in Manhattan.

Kathryn Ruemmler, a White House counsel under President Barack Obama, had dozens of meetings with Epstein in the years after her White House service and before she became a top lawyer at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in 2020. He also planned for her to join a 2015 trip to Paris and a 2017 visit to Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean.

Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, invited Epstein, who brought a group of young female guests, to the campus. Noam Chomsky, a professor, author and political activist, was scheduled to fly with Epstein to have dinner at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse in 2015. The WSJ goes on:

None of their names appear in Epstein’s now-public “black book” of contacts or in the public flight logs of passengers who traveled on his private jet. The documents show that Epstein arranged multiple meetings with each of them after he had served jail time in 2008 for a sex crime involving a teenage girl and was registered as a sex offender. The documents, which include thousands of pages of emails and schedules from 2013 to 2017, haven’t been previously reported.

The documents don’t reveal the purpose of most of the meetings. The Wall Street Journal couldn’t verify whether every scheduled meeting took place.

Most of those people told the Journal they visited Epstein for reasons related to his wealth and connections. Several said they thought he had served his time and had rehabilitated himself. Mr. Botstein said he was trying to get Epstein to donate to his school. Mr. Chomsky said he and Epstein discussed political and academic topics.

Mr. Burns met with Epstein about a decade ago as he was preparing to leave government service, said CIA spokeswoman Tammy Kupperman Thorp. “The director did not know anything about him, other than that he was introduced as an expert in the financial services sector and offered general advice on transition to the private sector,” she said. “They had no relationship.”

Ms. Ruemmler had a professional relationship with Epstein in connection with her role at law firm Latham & Watkins LLP and didn’t travel with him, a Goldman Sachs spokesman said. Epstein introduced her to potential legal clients, such as Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, the spokesman said. “I regret ever knowing Jeffrey Epstein,” Ms. Ruemmler said.

A spokeswoman for Latham & Watkins said Epstein wasn’t a client of the firm.

In 2006, Epstein was publicly accused of sexually abusing girls in Florida who were as young as 14 years old. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and police investigated, and Epstein reached a deal with prosecutors in 2008. He avoided federal charges and pleaded guilty to soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution. He registered as a sex offender and served about 13 months in a work-release program.

Epstein’s case generated waves of media coverage at the time, with publications in the U.S. and abroad reporting on accusations from underage girls and young women. In 2006, several politicians returned donations from Epstein. Some associates moved to distance themselves from him. His biggest known client, retail billionaire Leslie Wexner, later said he cut ties in 2007. His bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co., later said it closed his accounts in 2013, though some bankers continued to meet with him for years after.

Despite the negative press, Epstein’s days were filled from morning to night with meetings with prominent people, the documents show. There were dinners at New York restaurants, meetings at luxury hotels and gatherings in the offices of prominent law firms. Many appointments were held at Epstein’s townhouse in Manhattan.

Prosecutors alleged in 2019 that the townhouse is where Epstein sexually abused female victims for years, many underage, and that he paid some of them to recruit their friends to engage in sexual activity.

After the Miami Herald reported that dozens of women said they were abused, prosecutors charged Epstein in 2019 with a sex trafficking conspiracy. He died that year in a New York jail while awaiting trial in what the city’s medical examiner said was a suicide.

Of course, nobody in the world actually thinks that was a suicide. And many of the people who said they did keep committing strange sorts of suicide themselves.

Mr. Burns, 67 years old, a career diplomat and former ambassador to Russia, had meetings with Epstein in 2014 when Mr. Burns was deputy secretary of state.

A lunch was planned that August at the office of law firm Steptoe & Johnson in Washington. Epstein scheduled two evening appointments that September with Mr. Burns at his townhouse, the documents show. After one of the scheduled meetings, Epstein planned for his driver to take Mr. Burns to the airport.

Mr. Burns recalls being introduced in Washington by a mutual friend, and meeting Epstein once briefly in New York, said Ms. Thorp. “The director does not recall any further contact, including receiving a ride to the airport,” she said.

The following month, October 2014, Mr. Burns stepped down from his role at the State Department to serve as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank. He ran the Carnegie Endowment until he was nominated in early 2021 by President Biden to serve as CIA director.

The documents show that Epstein appeared to know some of his guests well. He asked for avocado sushi rolls to be on hand when meeting with Ms. Ruemmler, according to the documents. He visited apartments she was considering buying. In October 2014, Epstein knew her travel plans and told an assistant to look into her flight. “See if there is a first class seat,” he wrote, “if so upgrade her.”

Ms. Ruemmler first met Epstein after he called her to ask if she would be interested in representing Mr. Gates and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Goldman Sachs spokesman said.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Gates said Epstein never worked for Mr. Gates, misrepresented their relationship, and that Mr. Gates regrets ever meeting with him.

Epstein and his staff discussed whether Ms. Ruemmler, now 52, would be uncomfortable with the presence of young women who worked as assistants and staffers at the townhouse, the documents show. Women emailed Epstein on two occasions to ask if they should avoid the home while Ms. Ruemmler was there. Epstein told one of the women he didn’t want her around, and another that it wasn’t a problem, the documents show.

Ms. Ruemmler didn’t see anything that would lead her to be concerned at the townhouse and didn’t express any concern, the Goldman spokesman said.

Several people who visited Epstein during this time period said they noticed young women at his townhouse. One of the visitors, Helen Fisher, an anthropologist who studies romantic love and attachment, had lunch with Epstein in January 2016 to discuss her work.

Dr. Fisher said that after the lunch, Epstein invited her to speak with his staff. “And then, in filed, I would say, six young women,” she said. “All of them good looking. All of them young.”

Dr. Fisher said Epstein never funded her work, they weren’t friends and they didn’t stay in touch. “I didn’t have anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein,” she said. “But I remembered it because of his spectacular house and because of the six young women.”

“In the normal course, Epstein also invited her to meetings and social gatherings, introduced her to other business contacts and made referrals,” the Goldman spokesman said. “It was the same kinds of contacts and engagements she had with other contacts and clients.”

In 2015, she was scheduled to fly with Epstein to Paris and in 2017 he planned to stop in St. Lucia to take her to his island home in the U.S. Virgin Islands for the day, according to the documents.

Ms. Ruemmler never visited his island and “never accepted an invitation or an opportunity to fly with Jeffrey Epstein anywhere,” the Goldman spokesman said.

In addition to her current role as general counsel at Goldman Sachs, Ms. Ruemmler is co-chair of its reputational risk committee, which monitors business and client decisions for potential damage to the bank’s image.

Epstein also connected Ms. Ruemmler with Ariane de Rothschild, who is now chief executive of the Swiss private bank Edmond de Rothschild Group. The bank hired Ms. Ruemmler’s law firm, Latham & Watkins, after the introduction to help with U.S. regulatory matters, according to the bank and the Goldman spokesman.

Mrs. de Rothschild, who married into the famous banking family, had more than a dozen meetings with Epstein. He sought her help with staffing and furnishings as well as discussed business deals with her, according to the documents.

In September 2013, Epstein asked Mrs. de Rothschild in an email for help finding a new assistant, “female…multilingual, organized.”

“I’ll ask around,” Mrs. de Rothschild emailed back.

She bought nearly $1 million worth of auction items on Epstein’s behalf in 2014 and 2015, the documents show.

Mrs. de Rothschild was named chairwoman of the bank in January 2015. That October, she and Epstein negotiated a $25 million contract for Epstein’s Southern Trust Co. to provide “risk analysis and the application and use of certain algorithms” for the bank, according to a proposal reviewed by the Journal.

In 2019, after Epstein was arrested, the bank said that Mrs. de Rothschild never met with Epstein and it had no business links with him.

The bank acknowledged to the Journal that its earlier statement wasn’t accurate. It said Mrs. de Rothschild met with Epstein as part of her normal duties at the bank between 2013 and 2019, and Epstein introduced the bank to U.S. finance leaders, recommended law firms and provided tax and risk consulting.

“In parallel to that, Epstein solicited her personally on a couple occasions for advice and services on estate management,” the bank said.

Mrs. de Rothschild had no knowledge of any legal proceedings against Epstein and “was similarly unaware of any questions regarding his personal conduct,” the bank said. After later learning of his behavior, the bank said, “she feels for and supports the victims.”

One of Epstein’s scheduled meetings with Mrs. de Rothschild, in January 2014, included another of his regular guests: Joshua Cooper Ramo, then co-chief executive of Henry Kissinger’s corporate consulting firm.

Epstein scheduled more than a dozen meetings from 2013 to 2017 with Mr. Ramo, who at the time served on the boards of Starbucks Corp. and FedEx Corp. , the documents show. Epstein had special snacks on hand because he believed Mr. Ramo was vegetarian, the documents indicate.

Many of Mr. Ramo’s appointments with Epstein were in the evenings, typically after 5 p.m., at the townhouse. Mr. Ramo also was invited to a breakfast at the townhouse in September 2013 with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, another regular guest, the documents show.

Mr. Ramo, who still sits on the board of FedEx and recently stepped down from the Starbucks board, didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for Mr. Kissinger said he wasn’t aware that Mr. Ramo was meeting with Epstein.

Mr. Barak also met Epstein in 2015 with Mr. Chomsky, now 94, a linguistics professor and political activist who has been critical of capitalism and U.S. foreign policy.

Mr. Chomsky said Epstein arranged the meeting with Mr. Barak for them to discuss “Israel’s policies with regard to Palestinian issues and the international arena.”

Mr. Barak said he often met with Epstein on trips to New York and was introduced to people such as Mr. Ramo and Mr. Chomsky to discuss geopolitics or other topics. “He often brought other interesting persons, from art or culture, law or science, finance, diplomacy or philanthropy,” Mr. Barak said.

Epstein arranged several meetings in 2015 and 2016 with Mr. Chomsky, while he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

When asked about his relationship with Epstein, Mr. Chomsky replied in an email: “First response is that it is none of your business. Or anyone’s. Second is that I knew him and we met occasionally.” Chomkiest reponse ever.

In March 2015, Epstein scheduled a gathering with Mr. Chomsky and Harvard University professor Martin Nowak and other academics, according to the documents. Mr. Chomsky said they had several meetings at Mr. Nowak’s research institute to discuss neuroscience and other topics.

Two months later, Epstein planned to fly with Mr. Chomsky and his wife to have dinner with them and movie director Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, the documents show.

“If there was a flight, which I doubt, it would have been from Boston to New York, 30 minutes,” Mr. Chomsky said. “I’m unaware of the principle that requires that I inform you about an evening spent with a great artist.”

Epstein donated at least $850,000 to MIT between 2002 and 2017, and more than $9.1 million to Harvard from 1998 to 2008, the schools have said. In 2021, Harvard said it was sanctioning Mr. Nowak for violating university policies in his dealings with Epstein, and was shutting a research center he ran that Epstein had funded. MIT said it was inappropriate to accept Epstein’s gifts, and that it later donated $850,000 to nonprofits supporting survivors of sexual abuse.

In a 2020 interview with the “dunc tank” podcast, Mr. Chomsky said that people he considered worse than Epstein had donated to MIT. He didn’t mention any of his meetings with Epstein.

Mr. Chomsky told the Journal that at the time of his meetings “what was known about Jeffrey Epstein was that he had been convicted of a crime and had served his sentence. According to U.S. laws and norms, that yields a clean slate.”

MIT said lawyers investigating its ties to Epstein didn’t find that Mr. Chomsky met with Epstein on its campus or received funding from him. Harvard declined to comment beyond the report it published on its Epstein ties in 2020. Mr. Nowak has said he regretted his role in fostering a connection between Epstein and Harvard. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Botstein, 76, president of Bard College since 1975, had about two dozen meetings scheduled with Epstein over about four years, which were mostly visits to the townhouse.

“I was an unsuccessful fundraiser and actually the object of a little bit of sadism on his part in dangling philanthropic support,” said Mr. Botstein. “That was my relationship with him.”

Mr. Botstein said he first visited Epstein’s townhouse in 2012 to thank him for unsolicited donations to Bard’s high schools, then he returned over several years in an attempt to get more donations. In 2015, Epstein donated 66 laptops, the documents show.

“We looked him up, and he was a convicted felon for a sex crime,” he said. Bard has a large program providing education to prisoners, he said. “We believe in rehabilitation.”

Mr. Botstein, also the longtime music director for the American Symphony Orchestra, invited Epstein to an opera at Bard in 2013, then a concert at the college in 2016, the documents indicate. Epstein planned each time to bring some of his young female assistants and arrive by helicopter.

Mr. Botstein said he was expecting Epstein to support classical music causes and that the school took precautions when he visited. “Because of his previous record, we had security ready,” he said. “He did not have any free access to anybody.”

At Epstein’s home, Mr. Botstein was led to a dining room where they discussed classical music and other causes, he said. “He presented himself as a billionaire, a really, really rich person,” he said. “I found him odd and arrogant. And what I finally came to believe, which is why we stopped contact with him, is that he was simply stringing us along.”

Despite all his meetings, Mr. Botstein said, Epstein never made another donation to Bard. “It was a blessing in disguise,” he said, “that we never got any [more] money.”

There’s a lot more than the WSJ report about the Jeffrey Epstein case. For example, Dylan Howard’s “Dead men tell no tales” is a solid book on the issue. However, as it was published in late 2019, it’s already dating as new revelations appear, for example, about Bill Gates’ relationship with the famous “intelligence asset” and pederast – which appears to have been driven mostly by a loath of his wife and a stupid obsession with winning a Nobel Prize. Little on Gates appears in the book.

This is not the place to craft a detailed narrative of the Epstein case. Howard’s book works, however, as a very nice introduction. Below, there’s some of the stuff I underlined while reading it. Let’s kick off with Epstein’s famous, grand jet, the “Lolita Express”:

The jet could host twenty-nine people comfortably, but Epstein and Maxwell more frequently hosted intimate affairs in the sky. Flight logs we obtained in 2015 read like a who’s who of early 1990s society. From Hollywood, there were actors Kevin Spacey, comedian Chris Tucker, actor Ralph Fiennes, magician David Blaine, singers Jimmy Buffet and Courtney Love. Media moguls Charlie Rose and Bill Wallace make an appearance. From the world of tech, Bill Gates. Political leaders such as Tony Blair, Ehud Barak, and conservative scion David Koch. Then, there was President Bill Clinton. Clinton is never named in Epstein’s little black book of contacts, although his close friend and counselor Doug Band is, along with a listing for “42.” (Clinton was the forty-second president.) In the flight logs for Epstein’s Lolita Express, however, there was no such obfuscation. According to the logs, Clinton first hitchhiked on Epstein’s infamous Lolita Express in February 2002. They were joined by Ghislaine, her “assistant” Sarah Kellen, four members of the Secret Service, and five people identified only as “male,” “female,” or by their initials. According to the three-letter airport designations in the documents, the private jet flew from Miami International Airport to Westchester County Airport in New York State, where the Clintons have lived since 1999. On paper, it seems like an innocuous trip made by powerful men accustomed to brokering political and financial deals in unusual settings.

But that notion changes when put into context. President Clinton has claimed that he only traveled on Epstein’s Lolita Express on four occasions. Epstein and Clinton actually buddied up for six trips between 2002 and 2003, to Europe, Africa, and Asia. On their “humanitarian trips” to Africa, Clinton went without his usual security detail, and without chaperones. The men, it seemed, had hit it off… Although Clinton referred to a single “trip” in his statement, in truth, they flew on Epstein’s jet thirteen times during that eight-day overseas outing. What’s more, they were routinely joined by controversial characters, like Hollywood actor—and accused pedophile—Kevin Spacey, who joined them on three of those flights, and Epstein’s “personal massage therapist” Chauntae Davis, who got onboard in Cape Town and flew with them to Paris. Davis has since come forward with tales of Epstein’s sexual abuse. (Spacey has denied all allegations of impropriety against him.) “On almost every trip that I did go on, there were young girls around,” Davis claimed. In total, Clinton actually made twenty-seven trips with soon-to-be registered sex offender Epstein. Clinton’s press secretary would later insist that all of their flights were taken “in connection with the work of the Clinton Foundation” and that every leg included the applicable staff, foundation supporters and members of the secret service. Clinton denied that he ever knew of anything untoward happening on board.

Virginia Giuffre Roberts, for years abused by Epstein but also an accomplice of his, to some extent, is often quoted in the book because she’s been the most persistent and daring of his accusers for years:

“It’s called Lolita Express for a reason,” Roberts wrote. “That was a vessel for him to be able to abuse girls and get away with it.” Among the men who she claims violated her in Epstein’s mile-high club were The Simpsons creator Matt Groening (who gave her a personally inscribed sketch of Homer and Bart); model scout Jean-Luc Brunel (another reported sex trafficker who could secure passports for minors); cofounder of MIT’s artificial intelligence lab, Marvin Minsky; and former US Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell. (“I have never met, spoken with or had any contact with Ms. Giuffre,” the Maine senator has denied. At the time of this writing, Groening has not issued a public denial. Brunel is missing. Minsky is dead.) As for Epstein’s friend Donald Trump, Roberts wrote that he was a not-unfrequent presence in their twisted world, but she never saw him indulge: “I didn’t physically see him have sex with any of the girls. . . . I can’t say who he had sex with in his whole life or not, but I just know it wasn’t with me when I was with other girls.” In a later court deposition she even denied that he’d ever flirted with her. By late 2001, Ghislaine began shuttling Roberts around in a privately-owned helicopter. Even more discreet than the Lolita Express, the helicopter created still more opportunities for abuse.

This is Virginia, with the UK’s Prince Andrew, one of her regulars; Ghislaine is hovering behind:

In court documents unsealed in July 2019, Roberts alleged that she was forced to give “massages” to then-twenty-five-year-old filmmaker and environmentalist Alexandra Cousteau, the granddaughter of famous French explorer Jacques Cousteau. Roberts said that Epstein “instigated that she and I reenact as lovers in lesbian acts of foreplay and penetration” with a strap-on penis. Cousteau does have, however, links to one of Epstein’s closest business partners: Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Epstein had a framed photo of “MBS” in his Manhattan mansion and often claimed the controversial Saudi royal had visited his property there many times, these authors can reveal. In 2019, it was reported that MBS ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, nephew of Epstein’s infamous pal Adnan Khashoggi. In September 2019, Cousteau was named as one of the featured speakers at a conference sponsored by the United Nations and a foundation headed by MBS.)

MBS has been, of course, key to securing Arab recognition for Israel in recent years, as Saudi Arabia has essentially become Israel’s second-closest ally after the U.S.

Later, Epstein’s flight logs would show an entry for Trump on the Lolita Express. Not only was his phone number found in Epstein’s little black book; but also, more than a dozen additional ways to contact him. After Epstein’s crimes became public, Trump attempted to distance himself. He reportedly barred Epstein from Mar-a-Lago in 2008, and said in 2019, “I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him,” insisting, “I was not a fan.”

Epstein’s time behind bars would be more of a retreat than retribution. To start, he was not sent to federal prison like most sex offenders in the state. Instead, he was given a private wing at the Palm Beach County Stockade Facility, where he enjoyed the care of his own personal security guards. Even then, remarkably, he spent little time within the confines of the jail. Just over three months into his sentence, Epstein was granted work release, allowing him to leave the premises for up to seven days a week, up to sixteen hours at a time. That period included up to two hours at his Palm Beach sex den. In principle, it was shocking. In practice, it was illegal. Florida law prohibits anyone who has committed three violations in five years from being granted work-release. Epstein pleaded guilty to charges involving one victim. But in 2018, the Southern Florida Assistant US Attorney, Maria Villafaña, announced that she’d found “inaccuracies and omissions” in Epstein’s work-release file, claiming that he had actually made three violations and therefore should not have ever been given release. What’s more, of more than twenty inmates on work release at that time in the same prison, Epstein was the only sex offender… According to records obtained by these authors, one of his nonprofit organizations paid $128,000 to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department to cover the cost of his personal detail. They were even known to refer to him as “the client” instead of as “the perp.” Ultimately, Epstein—one of the sickest sex fiends to ever walk the planet—only served thirteen months before he was released on “good behavior.”

The honey trap—or “love trap,” as it is sometimes known—has a long and salacious history in American espionage. According to a 1975 Washington Post report, “For years, the Central Intelligence Agency operated love traps in New York and San Francisco, where foreign diplomats were lured by prostitutes in the pay of the CIA.” “Through hidden one-way mirrors, CIA agents filmed the sexual adventures and later tried to blackmail the victims into becoming informants.” The article noted, “The CIA possibly got the idea from the Russians, who have long used sex blackmail to entrap Westerners into spying for them.” CIA reps told the Washington Post reporters that they “had never heard of this.” But for Epstein, the playbook was already written. Dillon explained: If you’re an intelligence community, and you have someone like Epstein, who’s kind of a celebrity, who can attract celebrities, who can be in part of conversations about world events about the most secret things. If you could put people like Clinton on his planes and you can put Ehud Barak, a former Prime Minister of Israel and a former general, then he is a guy who really matters to you. If he is going to be your friend, he is going to work for you. He is going to be an asset for you. Look what he can do. He can give you information on all those politicians; on their private behavior, their peccadilloes, all these things are important to intelligence communities. Former CIA counterterrorism specialist Philip Giraldi said he also has “little doubt” that Epstein was running an intelligence operation… “There is no other viable explanation for his filming of prominent politicians and celebrities having sex with young girls,” Giraldi wrote in the American Herald Tribune in August 2019. “Epstein clearly had contact with former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak and [Epstein’s client Leslie] Wexner also had close ties to Israel and its government.” In addition to flying on the Lolita Express, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak also visited Epstein at his Manhattan home. In January 2016, he was photographed entering the property, followed by four young women soon after.

The “honey trap” is extremely prominent in the John Le Carré’s novels from the 1960s. It may be oldest trick of intelligence agencies, since Mata Hari or even Cleopatra.

According to Giraldi, former Palm Beach County state attorney Barry Krischer also may have been responsible for swaying Acosta in 2008, behind-the-scenes. Krischer had won the prestigious Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Award ten years before. (The ADL is a US-based Jewish organization with a long history of domestic spying allegations.) “The Jewish state regularly tops the list for ostensibly friendly countries that aggressively conduct espionage against the US,” Giraldi claimed. “Mossad would have exploited Epstein’s contacts. . . . Those blackmailed would undoubtedly in most cases cooperate with the foreign government involved to avoid a major scandal.” Fallen into the hands of the American justice system in Florida, he could have provided information far more explosive than whatever was happening at Bear Stearns. Indeed, Epstein’s attorney Kenneth Starr at one point went over Acosta’s head to Republican appointees at the Department of Justice, demanding that they drop the case. The attorney general in 2008, who likely would have received the request, was Michael Mukasey—an Orthodox Jew with such deep ties to Israel, that he has been accused of having dual citizenship.

Even worse than the media secrecy that surrounded the deal was the fact that it was deliberately hidden from the victims. A letter from one of Epstein’s attorneys to Acosta makes the plot clear: As part of the plea deal, Acosta would be barred from informing “any of the identified individuals, potential witnesses or potential civil claimants” about the details or even the existence of the agreement. Spencer Kuvin was an attorney representing several Epstein victims at the time. He described how he and his clients were kept in the dark to veteran crime reporter Doug Montero. “I’m in the courtroom and Mr. Epstein pleads guilty,” Kuvin recalled.” At this point, we still don’t know on behalf the victims what he’s pleading guilty to. We don’t know how long he’s going to stay in jail, we don’t know what the non-prosecution agreement that he entered into says, what it says for the victims, what it says about him, what charges he’s admitting to or what is the standard of all of the allegations that he’s admitting to at the time. He’s just whisked off and that’s it.”

What’s more, for the first time, Roberts unleashed on Prince Andrew: Jane Doe #3 was forced to have sexual relations with this Prince when she was a minor in three separate geographical locations: in London (at Ghislaine Maxwell’s apartment), in New York, and on Epstein’s private island in the US Virgin Islands (in an orgy with numerous other under-aged girls). Epstein instructed Jane Doe #3 that she was to give the Prince whatever he demanded and required Jane Doe #3 to report back to him on the details of the sexual abuse. Maxwell facilitated Prince Andrew’s acts of sexual abuse by acting as a “madame” for Epstein, thereby assisting in internationally trafficking Jane Doe #3 (and numerous other young girls) for sexual purposes. “Epstein also trafficked Jane Doe #3 for sexual purposes to many other powerful men,” the court filings claimed, “including numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders. Epstein required Jane Doe #3 to describe the events that she had with these men so that he could potentially blackmail them.” Indeed, in the years after Epstein was released from prison, his information-gathering and blackmail system went into overdrive like never before. Despite the fact that he was a convicted sex felon, still facing lawsuits and allegations in Florida, the highest levels of society stood waiting to welcome him back from prison with open arms.

In what now seems like a catastrophic misstep that launched the most sensational scandal in Buckingham Palace history, Prince Andrew remained a public ally of the convicted pedophile even after his release from prison. The Prince was a guest of honor at Epstein’s Manhattan “welcome home from prison” bash when he finished his sentence in 2010. Organized by an old-school publicist, Peggy Siegal, the event had a star-studded guest list of New York’s elite. Did they know exactly who was hosting the party? Among those who joined Epstein and Andrew that night were news anchor Katie Couric, talk show host Charlie Rose, comedian Chelsea Handler, filmmaker Woody Allen, and President Clinton’s former senior advisor, George Stephanopoulos. Just a few months before, Siegal had organized another high-society event at the mansion: A Yom Kippur dinner for 120 people—including their children.

This was too much, and word that Epstein was off-limits rapidly went through Manhattan, though.

For Epstein, it was becoming clear that his time rubbing shoulders with lawmakers and royals was over. Luckily, there was an entirely new class of movers and shakers for him to exploit: brilliant scientists and tech gurus who were building the future—and could make his wildest dreams of ultimate power come true. Epstein had already shown an interest in cultivating such circles. In 2006, he hosted a conference at the Ritz-Carlton on St. Thomas, which attracted the likes of Stephen Hawking. During one night of the conference, guests were shuttled over to Little St. James for a barbecue and submarine tour. According to reports, the sub was custom-fitted for Hawking’s wheelchair. A photo of the event shows him being personally attended to by a young blonde with her hair in a ponytail. Unlike politicians, however, scientists seemed more willing to overlook his status as a heinous sex offender. Yet again, Ghislaine would pave the way. In 2009, Epstein was still in prison when he began planning his grand return to the establishment. Ghislaine’s sister, Isabel, was in a relationship with leading visual theorist Al Seckel, and he worked with Epstein to plan a triumphant 2010 scientific conference on St. Thomas and Little St. James… The same month as the conference, Seckel was listed on Epstein’s website among the scientists supposedly funded by the pedophile. But then something unexpected happened. In March 2011, Seckel and Isabel Maxwell were charged with fraud by a mysterious company called Ensign Consulting. Based in the US Virgin Islands—like so many of Epstein’s businesses—Ensign claimed that Seckel had advised the company on investments, only to run off with more than $500,000 for himself. Almost at the same time as the lawsuit became public, Seckel’s interview with Epstein was removed from his science website. By the end of the month, the entire website was gone. Days after that, Seckel was in a terrifying car wreck that totaled his Lexus… What is certain, however, is that from there, Seckel’s life took a dramatic turn for the worse. Hounded by the Ensign lawsuit, he and Isabel—now his wife—filed for bankruptcy and fled to France. More messy lawsuits and humiliation followed. Then in spring 2015, Seckel went hiking in France and vanished. A massive search ensued, with participants even including those who had attended his conference with Epstein. By June 2015, Seckel’s rental car was found at the side of a cliff. About a month later, his body reportedly was found at the bottom of that same cliff. The cause of death was unclear. Some reports claimed that like Robert Maxwell, who fell from his yacht and drowned, Seckel’s unfortunate end had been precipitated by a “heart attack.” A few weeks later, Tablet magazine published an explosive article—written when he was alive—that claimed Seckel had cultivated information-­gathering relationships with powerful people in the worlds of science, politics, media, and more. What’s more, the article claimed that Seckel had been actively trying to sell the correspondence and personal files of his father-in-law, Robert Maxwell, a businessman and Mossad spy, in the weeks before his death. Did he take them from Epstein and Ghislaine? In 2004, this team found, Epstein was holding such documents at his Palm Beach home, years before meeting Seckel. In any case, he’d be found dead before he found a buyer.

According to Stratton, the ranch did feature unique entertainment for its guests. “I’ll tell you one thing that happened, like every time practically,” Stratton said. “They had a goat that looked like Merlin, long horns, long hair. It was obviously a male goat, if you know anything about goats. “Anyway, so they had this little game where they would have the girls or a girl, whomever, they were entertaining down to the stables and the stable lady named Shanna, she would already be sitting on a stool milking the goat. It was staged. “She he had this little jar with a little milk in it. So then the next thing they would say is, ‘Would you like to try to milk the goat?’ So of course, the girl sat on the stool and Shanna would reach her hands under there to his like ‘udder,’ which was actually his sexual organs and tried to milk him. “Well, nothing would happen. Then suddenly they’d go, ‘Oh, it’s a male goat!’ “That poor goat. I started feeling badly for the goat.”

Epstein’s ultimate goal was—if not evil—certainly unusual. In the early 2000s, he made it clear to several close friends that he had embraced transhumanism, the belief that science and technology would eventually allow humans to evolve beyond the confines of the body. Indeed, as he said before prison, “Your body can be contained. But not your mind.” In pursuing that goal, he hoped to use Zorro Ranch as his testing ground. We have independently corroborated through sources that Epstein planned to deep-freeze his body—specifically his head and penis—so that he could be thawed in the future, supposedly when science had advanced enough for reanimation.

Another aspect of his master plan allegedly included impregnating dozens of women to strengthen the Earth’s gene pool—with his own genes. Scientist Jaron Lanier, who once overheard Epstein prattle on at a dinner party, said Epstein had “based his idea for a baby ranch on accounts of the Repository for Germinal Choice, which was to be stocked with the sperm of Nobel laureates.” (Originally named the Hermann J. Muller Repository for Germinal Choice, the Repository was a sperm bank that operated in Escondido, Calif., from 1980 to 1999. The Repository was commonly believed to have accepted only donations from recipients of the Nobel Prize, although it did accept donations from non-Nobelists, also.)

One of the leaders of the psychology department in the time that Epstein was there was Stephen Pinker. Popular among students, Pinker was known for his cloud of curly white hair and bestselling books, such as The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works. In 2007, when Epstein was facing monstrous allegations in Florida, Pinker contributed his professional opinion to a disturbing legal document in the case, one that argued Epstein was not guilty of using the Internet to lure teen victims. Actually, the document implied, any luring had been done in person. Pinker has said that being categorized as a friend or even coconspirator of Epstein is seriously misguided. In a statement, he called it an “annoying irony” that his association with Epstein would be a black mark on his record, since “I could never stand the guy, never took research funding from him and always tried to keep my distance.” As with most statements of denial regarding Epstein, that last sentence raises an eyebrow. Pinker appears in the flight logs for the “Lolita Express” in 2002, long before Epstein got his official position at Harvard. Even more disturbingly, he was photographed lunching and chatting with Epstein at a 2014 lunch—more than five years after he became a convicted sex felon. Pinker explained away the chilling photo on the social media site Twitter: “I have no relationship with Epstein & have taken no funding from him. Our circles have occasionally overlapped: In 02, my lit agent invited me to join a group of east-coast TED speakers Epstein flew to CA. In 14, Krauss seated me next to him at a lunch, & someone snapped a photo.” But the very next year, Pinker tweeted a link to a legal argument from the defense in Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s civil lawsuit—a document that refuted her claims. So far, the scandal has only managed to subject Pinker to hundreds of angry tweets and dozens of probing blog posts.

On August 9, Epstein was blindsided by a new threat: a court had voted 2-to-1 to unseal all files relating to Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s 2017 defamation lawsuit against Ghislaine. The voluminous document dump was fast and furious, exposing the shocking extent of Epstein’s perversions and his network of rich, famous, and powerful sexual predator pals. Everyone from Prince Andrew to the Palm Beach police were about to get taken down. Reporters scrambled to comb through the documents, finding new allegations and new names, such as former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, billionaire Glenn Dubin, and former Democratic Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell. Roberts claimed Epstein forced her to have sex with all those men—a claim they all denied. The unsealing seemed like a shot across the bow to Epstein and his coconspirators. It was about to get ugly

In his cell that evening, as Epstein pondered what horrors were to come, his cellmate was not there. For some reason, Tartaglione had been moved to another unit, and Epstein had not been assigned another. Both of those developments were highly unusual, and the reason for those decisions is unclear. No matter why, Epstein was alone—and no one was watching. During the overnight shift, MCC had eighteen guards holding down the entire facility. Built for just 474 souls, the facility was known in recent years to be stuffed with up to eight hundred. As a result, many of the workers had to put in overtime. That night, the 9-South guards tasked with watching Epstein were on that list. One had logged eighty hours that week working “doubles.” The other was a former correctional officer who volunteered to pick up shifts at the understaffed institution. Although both men were low-level staff members, they had to have known that Epstein was the most vital to prosecutors. In addition, they could not have been ignorant of the fact that Epstein had almost died just days ago. Unfortunately, both coincidentally decided that something else was more important. For three hours beginning at 3:30 a.m., the 9-South guards failed to do six mandatory visual checks on Epstein. These rounds were to occur every thirty minutes. Not one happened. According to Bureau of Prisons officials, the two guards happened to fall asleep at their posts, at the exact same time and for the exact same duration. At approximately 6:20 a.m., the guards awoke and began their breakfast rounds. When they looked in on Epstein at 6:25, they saw the full weight of his body suspended by a bedsheet that was twisted around his doughy throat. The guards hurriedly entered the cell. One of them severed the knotted sheet that connected the inmate to the top bunk while the other guard triggered an alarm. They let Epstein drop like an anchor. The sex felon’s cold, rigid body had turned a chilling blue and he was unmistakably lifeless. He had been dead for a while.

In the course of this investigation, we spoke to dozens of people. When asked, every person close to the case believed at the time of this writing that his death was NOT a suicide.

Flight data obtained by this investigative team shows that just hours before the United States 2016 election that would elect President Donald J. Trump, Epstein’s jet flew from Paris to Riyadh, where it landed at 6:35 p.m. local time. Two days later, at 3:47 p.m. local time on November 9, the same aircraft departed the Saudi capital, flying in the opposite direction back to Paris. At the time, it would have been 8:47 a.m. in New York—not long before Hillary Clinton would concede to Trump. Epstein’s friend and colleague, Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, was in Riyadh at the time. (Epstein kept a personal photo of him in his Manhattan home.) Also in Riyadh over that period was Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who met with MBS and advisers on November 9. Epstein and Bezos were already acquaintances, having both attended the Edge foundation “billionaire’s dinner” in 2011 and 2014, years after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting underage prostitution. It’s unclear if Epstein met with any of the men, or what he might have said. What aspect of the Trump/Clinton election would have necessitated an unusual quickie trip to Riyadh?

sexual blackmail practices back to 1920s and 1930s America, when leading liquor salesman Stan Rosenstiel hosted bugged “blackmail parties” with young boys for party favors. Rosenstiel invited the rich and powerful, for very specific reasons. Webb cites a Florida Sun Sentinel report that alleges Rosentiel was once overheard saying “if the government ever brings pressure” against him or his pal, notorious mafioso Meyer Lansky, he’d use his recordings as blackmail. During World War II, such techniques became more mainstream as the US intelligence community looked to mobsters and underworld kings for techniques to help them win against the Nazis. After the war, the wise guys’ participation earned them a lifetime of “get out of jail free” cards. Meanwhile, Lansky didn’t limit himself to connections with and favors for the CIA. The shadowy character also worked with leading figures of the Mossad to launder money in the Middle East. Supposedly, Lansky’s own sexual blackmail ring was responsible for obtaining blackmail photos of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, leading to even more lenient treatment of Lansky and his associates throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Although a victim himself, Hoover also was famous for collecting blackmail files on leading Americans, including the members of Camelot—the Kennedy family, and specifically President John F. Kennedy. Did he learn the tactic from America’s original blackmailer, Rosenstiel? Hoover and the liquor baron were close friends, and Rosenstiel even donated $1 million to the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation. Both men cultivated a mentorship of rising young politico Roy Cohn—Donald Trump’s future mentor. Cohn became Senator Joseph McCarthy’s adviser, and later worked with Ronald Reagan’s administration. His meteoric rise through the ranks of the American elite, it seems, was due to his own “blackmail parties.” Rosenstiel’s fourth wife, Susan Kaufman, later claimed to have attended one such party in 1968 at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Kaufman said that in addition to Hoover himself in drag (going by the name “Mary”) she saw young boys engaging in sexual behavior with Hoover, Cohn, and her then-husband. Multiple reports claim that Cohn was unapologetic about hosting the gatherings, insisting that they were part of his anti-Communist crusade. As with Epstein, Webb writes, many turned a blind eye to Cohn’s activities. He was simply too connected, and had too much dirt, to take down. Trump’s former adviser Roger Stone explained: “Roy was not gay. He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate. He always seemed to have these young blond boys around. It just wasn’t discussed. He was interested in power and access.” Donald Trump would later buy Cohn’s party palace, the Plaza, and host his own debaucherous bashes there throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Male model Andy Lucchesi told reporter Michael Gross that such parties were populated by “a lot of girls . . . 14, look 24. That’s as juicy as I can get. I never asked how old they were. I just partook.” But Cohn’s influence, like Epstein’s, spanned both sides of the political aisle. His cousin, Dick Morris, was a close adviser to Bill Clinton. Cohn had connections in media, too: He was friends with FOX News head honcho Rupert Murdoch, and called Barbara Walters his “wife.” His high school the pals turned friends for life included Si Newhouse Jr., Generoso Pope Jr. of the National Enquirer, and Richard Berlin, who owned Hearst. Many of Cohn’s connections would later become close with Jeffrey Epstein as well. Roy Cohn died in 1986, but sexual blackmail—including the trafficking of children—would continue to permeate the highest levels of American society. In June 1989, George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush were photographed visiting the Covenant House, a Catholic charity for homeless kids in Manhattan. It had been founded under the direction of Cohn’s friend and frequent party guest, Cardinal Francis Spellman. Bush’s Yale roommate, Robert Macauley, was on the organization’s board. (His AmeriCares foundation funded Covenant House, while also working with the CIA to fund the Contras in South America. Like Epstein, Macauley lived in Palm Beach.) Just weeks after the presidential pair’s visit, Covenant House was the topic of a jaw-dropping exposé by the New York Post, which alleged that extensive child sex abuse had happened there. That same year, the Washington Post reported that former NBC News correspondent Craig Spence had been caught running a D.C. child sex ring that provided underage sex slaves to powerful men in apartments that were bugged and rigged with security cameras. Even his parties, which hosted members of the Reagan and Bush administrations, had been bugged for gathering blackmail material. Spence even brought his prisoners to the White House for late-night encounters (not with the president). Like Epstein, Spence often boasted to his friends and colleagues that he was working for the CIA. Also like Epstein, after his dirty deeds were exposed, Spence was found dead—supposedly by suicide.

Donald Trump’s personal fixer Michael Cohen and Jeffrey Epstein are both tied to a company called Reporty (now named Carbyne), which was then in the early stages of creating a new spy-like technology. (Convicted felon Cohen plead guilty on August 21, 2018, to eight counts, including campaign finance violations, tax fraud, and bank fraud. Cohen said he violated campaign finance laws at the direction of Trump and “for the principal purpose of influencing” the 2016 presidential election. In November 2018, Cohen entered a second guilty plea for lying to a Senate committee about efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. In December 2018, he was sentenced to three years in federal prison and ordered to pay a $50,000 fine.) The stated purpose of Epstein and Cohen’s business alliance in Carbyne was to help 911 callers by connecting the dispatch system to their cellphones’ microphone, GPS, and camera, giving the dispatcher a live feed of the caller’s surroundings. The obvious implication is that the same technology could easily be used to execute widespread spying and blackmail, to an extent the world has never before seen. The explosive story of Carbyne’s background was first published by reporters Zev Shalev and Tracie McElroy of Narativ.org. In September 2017, Russian billionaires Viktor Vekselberg and Andrew Intrater bought 24 percent of Carbyne’s most valuable stock options, through Intrater’s company Columbus Nova. (Intrater donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration fund, and has already donated thousands to his 2020 campaign. His company also paid Cohen half a million dollars in “consulting fees.” He was investigated by Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel team.) In 2015, the Times of Israel reported, Ehud Barak had formed a limited partnership company called Sum and bought all of Reporty’s Series A stock—with most of the millions he needed to do so coming from Jeffrey Epstein. (It wasn’t the first time he’d gotten millions thanks to Epstein. In 2004, Barak received about $2.4 million from Leslie Wexner’s Wexner Foundation, where Epstein was both a trustee and major donor.) Barak’s cash infusion was enough to win him a seat as chairman of the board at Reporty, now Carbyne. The company is now based in Tel Aviv. (In a twist that is sure to titillate Tom Brady haters, the Kraft Group is also a major investment source… You may not have heard of it, but “Smart911” already has been implemented by local governments—and put on Americans’ cellphones—in South Carolina, Ohio, Kentucky, Florida, Arkansas, New York, California, Massachusetts, Hawaii and more. According to Windbourne, Smart911 is in forty states at the time of this writing. Newer versions of Smart911 reportedly also can access your personal photos, medical and health information, and other details. The company insists, “It is NOT the goal of Smart911 to spy on you or share your information with anyone or any organization without cause.” The only consolation in the twisted story of Jeffrey Epstein may be that in the future, exploitative spies like him will probably become obsolete. Instead, we’ll willingly gather intelligence on ourselves. In 2020, who needs the classic honey trap when you’ve got the app?