Hannah Arendt wrote that if the fundamental problem of postwar intellectual life after 1918 was death, then after 1945 it was evil. Today, the fundamental problem is complicity: reckoning with our acquiescence to a political system that suddenly appears criminal. These shocks all expose something rotten beneath the surface of liberal respectability: how elites participate in atrocity while maintaining prestige; how institutions supposed to safeguard justice in fact protect the powerful and exploit the vulnerable; how mass consent is secured through careful distribution of access and silence. The names in those Epstein files – political leaders, corporate titans, academics and cultural impresarios – are shocking because their continued authority and uninterrupted careers make undeniable what we have known but perhaps refused to fully concede: that the moral vocabulary of the US-led liberal international order became a cover for domination and kleptocracy.
The Epstein outrage and Trump’s demolition of American prestige have alike led the collapse of enforced silence. Mark Carney’s admission at Davos that the US-led order had passed was applauded by the very Atlanticist elites who championed it for decades. Trump’s obscenity has made the system impossible to defend with the usual pieties. That these same commentators were unmoved by Biden’s sponsorship of genocide shows what actually troubles them: not the order’s concealed violence, but the loss of its dignified facade. It is now a scramble to salvage reputations amid general collapse.
The geography of these recent revelations is not incidental either: it’s a short hop from Epstein’s island to Caracas, a reminder, much like Trump’s threats to Greenland, of how Washington treats territories outside the sanctuary of that same order, subject to extraction, interference, or outright seizure. Trump's “America First” slogan merely makes explicit the credo that has long driven US power in this zone of impunity.
Aimé Césaire observed that fascism became objectionable to Europeans only when it unleashed in Europe the brutality they had inflicted on the “inferior” peoples of Asia and Africa. Such insights are verified today at dizzying speed by the contrast between European alarm over Greenland and official indifference to a loudly proclaimed campaign of extermination against Palestinians. Western leaders still smilingly pose for pictures with wanted Israeli war criminals.