The Aesthetics of Violence: An Introduction

Child sex traffickers and abusers in history and fiction

This is a comment that spiraled out of control into a full blown essay introducing something I’m developing called “The Aesthetics of Violence,” inspired by all the things I mention here as well as my discussion with Darryl Cooper about spree killers and his fantastic, indispensable series on Jeffery Epstein. Here’s a link to the full three part episode, which is behind a paywall but well worth the price of admission (5$)

One thing that really really struck me, was that when all the Epstein stuff came out, a lifetime of reading disparate things came flooding into my mind at once and suddenly I saw a theme reaching back through all time, and all human history. The very first thing I thought of was the stories the peasants told each other about Tiberius, the Roman emperor, that he had a villa on the isle of capri where young children were sent for him to have his way with. When I first heard that, I thought it was just rumors the little people tell. But now I think it was all true.

But then I thought about Vlad the Impaler, and Madame Bathory, and The Marquis De Sade, nobles who feasted on and derived sexual pleasure from torturing and humiliating their victims. in the case of the Marquis, he would kidnap women off the street and keep them as his slaves, he got arrested and thrown in the Bastille and bailed out, and he did it again and ended up back in the Bastille, his family - a family of nobles - said he was an embarrassment, let him rot. So he wrote his "novels." It all suddenly looked to me like he was exposing them and they wanted him locked away to keep it secret. Because of course if you read his books, its not just him, its all the elites. The 120 Days of Sodom is like the French "Eyes Wide Shut," though far, far more depraved. And just like the author Darryl talks about here (Gabriel Matzneff), the Marquis actually did, was KNOWN to have done, the things he talked about in his books. both authors came in contact with the law, so there's no denying it. Though of course they never tried.

The stories of Madame Bathory, conversely, had her bathing in the blood of young women to preserve her youth. And of course we have our conspiracy theory of adrenochrome. The elites, according to some theorists, don't just have their way sexually with these minors, no, they harvest their adrenochrome in an attempt to preserve their own youth. So its a recurring motif.

Two books that helped put the mythopoetic significance of these motifs into stark relief for me were Naked Lunch by William S Burroughs and 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, however the insights I had about them I had before the Epstein case. The Epstein case simply made me realize that the things in those books are universal, and happening here. First we have Naked Lunch in which "mugwumps" are mutant "furry" monsters, the elite in some alternate dimension called "interzone" who are depicted as not only having graphic sex with underage boys, but also killing them as the boys ejaculate (sorry). Immediately upon reading this I knew the metaphor was harvesting the youth for their vitality and discarding them, vampirizing them in the same way madame bathory did. But what I also knew was that Burrgough, along with Allen Ginsberg, who is responsible for helping Burroughs put these writings together into novel form, used to go to places like Morocco and actually have sex with underage boys. So again we have a fictitious depiction of something the author and his friends actually participated in in real life.

But it doesn't stop there of course, for William Burroughs, unlike say Jack Kerouac or Neal Cassidy or Gary Snyder, or any of the other Beats for that matter, wasnt just some random gifted poet (though Burrough is gifted, and brilliant honestly), but he was ALSO an elite himself! You see his grandfather was an inventor and, while the family name isn't exactly Rockefeller and there aren't any Burrough Senators as far as I know he was...like the Marquis actually...a highly educated writer who never had to work a day in his life, who spent his time exploring all manner of sexual degeneracy and deviancy.

The last example I want to give is 2666 because while it incorporates similar elements, it has one detail that really hit home for me. Briefly, the main portion of the 1,000 page book is concerned with a series of grisly murders of underage girls that really did happen over a period of about a decade in Northern Mexico. "The Part About the Crimes," while about many things, is centered around graphic descriptions of mutilated and raped remains of young girls found in various public locations in northern Mexico around the newly springing up industrial parks (one of which is called Interzone) These murders happened, and this novel takes place, in the 1990s, right around when NAFTA was ratified and American manufacturing was moving down there. This led to millions of people flooding into cities like Tijuana from the countryside, looking for work. Many of these people were young girls away from home for the first time.

There’s tons of speculation in the novel, and there was in real life, about who was committing these murders. Was it a serial killer? Well its more or less been solved, unofficially, though we may never get hard evidence. But it appears that what was happening (this part isn't in the novel) was that drug cartels were throwing parties at their estates for their members, and these parties were sex parties or even orgies, and many of the women involved were young girls who'd been abucted and brought there, sexually abused, and then murdered and their bodies were dumped in the city alleyways. And in the novel its highly insinuated that the local police were picking these girls up and delivering them to the drug cartels.

What's also insinuated, and this part turned out to be true, was that the political party in Mexico, the PRI, who was in power from 1929 all the way up until 2000, knew all about this and was in collusion with the drug cartels through corruption (much like our Italian mafias in America) and they allowed them to commit these and many other crimes, unmolested (sick pun intended). Now this has all been more or less shown, and there's lots of journalism out there depicting Mexican drug raids moving in on huge parties with strippers and prostitutes, and I even remember one story in which, after the drug dealers were all put in handcuffs, the cops took off their clothes and got in the hot tubs with the prostitutes and drank the drug dealers liquor and smoked their cigars. And even MS13, the South American gang operating in America, who trump was denounced as a racist for calling out as rapists and murderers, are known for doing the same thing, recruiting high school boys to lure underage girls to their home base, whom they would proceed to rape for a weekend at drug fueled parties and drop off on Sunday night, telling them "hey we know your uncle Pedro is illegally here, if you don't want him deported, don't tell anyone." They were also known for threatening to killl the parents and siblings of these girls.

So we see time and agin, the motif in literature depicting the rape and cannablism of young people as a metaphor for the sclerotic gerontocracy and entrenched political elite asserting their power through vicious intimidation and sucking the blood of the youth to give them the fuel they need to continue their nefarious scheme of running an international child sex trafficking operation.

But the detail in 2666 that really gave me pause, and really changed my perspective, is a scene in which a cop points out that these bodies aren't being hidden, they're being displayed, that whoever was doing the killings was dumping them in places where they wanted them to be found. I saw this as both an intimidation tactic but also something even more twisted; they saw their victims as artistic creations. they wanted people to see them in the same way an artist wants his work read or his paintings viewed. And then I started seeing it everywhere, that Bolaño was right. The marquis didn't just torture and rape young girls, he wrote stories about it. Same with Burroughs. And the podestas and Epstein? well they weren't just trafficking and raping children, they were hanging graphic art scenes of it all over their own houses, where they brought their victims! and their customers. So while they may have been rubbing their faces in it, as im sure they were, the guys themselves still had to LIVE around all that. They thought it was beautiful and calming in the same way me and you think a painting of nature or pictures of our family make us feel warm inside.

Think about Jeffery Dahmer. He didn't just kill people, he made art out of their corpses. That's what Bolaño was trying to tell us, and that's what our elite are doing. What the elite have always done.