Material now coming into the public domain appears to implicate the Duke of York, Andrew Windsor, the second son of the reigning monarch of the UK, Elizabeth Windsor, and fifth in line to the throne, in a scandal involving the trafficking for paid sex of underage girls by a Jewish billionaire banker, Jeffrey Epstein, in the US, UK and elsewhere. Epstein has admitted soliciting under age girls for prostitution. Now testimony has been submitted in court in the United States accusing Windsor, as well as the hot-shot Jewish-Zionist lawyer Alan Dershowitz, of engaging in sexual activity with underage girls procured by Epstein, allegedly working with Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of the late corrupt press baron Robert Maxwell, who was also a rabid Israel supporter.

Robert Maxwell was one of the key architects of the Mossad kidnapping of Mordechai Vanunu, who exposed the size of Israel’s nuclear arsenal – in excess of 200 nukes – in the Murdoch press in 1986. One of the few creditable actions of Murdoch’s Times was to run this story, but the fact that Vanunu had previously unsuccessfully offered it to Maxwell’s Mirror Group put Mossad onto him, the result being his abduction via a fake holiday to Rome. Maxwell was up to his neck in this crime. It should be recalled that, after Maxwell finally drowned himself in the sea, fearing imminent exposure of his embezzlement of hundreds of millions of pounds of his workers’ pension funds, he was buried in Jerusalem, on the Mount of Olives.

Dershowitz, one of the most rabid, virulent witch-hunting Zionist racists in the United States, and a stalwart of AIPAC, is now screaming bloody murder at the young woman who has accused him and others of involvement in this affair. But this time Dershowitz’s characteristic bluster and air of cultivated, fake moral outrage, familiar when he is dishing out phoney allegations of ‘anti-semitism’ against critics of his murderous Israeli clients,  is not serving him so well. The woman involved, through her lawyers, put out a statement saying that Dershowitz’s pungent remarks that she “should not be believed” amounted to her being “unjustly victimised again” (see The Guardian, 2 Jan for more details).

Though Ms Maxwell does not appear to have the direct political involvement of her father, her close association with Epstein, who does have similar Zionist proclivities, appear to make Dershowitz and Ghislaine Maxwell appropriate bedfellows (in the metaphorical sense of the term).

Guilt or innocence?

So what is the significance of this case? There are several strands. First of all, no conclusions can be drawn as to the guilt or innocence of the accused, and it is not necessarily clear whether what was involved was actual coercion, or simply the use of the inordinate wealth of the accused to buy sexual services and favours that would otherwise be denied to them. More details need to come out to be able to judge this. Communists are consistent democrats, and firm opponents both of sexual coercion where it can be shown to have taken place, as well as of the criminalisation of consensual sexual activities.

One of the deleterious effects of the ‘politically correct’ climate of pseudo-egalitarian ideology that has seeped into the body politic in Western countries, courtesy in no small measure of fake ‘anti-racist’ Jewish-Zionist ideologues like Dershowitz with their continual drip-drip of fake allegations of anti-semitism, is a general witch-hunting climate that extends to the sphere of sexual relations, where the distinction between consensual sexual activity and abuse is systematically blurred.

Stupid moralism

Thus in the UK we have feminist-influenced ideologues making equations between genuinely foul examples of abuse, such as that perpetrated by the late Jimmy Saville, with individual cases such as that of Jeremy Forrest where clearly consensual relationships were involved that ran afoul of overly rigid age of consent laws. I have written about this subject before, and made my own proposals for better criteria for dealing with it. But it should be noted that consensual sexual activities for money are still consensual relations, irrespective of the opinions of reactionary religious and feminist ideologues about it.

An example of the stupidity of radical feminist-inspired moralism over this is the prosecution of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi over his putative relationship with an teenage sex-worker a few years ago. Berlusconi is a foul reactionary politician and Iraq war criminal, who richly deserved the earlier attack made on him by an angry but deranged assailant, who hit him in the face with a heavy marble statuette and seriously injured his jaw. But the prosecution of Berlusconi for his relations with ‘Ruby the Heartstealer’ actually produced a degree of public sympathy, since she did not regard herself as a victim and refused to testify against him. This is an example of where such moral witch-hunts are not only wrong in principle, but actually counterproductive even from the point of view of (quite legitimately) opposing reactionary figures like Berlusconi.

It is not entirely clear which side of this line the alleged activities involving Dershowitz and Andrew Windsor  fall on. But irrespective of this, it appears that Dershowitz is now hoist on his own petard, as a lying lawyer and witch-hunter.

Abolish the monarchy

What is the wider significance of this? Well, for a start, this could be extremely damaging to the British monarchy, though Andrew is now a fairly minor figure, being only fifth in line to the British throne and with virtually no chance of ever succeeding. Nevertheless, the taint of royal involvement in a sex scandal, particularly one where there are hints of possible paedophilia involved, is very damaging. Though obviously the absence of a monarchy does not render the body politic immune to such things, a formal regime of hereditary privilege – that is, state nepotism – itself a form of corruption – must necessarily provide a culture medium for other forms of corruption. So these events are solid ammunition for the elementary socialist demand for the abolition of the monarchy. Apart from the Saville and then Rolf Harris scandals – both of whom involved people with extensive establishment and even Royal connections – Rolf Harris even painted a portrait of the Queen – there are other such scandals involving establishment figures, such as that of Sir Cyril Smith, who was knighted by the Queen, as was Sir Jimmy Saville.

The supersized Rochdale Liberal MP abused boys in children’s homes for decades. Newspaper editors who sought to expose his behaviour were served with D-Notices to suppress publication, showing knowledge and condonance of this abuse at the highest level. Then there is the Dolphin Square investigation, where the cops now say that they believe that young boys were abused and even murdered in the 1970s and 80s by a paedophile ring that included top politicians and judges, at a variety of locations. One of the murdered victims is believed to be an 8 year old boy of South Asian background. This is utterly explosive stuff, and linked to the wider issue of abuse in children’s homes.

With all the shenanigans involving the current Tory Home Secretary, Theresa May, failing to appoint a credible chair of an enquiry into historical sex abuse by senior figures in the establishment from the 1970s to the 1990s, allegations were in the public domain in the 1980s, including from a (since deceased) leader of the Kent miners, Jack Collins, that accused a former Tory Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, of involvement in child sexual abuse.  He has also been more recently publicly accused of raping a teenager – which he strenuously denied after being questioned by police. Brittan’s alleged role in sidelining investigations into such matters has been an important issue in making it very difficult for May to appoint a safe establishment figure (a latter-day Hutton, perhaps) to chair this enquiry.

Interpenetrated

An important strand of the Andrew Windsor business is that it is yet another indication of the thoroughly interpenetrated nature of relations  between the central elements of the ruling classes of the advanced capitalist countries, and the Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie. You cannot get much more central to the British ruling class than the monarchy and its hangers-on like Andrew, whose role as Britain’s ‘trade ambassador’ – appointed under Blair and continuing under Brown and then Cameron – prior to an earlier eruption of the Epstein scandal, underlines.

It should also be recalled that this was not always the case – the sympathy of ex-King Edward VIII for Hitler is also a matter of history, reflecting fascist, anti-Jewish views that were quite common in the Western ruling classes of his day. Edward VIII, by some accounts, found Jews almost as distasteful as Hitler did.

Such views became distinctly unfashionable as imperialist war with Germany became inevitable, and were rendered utterly superfluous with the destruction of most of the revolutionary Jews by Hitler, and then the foundation of Israel by the very non-revolutionary Zionist pseudo-left, who created a new imperialist ally of Britain, the US and not least the new pro-NATO German Federal Republic through the expulsion of the Palestinian Arab population, transforming the position of the Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie from a mistrusted semi-ally into a strategic partner of the major imperialist powers and a vanguard element of world capitalism. As was an inevitable result of such nationalist betrayals of socialist universalism, Israel is now dominated by an openly racist, rabid right.

No progressive or reactionary peoples

One other important point deriving from this is that Jewish-Zionist sources have been very instrumental in promoting anti-Muslim hatred both in the US and the UK. In the Rochdale and Rotherham sexual abuse cases, where gangs of Pakistani Muslim men, mainly taxi-drivers, were convicted of sexual abuse of young girls, there has been a huge campaign to racialise the issue of sexual abuse and exploitation and to portray the main perpetrators of such abuses as being Muslims. But Cyril Smith was not a Muslim; he operated in Rochdale and, unlike the various convicted perpetrators of Muslim origin, he had protection from the state and the establishment. As did Saville and it looks likely, a whole bevy of other establishment figures.

The truth is that it is inequality and the oppression and economic powerlessness of youth that make them vulnerable to abuse of all kinds. It is no accident that it was youth from deprived, working class backgrounds who are in a position to be preyed on by abusers of all backgrounds, from young girls with no prospect of jobs and independent living in economically deprived Northern towns, to young people in children’s homes, who continue to be regarded by the ruling class as trash. Even as they tut-tut about abuse and attempt to racialise the issue, Tory, Lib-Dem and Labour politicians cut the benefits of youth who they portray as a feckless and immoral, and thus make it easier for would-be abusers with a bit of financial clout to gain the opportunity to abuse young people, who do not have the means to easily escape.

What this shows is that there are no progressive or reactionary peoples, nations or cultures. It would be relatively easy to write an article, based on the Jewish origin of quite a few of the alleged perpetrators in the Epstein scandal, as well as other alleged offenders such as Leon Brittan, to argue that Jews have some innate tendency to sexual misconduct of varied kinds. But that would be wrong, just as wrong as the attempts by anti-Muslim bigots such as Melanie Phillips to generalise about Muslim men from the scandals involving some Muslim men in Rochdale and Rotherham.

What has been shown by these events is that sexual abuse is a complex problem that involves and affects all ethnic groups, and that we should seek to analyse and remove the causes of it, which are rooted in poverty, inequality, and lack of economic power. It will take a social revolution to remove these causes; attempts to ‘solve’ the problem while ruling this out will only result in more social regression, with either racist, or reactionary-moralistic, witch-hunts taking the place of a rational and humanistic approach.