1 - The Dutroux Affair

Great intro :" Hi Guys and welcome to the first episode of a new podcast dedicated to exploring a kind of occult history of postwar Western society. And the impetus for this, which I assume you know, if, like me, your head is still smashed from the summer of conspiracy we are just emerging from, is the Jeffrey Epstein network. So even a cursory look at the Epstein affair reveals a Byzantine system of connections with lines snaking from Silicon Valley to Wall Street from the city of London to the Saudi Royal family. And every step of the way you see spooks and assets and money laundering fronts connected to the CIA to Mossad to MI-5 and so on and so forth. Now the more I’ve read, the more convinced I am that we need to think of new ways to mark the topography of this strange world that we find ourselves in. This system that seems to be buckling and glitching more and more as we move into the 21st-century. I think that we need new ways of tracing these dark lines of power running all around us. I am definitely not smart enough to develop some whole new analytical framework that will make somehow conspiracy theories palatable, but I think that compiling some stories that we scoop up here and there and thinking about them and talking about them, can help us better understand the social and political and economic forces driving these people and these events. So as we proceed we’ll find the lines of intriguing and inquiry that we will be following frequently split and branch off again and again and again and eventually a lot of them become lost in this kind of the murk and fog. But maybe there is some value to tracing these lines anyway, because I think that understanding why the fog is there and how the truth of these events is suppressed, or sometimes drowned in a deliberate overload of information and disinformation via media and the Internet, has some value in and of itself. And if nothing else I’m hoping that this series can at least help me clarify my own thinking about how these forces work to shape our society, and further atomize and alienate us from ourselves from each other. Undertaking this project is absolutely fucking insane because, I have no real idea of just how big and deep I am intending to make this. I just have a list of subjects that I want to touch on because I have been obsessed with them for years. But it will entail discussing some extremely dark subjects, and we will need to handle a lot of historic events with extreme, extreme caution, because what happens to way too many people, when they start diving into “the deep state”, is that a fire gets lit beneath them, which can be good, but, without the ability to critically interpret and interrogate the things that they are reading and researching and posting about, they very quickly fall victim to extremely dangerous, reactionary forces - I’m thinking here of the InfoWars types and QAnon “chuds” I believe the Americans call them - and falling prey to these forces for me is exactly what the fascist psychos running the show want to happen. Because the insane right-wing conspiracy mill poses no actual threat to any centers of power. That’s just the way they want it. So what I am aiming for with this project is less skull-exploding tinfoil hat carnage and more of a kind of controlled swan dive off the deep end. I think that will suit all of us the best."

Dogface Reilly

Insane episode. What’s the song at ~22’?