Just glance at the educational backgrounds of what Marxists rightly call “the ruling class” (in the West) or the Iranian professor at Teheran University Mohammad Marandi calls “the Epstein Class”, you will find nothing but Oxbridge- and the Ivy League-educated men and women, from USA and UK.

Their high level of educational achievements conceal the total absence of humanist wisdom and, more chillingly, the total lack of healthy capacity for empathy (that is, humanity).

It is chilling because these two Anglo-American camps of imperialists, one without their empire and the other with their then still rising empire - the so-called unipolar moment or global hegemon, post-USSR (and the fall of the Berlin Wall in Nov. 1989, which, incidentally, Washington facilitated in erecting as the East Germans were fleeing in large numbers into Washington’s post-WWII vassal state of West Germany.

Since the end of the World War II, that is, the dissolution of Europe-based textbook empires and the wrecked European industries, cities, and institutions, the role and influence of continental European leaders has been reduced to next to nothing as their political states and regimes have been rendered Washington’s dependencies or “vassals”.

Formerly imperial British elite tried to stay relevant in the world where Britain no longer ruled the waves simply by, first, grudgingly accepting their poodle role in the new post-World War II order of states clustered around San Francisco-established United Nations.

Grudgingly, yes.

Cambridge-educated British stock-trader and economist John Maynard Keynes made a snide remark that the American (cowboys) have all the money, and the British had all the brain, or to that effect. Of course, the two world wars - and the White Man’s wars to keep angry colonies “pacified” (that is, genocidally repressed), had brought Keynes’ beloved Britain to its economic ruins.

The British people lived off Soviet-style rationing as the World’s pre-eminent rogue state had by then pretty much lost both its old imperial glories and the ill-gotten wealth, extracted from a number of dodgy sources: the colonised people, their land and their natural resources, royally commissioned sea piracy of the East India Company, and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade (also known as “Triangular Trade” of European-manufactured goods, African raw “commodities”, well, such as humans, and plantation products from “the New World”).

True or not, I remember reading somewhere some years ago that the great British economist made that remark at the Bretton Woods meeting, aimed at redesigning the world’s economic and financial architecture. The meeting was held in New Hampshire - not the original Hampshire of Britain - in the United States, in July 1944, just a little under a year before the war between Fascists and Imperialists in May 1945. (To get a critical perspective on this Bretton Woods meeting and the blood-sucking financial institutions it created my old comrade Kevin Danaher’s 50-years is Enough remains a great primer).

From grudging to gleeful poodles: UK Power Elite’s Addiction to Imperial Delusions

By the time the Oxford-schooled Tony B-liar, a lawyer with a brief, came along as the war-mongering British Prime Minister, the British attitude has evolved: Blair found it significant to make a public mention of the fact that he and George W. shared the same toothpaste, while having been caught with a micro-phone on, whispering into the ears of US President George W. Bush that Washington could, in effect, use him, the British Prime Minister, as a message delivery boy in cases the Americans couldn’t afford the PR fallout. That was after the burst of Anglo-American love-fest around the second and illegal invasion of Iraq. (As to be expected, Tony sent his son to Washington, the post-British imperial centre, to intern after his 3-year-undergraduate studies at Oxford and to find greener pasture in the vast United States).

At the American Master’s behest, Blair is at it again:

Blair pressed PA to strip Palestine from school textbooks, UK envoy says

Times of Palestine

By the time NATO’s (Washington’s, really) war broke out against the Russian Federation on Ukraine’s soil in February 2022, Boris Johnson continued with B-Liar’s tradition of licking the American cowboy’s behind: he travelled to Kiev and delivered what many observers suspected was Washington neo-cons’ message: don’t agree to any Turk-mediated Peace Agreement with Moscow because we the Imperial Patrons will find the bloody Russians till the last Ukrainian standing!

I was in Kiev a year later, and learned from my local friends, that Ukrainians loved the Eton- & Oxford-educated buffoon, who became the first Western head of state to visit Kiev during its war with its old Russian neighbour, so much so that they named their donuts “Boris”.

Whatever the nature of this Anglo-American “special relations”, there are three commonalities that “power elite” from both sides of the Atlantic share: 1) a dazzling array of educational credentials from what the rest of the world consider “prestigious universities” - Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, etc. on this side of the pond and Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Princeton, Berkeley etc. on the American side; 2) the typical absence of humanity or the vast underdevelopment of human capacity for empathy (Elon Musk is just the best caricature of this class), and 3) oversized delusions about their Superiority that come with enormous power and wealth through global crimes.

I have rubbed shoulders with representative members of this “power elite” on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as the awe- and prestige-struck elite from the formerly colonised world of Asia, Africa, Latin America, Anglophone America, and Australia in my grown-up life of nearly 4-decades on 3 continents of Asia, Europe and N. America. In the corridors of power in Western capitals, the exalted Ivory Tower, security conferences, closed doors-meetings, cocktail parties and invite-only dinners, as well as in the world of philanthropists and information gatherers.

I have long concluded that these men and women of power and influence, I have encountered, absolutely lack normal (cultivated) universal empathy - something those of us with Buddhist orientation call “metta” or indiscriminate compassion, for anyone downtrodden, oppressed or genocide.

Over the last nearly three years, I have, however, been heartened by the explosion of honest self-reflections by some of the Western public intellectuals, particularly Americans who have come forward, and tell it like it is. They are NOT the rule, but the exceptions, amongst the chattering classes of the West

Pathetically, British power elite continue to hold on to the illusion that their long dead Empire left a largely virtuous legacy, with some minor moral failings, despite evidence to the contrary.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock is just a typical veteran British operative who operated in the inner circles of Anglo-American powers. He repeats the tired old Zionist lie of “Israel is a democracy”, and made excuses for Britain’s crimes while admitting meekly Britain’s moral failings such as “stealing Palestine from the Palestinian people and giving it to Zionists” (Zionist Jews), as Avi Shlaim recently told Piers Morgan in plain English.

Here is a short collection of rather admirably self-critical reflections by the Americans who realise that history - and the world - have moved on, while the Epstein Class cling onto their long-held delusions as the Eternal Empire.

1. Jeffrey Sachs (41 minutes)

retired US Army Colonel Laurence Wilkerson and former Chief of Staff for US Secretary of State the late Collin Powell (54 minute

former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and former Assistant Secretary of Defence Chas Freeman (56 minutes)
Professor John Mearsheimer (19 minutes),
and former US Colonel Douglas MacGregor, who served as a senior advisor in the Pentagon (40 minutes).