ISIS: GLOBAL DANGER POINT NEAR
M D Nalapat![]()
Interestingly, the psychology of ISIS most resembles that of the Nazis. Like its German predecessor, the organisation has a supremacist ideology and extreme cruelty in its methods. It legitimises the slavery of innocents by recourse to a manufactured mythology, while its members believe themselves to be the Herrenvolk or Master Race. Millions of Germans, especially among the young, were attracted to the hate filled, hateful ideology of Adolf Schicklgruber (the original family name of the Nazi Fuehrer). As a consequence, it took many years of war before the Third Reich could be defeated, but not before it had exterminated millions of the finest individuals on earth, permanently impoverishing the future of the human race. Had Hitler been checked earlier, when his movement was much smaller, the world would have been spared the cataclysm of war. Unfortunately, the world stood by while Hitler and both his ideology as well as his followers grew in strength.
Thanks to President Obama signing on to the strategy of reserving much of the firepower available to the US in the war against ISIS till such time as the Sunnis get the same primacy that they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein (a situation that will never come about), ISIS is now in its third year of operations. In just three or so more, the organisation would have enrolled tens of thousands of members (whether declared or secret) within Europe and North America, not to speak of South Asia and the GCC countries.
At that stage, it will become impossible to fight, except by a lengthy war of attrition that would cost the globe both growth and stability. What those who refuse to deal a knockout blow on ISIS forget is that millions across the world are at risk of adopting the ISIS creed. This is because of (i) the license it gives to kill, enslave and torture and (ii) its vow of supremacy of its followers within the human race. Those with the highest risk of infection are the citizens of the countries that have lavished time and treasure on fighters who subsequently morphed into ISIS, and which even today are assisting organisations such as the Al Nusra front, which differ from ISIS only in matters of detail. GCC governments in particular need to understand that backing Al Nusra and its clones against specific foes such as Bashar Assad in Damascus and the government inBaghdad entails the certainty that such elements will turn on their benefactors as soon as they overcome such rivals of the GCC leadership. An example is Libya, where the very diplomat who promoted the US-EU policy in Libya of removing Kaddafy through arming and training extremists was assassinated by his proteges in Benghazi two years later There is an undercurrent of the animal in each “civilised” human being, although fortunately such tendencies get expressed only in shouting at a football match or occasional fits of temper at the home or office. It is this basic bestiality in human beings that Adolf Hitler tapped,by not simply condoning but legitimizing such behaviour as being the appropriate response to those regarded as being from a different class of human, “unbelievers” and “apostates”.
Millions of Germans followed the orders of Hitler to the final days of his life, and the mass murder which took place in concentration camps and extermination facilities across Europe could never have been carried out but for such an enthusiastic participation by significant elements of the population. They became intoxicated by the message of superiority and - although this sounds incredible - moral ascendancy,and joined a putrid party in their millions in Germany during the 1930s,especially after 1933. Thanks to the permeability of social media and the emphasis placed on this by the controllers within ISIS,several thousand individuals in Europe,several hundreds in the US,and several tens of thousands elsewhere have already undergone the character transformation from human being to beast,although as yet,the overwhelming majority of such recruits have not declared themselves.
1936-37 was the period when the Nazis could be “capped, rolled back and eliminated” from Europe through coordinated action by the powers that later became the Allied force of the 1939-45 world war. In the case of ISIS, 2015-16 is the period when the terror organisation will have accelerated sufficiently for takeoff into the realm of mass recruitments across the globe, in case it has not been visibly and comprehensively defeated in the meantime. Which is why this columnist has called for a global coalition to defeat ISIS,and why he is disappointed that countries such as China,Russia and India are not doing more to eliminate this scourge.
Should such a coalition not form within the year, it will do so by 2019,when ISIS will have become strong enough to launch a global war through activating nests of members in those very countries (in the GCC and in NATO) which are today regarding the organisation as a threat which can “be dealt with later, should the need arise”, much as politicians across both sides of the Atlantic (with exceptions such as Wendell Willkie, Paul Reynaud and Winston Churchill) disregarded the imperative of taking out Hitler before he became strong enough to unleash the cataclysm he subsequently did.
—The writer is Vice-Chair, Manipal Advanced Research Group, UNESCO Peace Chair & Professor of Geopolitics, Manipal University, Haryana State, India.
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