I believe I read somewhere that if the caliphate falls it means that they never truly had the mandate of heaven. How could their followers justify continued obedience?
You are betting on the people who joined ISIS in the first place to make rational decisions?
These organizations never die, they hibernate or morph into something else.
If they'll lose in Iraq and Syria they'll go to fight in Africa or Afghanistan, there is never a shortage of world conflicts that would lure these types of people.
I don't think that's the way radical groups like this work. Promises are edited from the record, "facts" go unchecked, and followers are already so emotionly invested they are incapable of changing their minds any more.
As I mentioned else where. Many will fall for the sunk cost fallacy and instead of giving up or realizing that God wasn't on their side they will rationalize that away and continue to the point of "God wants my all" and turn to suicide bombing.
>How could their followers justify continued obedience?
Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing and they will just rationalize their way to finding a reason to continue. Most will suffer from the sunk cost fallacy and probably resort to the last thing they can think of... suicide bombing. Quite scary when you think about it.
EDIT: Upon further thought. I suppose many might welcome the end as they no longer have to constantly worry about dying... many having started fighting not fully knowing how brutal commanders would be and the amount of obedience demanded and because many joined because they were merely being opportunistic and looking for wealth/income.
Well, there are other religions that have carried on after their promised messiah died by quickly reinterpreting their texts. I know it sounds like I'm trying to be edgy, but seriously: there's good precedent for religious fanatics being undeterred by a prophecy being unfulfilled.
The cynic might suppose that for most people of any kind, that kind of logically-consistent self-scrutiny, combined with personal accountability, is too much to ask. But to me that feels too pat, too binary. Religion feels to me like one of the large set of psychological systems that are complex enough to enable all kinds of strategic patterns to emerge when it comes to processing the causal background to real events. Some events really do seem like they'd be hard to fit into the patterns though, and yeah, I also wonder about the psychology of people who have to adapt to them. I bet you'd find similar backtracking among people who fervently believe in failed apocalypses, for example.
> I bet you'd find similar backtracking among people who fervently believe in failed apocalypses, for example.
I used to be a JW, I can tell you they pulled the 'sell everything and wait for the end' stunt in the 70s. They are still around even though a large number 'fell away' due to the prophesy not being filled.
What happens is the old literature is adapted or ignored. Then the new line is repeated so many times the followers eventually believe it was the old one and there is no inconsistency. If you've ever played the game where you say a word dozens/hundreds of times until it loses its meaning then you have an inkling of how that could occur with contradictory information. It helps that they don't revisit their old books much or they'd get some surprises.
Their organization has 'gone digital' and become much more centralized as they continue to go into the red, which makes analysis more difficult.
Presently they are gearing up for their new apocalypse. They have been making some fairly weird videos involving them escaping to shelters/basements with a survivalist vibe about it.
Obviously they are larping. They have no clue how you'd practically survive an actual conflict. I see my relatives packing go-bags but they have no idea what they are doing. The instructions they're getting are becoming weirder like they did with the now forgotten aluminum saucepan controversy.
I'm not one of those who claim believers in a God or Creator are stupid or insane.
It is still evident that some religions are worse than others and some small religions, often called cults, are liable to go collectively bonkers.
Suppose that you believe there exists a God that will make a judgment of all humans in the future. Suppose a subsection of the population is to be spared and dead faithful ones can be returned.
What then, is the purpose of preparations to live in bunkers? It surely shouldn't have any affect on your chances of getting to Heaven/Earth.
It would however make sense if you wanted to acquire financial aid.
My guess is that the generals at the top are well-aware of political and military realities and the downfall of the caliphate was planned for. Sure, some of the faithful will fall away disillusioned, but not all of them.
The soldiers who fought for the south were people's family members, and honoring their memory had evolved into a statement against the cultural erosion that many in the south are upset by. It's possible that plantation owners started the war to protect their slave holdings, but I assure you that no poor unlanded Confederate rifleman died thinking about it.
> The soldiers who fought for the south were people's family members, and honoring their memory had evolved into a statement against the cultural erosion that many in the south are upset by.
That doesn't actually fit the facts in explaining the popularity of the Confederate flag as a symbol; the modern popularity of the Confederate flag as a symbol traces directly back to its adoption across the south specifically as a banner of resistance against the civil rights movement, before which it was much less commonly encountered.
So... we honor the memory of poor Southerners who were exploited as soldiers by... flying the flag of their exploiters who sent them to die in vain fighting for an even worse oppression?
One perspective is that these Southerners died defending their home against a foreign invasion. Despite being vastly outmanned and outgunned, they withstood five bitter years. Some view honor in that.
Absolutely. That is a valid and empathetic perspective, and one I've heard before through many years of living in the south. I was never able to work up any sympathy for the CSA as a nation, but had a lot of appreciation for the history/tragedy/bravery exhibited by both sides.
My only quibble is that when it's been explained to me in those terms, the explainers often offered it as the only perspective. I can't tell you how many times I've heard "the Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about states' rights" or "the Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about the industrial states trying to dominate the agricultural states", etc.
The problem is that every time anyone said "the Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about X", they were always really trying to say that it wasn't also about slavery. But of course it was also about slavery. There are all sorts of values of X for which one could say, "the Civil War was about slavery, and it was also about X", but there is no value of X that somehow erases the slavery aspect from the origins of the war. It was about a lot of things, but it wouldn't have happened without political disagreements over the continued existence of slavery as a government-protected institution.
There are many people in the south who honor and respect those who died fighting for the CSA, but who still view the war as a great national tragedy in which the south unfortunately chose to stand up for a morally indefensible institution (but may have also been standing up for much more legitimate ideals as well). Those sorts of nuanced views just seemed far less common than the "it wasn't about slavery, it was about X" perspective.
If you read the newspaper articles and speeches from the time, what the war was about depended on who was speaking. In the South, in the legislatures who were voting for secession, the war was very much about slavery, and states rights was waved about because that would allow them to keep slavery.
Slavery wasn't even in danger at the time, but Abraham Lincoln was just elected and was very vocal about limiting the spread of slavery to new territories. The southerners were freaking out, believing that if slavery couldn't spread, then it would end up dying out, and all their livelihoods would die out too.
Most of the people in power in the southern were wealthy slaveholders, so they cared a great deal about slavery. For them, it was definitely about slavery.
The non-slaveholding majority weren't as concerned about slavery, but if their state government decided to secede, they felt a loyalty to protect their state. I'd say that for the average southerner who had no slaves, the war was less about slavery and more about a feeling of loyalty towards their state. To me, it seems that the upper class of the southern states dragged their citizenry into war to protect their own way of life, but I don't think that's how the typical southerner viewed it at the time.
This attitude made things very difficult for Jefferson Davis, who was trying to get all the rebellious states to cooperate and work together at a time when they were all screaming about state sovereignty and independence from a federal government.
The average northerner didn't care at all about slavery. At the beginning the northern states had no intention of abolishing slavery. They just wanted to keep the country together and stop the southern states from seceding. Some of the northern states were slave states: they weren't at all in favor of abolishing slavery. Even Abraham Lincoln said that if he could save the union by preserving slavery, he would do so.
Eventually, much later in the war, when there was no hope of the southern states returning voluntarily, Lincoln went ahead and abolished slavery (in the rebellious states only) as a way to hurt them as much as possible. That was really only a way of sticking it to the south and was definitely not a focus of the war for the North.
I definitely would agree that the CSA is looked on in the southern states through rose-colored glasses, and a lot of the more unpleasant realities are glossed over as attitudes change. That's human nature. People who really believe in something tend to reinterpret it as attitudes and opinions change, usually burying the unpleasant aspects in the process.
I suspect that if the southern states had never revolted and seceded, slavery would have slowly dwindled over time and would have eventually been abolished gradually. I don't think that Lincoln would have had the political backing to abolish slavery with the southern states still participating, but he probably would have been able to successfully confine it and make it less appealing.
If you do a little reading besides the WSJ and NYT, it's obvious that the CIA has been propping up ISIS. Some articles on Glen Greenwald's publication The Intercept goes into to this in a bit of detail. It's amazing to me how few people understand this.
Short answer: because it's absurd. People don't have to explain downvotes for conspiracy theories based on peoples' gut feelings/fears/paranoia regarding what's really going on below the visible surface of world events.
Long answer: if you said you had a fear that there might be a conspiracy but didn't have anything other than circumstantial evidence and intuition to back it up, that'd be one thing. But you didn't. You said it was "obvious" that that's what's going on.
Lots of people base lots of beliefs (and subsequent actions) on their gut feelings about things that are opaque to them, but if you don't take your own gut feelings with a grain of salt then it's actually introducing noise into the collective global conversation about this stuff. You end up with everyone arguing about hypotheticals that neither side can prove or disprove rather than actionable intelligence.
Much better to seek small, messy, unsatisfying truths and fight for them, than to intuit exciting, reductive narratives with truthiness derived from their explanatory power. The former can lead to people making positive differences in the world, while the latter usually just leads to lots of angry, endless, unresolvable arguments on Reddit or at family gatherings.
You probably believed Bush's absurd conspiracy theory that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. And you are probably ignoring the news in the (mainstream, non-conspiratorial) press that Saudi Arabia actually supported 9/11 and is supporting ISIS. And you probably ignore the obvious alignment of interests between Russian, Iran (shiite), and Syria's Assad (shiite), and the alignment of their enemies, the US, Saudi Arabia (sunni), and ISIS (sunni). The US isn't even being that secretive about their support of "rebels" in Syria, but most people just read headlines.
But no, it's another nut job conspiracy theory, just like all those nuts who thought Bush lying.
Russia + Iran (Shiite) + Syria's Assad (Shiite)
VS
US (and Europe) + Saudi Arabia (Sunni) + ISIS (Sunni)
How are these connections not simple and obvious? Did you also believe that Iraq had something to do with 9/11? How does everyone forget so easily how big the lies are that are told by the US government in order to prosecute war?
