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ISIS is no longer defined largely as militant group whose goal is to establish a caliphate — using whatever means including cruelty, murder, and violence. The means are the end. Cruelty, murder and widespread violence are the end.
Slaughter is the goal, George Packer writes.
The very name of the self-proclaimed caliphate strikes most people, not least other Muslims, as ridiculous, if not delusional. But it’s the vaulting ambition of an actual Islamic State that inspires ISIS recruits. The group uses surprise and shock to achieve goals that are more readily grasped by the apocalyptic imagination than by military or political theory. …
… The videotaped beheadings that began at the same time shocked the West. Last week’s decapitation shocked Japan. Sooner or later, it seems, everyone will have a turn. And yet, if the group thinks that it will intimidate countries into keeping out of or leaving the anti-ISIS coalition, its tactics have so far been a failure.
… The violence is the point, and the worse the better. The Islamic State doesn’t leave thousands of corpses in its wake as a means to an end. Slaughter is its goal—slaughter in the name of higher purification. Mass executions are proof of the Islamic State’s profound commitment to its vision. …Packer,NewYorker
It’s a death cult, Packer writes. For the west, it’s chilling to face the perceived goal: slaughter, and that “sooner or later everyone will have a turn.”
And the more spectacular, the more affecting, the better.
Cross-posted from Prairie Weather
graphic via shutterstock.com