I found this on Twitter yesterday. It’s genius.
Grammar Cops should probably take a pill before reading. Credit to Karl Sharro.
You want the simple one line explanation for what caused ISIS? Here goes: the failure of the postcolonial elites to create genuine democratic societies and foster a sense of national unity opting instead for military dictatorships that eroded the potential for economic and political development coupled with the historic mistakes of Arab progressive parties and their appeasement towards autocratic rulers contributing to the complete evisceration of alternative political frameworks that could create organic resistance towards external meddling, hegemony and outright military interventions leaving a radical interpretation of religion as the only remaining ideological platform capable of mobilising the disenfranchised exacerbated by the global decline of universal ideals and the rise of identity as a prime mobiliser and enabled by political and financial support from theocratic regimes aiming to shore up their legitimacy and made worse by the collapse of the regional security order creating the conditions for proxy wars and political, social and economic upheaval intensified by geo-politically incoherent international meddling escalating conflicts and leading to a perpetual state of chaos under which the appeal of a revivalist religious-political order embodied by the caliphate becomes attractive particularly when coupled with a millenarian apocalyptic narrative. Simple.
To which our Middle Eastern correspondent replied, “Perfect.”
(For you social media purists, it was uploaded as an image thereby circumventing Twitter’s 140-character rule.)