Is forgiveness a weapon in the war on terror?

Could you ever torture someone? Could you, under different circumstances, in a different world (I hope) than the one which led you to this Spectator, be as brutal as the fighters of the Islamic State? Your answer, I reckon, is most likely to be no. Most people these days talk of IS jihadis as if they’re unnaturally evil, an aberration — and you can see why. If the IS are uniquely bad, it means we don’t have to re-evaluate the species, and to boot, it gives us licence to stamp them out.

It is tempting to think of them as an anomaly, but on this point I’m with Toby Young, who earlier this month wrote that the Catholic notion of original sin explains brutality best. The seeds of cruelty are in all of us — not just IS, or young men, but girls and grandparents too. We could all, if we chose, grow into terrible monsters. Nothing human is alien to me and all that, which is sometimes used as if it were an excuse these days, but is not.

What we forget about IS, I think, is that the boys who herd off to join the jihad in Iraq or Syria don’t usually start off as monsters — they are made into them along the way. There are techniques for making sadists out of young men that have been practised by militias worldwide and throughout history. In fact all that throat-cutting and torture, which seems so particularly diabolical for being unnecessary, is actually a crucial part of the monster-making process itself.

I heard all about it once from an expert, a man by the name of Joshua Milton Blahyi (General Butt-Naked to his foes), who was once a warlord in the Liberian civil war. Back in the bad old days, Joshua specialised in turning boys into psychopaths, and though his recruits were often younger than your average jihadi (12 to 18, say) there’s no hard line between boyhood and manhood, and the method was anyway much the same for twenty-somethings, he said.