At Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple quotes from Ivor Brown’s I Commit to the Flames, written in 1934, and notes its suitability as a description of ISIS terrorists:
The mass-myth fascinates a fatigued or baffled or frustrated people; it demands no critical power…it is easy and it flatters. It puts a splash of colour into the citizen’s life if he can imagine himself as the instrument of a Mighty and Magnanimous Force…. Besides, he soon sees that, if he plays his game shrewdly, he can become one of the chosen, the party, the brotherhood, the shock troop, in short a gangster in a community where rights have been abolished…