INSIGHTS INTO THE SOUL-KILLING TRAITS OF CULT LEADERS AND TERRORISTS

In considering the after-death fate of particularly evil people, I have often thought that some of the real soul-killers who attempt to rob others of their hopes and dreams actually lose their souls after they die. In other words, they suffer complete annihilation, a just recompense for what they attempted to do to others during their lifetimes. Another aspect of such people is that, in truth, no matter how destructive a force they were in the lives of some people, to others close to them they were often quite the opposite: loving parents and spouses, attentive neighbors, and models of ethics in their dealings with their colleagues and friends.

Twentieth-century history is littered with the bones of many such demons whose double-dealing practices with politicians and soldiers alike led to the deaths of untold millions. In our own time, names such as Kim Jong-un, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, and Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi come to mind. Each is an example of the modern day cult of personality, which differs only from older historical models in the lethality of the weapons used by its adherents. My contention here is that in cases where such cults flourish, the political aspirations of their leaders last only as long as the parasites they employ exhaust their plunder. 

Terrorists and cult leaders alike offer delusions about the hereafter aimed at their thugs and devotees in the full knowledge that such ruses will be discovered by the majority of their followers. Such short-term enterprises are characteristic of con-artists everywhere. Its formula both familiar and predicable: offer promises of long-term gains based on fighting others for half-baked claims of tribal or historical rights denied by thieving apostates and other fallen souls, and then offer the survivors the simple, contented lives of your ancestors or some people out of a mythical time or if they die in battle, assure them that they will achieve eternal bliss. In this way, grown men (and sometimes women) are taught to cultivate their lowest impulses and learn to feed on ideologies based on resentment and theft. The lofty aspirations that they initially brought to the cult or terrorist organization are soon revealed to be an imaginary set of ideals they must abandon or find themselves reviled or expelled, penniless and often without a family or even a country to which they can return.

Despite their expertise in crafting an image of themselves as threatening giants, at their core such terrorists are merely overblown con-artists and sociopaths who live by sucking out the souls of others to disguise their own lack of conscience. They are like vampires who cast no reflection. In order to maintain their disguises, they attach themselves to the throats of their followers, draining them of their funds and training them to do the same to others. Central to their deception is their substitution of victimization narratives for any dialogue based on factual evidence and the capacity for rational thought.  It is supremely ironic that many of these people exploit innocent seekers of what they themselves privately scoff at--a tight-knit, brotherly community of higher values. Instead, they treat the fools who bark at their heels like human shields, instructing them to ensnare or kill others in the most vicious manner imaginable, while hiding themselves like the cowards they are in a lair or palace teaming with sex-slaves, ample food, and more gun-toting idiots. 

IMPRESSIVE, BUT IT STINKS

Like the giant stinkflowers that bloom every few years in the fertile jungle, leaders of terrorist groups or other apocalyptic cults exude confidence and seem invested with heroic grandeur, all the while polluting the air with the stench of rotten flesh. Contrary to what some people think, a phony guru or gang leader does not gain followers by exerting some kind of svengali-like influence over them. Neither is this a case of a split personality. Unlike true psychopaths, they do possess empathy under certain circumstances, but only towards those they regard as fulfilling some aspect of their megalomaniacal aspirations. Perhaps their followers will find peace and a way forward if they pull themselves out of the ceaseless round of resentment, theft, and fawning over an inflated personality they should realize is nothing more than a loud-mouthed, insecure parasite who has built a business on ruining lives. I doubt, however, that  the so-called guru or terrorist will ever reflect on his sins and repent, having inflated his ego to such an extent that when it explodes in his own face, his insignificant, rotten soul will go with it.

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