Wole Soyinka writes in the Guardian today for the special benefit of naive liberals with a wholly benign view of human motivation and wilfully unseeing members of the left:
[I]n the end, it took a former colonial power to seize the leadership. Humiliating? Not quite. This invasion was not just a Malian affair, or even an African one: it was a global challenge. It had become clear that a few more weeks of inaction would have empowered Mali's invaders and, by extension, the murderous campaign of Nigeria's own Boko Haram.
Unlike most commentators, I confess that I find it impossible to regard these al-Qaida clones as either political or religious movements, even of the extremist kind. That their ability to recruit footsoldiers is a reflection on society's failures is not in doubt; nonetheless, it is naive to attribute this solely to unemployment, marginalisation and other social inequities. The world is facing viral mutations of the human psyche. Take Joseph Kony, the Christian warrior of Uganda whose idea of "resistance" is child conscription, abduction and rape, spiced with the slicing off of lips, ears and noses of unbelievers. People such as he belong to a special category that is part-criminal, part-psychopathic...
.....
The truth, alas, is that the science fiction archetype of the mad scientist who craves to dominate the world has been replaced by the mad cleric who can only conceive of the world in his own image...
The rest is here. Soyinka understands what is all too evident not only from the world stage but also in smaller - domestic and professional - environments: that people are moved by ideas as well as by root causes and that they sometimes behave in ways that the reasonable think of as semi-crazed or even fully crazed, but in any case with evil intent.
