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Notes -
I question whether one can in fact rise to control of a nation-state without becoming sufficiently cynical/realist that "don't try it, you and 3/4ths of your people will die" still works. We had a whole lot of evidence that the Japanese were insanely fanatical, but in the end they were, in fact, actually sane humans. Jihadism has demonstrated that it is willing to eat notable costs, but they still have to recruit their suicide bombers very carefully from a quite-limited pool.
It is not clear to me that Jihadism is actually more insane than Communism, and MAD worked on Communism.
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