MEGA: The Holy War of Our Making is one of the longest and most complex productions I’ve ever released, it’s a project that I originally started as a documentary script 4 years ago back in 2020, around the same time I had been working on my “Truth of North Korea” script, which was a heavy inspiration for several segments in the first episode of MEGA, MEGA: Yeonmi and North Korea.
But the difference is that when I worked on MEGA: Yeonmi and North Korea, I didn’t actually carry over any text from “Truth of North Korea”, what I carried over was the knowledge I had gained, writing wise I was starting from scratch, this allowed me to naturally filter out any mistakes I had made in my research or any poor formatting/writing techniques.
With this script it has been one continuous script evolving over 4 years of on and off work, it started purely as my own project that I was going to write, edit and record all by myself, in that first year I did put together a version of the first episode of the project, which I called “The West’s Terror Problem, the Politics of War” or the “Terror Problem” script for short, but I never published it, with my poor quality microphone and sub par editing techniques I didn’t think it was something I could present to the world.
But the topic still stuck with me and at some point I showed the documentary to Massi and he agreed it had merit, so overtime I kept adding new parts to the script and reworking old ones, I gave the project a new title (its current one, The Holy War of Our Making) and we agreed it would be part of the MEGA series.
A breakthrough came when we decided to record the script alongside the recording of the third instalment of MEGA, MEGA: The Ukrainian Divide, on my Christmas/New Year trip to Germany, while most of my work went towards Divide there was a small amount of work put towards polishing this script and I then recorded it in its entirety, with the idea that The Holy War of Our Making could be a documentary that would release either after Divide or maybe even before it, as its shorter length could potentially make it a stop gap to tide audiences over until Divide was finished.
But then production on The Ukrainian Divide ended up taking far longer than we previously imagined, so none of our time went toward producing The Holy War of Our Making, we also started to take interest in other topics including other ideas for MEGA documentaries, so this project ended up falling by the wayside.
As a result I’ve decided to release The Holy War of Our Making as a series of articles on Entropic Domain, so the project can see the light of day in some form without needing to wait for all the lengthy production time documentary making in a video format would demand, a video would need hours worth of b-roll, a soundtrack, a lengthy editing process to make sure all the timing is right, an article just needs the text I’ve already written and whatever images I choose to toss in to spice up the visuals.
Getting this project ready for release has been a challenging task, my writing and research style pre-MEGA was a lot more amateurish, because of the continuity between the old and new versions of the script it has been hard to fix that. While the underlying thesis of the project (the argument that past interventions from Western governments are primarily to blame for the rise of groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS, that this was avoidable and not a price worth paying in order to win the Cold War) was never in doubt for me, I’ve had to fix various issues with my coverage over the years, mistakes like getting the order of some historical events mixed up or making points that were lacking in detail and in some cases outright wrong.
I’ve also had to make sure the script kept pace with current events, when I completed my first draft of the script the Afghanistan war was still ongoing, by the time it was done the war was over and the Taliban had achieved victory, the country looked very different.
I also needed to tackle the complex problem of terminology, this conflict is tangled in very loaded terms and names, of course “terrorism” itself is a very obvious example, terrorism is defined as the use of violence to intimidate and achieve political goals, but this is such a broad term you could use it to describe the actions of most governments and of many “freedom fighter” groups around the world.
Really “terrorism” is a term that’s essentially based on vibes, for violent political groups we do like they’re freedom fighters, for the ones we don’t like they’re terrorists, there’s no consistent definition at all, I considered discussing this point in the script but ultimately left it out in the end except for a few scattered references to the point that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”.
There were 2 major examples of terminology issues I had to address for this project, the first was how to refer to the ideology of groups like Al Qaeda, some use the term “Islamism”, some use “Islamic Extremism”, others choose “Islamic Fundamentalism” and others still opt for “Jihadism”.
For most of the production I went with “fundamentalism” but I ultimately chose to use “Islamic Extremism”, as I believed “Islamism” or “Islamic Fundamentalism” implied that these Al-Qaeda style mentalities are the essence of Islam as a religion, a point I absolutely didn’t want to make and don’t believe in.
I rejected “Jihadism” for the same reason, as Jihad is a badly misunderstood concept in the West where it is almost exclusively associated with violence and terror campaigns, Jihad actually just means “struggle” in a religious concept, that of course can mean a military struggle in the name of religion but it can also just as much refer to a spiritual struggle, a fact I ended up pointing out in later additions of the script.
I felt “Islamic Extremism” creates a distance between the wider religion and the extreme, implying an Extremism using Islam as its base, rather than Islam itself being synonymous with Extremism.
I had also considered referring to the ideology of these groups by the specific names of their interpretations of Islam (for example Al-Qaeda is said to believe in a branch called Wahhabism or Salafism while the Taliban follows a branch known as Deobandism) but I mostly avoided this for the simple reason that I’m not a religious scholar, I’m not qualified to judge which label belongs to which group, I also think what defines groups like Al-Qaeda isn’t their cultural values but their militancy, there are ideologues in the Muslim world that are just as ultra-conservative as groups like Al-Qaeda in their values but reject their methods, encouraging “political quietism” (apoliticism), rejecting aggressive war and war crimes, or banning specific tactics like suicide bombings.
Extremism as a term also has its own pitfalls, as what’s extreme to one society or even one person will be normal to another, but I saw it as the best of a bad bunch.
The second example was I had to address what to call the terror group ISIS, most reporters call the group ISIS, IS or ISIL, variants of their official titles - the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”, the “Islamic State”, the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”, I didn’t want to do that as I felt it would legitimise the claims of the group to represent Islam. Other reports acted on this exact issue in different ways, often by using terms like “the so-called Islamic State” in order to use the name without endorsing it, but I felt this was a clunky solution.
Others had called them by an Arabic slang term used in the Middle East itself, “Daesh”, and this was the solution I ultimately chose, the compromise I made was that I would use the group’s name initially until I found a moment where I could discuss the issue in a segment, there I would explain the different attitudes and the meaning of the “Daesh” term, and from then on I would use “Daesh”.
Another major issue was how to format this script, originally the script was a 3 episode (or “part” as I’m calling them for the written version) project, the first episode being about Afghanistan, the second about Iraq, the third about Syria, these being the 3 key areas where the “terror problem” of Al Qaeda, ISIS and their offshoots began and then expanded, the idea was that each episode would tell the story of that country’s “terror problem” in chronological order, from a specific start point to how things look in the present day, for Afghanistan that start point would be the Afghan Civil War in 1979, Iraq would be the Iraq War in 2003, for Syria it was the Syrian Civil War in 2011.
But ultimately I decided that the conflicts in Iraq and Syria were too interlinked to discuss separately and so their episodes were merged, I once described this kind of problem to a friend by saying that
the problem with trying to organise my scripts is i try to do things both by topic and by chronology
the problem is the chronology doesn’t give a fuck about my topic choices and everything is happening at once so i have to fudge it
And one problem that I simply couldn’t overcome was the form of address, I originally wrote the article with the mindset that my audience would be from someone in a “coalition country” or the Western world, a country that was aligned with the geopolitical West and had participated in actions like the “War on Terror”, a country like the UK where I’m from, the US, or somewhere else, I later came to see this as a mistake as audiences from other countries will probably end up reacting to some of the points made like this:
But reworking it would either need a sweeping rewrite or a lot of wonky changes that would just make the writing feel out of place, so if you’re not from my neck of the woods I’m sorry if any of this comes off as jarring.
The end result of all this work is something I know will be imperfect and will still have clunky elements to it, but despite all that’s changed since I started on this project I still believe in my work and feel that what it discusses is a very important topic.
I don’t think any project has so cohesively pointed out just how culpable the governments of the Western world are in the rise of militant Islamist Extremism and by extension the deaths of many of their own citizens, whether that’s soldiers who were sent to try and contain this problem or civilians who were killed by gun, knife and bomb attacks. The information has been out there for many years, but scattered across many different news articles, government documents, studies and polemics by activist groups, here I wanted to pool all the key context into one place.
As you will see the project is not a condemnation of intervention as a whole but a call for accountability, a condemnation of elites making sweeping decisions about the lives of millions or even billions with little to no participation of their own people involved, it’s an attack on war being used as a tool for enhancing power blocs and a rejection of war as a business.
Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, where I’ve advocated for continued aid to Ukraine, I’ve wondered if I’ve become a hypocrite or shifted on that last point, as I despise arms companies but now support their products being shipped out in the name of a cause I support, Ukrainian independence; I suppose there isn’t, supporting military aid doesn’t mean supporting war as a business, I want Ukraine to be aided so their country survives not so the CEO of Raytheon can get a new bonus package next month, Afghanistan and Ukraine are 2 very different conflicts as well, the Soviets and their allies in the 1980s were tending towards compromise and an end to the power bloc contest, Putin’s Russia today tends towards outlandish demands, aggression and a revival of that contest, a point I ended up adding to the conclusion, it’s 2 mindsets for 2 different conflicts, their own circumstances gave me 2 different impressions.
But it does feel like my current mentality is in a bit of an uneasy alliance with the shady organisations I condemned staunchly here, I went from seeing them as evil to maybe to some degree a necessary evil, I suppose you can read my writings on Ukraine as well as this and then judge for yourself, if you’re so inclined.
Regardless, even though this is in some ways an out of date project that I’ve moved on from it’s one I didn’t want to let die and that’s why you can read it today, like all the MEGA projects I hope you find it educational.