I'd like to draw a comparison between today's Teahadists and Josef Stalin, a man they resemble, at least when it comes to being dangerously paranoid and annoyingly pigheaded.
In 1941, Stalin nearly handed World War II to Hitler on a sliver platter. Now why would anybody say such a thing about kindly Uncle Joe? Because he purged the Soviet officer corps in the late thirties, so that when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union -- Stalin refused to believe his partner in crime from 1939 had betrayed him for days and threatened anyone who tried to tell him otherwise -- the country was unprepared to fight. There were simply too few experienced, competent leaders in the Soviet army.
More to the point was Stalin's purge in progress at the time of death, known as the Doctor's Plot. Stalin imprisoned a number of Jewish doctors in the Lubyanka on trumped up treason charges where they were mercilessly tortured; plans for show trials and executions had already been drawn up. However, this purge was interrupted on March 1, 1953 when Stalin suffered a severe stroke. It took a whole a whole day for those responsible to even check on Stalin's condition because because everyone was frightened of upsetting him if the reason he hadn't been seen coming from his private quarters for that long had something more to do with his notoriously quirky personality than his health. He was found on the floor in a pool of his own urine, unable to speak or get up. On March 3, the doctors in the Lubyanka couldn't help but notice something strange: the guards were relaxed and friendly and there were no beatings. Later, as the situation became clear to the inmates, one of the officers at the Lubyanka asked one of the doctors who the best specialists to treat Stalin's condition. The frank answer was, "They're all in here."
Stalin died on March 5. In addition to the fact that doctors who could do the most to save his life were in the Lubyanka on his orders and that no one on his personal staff wanted to face his wrath by disturbing him even if just to see if he was in good health, the four men in charge of making decisions during Stalin's incapacitation, Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev and Bulganin, were afraid of doing anything simply because they were afraid of what Stalin would do to them if he recovered. NKVD chief Beria was particularly afraid of a coming purge and the others weren't feeling to secure about their futures, either.
So, Stalin died four days after suffering a stroke because he had no friends on his personal staff or inner political circle and he had locked up, beaten and tortured the best doctors who could have helped him in one of the world's most notorious prisons.
Well, I see some parallels in the story.
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