This thought seems familiar, somehow. Kind of Laundry RPG-ish, although a quick scan of the books didn’t bring anything up. Ach, well.
Operation FRIDAY CURIOSITY
Background: From 2013 to 2019 the human sacrifice death cult known mundanely as ‘Islamic State’/’Daesh’ (hereafter referred to as ‘IS’) operated as a proto-nation state in Syrian and Iraqi territory. IS attempted to mix its alarmingly brutal ritualistic practices with the maintenance and creation of a functional civic infrastructure, and achieved some success before the cult was eventually forced out of its physical territory. Preliminary checks by untainted Abrahamic theurgists have not uncovered conclusive proof of actual contractual diabolism, but ritual purification of important IS sites is ongoing.
Unfortunately, it is not enough to simply exorcise former slave camps and reconsecrate captured cult fanes to Allah; IS’s former bureaucratic structure itself is now a source of concern. Organized and regimented evil-aligned death cults are nothing new, of course. But one that so enthusiastically embraced paperwork is alarmingly novel. It has been argued, convincingly, that IS itself considered things like its building permits and vital records to be significant workings of the cult. This suggests that IS’s paperwork and documents have the potential to become ritual items themselves, and it hardly needs to be said that it is foolish to allow random, possibly diabolically-tainted, and certainly evil relics to end up on the occult black market.
Hence, Operation FRIDAY CURIOSITY. Your brief will be to check existing captured IS documents for evil ritual taint; if any tainted items are found, exorcise or destroy the physical focus of the proto-relic. Once that preliminary task is accomplished, develop and test a working system for checking unsecured documents in the field. Needless to say, should your team encounter occult scavengers or procurers, relieve them of potentially dangerous IS proto-relics. Deadly force is authorized, if deemed necessary, but please remember that out-and-out murder in the presence of potentially diabolically-tainted items is contraindicated, in a way that legitimate self-defense against an Evil-wielding foe is not. Plan accordingly.
IS was even more gung-ho about paperwork and permits than the Nazis?
Color me surprised…
Trying to impose order on a tribalistic society noted for corruption?
You’re going to need to import fighters without loyalties to the local tribes.
And you’re going to need paperwork, lots of paperwork. With regular cross-checks.
For maximum effectivenes, those who try to corrupt the system must be punished mercilessly.
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Somewhat counterintuitively, fanatically religious warriors make excellent bankers.
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But remember, the Ba’ath party was a pan-Arab organization deliberately modeled on the German Nazi party.
Islamic Jihad (and successor splinter factions) arose as a critique of the Ba’ath party, in which it was argued that the unifying aspect of Middle Eastern fascism should be religion, not race.
So the ideal was already in place.
(I might have delivered many lectures about this subject some 16-18 years ago when using the term “Islamic fascism” got you accused of being ignorant by people who were actually ignorant.)