People who become important activists, they also struggle with the process of discovery.

It is convenient for Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair to say the rise of the Islamic State has nothing to do with the Iraq War because that takes the culpability off their shoulders. The Islamic State is a product of the Iraq War. It took about a 100 years to build the Iraqi state, and the Americans and the British destroyed it in an afternoon.

The Islamic State is able to raise finances through taxation, through theft of banks, and certainly through oil sales from the Omar oilfields in eastern Syria. So right now the question of funding isn't of the essence.

Turkey is using the Islamic State in the same way as Pakistan used the Taliban in Afghanistan. You know, that's perhaps Turkey's strategy.

There's a different use for different strategies.

In the early period of Left struggles, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there were many different trajectories for the struggle, whether you call it 'syndicalism' or 'anarchism' or, at the time, 'social democracy', eventually 'Communism', these were different theories of struggle. But all of them shared a basic understanding that the people...experience exploitation, they experience oppression, but they're not prepared to rise up.

I understand politically that uprisings take place as a combination of spontaneity and preparation, not that preparation is more important than spontaneity.