This newsletter is entitled...

The War on Terrorism is an Unwinnable War

How can we defeat terrorism if the building blocks of terrorism are ignorance, poverty, hunger, hopelessness and despair.

The more bombs we drop, the more people we kill , the more people we unjustly jail ~ the more the disenfranchised resort to their only available weapon ~ terrorism .

Under these circumstances the most powerful weapon that could be used against Terrorism is social cooperation and altruism . And there is much evidence that these twin weapons of mass outreach to the poor and disenfranchised are the very foundation of our evolution as a human species.

In the June 1995 issue of Scientific America ~ Nowak, May and Sigmund co-wrote an article entitled THE ARITHMETICS OF MUTUAL HELP .
In that article they demonstrate , through computer experiments, how cooperation rather than exploitation can dominate in the Darwinian struggle for survival.

" Throughout the evolutionary history of life, cooperation among smaller units led to the emergence of more complex structures, as, for example , the emergence of multicellular creatures from single-celled organisms. In this sense, cooperation becomes as essential for evolution as is competition........ In the course of evolution, there appears to have been ample opportunity for cooperation to have assisted everything from humans to molecules . In a sense, cooperation could be older than life itself . "

And what else but Love, social cooperation and altruism could be older than life itself . Are we denying our deepest and most basic urge to unite and cooperate with one another ?

Teilhard de Chardin clearly defined this universal urge to unite when he wrote ;

If there were no real propensity to unite , even at a prodigiously rudimentary level, indeed, in the molecule itself ~ it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up in the ' hominized ' or human form.

So this ongoing war on terrorism is in direct conflict with our deepest urge to unite and cooperate with one another ~ and is eventually unwinnable.

So why do we fight an unwinnable war ?

Robert Higgs anwers this question brilliantly in a recent article in the S.F. Chronicle entitled THE BATTLE ON TERRORISM IS AN EXCUSE TO MAKE FIGHTING PERMANENT ;

" So there you have it : The war on terrorism - the new permanent war - is a winner . The president loves it. The military brass loves it. The bigwigs at Boeing and lockheed love it. We all love it . Except, perhaps, that odd citizen who wonders whether, all things considered, having a permanent war is truly a good idea for the beleaguered U.S. economy and for the liberties of the American people . "

And , I would add, for our own human survival .

All wars are civil wars,
because all men are brothers.. _{Francois de Salignac de la Mothe Fenelon}

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