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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0.5in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Courier New'; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt">“It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>witnessed by the history of mankind:<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws.”<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Osama bin Laden explaining to Americans why they are Satanic, Message To the Ummah May 12, 2004<o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Courier New'; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt">Western Civilization gives the right to do it your self, diy, the right to create—the right to create new movements, the right to create new artforms, the right to create our own constitutions, laws, theories, and beliefs. Osama wants to take all that away.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Courier New'; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt">Every pecking order battle between groups is a battle between hypotheses in the mass mind—guesses about the best way to do things. Osama’s guess, his hypothesis, has been tried out in Sudan and Afghanistan. Its result is a living nightmare.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Courier New'; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt">Margaret Mead said that every primitive, indigenous tribe in the early days of man forbade the murder of human beings. The problem was the definition of a human. The name of our tribe meant we were humans. Everyone from another tribe wasn’t human at all. he or she was fair game. In early tribes like these, said Mead, the number of “humans” whose lives were sacred was only 50 to 75. The rest of the earth's population was a legitimate target for murder. But today, Mead pointed out, the number a single society says “thou shalt not kill” is much, much greater. In India and China your fellow tribe members, your fellow human beings, your fellow Indians or Chinese, your brethren who you’re not supposed to kill, is 1.2 billion.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Courier New'; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt">Two anthropologists, William Divale and Marvin Harris, combed through data from 561 primi­tive tribes and discovered that 21% of the males were killed off violently before they ended adolescence. One out of every five men in these primitive, indigenous tribes died in skirmishes and war. The percentage of the slaughtered skyrockets if you include the women and children wiped out by indigenous peoples like the South American Taulipang, who burned dozens of families in their huts, loved the screams of pain inside, then marched home shouting a joyous "hei-hei-hei-hei-hei!"[i] <o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Courier New'; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt">If our techno-modern society killed at the old tribal rate, roughly 720 million modern humans would be blasted to smithereens in wars or homicides every generation. Compare this with the 55 million who died in WWII, and the bloodlettings of the last hundred years, are less than one-tenth of what they'd amount to under tribal or hunter-gatherer ways. <o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Courier New'; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt">Much as many of us hate Donald Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld tried to invent a new form of humanitarian war in Iraq. He tried to achieve it with smart bombs and with missiles that could jet down the street, turn a corner, and go directly into the room where a military group was hiding out. <o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Courier New'; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt">Total American deaths in Iraq now total 1,100. Civilian deaths come to a maximum of 13,603 . The total deaths in a regional conflict of this sort 150 years ago, the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856, came to 615,378.[ii] For every 41 people killed in the Crimean War, the Iraq War has killed only one. <o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Courier New'; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt">The war in Iraq is grisly, ghastly, and deplorable. But for all practical purposes, the War In Iraq has saved 600,000 lives. That is a huge reduction in violence.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Courier New'; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt">Compare the deaths in the current Iraq War, revolting as it is, to deaths in the war that dragged on between Iraq and Iran from 1980 to 1988. That war lasted eight years and cost more than a million lives.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Courier New'; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt">Or compare this to a total of a million deaths every year worldwide in car accidents. Or compare it with the deaths worldwide each year caused by cigarette smoking, which total about 5 million[iii]. Every death is horrible and every war is deplorable. But thanks to industrialism, capitalism, technology, cultural advances, the spread of western values, and thanks to what some of us call cultural imperialism, we are making progress.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Courier New'; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt">There’s an unspoken moral imperative to capitalism. It says to those who practice it, “save thy neighbor”. Save her with a delight. Save her with a moment of joy. Save her by taking her out of herself for a minute, an hour, or a day. Save her by giving her new powers. Save her by giving her new comforts and new consolations. Save one neighbor and you make a dollar. Save a thousand neighbors and you can make a thousand dollars. Save ten million folks you’ve never seen, folks who are your neighbors on this planet, and you can make ten million dollars.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Courier New'; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt">If you forget that your mission is to understand your neighbor’s needs and serve them, you will go home empty at the end of the day. You’ll wonder why you’re among the mass of men who lead lives of quiet desperation, why you’re among the hollow men, heads filled with straw, trudging without purpose through life. Save your fellow human beings with what we call products and services and you can go home knowing that someone needed you today. You can go home knowing that you were a part of something far, far greater than yourself—the advancement of others. <o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoBodyText style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face="Courier New">And perhaps you were even a part of something that Osama deplores and we should celebrate-- the handmade evolution of the human race. </FONT></P></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT lang=0 face=Arial size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" PTSIZE="10">----------<BR>Howard Bloom<BR>Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century<BR>Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute<BR>www.howardbloom.net<BR>www.bigbangtango.net<BR>Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series.<BR>For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org<BR>for two chapters from <BR>The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer<BR>For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net<BR></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>