Terrorism is a cancer on the body of humanity This phrase sounds like something uttered by a politician campaigning for election,

whipping the populace into a frenzy of action to remove a threat to the system. The phrase uses two words dreaded by human society the world over, two sources of misery and pain that seem to be ever present and increasing in incidence with each passing day. Without any amusement at all I can say that the phrase is truer than many would actually believe. Compare the two, terrorism and cancer. Both are a scourge on their respective victims, the human body for cancer, on civilisation for terrorism. Both are caused by factors within and outside their immediate areas of effect. Cancers are caused by the mutation and overproduction of cells that attack our own systems. Terrorism is delivered at the hands of individuals who do not fit effectively into our society and as a result work against it with violent actions. The immediate similarities are obvious, more striking though are the further similarities between the causes and treatment of these two afflictions and the answer to the problems that is so often ignored it is amazing that it has not yet been put into action. Cancer, as mentioned, is the reaction of cells in the body to a myriad of events that end in the uncontrolled change of cell structure with the consequence of damage to the surrounding tissue, often eventuating in death. Cancers come in two forms, benign and malignant. Of these two it is the malignant cancers that cause serious damage to our bodies, they are uncontained, they spread, infecting other parts of our bodies and sometimes lying dormant before bursting once more into life, beginning again the cycle of misery anew. Terrorism is of a similar nature, it is created through an underlying instability in the structure of our society, exacerbated through an overabundance of dissatisfaction and an absence of control systems to lessen the impact of what are appropriately termed radicals. These malignancies created by the radicals

are the ideologies and aims which will ultimately kill our society over time just as cancer does. In turn the catalyst of malignant ideology will trigger an unrelenting assault on the body of society which only grows in strength over time and with which our current systems cannot hope to cope with. A sobering aside, there is rarely any hope of beating cancer, there is only hope for remission. So it is with terrorism as well, the longer we are forced to struggle against it the more likely it is that the civilisation that we have built will be first crippled, then brought down, ending in a slow painful death which we will do anything to release ourselves from. The question remains, what can we do? What can we do to fix this problem, to cure this cancer of our society, to eradicate the stain of malignancy upon our civilisation, that festers over time, growing in strength and numbers as we sit unaware of its silent multiplication. The cancer analogy continues with the treatment. Currently we use two main processes to treat cancers, surgery and chemotherapy. It is strangely apt how relevant these two treatments are to our analogy. Surgery to terrorism is removing the offending tumour, cutting it out of the meat of our body. The process is grisly, painful and leaves the risk of parts of the cancer remaining to germinate again in another part of our body. Terrorism shares this tendency as we kill a terrorist but leave behind their grief stricken loved ones who now also wither inside and thus corrupted, perpetuate the spread of the disease. Clearly, surgery is only effective if every possible part of the cancer or flesh that threatens to become cancerous is removed. In a human this could mean removal of a lung, a limb, some organ that we decide we must live without because the alternative is to be threatened again by the insidious creeping worm of a tumour.

In society, taking this course of action will see us removing great swathes of our global society because we fear it could become corrupted, our fear will drive us to maim ourselves, depriving our civilisations body of vital productive facilities, social structure and people in the hope of once and for all remaining cancer free. We can see how our attempts to do such things in society have only hastened the destruction of our humanity. We reject refugees because they come from places beset by terrorism, we ostracise religions because some of their adherents have twisted against their good and honest principles. In doing so we are debilitating ourselves and creating yet more cause for dissent, for destruction. As cancer becomes more common though and more importantly, more talked about there is another consequence which must be examined. Our governing brain also panics at the thought of terrorism and like a sun tanned beachgoer becoming anxious at finding a simple freckle we brutally excise the benign tumours, the peaceful dissenters from our social body because they do not belong in our ideal image of society, blindly ignoring the fact that dissent was only ever an issue because our actions have been so inconsiderate to our greater social body that some reaction is inevitable. Cutting away at everything that could cause a problem regardless of its cause or our condition does not provide a cure for the cancer of terrorism. It merely makes us victims of our own fear. Terrorisms aim is to make people fear and with our actions, trying to scalpel away every last bit of unstable flesh we only create fresh opportunity for terrorism to spread to other parts before returning, savage and vengeful to punish us for having the audacity to try and cure ourselves. Clearly, if we continue to treat our fears of terrorism in this way, by treating benign dissent as an enemy instead of a warning, we are not dealing with our societys sickness as we should. Our other method of treating cancer is with chemotherapy, a dose of radiation to poison the tumour and to wither it away to nothing. Chemotherapy is a war

against the biological self and is as powerful a direct weapon as a surgeon could hope for against cancer. But chemotherapy comes with a well-known side effect. The bombardment of our cells, healthy and malignant with radiation causes degradation in our bodies which cripples us severely. When chemotherapy treats a cancer we lose our hair, we experience incredible pain, and our organs threaten to fail and sometimes the pain of the cure is so bad it leads to our death, weak, malnourished and without hope. If we survive many realise it is only a matter of time before the cancer resurfaces to fight against a body that is crippled by our own solution. War on terrorism, war waged with soldiers, occupied countries and broad-stroke punishments are our chemotherapy. We see another nation or people as the site from which our cancer issued; we attack it with all our might, destroying its infrastructure, brutally battering away any place in which cancerous terrorist tumours might hide. While we lurch and attack indiscriminately like the proverbial bull in a china shop the malignancy slips away to hide quietly elsewhere while we trumpet our mission a success. The malignancy hides among populations that are clean that our brains assure us are not a threat to our social body. We relax and complain about the pain of the therapy, forgetting that we ourselves condoned its use in the first place and making villains of the soldiers who serve our countries in an effort to keep us safe. We malign those worthy individuals that would sacrifice themselves to keep us safe, in turn providing a path for them to radicalise and turn against us in their hopeless frustration. Like a chemotherapy patient our society takes drugs for the pain, we find distractions in ridiculous, flippant behaviour of our celebrities, we numb ourselves with arguments about vacuous idols, ignore the pain, go back to the way we were and for a while it seems like everything will be okay. It should be obvious that our traditional cures for our terrorist cancer are not working But, that does not mean we should not hope that terrorism is impossible to beat.

It has long been known that in most cases, prevention is better than cure. With cancer, prevention takes the form of a healthy diet and not being exposed to those things that cause mutation in our cells, some of these things are admittedly more difficult to avoid than others. With terrorism the same ideology holds true, if society is healthy and in balance then the few free radicals our body has are brought under control by the generally stable state of our immune system. An increase in destabilising influences also increases the risk of developing parties which are unstable and which may seek the destruction of the very body they live in. It is important to note that the analogy of cancer holds true when regarding the development of these tumours in societys body. There are both benign and malignant reactions to these occurrences. Too often our protective systems, in their fear, spend time targeting the benign; these are represented by protesters, rally attendees and activists. These people are targeted because they are obvious, they are easy to remove. Like a sunspot on the skin they are the warning signs that something is not working correctly but instead of the cause being caught the symptom is removed and the true danger ignored again. These benign protests are the voices of those demanding accountability from a brain that is not thinking its actions through, that is acting in short term selfinterest without regard to the longer life of society and without regard of the component parts of the body of our society. Just as the only true cure of cancer is prevention the only true cure of terrorism is to prevent its development. Some may think that this logically means preemptive destruction of those sites where terrorism is most prevalently developed, Africa, the Middle East, and the Muslim populations of poor nations. This ideology is being followed in the actions of governments right now. This ideology is flawed and is failing. We can see the social effects of pre-emptive war against terrorism, in places such as Afghanistan and in the Caucuses. It is akin to a person with a cold being bombarded with chemotherapy just in case they develop cancer. Ironically our

actions are leading to the weakening of yet more social structures, the crippling of more of our social organs, rendering them open to decay and malignant mutation once we declare the operation a success. Iraq is such a case, where before the nation did not function as we would like it, it posed little real threat to the rest of our global body, in fact the fears we had of it turned out not to be true at all. The destruction of this organ have left us not with a sickness to be cured , but instead, a ruptured, festering, bile-filled stomach that breeds disease that spreads across our worlds flesh. If we want to cure ourselves of terrorism we need to remove the carcinogens that cause its development. Firstly, nothing causes discontent like an empty stomach, when we starve in silence we often accept it as unavoidable. However; the spread of communication, the idea of mass consumption has reached across the globe from our first world apartment buildings to the shanty towns of middle Africa and slums of the Middle East. While first world countries feast on mass marketed sub-food we are told is good, the poor across the world look at their empty bowls and wonder why if there is so much to be had, why do they have nothing? We shake the wealth of our nations in the faces of the poor and disenfranchised, we tell them that to have what we have they must become like us, then we take away their opportunity to do so. Even within our own cities people starve while super-stores dump food in bins to rot in landfill, a heartless action that perpetuates the misery of those unable to support themselves. It is not just food that fits this criteria, every resource our planet produces needs to be utilised fairly and efficiently, not stockpiled like fat so that greedy individuals can manipulate supply and demand furthering the inequality between those that have and those that do not. Second, we find ourselves blessed to have the chance to choose our own leaders, but then our elected representatives are unable to lead with honesty and transparency. Our leaders become addicted to the drugs of responsibility; privilege, dirty money, perks and legal grey areas. Corruption of our leaders allows corruption of our societys body. Just like a crack addict, our leaders decide the solution to a problem is more of the drug, more money poured into

black hole habits that hide the true causes of hide the worsening condition, e.g. wars on drugs, restrictions on freedoms, more secrets hidden because the truth is too painful to admit. It is the realisation that this is occurring that drives people to strike out against the social body and repression of these markers only leads to hidden dangers. Third, the exposure to social carcinogens, impossible to avoid completely as too much of anything is bad for you. We are provided with media that is no longer impartial but instead is merely a mouthpiece for vested interests, be they leftist or rightist. People divide into camps and declare without thinking that to do differently to themselves is wrong and that to think differently is a crime and should be punished. The division of society enables the breakdown of social function, the inability of the body to operate, the rise of extremists and the death of our civilisation. So what can be done? First, the food we produce needs to be utilised for the sake of people, not for the sake of profit. Through greater utilisation of community, national and even global food banks. Resources such as fuels, minerals and building materials need to be produced and used sustainably with the future of our race and our only planet put before the needs of individuals to make obscene profits. While this is the most necessary action it is also the most difficult to enact for it requires action in both the second and third problems to be effective in any way at all. Our second problem can only be rectified once our leaders are held accountable for their behaviour and actions. Our leaders are elected to serve the people, not to serve the interests of selfish individuals. White collar crimes must be held anathema to a properly functioning society and the consequences for them must reflect the severity of such actions as embezzlement, fraud and manipulation of the economy. Our leaders are supposed to be the best and brightest of us, not simply the richest and most zealous. Leaders should be empowered by the need to serve, not to greed to be rich and as a result their salaries should only ever amount to that of public servants, their expenses must be scrutinised and corruption among this crucial social organ must be dealt with without fuss or fanfare but with complete transparency. Without our brain, we die, with a brain

that functions irrationally, with anger or without awareness we have no hope of survival. Our third problem can only be mitigated by the equilibrium of our social tools. Monopolies cannot be tolerated as without diversity in ideas, products and services, corruption and thus dissent, is inevitable. Balance is the only prevention of instability in our body and so it is with our society. When we eat properly, when our minds are clear and not clouded by worry over the unknown and when our organs are in balance our chances of cancer are very much reduced. When people have food in their bellies, accountable governments and balanced control and understanding over the worlds assets, be they physical, mental or spiritual, then we have removed the forces that contribute most to the spread of terrorism. When we realise these things, then we can realise peace, we can live without fear of the cancer of terrorism striking those who have done nothing to deserve it and we can move humanity towards being all it can be, all it deserves to be, and all it should be.

For RePeace B.Groot