> Chapter 7
"REPORT FROM
(Foreword by Leonard Lewin. Pub. 1967, Dial Press, NY. Call American
Opinion Books, 414-749-3783.)
This remarkable book appeared eighteen years after Orwell's 1984, and suffers from many of the same
speculations as to its origins. It is not a novel, but rather a report written
by the members of a 15-man "Special Study Group" commissioned, they
believe, by some governmental entity which wished to remain unknown. The report
is addressed to that unknown requestor, the work of the group having been
completed after about two and a half years of labor. The members of the group
knew that they had been carefully screened and selected for the task, that they
represented the highest levels of scholarship, experience, and expertise in a
wide range of the physical and social sciences, that they possessed years of
service in business, government, and academe, and that among them they had
access to a vast proportion of the country's resources in the social and
physical science fields. The Special Study Group was clearly possessed of outstanding
establishmentarian credentials.
The book comes to us because one of the members of the group, identified
only as John Doe, approached Mr. Lewin several months after the completed
report had been submitted, and sought his help in getting the report commercially
published, since he (Doe) felt that the public had a right to be apprised of
its existence, even though the group had previously agreed to keep it secret.
Mr. Lewin, having agreed to serve in that capacity, wrote a foreword spelling
out these circumstances and passing on what little he learned from Doe
concerning the study's origin and its participants. He further revealed his
personal reaction to the conclusions of the report, conclusions which he said.
he does not share, but which appear to explain aspects of recent American
policies which have otherwise been incomprehensible from a "common
sense" viewpoint.
As with 1984, we shall not
indulge in speculation as to the possible motives of persons involved in
commissioning, performing, or publicizing the Study's activities, except to
suggest the possibility that both 1984 and
The Report From Iron Mountain may
have been created to serve as guides for middle-level workers in the fields of
the elites. This would require, of course, a certain skill in reading between
the lines, since calling a spade a spade would obviously raise too much public
reaction. But let's move right along, starting with a little background on the
nature of the Study Group and its operations.
The name
Meetings other than the first and last were held, approximately monthly,
at universities, hotels, summer camps, private estates, or business
establishments in various parts of the country, but never in the same place
twice. Participants were paid travel and per diem expenses by a member
identified as the "government contact" who also instructed them not
to report those payments on their income tax returns, and to otherwise do
whatever was necessary to keep their deliberations secret.
The first meeting was held in August of 1963, though the idea for the
study, according to Doe, originated as far back as 1961 with the incoming staff
of John Kennedy's administration, mostly, says Doe, "with McNamara, Bundy,
and Rusk." Doe further revealed that three of the fifteen Study Group
members had been in on the planning which produced the group, but the
identities of none of the members (except for Doe) were revealed to Lewin. The
last meeting was held in March of 1966, and the report was completed and
submitted shortly thereafter. Lewin was approached by Doe during the following
winter to arrange for commercial publication. (For reference, recall that John
Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963.)
Lewin warned in his foreword that the Report contained presumptions and
recommendations which were, on the face of it, outrageous and offensive to
ordinary common sense, including such notions that poverty is both necessary
and desirable, that the return of slavery as an institution may be desirable,
and that budgeting the optimum number of deaths to occur annually in warfare
was a proper function of government. With this warning in mind, one cannot help
but be mentally probing, as he proceeds through the Report, for the real
purposes being served, including the foundation premises upon which the study
was based. Doe told Lewin that the purpose stated by the anonymous caller who
recruited him was "to determine, accurately and realistically, the nature
of the problems that would confront the
We are soon led to observe that there is something askew in the logic of
the first stated purpose. A society's "problems" are not nearly as
uniquely determined by the presence or absence of "peace" as they are
by other societal characteristics, most particularly the presence or absence of
"individual liberty." The question to the Study Group should
therefore spell out as a postulate the status of this elemental characteristic,
since the society's "problems" will be grossly different depending
upon whether its citizenry is or is not "free."
We, as Americans, would naturally assume that the Study Group would
automatically acknowledge, respect, and seek to preserve the philosophical
foundation of our country (the existence of our individual inalienable rights
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) along with the mechanics which
our forefathers put in place (the U.S. Constitution) to try to preserve those
rights for their posterity, rights which they had just wrested from Old World
monarchs representative of the entire prior world history of ongoing despotic
rule by whoever managed to acquire a preponderance of arms. It soon became
clear, however, that such an assumption was ill-founded, and that the implicit
presumption of the Study Group was that the condition of individual freedom was
to be that which had historically existed in the
The main question that was to absorb the group's labor was posed early
in the Report's Introduction. Presuming a world with no war, war preparations,
or armaments, were there not certain societal functions fulfilled in the past
by warfare for which substitute activities would have to be found in a world of
peace? Thus, what functions did war
fulfill? If no viable substitutes could be found to fulfill them, was
"peace" even desirable, in terms of "social stability?"
The study member who was the government contact was code-named Able by
Doe, who revealed to Lewin that it was Able who challenged the classical
definition of war, and suggested that war served other purposes beyond being an
extension of diplomacy, or ultimate physical actions in support of a foreign
policy, etc. All the other members ultimately came around to his view. It was
also Able who, with one other member, drafted the Report, circulated it for
review, and then produced the final version. It therefore seems likely that
those who conceived the study had pretty well in mind what the study would
produce from the beginning.
Of course all of us ordinary folk have a pretty good idea of why peace
is desirable. In a few words, war involves lots of us getting killed, usually
for the benefit of kings or other elites with whom we have little truck, and
even if we physically survive, our savings, i.e., the fruits of our lifelong
labors, are expropriated (by inflation or otherwise) and spent on killing
others, reducing our ability to lead the good life, and ruining life in its
entirety for those who are killed, displaced, enslaved, tortured, etc. All that
being so, what is this "social stability" that the Report refers to
which may bring into question the desirability of peace?
It took a long time for the Report to get around to defining what it
meant by "social stability." But here are a few of the significant
steps that we detected on the way. First, in describing the scope of the study,
the Report claims that one of the operative criteria was to avoid utilizing any
preconceived value assumptions (such as one's right to life or liberty, we
assume). But then it proclaims one, since any serious investigation "must
be informed by some normative standard.... The stability of society is the one
bedrock value that cannot be avoided." The words still remain undefined,
however.
The Report next goes directly into the economic effects of disarmament,
alleging that such effects would be the same whether disarmament preceded or
followed the attainment of peace. The study therefore entirely bypasses the
issue of how nations, centered about our own Constitutional Republic, might
work to create the desired peace With freedom, for example by jointly defining
the conditions, including self-sufficiency and security, which must be
satisfied to make nations willing to disarm, and then working jointly to
realize those conditions. With a regime of "peace with freedom"
established, the institutions then existing could be examined to seek out problems
then remaining and recommend programs for dealing with them. The Study,
however, avoids looking at what institutional structures might evolve in the
production of, peace with freedom, though such structures would undoubtedly be
very different from those presently existing.
The Report fleetingly describes and then dismisses prior studies leading
to mechanistic disarmament procedures. This brief discourse acknowledges that
before such scheduled disarmament procedures could begin, genuine agreement of
intent would have to be reached among the major powers. We described that above
as seeking to define and then realize the conditions which would permit nations
to feel secure about disarming. The Report, however, does not mention the
attainment of common intent, but rather proclaims that disarmament efforts have
been unsuccessful because nations do not want
peace to reign, and desire instead that the use of war as an institution
continue, because war serves certain essential purposes that peace cannot. In
point of fact, says the Report, war is not "subordinate to the social
systems it is believed to serve." Rather, society's war readiness
"supersedes its political and economic structure. War is itself the basic
social system, within which other secondary modes of social organization
conflict or conspire. It is the system which has governed most human societies
of record, as it is today."
We find fault with the above, not respecting its accurate description of
how the Old World powers behaved in order to expand their powers at the expense
of others (that is, to indulge the fatal flaw of their rulers of being
corruptible by power), but most particularly with respect to the purposes and
intent of the United States of America, in whose name and for whose benefit the
Special Study Group was presumably laboring. George Washington, in his Farewell
Address, warned Americans to stay out of
We the people do not want war, we know we do not want it, and we are
more than willing to support efforts to obtain and maintain peace in the world.
To this end we supported the formation of the UN, but were again conned into
doing something against our real interests, because the UN is clearly
recognized now not as an institution seeking peace with freedom, but rather as
the institution charged with acquiring political and military control over the
world's peoples for the benefit of today's power elites.
Let's go on with the Report. It next sets about to define what it says
are the real functions served by war, and in so doing cannot avoid tipping its
hand concerning its previously implicit postulates. It first takes up the
economic functions of war. Though war involves waste, it says, such waste has
social utility, in that the waste is outside the control of market forces, and
is subject instead to "arbitrary central control." That control can
be used to "stabilize the advance" of the world's industrial
economies, which have "developed the capacity to produce more than is
required for their economic survival...." It can also be used as a sort of
economic flywheel to balance the economy, and is better for this purpose than
wasteful social welfare programs, because the latter, once initiated, become
imbedded in the general economy where they are "no longer subject to
arbitrary control." In fact, compared to war, "no combination of
techniques for controlling employment, production, and consumption has yet been
tested that can remotely compare to it in effectiveness...."
One perhaps begins to detect that a major goal, perhaps the major implicit postulate, is control, and more particularly,
arbitrary central control. But, we ask, why do we want to "stabilize the
advance" of the industrial economies? Isn't it proper to try to avoid war
in order to permit the continuing increase in our own standard of living, as
well as the rest of the world's? And isn't war a ludicrous price to pay as a
mechanism for smoothing out the ripples in the economy? Aren't better and much
less costly mechanisms available? The answers are right around the corner.
The Report has now arrived at its core issue: the hidden political functions of war. And here we
run once again into that undefined phrase that we started with: "social
stability." War, we are told, is even more critically needed for maintaining
social stability than it is for providing economic stability. It is fully
capable of doing so because a state's war powers constitute "the basic
authority of a modern state over its
people." In our modern industrial societies, war has served "as
the last great safeguard against the elimination of necessary social classes." Our productive economies make it
more difficult to "maintain distribution patterns insuring the existence
of 'hewers of wood and drawers of water."' But fortunately, the arbitrary nature
of war expenditures and related military activities "make them ideally
suited to control these essential
class relationships." Unless a substitute can be found, the institution of
war must be continued "to preserve whatever quality and degree of poverty
a society requires as an incentive as well as to maintain the stability of its internal organization of power." (Our
emphasis added.)
The prime political function of warfare, as understood by the Study
Group, is thus seen to be to preserve
poverty in the society as an aid to maintaining the elite class in control.
The congruence of the Report with Orwell's 1984
is now clear. What social stability really means is "keeping the Low's
in poverty and the High's in power, forever."
The last essential step to completing the Study Group's thesis is to
understand why war is so readily accepted by the public, whose members are
always the prime losers in any war. The reason, says the Report, is that
individual citizens will willingly rise to the defense of their society when
they see it being threatened by an external enemy. The enemy, of course, must
be formidable and the threat real, or at least perceived to be real. Such a
major threat to one's society justifies to the individual the loss of life
associated with meeting that threat, including even the loss of one's own life.
It may be very difficult, says the Report, to find a substitute for war that
produces the desired waste of resources and is at the same time so readily
acceptable to the populace. The Report makes no mention of the ease or
difficulty of producing wars on demand, perhaps because the means were so
obvious that no discussion was felt to be needed.
The final nonmilitary function of war, not necessarily incapable of
adequate fulfillment by a substitute, is the loss of life which it produces.
This comes under the euphemism of ecological control, aimed at maintaining the
world's population at that reduced level at which it may successfully sustain
itself within the constraints of the world's agricultural capacity. The Report
briefly acknowledges that this Malthusian notion of population control may be
approaching obsolescence due to the increasing efficiency with which food and
other essentials are being produced, but then quickly dismisses the thought.
The chief difficulty with using war for population control, says the Report, is
that war regressively kills off a higher proportion of the fittest (our young
warriors), instead of our old, weak, and infirm, thereby acting against eugenic
improvement. Modern warfare has the promise of improvement in this regard,
however, since nuclear warfare will enable millions to be rapidly killed off,
and indiscriminately with respect to the weak or the strong. (It really says
that!)
The Report further notes, as an incidental matter, that medical science
has also exacerbated the problem by removing pestilence as a method of
population control, but even worse, it has done so by perpetuating the lives of
those who would otherwise have been eliminated by their genetic susceptibilities,
thereby eugenically weakening the race. The coming "transition to
peace" should probably take these matters into account as well.
The Report then seeks to define substitutes for the essential
nonmilitary functions of war which it has allegedly found in the economic,
political, sociological, and ecological arenas. In the economic field, there
are two important criteria for substitutes: they must be wasteful (involving
the destruction of at least 10 percent of the gross national product) and they
must be outside the consumer supply and demand system. The first candidates
considered are massive social welfare systems, such as cradle-to-grave health
care, college education for all, housing for all at the level of the current
top 15 percent, environmental purity with respect to air, water, forests,
parks, etc., and the elimination of poverty via a guaranteed annual income or
other appropriate redistribution scheme. While these schemes may prove useful
during the transition to peace, says the Report, they all suffer from the
disadvantage that they are too cheap (not as wasteful as war), and would work
themselves into a permanent level of expenditure embedded within the general
economy, and therefore not subject to arbitrary control.
A second possibility for an economic surrogate is a massive, open-ended
space research program having substantially unattainable goals, such as the
colonization of Mars, etc. This one might produce sufficient economic waste,
and could be extended indefinitely, but lacks the urgency associated with an
imminent, credible threat.
In fact, this lack of a credible threat turned out to be the main
difficulty with finding any viable
substitute for the political and sociological functions of war. Any such
substitute requires the existence of an "alternate enemy" posing a
massive and credible threat, sufficient for one to be willing to give up his
life to fight. Of the social welfare programs mentioned above, environmental
pollution is perhaps the only one which might be blown up into a big enough
threat to convince people that lots of money urgently had to be thrown at the
problem. But even this appears to have doubtful viability, even if efforts were
made to deliberately poison the environment in various ways in order to enhance
the threat. The Report's way around this apparent brick wall was to conclude
that, if a viable natural substitute could not be found, a fake one would have to be invented. The Study Group didn't wish
to pursue that matter any further, at least in print, in order not "to
compromise, by premature discussion, any possible option that may eventually
lie open to our government. "
The Study Group did manage to find an alternate to war for proper
population control (an "ecological" function). The Report declares:
"A universal requirement that procreation be limited to the products of
artificial insemination would provide a fully adequate substitute for
population levels. Such a reproductive system would have the added advantage of
being susceptible of direct eugenic management.... The indicated intermediate
step - total control of conception with a variant of the ubiquitous 'pill,' via water supplies or certain essential
foodstuffs - is already under development." (Emphasis added.) The only
question the Report raised about this matter was whether the imposition of
procreation control should or should not await the arrival of peace. The
participants seemed to reluctantly agree that it should, since significant
excess manpower would probably be needed in the warfare that was likely to
ensue prior to the arrival of the "peace system," and because
procreation control would naturally also require the existence 'of a centrally
enforced "peace."
The Report reprises the motivation for the study, now clearly stated, in
its summary: "The permanent possibility of war is the foundation for
stable government; it supplies the basis for general acceptance of political
authority. It has enabled societies to maintain necessary class distinctions,
and it has ensured the subordination of the citizen to the state, by virtue of
the residual war powers inherent in the concept of nationhood.... The war
system has provided the machinery through which the motivational forces
governing human behavior have been translated into binding social allegiance....
The foregoing [political and sociological] functions of war are essential to
the survival of the social systems we know today." Except, perhaps, the
one created in the late 1700's by Jefferson, Adams,
After all of this cerebral effort, the Report concludes, "No
program or combination of programs yet proposed for a transition to peace has
remotely approached meeting the comprehensive functional requirements of a
world without war.... The war system cannot responsibly be allowed to disappear
until 1) we know exactly what it is we plan to put in its place, and 2) we are
certain, beyond reasonable doubt, that these substitute institutions will serve
their purposes in terms of the survival and stability of society.... It is
uncertain, at this time, whether peace will ever be possible. It is far more questionable ... that it would be desirable, even if it were demonstrably
attainable."
But given the above, the Report goes on to complain how even the
"war system" is getting difficult and risky to manage. For example,
it is becoming more possible "that one or more sovereign nations may
arrive, through ambiguous leadership, at a position in which a ruling
administrative class may lose control of basic public opinion or of its ability
to rationalize a desired war." Horrors! What if significant leaks were to
develop in the media's paper and electronic curtains?
The final recommendation of the study is that a War/Peace Research
Agency be created, with unlimited secret funding, and accountable only to the
President, to continue research on both how to get to the sought-for permanent
peace, and how best to shore up the present war system so that it can continue
to be efficiently used until such time as a stable peace is secured. The war
studies should include, for example, the "determination of minimum and
optimum levels of destruction of life, property, and natural resources
prerequisite to the credibility of external threat essential to the political
and motivational functions."
One wonders if such a War/Peace Research Agency presently exists.
In our review (Chapter 5) of
"The answer is that this one
was commissioned and executed, not by ivory tower dreamers and theoreticians,
but by people who are in charge. It is the brainchild of the CFR. Furthermore,
it should be obvious that the stratagems outlined in the report are already
being implemented. All one has to do is hold the report in one hand and the
daily newspaper in the other to realize that every major trend in American life
is conforming to the recommendations of the report. So many things that
otherwise are incomprehensible suddenly become perfectly clear: foreign aid,
wasteful spending, the destruction of American industry, a job corps, gun
control, a national police force, the apparent demise of Soviet power, a UN
army, disarmament, a world bank, a world money, the surrender of national
independence through treaties, and the ecology hysteria. The Report From Iron Mountain has already created our present. It
is now shaping our future."
We will have more to say about a major element of that shaping process
in our next review.