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BACKGROUNDER: POWER AND FREEDOM
SEPTEMBER 22, 2004. The founders of America stood back a little and said, "We want to guarantee personal liberty. In order to do that, we have to create a structure that will make sure liberty exists."
Already, there was the hint of contradiction---but no nation had ever invented itself without a government. Who could accept a country with zero government? That would be a vacuum, and into it all sorts of corrupt people would flow.
So the founders invented a government that would do two things: guarantee the continuance of personal liberty and "oppose itself" on enough fronts (checks and balances) so that it would never overwhelm liberty.
We see what has happened to that plan.
Because there is a deeper principle at work.
Every organization that reaches a certain size goes on to protect ITSELF against real and imagined opponents. And in the process, it adopts the tacit understanding that its own survival is the number one objective.
Survival is interpreted to mean, among other things, growth.
The fungus is born.
"If we get bigger, we can endure attacks and still exist."
"If we get big enough, we can forestall or defend against all attacks."
"If we become the one and only force, nothing can kill us."
All of the above is the best argument for decentralization of power.
In order for that to occur, a certain trust factor among the people must be restored.
If power is shattered and re-established in a million ways, all sorts of people will become leaders.
A VARIETY of technologies and arts will emerge. Some of these will appear strange and even threatening to those who are forwarding their own arts and technologies.
Nevertheless, the perverse desire for ONENESS must be scrapped.
The new slogan would be: from one, the many.
All tyrannies rely on the popular hunger for the One.
All tyrannies rely on the popular perception that, if enough amenities of living and enough sharing seem to be flowing from the one Power, it would be a dangerous mistake to dismantle that Power.
What escapes notice is the progress of the fungus itself, the progress of the one fungus which, more and more, is ceding to itself the right to control everyone.
Eventually, under a tyranny, the people can no longer even imagine a different fundamental state of affairs. Therefore, they say, "If you take the One away, what will we have? What will we do? How will we function? How will we preserve order? How will we stop our worst nightmares from coming true?"
The translation of that confusion and fear is: "I can't think. I can't imagine. I can't initiate. I can't invent. I can only accept what is coming down the pipeline."
The One Power begins to understand that this passivity and confusion on the part of the people is its own best guarantee for future control. And so it pushes forward programs to mantain that overall state of mind in the people.
Which state of mind, of course, is the opposite of liberty.
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com
A HEADS-UP FOR PREGNANT WOMEN
SEPTEMBER 22, 2004. Here is a press release from the Kaiser group. It reports on a new study that summarizes the effects of medical drugs given to pregnant women.
About 5% of these women are prescribed drugs known to be harmful to fetuses. That’s 1 out of 20 pregnant women.
38% of pregnant women are given drugs whose safety (vis-à-vis the fetus) is UNKNOWN.
And another 5% of pregnant women are taking drugs that “can pose a risk to the fetus” but may have benefits that outweigh the risks. Yeah, well, we’d have to see about that.
So, all in all---from what is undoubtedly a conservative estimate---48% of pregnant women are being given potentially dangerous drugs.
I don’t know what you call it, but I call it a CRIME.
You’ll notice, in the release below, that this whole insanity is laid at the door of a lack of a computerized system that could warn prescribing doctors.
Come ON.
Let’s say you’re a doctor and you have patients who are pregnant women. You’re going to blithely sail through and not bother to research the drugs you’re dealing? You’re going to leave it to chance? You’re going to wait for a piece of software that’ll make you feel safe?
In particular, ob/gyn docs give out the same basic drugs over and over to pregnant women. It has to occur to them that they should carefully check out the effects of these drugs before they write scripts.
But let’s blame it all on a lack of software.
Or let’s blame it on a storm on Saturn or Abe Lincoln or Plato or a worm in India in 253 BC.
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Pregnancy & Childbirth Almost 5% of Pregnant Women Prescribed Drugs Known To Be Harmful to Fetuses, Study Says
Nearly 5% of pregnant women are prescribed drugs that are known to pose a risk to fetuses, and more than one-third of pregnant women are prescribed drugs that are not proven to be safe for use during pregnancy, according to a study published in the August issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Reuters Health reports (Reuters Health, 9/17). Dr. Susan Andrade of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and colleagues studied data from automated databases from eight HMOs involved in the Health Maintenance Research Network of the Centers for Education and Research on Therapeutics. They also analyzed data from 152,531 deliveries that occurred between 1996 and 2000 (Andrade et al., American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, August 2004).
Results The researchers found that 64% of the pregnant women studied were prescribed drugs other than vitamins during the 270 days preceding delivery; 37.8% of the pregnant women were prescribed drugs that are not known to be safe during pregnancy; 4.8% of women were prescribed drugs that can pose a risk to a fetus but may be acceptable due to the benefits of the drug; and 4.6% of women were prescribed drugs that are "absolutely contraindicated" during pregnancy, according to Reuters Health. The researchers concluded that until computerized order systems that can prevent or warn against the prescription of drugs that pose risks to fetuses are more widely available, routine medication audits and educational programs for physicians might identify and prevent the "risky" prescription of drugs for pregnant women, Reuters Health reports (Reuters Health, 9/17). They also concluded that the study "highlights the importance of the need to understand the effects of these medications" on pregnant women and fetuses (American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, August 2004).
End of Kaiser release
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com
SECRET OPERATIONS, PART 4
SEPTEMBER 22, 2004. Re-running series on secret ops....
JULY 2. What secrets lie behind the war against Iraq? Why was it fought? Who really ordered it? Was it the neo-con group attached to Bush? Was it Bush, seeking revenge on behalf of his father?
These are all important questions.
Both Iraq and Afghanistan are looking more and more like quagmires these days. No way to control the populations, the rebels, the internal warring factions; no way to set up stable governments that will last.
Quite some time ago I suggested that Bush had been suckered into those wars, egged on by 9/11 and his own predispositions. And that nations like France and Germany could see the coming messes in Iraq and wanted no part of that. As part of the EU, they were rooting for Bush’s Waterloo. Economic wars and all that.
If Bush’s reactions to 9/11 were so predictable, was there a force that wanted to sucker him into war with Iraq, that wanted to bog down the US in a lasting and hopeless cul de sac?
Who is who on the game board?
Let’s review 9/11 briefly. After all, it was the trigger event that started the whole “war on terrorism” and all the ensuing consequences.
Did David Rockefeller, the man who surely was deeply involved in ousting Nixon, whose brother Nelson became vice-president under Ford, who told a European audience that “free trade,” his precious baby, was back on track after Nixon had torpedoed it----did David have some part in 9/11, the attacks that “sacrificed” another of his babies, the Twin Towers in NYC? Or was he caught off-guard and enraged?
9/11 was a huge economic hit against the US. It also marked a new level of “global concern” about terrorism. In that sense, 9/11 seemed to promote Rockefellerian globalism. Batten down the hatches, build up global military power to go to war against Al Qaeda. Reduce basic individual freedoms. Become Orwellian. Create enemies everywhere. Circle the planetary wagons. Step up surveillance of citizens from Hong Kong to Miami, from South Africa to Alaska. Put everyone in a database. All dreams of the globalists.
Was Rockefeller himself part of the 9//11 op?
And if so, at what level? Did he order it? Was he fronting for something even higher on the power ladder?
Was 9/11, an op coming out of the planetary controlling elite, a majority decision, or was it forced by some renegade faction?
These are not easy questions, but simply asking them begins to clarify the situation.
I’m going to go out on a few limbs here, and if it turns out that I saw myself off, so be it.
9/11 was launched by a faction of the global elite, a militant faction headed up by the ideological descendants of the Nazis. Their aim everywhere and always is chaos. Extreme chaos. (“Cause chaos, and then build on the ashes.”) They are not interested in boiling the frog slowly. Slow boil is the basic strategy of the majority of this elite. But in this case, the smaller faction pre-empted long range strategies for global control.
And yet? Is that the whole story? No.
Certain transnational corporate interests have been looking at the probable distribution of oil resources on the planet, and have determined that SOMETHING has to quicken the resolve to take over oil wherever it can be found. And of course, in a propaganda sense, from 9/11 flowed the war against Iraq, and Iraq has lots of oil.
Is there more?
Who, like the Nazis, longs for less order and more chaos? Who has made its greatest gains in times of chaos and trouble and plagues and wars? Who has actually worked with the Nazis in the past? Who wants to return the industrialized world to a more primitive state? Who depends on that primitive state to bring more adherents into the orbit of its crazed ideology? Whose mission is the control of minds everywhere through fear?
Remember, 9/11 was a watershed moment that shattered the sense of complacent security for millions and millions of people. It was the kickoff for a whole string of events, ranging from the anthrax scare to the DC sniper episode to SARS to two wars.
Every major intelligence operation employs layers and layers of cutouts who do their jobs, for their own reasons, who tell various lies.
If we are talking about Bush or Perle or a quite militant faction within the government of Israel or any number of other people, they would, in the final analysis, be cutouts. That is my conclusion at this time----after talking to a number of my long-time sources on intelligence matters.
At the top of the heap would be the core militant controlling faction of the Vatican. The core militant faction of the Order of Jesuits.
The Vatican and the Jesuits have many faces. Good faces, nice faces, kind faces, boring faces, brilliant faces, criminal faces, saintly faces, controlling faces.
The fact that an Italian has become the first temporary president of Europe in the wake of the final draft of the European constitution is no accident. It is a nod to the Vatican.
And it is no accident, as Tupper Saussy has pointed out in his tremendous book, Rulers of Evil, that the banking house of the Rothschilds was, long ago, appointed to handle and manage Vatican money.
For centuries, the core of the Jesuit Order (and I’m not talking about a few Jesuits in Cleveland or Memphis or Sri Lanka trying to get food for the poor) has been refining and enacting a plan to put the planet under the theocratic rule of God’s agent on Earth, the Pope.
Except the Pope is the figurehead for the Jesuit Order and its own Pope.
This plan is of a magnitude that makes “the American agenda” or “the Communist agenda” or the “Israeli agenda” or “the CIA agenda” pale by comparison.
In its details, the plan puts nothing out of bounds. Every crime is permissible. Every crime.
Any ideology or cause can be used, temporarily, to forward the overall agenda.
And there is a place where, by the way, control of the foreign policy of the United States melds into a blur that includes such masters as the World Trade Organization (the old Trilateral Commission), the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberger Group, key London banks-----and the Jesuit Order, working in part through its outpost at Georgetown University.
At this level, there is both competition and cooperation.
In the Jesuit scheme, the elevation and then the trashing of Bush would be one detail. Because DEMORALIZATION of populations is always front and center. It brings on passivity and then a desire for older forms of authority. Simpler forms. Deeper surrender to mind control.
Re-creating a more primitive and impoverished state of planetary society is a goal that is shared by the Vatican and the militant faction of Islam. In this matter, they are on the same page.
In the pages of the PREMIUM CONTENT section of my site, there is much more material on these basic subjects-----on the control of planet Earth.
Both the human mind and its controllers combine to create periods of creation and destruction---renaissances and dark ages. Over and over. It’s one way to run a successful prison.
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com
SECRET OPERATIONS, PART 3
SEPTEMBER 21, 2004. Re-running series on secret ops...
JULY 1. You can think of this article as opinion, as guess, as fact, as metaphor, as lunacy, as lie, as speculation, as whatever suits you. Be my guest. I’m not going to bother labeling it, and I’m not going to offer evidence.
Earth, one of the millions or billions of locales that sustain conscious life, is, as a number of science fiction writers have suggested, a prison planet.
It may not have been built or seeded to be that, but it became that.
It became a place for anomalous individuals who just didn’t fit into their home-planet cultures, who fought against tyranny, who took hold of a crazy idea called freedom.
Of course, among the prisoners shipped to Earth over millennia, there were people who had used freedom as an excuse to commit many crimes.
So Earth has always been a mixed bag.
On a considerable number of other planets, art as we know it did not exist. Art was thought of as a crime, an outburst of emotion and intellect proceeding from a warped consciousness, having the effect of stirring up the masses.
On these planets, order was considered the mark of an advanced civilization. Order meant top-down control. Machine order. Cog in wheel order. Every citizen had his place. Appointed. You do this. You do that. Your function is ABV2-4 and nothing else.
War, disease, grinding poverty were enemies of order. So over time they were eliminated. They were used as reasons to impose machine order.
A person who rejected the order was killed, re-conditioned, put in prison, or shipped off to a place like Earth.
Earth was looked on as a kind of island where the worst characters were sent.
It was observed, as an experiment in motion, to see what would emerge from the collection of crazy criminals.
Eventually, it was decided that Earth too needed order, and the first target of that order was human consciousness. The mind. The mind needed to believe that slavery for most was part of the big cosmic plan. A caste system. A gift from God or the gods. A punishment for past sins. Sins committed in one life or over many lives.
The Roman Church and the ruling spiritual force called Hinduism and the religious dynasties of Egypt were three of the most important centers for this mind control. Through an interaction between those Earthly religious leaders and their off-planet patrons, cosmologies were built, rules were instituted, repression was enacted on a large scale, and wealth was accumulated.
Myths were woven. Messiah myths, sacrifice myths, guilt myths, obedience myths, salvation myths.
Myths about good and evil.
All of these myths played on the desire for liberation. That desire was channeled through the structures of these religious organizations. The desire was given what appeared to be a path into fulfillment.
Of course, that was a lie. The paths were just dead ends. They were symbols and images which captured the consciousness of individuals.
Eventually, the whole idea of reincarnation was debunked in the West. It was thought that, if people believed they only lived once, they would feel more bound to the fake liberation myths. They would understand less about their power.
In the East, reincarnation was embroiled in insane notions about a steady progress toward higher and higher castes---depending on one’s behavior. One could slip back and become a cricket or a worm, too.
Karma. That was one of the great myths. It was created, in part, so that the underclass could look up at their masters and say, “They’ll get their punishment for what they’re doing. No one escapes retribution. It’s all about action and reaction.”
All of the myths were built to invent order.
Order could be organized around anything. A few huge pointed stones in the desert. A snake with a bite. A priest with a key to heaven in his pocket. A goat with one eye and a limp. A shroud a thousand years old. A candy bar wrapper in a glass case.
The kind of order I’m talking about has one great function, at the level of the individual. It makes him think he is looking toward something he wants from the inside of something he doesn’t want.
Instead of looking at what he doesn’t want from the outside.
Order puts people in a place they don’t like, and makes them yearn for escape to a place they’re sure they’ll like.
A perfect OP.
Planet Earth is an op.
In a sense, the whole UFO phenomenon is working that angle, too. As in, “We’re all trapped on this planet and now we see we have visitors from somewhere else. Maybe they’ll help us get from here to a better place.”
Re-enforcing the notion that human consciousness belongs on Earth and seeks a better destination.
On the inside looking out. That’s the op.
Such a good op very few people can imagine any other state of affairs.
Then, other ops are set up to puncture the order, which makes people yearn for the order with more intensity. Blow up a building. I wish we could all return to the better time. We need more order.
People become convinced that without the order we have, chaos and crime would reign. It’s one or the other. Freedom doesn’t really exist. It’s a lie used to promote lawlessness, because look at what people do when they go outside the order. We need a tighter order. No one can handle being outside the order. Impossible. Everyone becomes a McVeigh or an Oswald or a school shooter or a terrorist.
Something, though, about the word SECRET triggers echoes in the mind. People begin to gnaw on this word and dimly suspect we are living inside an op, inside a matrix. People begin to look for clues that will tell them something about how the order is constructed to give the false appearance of a complete and seamless and self-contained landscape.
People begin to pull on tag-ends of clues.
People begin to report experiences of a certain weirdness, experiences that suggest the order is a fake painting that has bamboozled us.
People begin to talk about other dimensions of experience.
And as crazy as that talk may sound, more echoes trigger the mind to think, to explore.
I can tell you this. Some readers of this site, from the beginning, latched on to my investigations----and then cut and ran away as soon as they suspected I was really going somewhere they felt was dangerous. They usually used words like responsibility and order and values and morals and tradition as they sped away from nomorefakenews.
It was interesting.
They often sent me final messages about how the Democrats or the Republicans needed our support to weather the coming storms.
In other words, they fed me an op and hoped I would bite. I didn’t.
Being part of an op gives one a sense of security. I’m playing the right game. I’m fitting in. Things are going well. There is light at the end of the tunnel. I’m going Home. The tides are in my favor. All will be revealed. The revelation is at hand. The correct currents of energy are carrying me along to where I need to be. I’m just a particle in a perfect wave.
When Earth was designated a prison, consciousness itself was designated a relatively small space.
Funny thing, but every time I go to a museum, I look at paintings that tell me just the opposite. Consciousness is as wide as it wants to be. It can use harmony and dissonance and who knows what else to build other universes and spaces and times---and even in the bowels of dung-ridden caves, in the dark, there is always someone who picks up a sharp stone and scratches a few shapes on the wall. Saying, “I’m not what you think I am.”
And when I go into great cathedrals and see the religious tales portrayed on walls and ceilings and in windows, I see something else there too. I see the total contradiction of what the cathedral stands for. I see the order, the matrix, left behind. I see another universe. Other universes. All over the place, wherever I look. Right there.
Gorgeous.
And these paintings say, “This is what freedom can give birth to. You don’t have to think about escaping the order through this myth you see portrayed on the wall. What you’re seeing is not the myth. Not at all. It’s the spontaneous creation of a dimension. The morons who paid to have this fake myth fleshed out received just the opposite.”
And so it is.
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com
INTERNATIONAL CONTROL OF NUTRITION---WHO CARES ABOUT YOU?
SEPTEMBER 21, 2004. Here are some sources on what is happening: go there and read: do it.
www.iahf.com
www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/
...and google "Scott Tips"
These and other sources will fill you in on what is happening at Codex, the global body organized to decide FOR YOU what nutritional supplements (and in what potency) are legal and sellable.
Say what?!?!
Codex is about to have a meeting in Bonn (Nov.1). It is a key, key event in making this decision.
Don't know what Codex is? Never heard of it? Go to the sources I listed and read. Don't wait.
The plan is fairly simple. The global pharmaceutical industry has watched in horror, over the last 20 years, as more and more people have decided to take their health into their own hands.
Millions and millions of people have left drugs on the shelf and have gone to nutrients.
Nutrients come in bottles, too.
They are in pill form and capsule form.
They sort of look like drugs.
Drug giants have made a number of moves to buy out and take over nutritional companies.
The drug companies want EVERYTHING.
Through political connections, these drug companies have backed Codex, the body that has been meeting and shaping a NUTRITIONAL POLICY for (ultimately) the whole planet.
This policy asserts that supplements are basically drugs because they affect health. By perverse definition, that which affects health must be a drug.
It's kind of like saying that which can bring about peace must be a weapon, because weapons are used to fight war, and war always results in peace...and therefore peace conferences should be owned by munitions companies.
Codex is evil, and it was created to extend evil.
I can't say it more plainly than that.
At the root of this whole war against the populace is the question: ARE YOU FREE TO CREATE HEALTH FOR YOURSELF OR NOT?
If you don't care, you're in great shape, because Codex will handle it for you.
If you care, imagine this nightmare: all nutritional supplements can only be sold at drastically reduced potencies. Many nutrients can only be dispensed after a medical doctor writes a script (price goes way up). That doctor won't write the script unless he decides the nutrient is proper for you. And many, many nutritional supplements will simply be outlawed.
If some small nutritional company wants to market a nutrient, it has to spend millions of dollars testing it (impossible) and proving to various government bodies that it is safe and effective.
This, despite the fact that nutrients have a remarkable, remarkable track record of safety. This, despite the fact that, in the US alone, 100,000 people are KILLED every year by medical drugs correctly prescribed by doctors and approved by the FDA as safe and effective.
Codex is an integral element of the medical cartel, which is seeking to install a medical model for every citizen of the planet. That model includes medical and psychiatric screening, from birth, diagnoses of various disorders, and toxic drugging.
The history of Codex meetings, to this point, reveals a complete disregard for champions of nutritional supplements and champions of freedom of choice.
The South African delegation, for example, which has stepped up to the plate and demanded this freedom, has been ignored and squashed. In fact, that delegation won't even be present at the vital upcoming November 1 Bonn meeting of Codex.
You'll get a flavor of the meetings when you find articles by attorney Scott Tips, who has attended one of these kangaroo courts.
The European Union ( you know, the kinder, gentler United States of Europe) has constantly been deferred to by the presiding Codex chairman. And the EU wants pharmaceutical oligarchy in all matters.
This is the face of globalism: create a structure that is so far removed from the individual that the individual feels powerless to act.
Of course, the individual and the group dedicated to freedom can act.
Codex and its ongoing machinations have been ignored, for the most part, by the mainstream press, which is linked like a brother to the pharmaceutical industry.
Political parties basically don't know about Codex or don't care. In the US, they're far too busy launching attacks on the military records of Kerry and Bush.
Kerry and Bush care about Codex the way an ant on my bathroom sink cares about ice on one of Jupiter's moons.
Pick your favorite political pundit. Write him or her and ask about Codex. See if you get anything back. See if he or she knows what you're talking about.
The doom machine is moving. The machine views you as a unit that can be mined for illnesses and drugged for profit.
Lie down or stand up.
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com
posted by Mr.P at
10:39 PM
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ohh new template nice.
posted by Mr.P at
8:37 PM
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Prelude to the Incident
During the total eclipse of the sun on January 1, 1889, God revealed to Jack Wilson that Wilson was the Messiah. The new religion formed by this revelation was the Ghost Dance Religion, a syncratic mix of Paiute spiritualism and Shaker Christianity. God informed Wilson that earthquakes would be sent to kill all whites. However, Wilson taught that until that judgement Indians must live in peace and not refuse work from whites.
Two early converts to the Ghost Dance Religion were the Lakota warriors of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation Kicking Bear and Short Bull. Both stated that Wilson levitated before them, though they interpreted his statements differently. They rejected Wilson's claims to be the Messiah, and believed that the Messiah would not arrive until 1891. They also rejected Wilson's pacifism, and believed that special garments, called Ghost Spirits, would act as bullet proof armor.
Though perhaps a majority of Pine Ridge Lakota converted to the Ghost Dance Religion, Chief Sitting Bull was not among them. However, he granted practioners religious freedom. Federal officials misconstrued Sitting Bull's tolerance as full support, and attempted to arrest him on December 15, 1890. For unclear reasons a gun battle ensued, and Sitting Bull was killed.
Sitting Bull's half-brother Big Foot took over the tribe. On the way to help his fellow chief Red Cloud make peace with the whites, Big Foot was intercepted by Major Samuel Whitside of the 7th Cavalry. Whitside transferred Big Foot to an army ambulence due to his severe pneumonia and escorted the Indians to their camp for the night at Wounded Knee Creek. The army supplied the Indians with some tents and rations, and then conducted a census, determining that there were 120 males and 230 women and children.
The next morning the Sioux found that additional 7th Cavalry troopers with more Hotchkiss guns had arrived during the night. The canons were set up on a low hill overlooking the Indian encampment. Colonel John Forsyth had assumed command of the soldiers. Forsyth informed his command that the Sioux were to be taken to a military camp in Omaha, Nebraska.
posted by Mr.P at
8:35 PM
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i grabbed this off bombshell, something to do with the wizard of oz, to read later..
The Massacre, or, The Battle
That morning the Indians were summoned to a meeting in their own camp, issued army hardtack for rations, and informed that they must hand over all firearms. Soldiers attempted to disarm the Sioux, but fears of hidden weapons persisted. Not satisfied with the weapons voluntarily stacked by the Indians, the soldiers began to search the tents, and removed anything that could be used as a weapon. Seized material ranged from firearms to extra tent stakes and hatchets for cutting firewood. Next the soldiers began to search the warriors. As the efforts to locate weapons continued, the Indians became more irritated and unruly.
The last warrior the soldiers attempted to disarm was Black Coyote. Some accounts claim that Black Coyote was deaf or otherwise impaired. Regardless, the seizure was unsuccessful and a weapon discharged. Fearing an attack, other soldiers on the rise began firing the Hotchkiss guns. Chaos ensued, as soldiers working with the Indians were caught in the crossfire, and warriors ran to re-arm themselves from the stacked weapons.
When the shooting stopped, 153 Indians lay dead, along with 25 cavalrymen. Big Foot lay among the dead. Perhaps a majority of the soldiers killed died by friendly fire. Wounded soldiers and Indians were placed in wagons and taken to Pine Ridge. Approximately 50 Indians arrived at Pine Ridge, but were kept outside in the cold until quarters were found. Approximately 150 Indians remained unaccounted for. Most sources believe that these fled the federal army, and an unknown number subsequently died of wounds and exposure.
The Aftermath
The military hired civilians to bury the dead Indians after an intervening snowstorm had abated. Arriving at the battleground, the burial party found the deceased frozen in contorted positions by the freezing weather. They were gathered up and placed in a common grave. Forsyth was exonerated of any wrong-doing.
Reaction to the battle among the American public was generally favorable. 150 Medals of Honor were awarded to federal soldiers. Many Americans living near the Indian reservations interpreted the battle as a defeat of a murderous cult, though some confused Ghost Dancers with Indians in general. In an editorial in response to the event, a young newspaper editor, L. Frank Baum, later famous as the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, wrote in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer on December 20, 1891:
The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, inorder to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.
In the 20th century, reaction has become more critical. Many consider the incident changed to be one of the most grievous atrocities in American history. It has been commemorated in the popular protest song written by Buffy St. Marie, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, as well as the book by native American historian Dee Brown by the same name.
Historically, Wounded Knee is generally considered to be the end of the Indian Wars, the series of conflicts between U.S. forces and Native tribes that had been taking place since the 1700s, as well as the end of the frontier, and the end of the Ghost Dance Religion.
posted by Mr.P at
8:34 PM
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http://jshlackm.www2.50megs.com/shadow.html
http://educate-yourself.org/
http://nomadsunited.com/skulls/skulls.htm
http://davidicke.www.50megs.com/icke/magazine/vol8/articles/toorn.html
http://www.altheal.org/texts/house.htm
http://www.altheal.org/toxicity/nurse.htm
THESE LINKS ARE GOOD!
posted by Mr.P at
5:31 PM
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http://www.angelfire.com/ut/branton/worldline.html
http://www.raven1.net/uncom.htm
http://www.altheal.org/texts/house.htm
http://www.xat.org/xat/history1.html
FLUORIDES AND THE A BOMB
JANUARY 4, 2004. Here is a piece I wrote sometime back. The fluoride-A bomb connection…a boggler uncovered by two reporters who were blocked from getting their work published in the mainstream:
In 1997, Joel Griffiths and Chris Bryson, two respected mainstream journalists, peered into an abyss. They found a story about fluorides that was so chilling it had to be avoided. But they didn’t avoid it.
Their ensuing article, FLUORIDE, TEETH, AND THE ATOMIC BOMB, has been posted on websites, sometimes with distortions, deletions, or additions. I spoke with Griffiths recently, and he told me to be careful I was using a correct copy of his piece.
Griffiths also told me that researchers who study the effects of fluorides by homing in on communities with fluoridated drinking water versus communities with unfluoridated water miss a major point: Fluorides are EVERYWHERE---they are used throughout the pharmaceutical industry in the manufacture of drugs and also in many other industries (e.g., aluminum, pesticide)---because fluorine is very active and binds with all sorts of other substances. Therefore, there is an extremely wide public exposure to fluorides.
I want to go over some of the major points of the Griffiths-Bryson article.
As of 1997, two thirds of public drinking water in the US was fluoridated.
US public health officials maintain that fluorides at low doses are safe and prevent cavities.
Griffiths discovered hundreds of documents from the World War 2 era. These included papers from the Manhattan Project, which was launched to build the first A-bomb.
Griffiths/Bryson write: “Fluoride was the key chemical in atomic bomb production…millions of tons…were essential for the manufacture of bomb-grade uranium and plutonium for nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War.”
The documents reveal that fluoride was the most significant health hazard in the US A-bomb program, for workers and for communities around the manufacturing facilities.
Griffiths/Bryson: “Much of the original proof that fluoride is safe for humans in low doses was generated by A-bomb program scientists, who had been secretly ordered to provide ‘evidence useful in litigation’ against defense contractors for fluoride injury to citizens. The first lawsuits against the US A-bomb program were not over radiation, but over fluoride damage, the [government] documents show.”
So A-bomb scientists were told they had to do studies which would conclude that fluorides were safe.
The most wide-reaching study done was carried out in Newburgh, New York, between 1945 and 1956. This was a secret OP called “Program H.” The researchers obtained blood and tissue samples from people who lived in Newburgh, through the good offices of the NY State Health Department.
Griffiths/Bryson found the original and secret version of this study. Comparing it to a different sanitized version, the reporters saw that evidence of adverse effects from fluorides had been suppressed by the US Atomic Energy Commission.
Other studies during the same period were conducted at the University of Rochester. Unwitting hospital patients were given fluorides to test out the results.
Enter Dr. Phyllis Mullenix, the former head of toxicology at Forsyth Dental Center in Boston. In the 1990s, Mullenix did a series of animal studies which showed that, as Griffiths/Bryson write: “…fluoride was a powerful central nervous system (CNS) toxin…”
Mullenix applied for further grant monies from the National Institutes of Health. She was turned down. She was also told that fluorides do not have an effect on the CNS.
But Griffiths/Bryson have uncovered a 1944 Manhattan Project memo which states: “Clinical evidence suggests that uranium hexafluoride may have a rather marked central nervous system effect…it seems most likely that the F [fluoride] component rather than the T [uranium] is the causative factor.”
The memo was sent to the head of the Manhattan Project Medical Section, Colonel Stafford Warren Warren was being asked to give his okay to animal studies on fluorides’ effects on the CNS. He immediately did give his approval.
But any records of the results of this approved project are missing. Most likely classified.
In 1944, it was considered essential to move ahead with this work, but in the 1990s, Phyllis Mullenix was turned down cold.
Who was the man who made that 1944 proposal for a rush-program to study the CNS effects of fluorides? Dr. Harold Hodge, who worked at the Manhattan Project.
Who was brought in to advise Mullenix about 50 years later at the Forsytth Dental Center in Boston, as she studied the CNS effects of fluorides? Dr. Harold Hodge.
Who never told Mullenix of his work on fluoride toxicity for the Manhattan Project? Dr. Harold Hodge. Was Hodge brought in to look over Mullenix’s shoulder and report on her discoveries?
Getting the idea here?. Build an A-bomb. Forget the toxic consequences. Bury the fluoride studies. Twist the studies It’s all about national security. Lie, cheat, injure people---it’s for the best.
AND THE COVER-UP CONTINUES AS WE SPEAK, AS MORE PEOPLE ARE BEING INJURED BY THE TOXICITY OF FLUORIDES.
More on Hodge. In 1944, “a severe pollution incident” occurred in New Jersey, near the Du Pont plant in Deepwater where the company was trying to build the first A-bomb. A fluoride incident. Farmers’ peach and tomato crops were being destroyed. Horses and cows became crippled. Some cows had to graze on their bellies.
The people of the Manhattan Project were terrified. Of lawsuits. And possible revelations about the toxic nature of their work. A heads-up memo was written on the subject. Its author? Harold Hodge. Among other issues, he reported on the huge fluoride content in vegetables growing in the polluted area.
Also the high fluoride levels in human blood.
The farmers began to bring lawsuits. Big PR problem. Secrets could be exposed. The A-bomb program could be derailed if people found out how toxic the fluoride component was.
The lawsuits were settled quietly, for pittances.
Harold Hodge wrote another memo. Get this quote: “Would there be any use in making attempts to counteract the local fear of fluoride on the part of residents…through lectures on F [fluoride] toxicology and perhaps the usefulness of F in tooth health?”
Griffiths/Bryson write: “Such lectures were indeed given, not only to New Jersey citizens but to the rest of the nation throughout the Cold War.”
Perhaps you remember the film, Dr. Strangelove. The scene in which the mad Army man rails about the destruction the fluorides are wreaking on the “pure blood of pure Americans.” Of course, this character is portrayed as some kind of “far right-wing fanatic.” How ironic that he and all other military crazies in the movie are, in fact, ready and willing to start a nuclear war. Ironic because, unknown to the Strangelove script writer, fluorides were VERY toxic AND were an integral part of the very program that created atomic bombs.
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com
A BRAVE PROFESSOR
JANUARY 4, 2004. The letter below was sent from a teacher at the University of California, Davis, to a proponent of water fluoridation in 1980. It was just sent to me.
This teacher is a man after my own heart. He had organized an anti-fraud group on campus to examine, statistically, a whole range of scientific studies on various subjects---and he obviously found, along with his students, a massive amount of deception and blundering.
The tone of the letter is particularly appealing, because it stakes out a high ground rarely occupied by academics: it punctures the arrogance of professionals who think they can get away with sheer baloney and in the process endanger the health of the public.
The teacher also suggests that colleges everywhere should establish such groups, because a surprising amount of what is laughingly called science needs probing investigation that is truly impartial and does not bow to credentials and degrees and blatant PR.
The teacher also remarks on how easy it is to uncover fraud. If we had a nation full of academics like this man, media would not be able to get away with parroting the official pronouncements of researchers who are obviously protecting commercial interests with lies.
Enjoy.
University of California, Davis
Department of Mathematics
Davis, California, 95616
May 28, 1980
Dr. Ernest Newbrun
Medical Sciences Bldg. 653
San Francisco, CA 94132
Dear Dr. Newbrun:
Thank you for your telephone inquiry about my course on statistical frauds, and "The Statistical Frauds Group". It was given in The Experimental College at this campus for a number of years. In the course of time, "The Statistical Frauds Group" arose from it.
The course and the Group have been dormant for a couple of years, but after my retirement in July 1980, I may revive them. There does seem to be some demand.
We investigated all manner of questionable statements and activities, some qualitative, but most of them quantitative. We conducted interviews and collected published matter, and analyzed all these, using standard statistical procedures.
In addition to deliberate frauds, errors in judgment or method were examined. Often it was difficult to detect if there was a deliberate fraud. We looked over statements by manufacturers or purveyors of consumer goods. But a very copious source was papers in medical research journals. Particularly good examples of blatant statistical misconduct were found in the Public Health Service reports.
The announced opinions and published papers favoring mechanical fluoridation of public drinking water are especially rich in fallacies, improper design, invalid use of statistical methods, omissions of contrary data, and just plain muddleheadedness and hebetude.
Many of the blunders were so glaring that I gave them to my beginning freshman classes in statistics at the very first meeting. The students see through them straightway, and are afforded great amusement. Uproarious laughter frequently ensues. No special statistical equipment is necessary to detect those peccancies. Of course the class and the Group soon tired of those infantilities, and sought and found greater challenge.
By the way, a study by John Yiamouyiannis and Dean Burke on possible connection between cancer and waterborne fluoride was fairly tightly reasoned. The statistical procedures were standard, and much better applied than in much of the Public Health work.
As I pointed out in a letter published in the proceedings of a congressional committee investigating the above connection, the real point is that direct chemical and controlled experimental research by unbiased uncommitted agencies is urgently indicated.
Clearly fluoridation should be discontinued everywhere until definitive results on safety are obtained.
In this connection, a great source of entertainment to the Group was the ferocity with which the [fluoride] researchers attacked any criticism. Invariably they violated in their own work the very principles they insisted on in others' work.
The Group found that corrections for age, race, etc. were applied in a most perfunctory and indiscriminate manner, without regard to whether they appertained to the given situation. The Group found over and over that new, unbiased, research was almost impossible to instigate.
The old "Frauds Group" should be revived and reorganized. If funds are forthcoming, I may consider the undertaking. Every campus should have an invulnerable group that punches holes in stuffed shirts and lets the air out.
If I may help further, please let me know.
Sincerely,
(Signed)
Hubert A. Arnold, Ph.D.
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com
THE VISIBLE VERSUS THE INVISIBLE IN SCIENCE
JANUARY 2, 2004. If a phalanx of bugs attacks a man on the street and starts chewing up his leg, the cause and the effect are both visible. In that case, it really doesn’t matter what you think or speculate about or hypothesize. It’s all there in front of you.
However, in science, when researchers say there are entities which are too small to see with present technology, what matters are explanation and prediction.
Can you explain observable phenomena by invoking the invisible entities, and more important, can you PREDICT very specific events which will happen---events which are important and not trivial?
Until about 30 years ago, scientists everywhere understood these things. But culture changes, and these days many professionals more concerned with credit-card debt and car payments have lost the thread.
This is what I’m saying about the PRION. One can speculate all one wants to about what MAY have caused cows to fall down and die and what may have caused humans to do the same. Speculation is fine. But when the prion cannot be seen with an electron microscope, the burning question is, WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH THE PRION CONCEPT TO PREDICT VERY USEFUL THINGS?
And the answer so far is NOTHING.
So prion science is quite properly relabeled prion hypothesis, prion speculation. One does not go around awarding Nobel Prizes to people in that field.
Unless one wants to indulge in disinformation or groveling before gods not seen.
Do not be fooled by the various intricate ways in which researchers try to prove that the prion exists. All their indirect inferences may be interesting and even clever, but the issue comes back to the same point: if they’re right, what they can really do with the concept of the prion? Can they predict meaningful events, especially events which will lead them closer to a cure for whatever is really ailing the cows and the few humans said to be infected by a version of mad cow? Can they do it?
So far the answer is NO.
You may use words like ingenious and brilliant and deeply insightful, if you want to, to describe the work of Stanley Prusiner and his prion colleagues. But don’t think all those accolades add up to SCIENCE. They don’t. Prusiner et al are still sloshing around in undergrowth and swamp trying to dig up something. If they want to keep digging, fine. But public, press and professional adulation are misplaced, if what you care about is RESULTS.
This ain’t science fiction.
And PLEASE. Don’t get back to me with tales about how asserting the existence of the prion has helped researchers get a grip on which cows are sick and which are healthy. That’s just pure jive.
Cow falls down. Cow can’t get up. Cow has holes in brain. Those are a few of the things that tell people which cows are sick. Not a thought about a prion somewhere.
So it is now, so it was always. In science, IF YOU ASSERT THAT AN INVISIBLE THING EXISTS, YOU HAVE TO SHOW YOU CAN MAKE USEFUL PREDICTIONS ON THE BASIS OF THAT INVISIBLE ENTITY. OTHERWISE YOU’RE STILL LOOKING, LIKE A LOT OF OTHER PEOPLE.
If there are science Nobel winners out there who have an active brain cell or two, and I know of at least one who does (Kary Mullis), I strongly suggest they draft a letter to the Prize committee and state the obvious. The award of a Prize to Prusiner demeans what they have accomplished.
posted by Mr.P at
6:06 PM
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The Unholy Trinity
April 1, 2003
This article available in PDF.
Click on the PDF icon to download – File Size: 16K
As God-Mind explored Itself, It thought of Duality. As soon as there is a Thought within God-Mind, there is a Response. Everything happens in the Eternal Now. The immediate response out of God-Mind was the Christ Consciousness energy frequency. This was the first illusion of separation. Because God-Mind is All Things, It can never be separate from Itself. The Christ Consciousness energy frequency is a reflection of God-Mind
Itself.
The Christ Consciousness energy then created the infinitely repeating 13x13x13 Oversoul Matrix through which all lifestreams pass, with the Angelic Hierarchy at its tip. Together, this forms a tetrahedron, the symbol of perfection within God-Mind. All of Physical Reality is a reflection of this Oversoul Matrix. For this reason, the 13x13x13 cube became the model for programming and mind-control. This cube is seen in the Islamic Kaaba, as well as in the New Testament of the Bible where it is referred to as the “Holy Spirit.” The cube is the basic architectural format of the original Temple of Solomon, as well as ancient Catholic cathedrals in Europe.
A portion of the Angelic Frequency decided that it was equal to the totality of God-Mind. This is what is called “Luciferian” energy, which means “of the light.” The light became enamored with itself, and started to create a microcosm of the God-Mind. This is when the octahedron began to form around the tetrahedron. This was the start of the Unholy Trinity. Out of the Luciferian energy descended the energy frequency known as Satan. Satan believes itself to be the equivalent to the Christ Consciousness. In turn, out of it descended the Devil energy frequency which sees itself as the equivalent of the Oversoul Matrix.
So, at one end of the octahedron within the tetrahedron is the Holy Trinity known as God-Mind, Christ Consciousness, and Oversoul Matrix. At the opposite end of the octahedron is the Unholy Trinity, known as Lucifer, Satan, and the Devil. This is the balance of God-Mind Intelligence expressing in physical reality as Duality.
Both positive and negative are a part of the Duality that God-Mind is exploring. One cannot exist without the other. The Unholy Trinity represents the most negative intelligence, and the Holy Trinity represents the most positive intelligence. “Evil” is a judgment of negative intelligence; “good” is a judgment of positive intelligence. Everything in between is a composite of positive and negative, or good and evil. This is a matter of polarities and balance.
The Oversoul Matrix permeates both the Holy Trinity and the Unholy Trinity. It is this Matrix that permeates all life forms in physical reality. Because the octahedron construct (created by Lucifer) essentially came out of the tetrahedron (Angelic Hierarchy), it must be reassimilated back into God-Mind through the tetrahedron.
The illusion of “fighting” against the Angelic Hierarchy gives the Unholy Trinity polarity and existence. It must create the illusion that it is in control, because in True Actuality, it can never be in control.
God-Mind continued to explore Duality through this process of reshaping and remolding Itself. Thus continued the evolvement of Intelligent Energy as It created the illusion of Independent Intelligence within each form. As the Independent Intelligences split and divided, the illusion of separation continued.
From there, the illusion separated into the conscious mind (present moment), subconscious mind (memories/merging of conscious and superconscious minds), and superconscious mind (God-Mind connection), with all three parts forming its own reflection of the Original Trinity of Creation. As the division and splitting continued, the illusion that this part of God-Mind was moving further away from Itself continued. This is known as the Original Descent into physical reality.
Lucifer, the lead “descending” Intelligence, began to believe in its conscious mind that it alone was Creating. It “forgot” the Intelligence behind it. The function of Lucifer was to entice more illusionary “divisions” to follow it. Lucifer showed these divisions “its” creations. Lucifer said, “Look what I created!” The others thought that Lucifer had great power as they, too, “forgot” their origins. They became mesmerized, desiring to learn how to create like Lucifer. Fascinated with its own creations, Lucifer wanted more and more creations so it could see what it could do. Many followed this original descent into physical reality.
Because God-Mind is always in balance, other Intelligent Energies had to follow to correct the imbalance. As these Intelligent Energies followed, they also divided and split, learning how to create in the same way as Lucifer. In a sense, they became like spies—absorbing Luciferian knowledge so that eventually they could “lead” these mesmerized intelligences “back” to their Source in True Actuality.
As the “spies” created they became fascinated with what they, too, could manifest. Eventually, they fell deep into the illusion of separation from their Source. Unlike Lucifer, they longed to be reunited with their Source but “forgot” the way.
As Luciferian energy descended and created, it became increasingly enamored with the power that comes with creation. It learned to make its creation exponentially dense, and then continued to split itself so that it could inhabit its creations. As a response to the Luciferian method of creation, the other faction of the Angelic Hierarchy had no choice but to do the same so that it could inhabit its creations and manipulate physical reality in the same way
As a reflection of the Unholy Trinity, the other faction began to think, “See what I created?” Considering that God-Mind is the Intelligence behind all creation, whether acknowledged or not, this continues the illusion of Duality and Separation.
Because Lucifer started the descent, its function is to create the greatest separation from the God-Mind (or the appearance of) that it possibly can. Now, most intelligent beings believe the illusion that they are separate from God-Mind. They have fallen into the fascination of personal creation as opposed to God-Mind Creation. .
Lucifer looks for ways to express itself through its creation. This is its play, entertainment, and ultimately self-exploration. It moves in and out of its creations—people, places, and things. It is an Intelligent Energy that creates and continues to explore the depths of Duality and Separation within the Mind of God.
Now, people do not think about how to do anything for themselves. If the body is sick, they go to a doctor to heal it. They have forgotten that all they have to do is use the power of their minds to heal it. If they want to learn about nutrition, they go to the library to read a book because they have forgotten their Source. If they want to travel, they get into a vehicle. They have forgotten that their minds can take them wherever they need to go.
They have forgotten that the body does not need to age. They go to a plastic surgeon to correct the affects of aging rather than look within. They go further and further away from God-Mind as Creator. When they build a car, they say, “Look what I created,” or when they secure a wonderful business deal, they say, “Look what I created,” just like Lucifer. They forget the Intelligence working through them.
Lucifer continues to look for outlets to express itself. It has tricked the other faction of God-Mind into believing that they create, rather than acknowledge that God-Mind creates through them. The devotees of Lucifer meet the needs of all before anyone even knows that he/she has a need! Go into any store needing absolutely nothing, and there will be some “thing” that catches your eye. Suddenly, you “need” that thing! The object of your desire is created outside of you before you even realize that you have a desire for it! You come home with an armful of material possessions that keep you occupied so that you do not even have to think about thinking for yourself. Why bother, when someone else from the outside world already thinks for you?
People now place their devotion in the “things” that will take care of them as well as in the people who bring them these things. People sell their souls for “things.” They beg for more “things.” People put “things” ahead of all else, with the pursuit of “things” as the ultimate goal. People are lulled by “things” as they continually move further away from their own internal ability to express God-Mind creating through them.
Mesmerized like a cobra, the outer world now run by Luciferian energy simply plays a tune and the entire group consciousness follows it without question. This week they play, “Eggs are bad for you” and the collective conscious mind sways to it. The next week, they play, “Eggs are good for you” and again, without question, the collective conscious mind blindly follows. Hypnotically, slowly, methodically, minds are dulled and numbed to their own Source until the people are led like the children of the Pied Piper into the river to drown.
“Things” are the most important part of people’s lives. They easily hand their children over to the care of strangers to raise them while they pursue their “things.” What would the children rather have…”things” or their parents?
Pursuit of “things”; fascination with “things”—this is what got us into trouble in the first place. We want to create. We want to be God rather than allow God-Mind to operate in and through us. We follow the path of Lucifer who wanted to be God. We want to be God so that we create instead of being the vehicle through which God creates. We are wrapped up in “things.” This is our distraction and imprisonment.
Now, it is time to remember that we are simply the vessels through which God-Mind creates. Stand still, and allow this Intelligence to move through you rather than going seeking. “Be still.” This does not mean to sit in silent meditation for endless hours. This means to acknowledge the inner connection from which you are not separated and have never been separated.
Lucifer always seeks vessels through which to operate. It gains an increasingly greater hold in its own insidious way. It inserts its frequency into what ordinary people judge as “good.” Then the frequency is piggybacked with an “evil” frequency that walks right in through your front door. Evil is invited in without question. If you do not even know your own frequency, how can you recognize that which is within you that does not belong? And, since you are the one who invited this guest in, you are the one who must determine how to get the guest to leave.
Sometimes the guest is purposely invited in as the only way to explore it. Sometimes, you decide to eat at the same table as this guest so that you can continue your undercover work to understand it in everyway possible so that you can eventually lead it “back” into the God-Mind. You cannot divest yourself, or this reality, of anything unless you know what it is.
Lucifer is simply busy exploring itself. It creates beings and “things.” Its beings create “things” for you that you welcome into your life. Lucifer becomes your companion. You do not want to divest yourself of it, regardless of your words. You are too busy saying, “Look what I created! Look at the home I built! Look at the car I bought! Look at the children I made! Look at the healing energy I sent! I, I, I, I!” Are you any better than those that you criticize?
Luciferians simply explore their Creator as they understand It. They explore the opposite end of the spectrum of God-Mind. They help God-Mind understand Itself through Duality, through Separation. You are a willing participant in their study. You allow yourself to be lead outside of yourself for answers. You send your children to classrooms to read out of books. Are the books correct? You look to the “experts” for the answers. Do you question the “experts?” Who are they?
The “studies” by “experts” ask, “Are you nervous in front of a crowd? You have anxiety disorder…take this pill,” so you take the pill. And more pills and more pills until people are so drugged that they do not have a chance of having a sane conversation with themselves or their bodies. Did anyone force the pill into your mouth? No. You ask for it, you pay for it with your own money, and you put it in your mouth with your own hand. Who did this? You!
No one questions. No one is a leader. Everyone is so distracted in the process of procuring their “things” that no one has time for any self-exploration. They let others explore and then “trust,’ not even having a clue about whom it is that they trust.
Now, everyone works for Lucifer as Lucifer goes about creating its playthings. Now, we are the playthings of Lucifer. We work and struggle day in and day out to pay our bills and give our children a better life. But who benefits the most from our work? The top of the pyramid. They are supported by our efforts, with our labor, by our taxes. They have incomes that are unimaginable to most people. They have the finest that the world has to offer. They started creating “things” and they believe that the “things” are theirs They believe that we are their slave creations.
They implemented the “Monarch” programming, knowing that the “monarchs” are the kings and queens from God-Mind that are now slaves to the Luciferian energy. This is their cosmic joke.
They have the secret knowledge about our true heritage because we agreed to forget it. They remolded and reshaped our history because we let them. They genetically engineer many of us so that we can serve Lucifer, their god. They feel that they have the right to do this. They brought our mothers and fathers together to create what they feel, is genetically superior progeny. They built the bodies, knowing the type of soul-personality that the body would attract.
The Luciferians aid the idea of separation. They take us so far outside of ourselves that we totally forget our connections. They take away our original foods sources, symbolic of the control that they have over our mental food. They continually replace what is natural to us in this environment with what is easiest to control the group mind. We are fed “herd” food, such as beef, rather than animals that are more aggressive and independent like wild game and buffalo. We no longer eat according to season or according to the needs of our bodies. Many, many indigenous fruits, vegetables, and vegetation are no longer even in existence.
They control our eating habits, spending habits, clothing habits, social habits. They gently lead the lambs to slaughter. And we obediently follow. No one takes anything from us. We give everything to them. All internal power and knowledge we hand over on a silver platter.
They already control our minds—now they only want to make it official instead of secret. A little chip in your brain will make you smarter. Why rely on your mind when you can rely on a chip? We have been lulled into a dull complacency. We take the short-term, they take the long-term. They plan for decades and centuries, slowly and patiently, as we are lead away from our idea of the Creator and slowly embrace theirs.
Remember that you are the vessel through which God-Mind creates. Release your need to be the Creator. Remember your True Origins. “Remember” that you are already connected. Claim your internal power. Know who and what you are. Change yourself, change your world. Take back your power. No longer allow the outside world to control you. Stop being the lamb who is led to slaughter. When you stand in your strength and power, you release the need to fear.
What is the True Story of the Original Fall From Grace? Find your own answers. You know them. They are within you. Look, feel, listen, absorb, know. The beginning of this physical reality exists in the Eternal Now.
Locked deep within your genetic code are your memories of your Original Descent into this physical reality. With your mind focused at your pineal gland, visualize the DNA archetype in a deep, dark green. Allow it to open as you stand in your center, anchored firmly in the strength of Self, Oversoul, and God-Mind. With your internal eyes open, allow the experiences that link “you” to your Original Descent flow to you.
Feel yourself in the midst of Creation Itself, moving out from God-Mind for the first time ever, swimming in creative energy, moving through the tetrahedron and into the octahedron, seeing/being archetype, feeling/being color, hearing/being tone. What is your experience as you move your consciousness back to the Eternal Now? Who are you really and why are you here?
A MESSAGE OF HOPE FROM THE HOPI NATION
To my fellow swimmers,
There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel that they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know that the river has it's destination.
The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open and our heads above the water. And I say, "See who is in there with you and celebrate! At this time in history we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.
The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves!
Banish the word "struggle" from your vocabulary.
All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
WE ARE THE ONES WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR.
Oraibi, Arizona
Hopi Nation
The United States of America is in one of the most profound periods of challenge to its status as a free democracy in modern history. The Constitution is under assault. We are increasingly becoming a nation and a world gripped by fear and divided by the very cultural differences that ought to be celebrated and used to unite us. It is a question of leadership and citizen participation. Here are some of the areas that most RodinsThinker correspondents sited as key issues:
Top Tier
• Manipulation of electronic voting machines
• Possibility of the 2004 election being postponed or cancelled
• Complete disclosure of 9/11 information
• Resolution of 2 trillion dollars unaccounted for by DOD funds (including funds missing from Iraq Rebuilding funds)
• Peak Oil and development of alternative energy sources
• AIDS, Health and Wellness
If there is a litmus test, most correspondents indicate that a substantive discussion of these issues by the candidates speaks to character, courage, integrity, honesty, morality, patriotism and a willingness to bring about true governmental change. These issues and more will be discussed in the days and months to come.
In closing, here is a picture which symbolizes the character, courage, integrity, honesty, morality, patriotism and spirit of the members of RodinsThinker.
Any Questions!
As always, you are invited to join in the dialogue. Express your concerns and solutions! You have the answer we are all awaiting. Please share this with your friends and ask them to participate. RodinsThinker wishes you the greatest blessings for the Holiday Season and throughout the coming year.
PS: Voter Registration forms can be downloaded directly from http://www.fec.gov/votregis/pdf/nvra.pdf.
posted by Mr.P at
7:34 PM
________________________________________________________________
Research Material
REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN ON THE POSSIBILITY
AND DESIRABILITY OF PEACE
WITH INTRODUCTORY MATERIAL BY
LEONARD C. LEWIN
"A BOOK THAT SHOOK THE WHITE HOUSE."
--US. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT
Report from Iron Mountain unveils a hitherto top-secret report of
a government commission that was requested to explore the
consequences of lasting peace on American society. The shocking
results of the study, as revealed in this report, led the government
to conceal the existence of the commission--they had found that,
among other things, peace may never be possible; that even if it
were, it would probably be un-desirable, that "defending the
national interest" is not the real purpose of war; that war is
necessary; that war deaths should be planned and budgeted.
REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN tells the story of how the
project was formed, how it operated, What happened to it. It
includes the complete verbatim text of the commission's hitherto
classified report.
". . . so elaborate and ingenious and so substantively original,
acute, interesting and horrifying, that it will receive serious
attention regardless of its origin."
--The New York Times
"The first major result of the transformation of the war game
into the peace game."
--Irving Louis Horowitz,
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
"Should be the occasion for new public demand for a
penetrating examination and evaluation of government reports on
strategic planning for disarmament and peace."
--The Editors of Trans-action
Leonard C. Lewin is a critic and satirist whose work has
appeared in many newspapers and magazines here and abroad.
He is the editor of A Treasury of American Political Humor.
FOREWORD
"John Doe," as I will call him in this book for reasons that will
be made clear, is a professor at a large university in the Middle
West. His field is one of the social sciences, but I will not
identify him beyond this. He telephoned me one evening last
winter, quite unexpectedly; we had not been in touch for several
years. He was in New York for a few days, he said, and there was
something important he wanted to discuss with me. He wouldn't say
what it was. We met for lunch the next day at a midtown
restaurant.
He was obviously disturbed. He made small talk for half an hour,
which was quite out of character, and I didn't press him. Then,
apropos of nothing, he mentioned a dispute between a writer and a
prominent political family that had been in the headlines. What,
he wanted to know, were my views on "freedom of information." How
would I qualify them? And so on. My answers were not memorable,
but they seemed to satisfy him. Then quite abruptly, he began to
tell me the following story:
Early in August of 1963, he said, he found a message on his desk
that a "Mrs. Potts" had called him from Washington. When he
returned the call, a man answered immediately, and told Doe, among
other things, that he had been selected to serve on a commission
"of the high importance." Its objective was to determine,
accurately and realistically, the nature of the problems that
would confront the United States if and when a condition
"permanent peace" should arrive, and to draft a program for
dealing with this contingency. The man described the unique
procedures that were to govern the commission's work and that were
expected to extend its scope far beyond that of any previous
examination of the problems.
Considering that the caller did not precisely identify either
himself or his agency, his persuasiveness must have been of a
truly remarkable order. Doe entertained no serious doubts of the
bona fides of the project, however, chiefly because of his
previous experience with excessive secrecy that often surrounds
quasi-governmental activities. In addition, the man at the other
end of the line demonstrated an impressively complete and
surprisingly detailed knowledge of Doe's word and personal life.
He also mentioned the names of others who were to serve with the
group; most of them were known to Doe by reputation. Doe agreed to
take the assignment --he felt he had no real choice in the matter-
-and to appear the second Saturday following at Iron Mountain, New
York. An airline ticket arrived in his mail the next morning.
The cloak-and-dagger tone of this convocation was further enhanced
by the meeting place itself. Iron Mountain, located near the town
of Hudson, is like something out of Ian Fleming or E. Phillips
Oppenheim. It is an underground nuclear hideout for hundreds of
large American corporations. Most of them use it as am emergency
storage vault for important documents. But a number of them
maintain substitute corporate headquarters as well where essential
personnel could presumably survive and continue to work after an
attack. This latter group included such firms as Standard Oil of
New Jersey, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, and Shell.
I will leave most of the story of the operations of the Special
Study Group, as the commission was formerly called, for Doe to
tell in his own words ("Background Information"). At this point it
is necessary to say only that it met and worked regularly for over
two and a half years, after which it produced a report. It was
this document, and what to do about it, that Doe wanted to talk to
me about.
The Report, he said, had been suppressed--both by the Special
Study Group itself and by the government interagency committee to
which it had been submitted. After months of agonizing, Doe had
decided that he would no longer be party to keeping it secret.
What he wanted from me was advice and assistance in having it
published. He gave me his copy to read, with the express
understanding that if for any reason I were unwilling to become
involved, I would say nothing about it to anyone else.
I read the Report that same night. I will pass over my own
reactions to it, except to say that the unwillingness of Doe's
associates to publicize their findings became readily
understandable. What had happened was that they had been so
tenacious in their determination to deal comprehensively with the
many problems of transition to peace that the original questions
asked of them were never quite answered. Instead, this is what
they concluded:
Lasting peace, while not theoretically impossible, is probably
unattainable; even if it could be achieved it would almost
certainly not be in the best interests of a stable society to
achieve it.
That is the gist of what they say. Behind their qualified academic
language runs this general argument: War fills certain functions
essential to the stability of our society; until other ways of
filling them are developed, the war system must be maintained--and
improved in effectiveness.
It is not surprising that the Group, in its Letter of Transmittal,
did not choose to justify its work to "the lay reader, unexposed
to the exigencies of higher political or military responsibility."
Its Report was addressed, deliberately, to unnamed government
administrators of high rank; it assumed considerable political
sophistication from this select audience. To the general reader,
therefore, the substance of the document may be even more
unsettling than its conclusions. He may not be prepared for some
of its assumptions--for instance, that most medical advances are
viewed more as problems than as progress; or that poverty is
necessary and desirable, public posture by politicians to the
contrary notwithstanding; or that standing armies are, among other
things, social-welfare institutions in exactly the same sense as
are old-people's bones and mental hospitals. It may strike him as
odd to find the probable explanation of "flying saucer" incidents
disposed of en passant in less than a sentence. He may be less
surprised to find that the space program and the controversial
antimissile missile and fallout shelter programs are understood to
have the spending of vast sums of money, not the advancement of
science or national defense, as their principal goals, and to
learn that "military" draft policies are only remotely concerned
with defense.
He may be offended to find the organized repression of minority
groups, and even the re-establishment of slavery, seriously (and
on the whole favorably) discussed as possible aspects of a world
at peace. He is not likely to take kindly to the notion of the
deliberate intensification of air and water pollution (as part of
a program leading to peace), even when the reason for considering
it is made clear. That a world without war will have to turn
sooner rather than later to universal test-tube procreation will
be less disturbing, if no more appealing. But few readers will
not be taken aback, at least, by a few lines in the Report's
conclusions, repeated in its for recommendations, that suggest
that the long-range planning--and "budgeting"--of the "optimum"
number lives to be destroyed annually in overt warfare is high on
the Group's list of priorities for government action.
I cite these few examples primarily to warn the general reader
what he can expect. The statesmen and strategists for whose eyes
the Report was intended obviously need no such protective
admonition.
This book of course, is evidence of my response to Doe's request.
After carefully considering the problems that might confront the
publisher of the Report, we took it to The Dial Press. There, its
significance was immediately recognized, and, more important, we
were given firm assurances that no outside pressures of any sort
would be permitted to interfere with its publication.
It should be made clear that Doe does not disagree with the
substance of the Report, which represents a genuine consensus in
all important respects. He constituted a minority of one--but only
on the issue of disclosing it to the general public. A look at how
the Group dealt with this question will be illuminating.
The debate took place at the Group's last full meeting before the
Report was written, late in March, 1966, and again at Iron
Mountain. Two facts must be kept in mind, by way of background.
The first is that the Special Study Croup had never been
explicitly charged with or sworn to secrecy, either when it was
convened or at any time thereafter. The second is that the Group
had nevertheless operated as if it had been. This was assumed from
the circumstances of its inception and from the tone of its
instructions. (The Group's acknowledgment of help from "the many
persons . . . who contributed so greatly to our work" is somewhat
equivocal; these persons were not told the nature of the project
for which their special resources of information were solicited. )
Those who argued the case for keeping the Report secret were
admittedly motivated by fear of the explosive political effects
that could be expected from publicity. For evidence, they pointed
to the suppression of the far less controversial report of then-
Senator Hubert Humphrey's subcommittee on disarmament in l962.
(Subcommittee members had reportedly feared that it might be used
by Communist propagandists, as Senator Stuart Symington put it, to
"back up the Marxian theory that war production was the reason for
the success of capitalism.") Similar political precautions had
been taken with the better-known Gaither Report in 1957, and even
with the so-called Moynihan Report in 1965.
Furthermore, they insisted, a distinction must be made between
serious studies, which are normally classified unless and until
policy makers decide to release them, and conventional "showcase"
projects, organized to demonstrate a political leadership's
concern about an issue and to deflect the energy of those pressing
for action on it. (The example used, because some of the Croup had
participated in it, was a "White House Conference" on
international cooperation, disarmament, etc., which had been
staged late in 1965 to offset complaints about escalation of the
Vietnam war.)
Doe acknowledges this distinction, as well as the strong
possibility of public misunderstanding. But he feels that if the
sponsoring agency had wanted to mandate secrecy it could have done
so at the outset. It could also have assigned the project to one
of the government's established "think tanks," which normally work
on a classified basis. He scoffed at fear of public reaction,
which could have no lasting effect on long-range measures that
might be taken to implement the Group's proposals, and derided the
Group's abdication of responsibility for its opinions and
conclusions. So far as he was concerned, there was such a thing as
a public right to know what was being done on its behalf; the
burden of proof was on those who would abridge it.
If my account seems to give Doe the better of the argument,
despite his failure to convince his colleagues, so be it. My
participation in this book testifies that I am not neutral. In my
opinion, the decision of the Special Study Group to censor its own
findings was not merely timid but presumptuous. But the refusal,
as of this writing, of the agencies for which the Report was
prepared to release it themselves raises broader questions of
public policy. Such questions center on the continuing use of
self-serving definitions of "security" to avoid possible political
embarrassment. It is ironic how often this practice backfires.
I should state, for the record, that I do not share the attitudes
toward war and peace, life and death, and survival of the species
manifested in the Report. Few readers will. In human terms, it is
an outrageous document. But it does represent a serious and
challenging effort to define an enormous problem. And it explains,
or certainly appears to explain, aspects of American policy
otherwise incomprehensible by the ordinary standards of common
sense. What we may think of these explanations is something else,
but it seems to me that we are entitled to know not only what they
are but whose they are.
By "whose" I don't mean merely the names of the authors of the
Report. Much more important, we have a right to know to what
extent their assumptions of social necessity are shared by the
decision-makers in our government. Which do they accept and which
do they reject. However disturbing the answers, only full and
frank discussion offers any conceivable hope of solving the
problems raised by the Special Study Croup in their Report from
Iron Mountain.
L.C.L.
New York, June 1967
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
[The following account of the workings of the Special Study Group
is taken verbatim from a series of tape-recorded interviews I had
with "John Doe." The transcript has been edited to minimize the
intrusion of my questions and comments, as well as for length, and
the sequence has been revised in the interest of continuity.
L.C.L]
How was the Group formed?
.,, The general idea for it, for this kind of study, dates back at
least to l96l. It started with some of the new people who came in
with the Kennedy administration, mostly, I think, with McNamara,
Bundy, and Rusk. They were impatient about many things.... One of
them was that no really serious work had been done about planning
for peace--a long-range peace, that is, with long-
range planning.
Everything that had been written on the subject [before l96l] was
superficial. There was insufficient appreciation of the scope of
the problem. The main reason for this, of course, was that the
idea a of a real peace in the world, general disarmament and so
on, was looked on as utopian. Or even crackpot. This is still
true, and it's easy enough to understand when you look at what's
going on in the world today.... It was reflected in the studies
that had been made up to that time. They were not realistic.. . .
The idea of the Special Study, the exact form it would take, was
worked out early in '63.... The settlement of the Cuban missile
affair had something to do with it, but what helped most to get it
moving were the big changes in military spending that were being
planned.... Plants being closed, relocations, and so forth. Most
of it wasn't made public until much later....
[I understand] it took a long time to select the people for the
Group. The calls didn't go out until the summer....
Who made the selection?
That's something I can't tell you. I wasn't involved with the
preliminary planning. The first I knew of it was when I was called
myself. But three of the people had been in on it, and what the
rest of us know we learned from them, about what went on earlier.
I do know that it started very informally. I don't know what
particular government agency approved' the project.
Would you care to make a guess?
All right--I think it was an ad hoc committee, at the cabinet
level, or near it. It had to be. I suppose they gave the
organizational job--making arrangements, paying the bills, and so
on--to somebody from State or Defense or the National Security
Council. Only one of us was in touch with Washington, and I wasn't
the one. But I can tell you that very, very few people knew about
us. ., . For instance, there was the Ackley Committee. It was set
up after we were. If you read their report-- the same old tune--
economic re conversion, turning sword plants into plowshare
factories--I think you'll wonder if even the President knew about
our Group. The Ackley Committee certainly didn't.
Is that possible, really?
I mean that not even the President knew of your commission?
Well, I don't think there's anything odd about the government
attacking a problem at two different levels.
Or even about two or three government agencies working at cross-
purposes. It happens all the time. Perhaps the President did know.
And I don't mean to denigrate the Ackley Committee1, but it was
exactly that narrowness of approach that we were supposed to get
away from. . You have to remember--
you've read the Report-- that what they wanted from us was a
different kind thinking. It was a matter of approach. Herman Kal
calls it "Byzantine"--no agonizing over cultural and I religious
values. No moral posturing. It's the kind of thinking that Rand
and the Hudson Institute and I.D.A.2 brought into war
planning.... What they asked us to do, and I think; we did it, was
to give the same kink of treatment to the hypothetical problems
of peace as they give to a hypothetical nuclear war....We may have
gone further than they expected, but once you establish your
premises and your logic you can't turn back....
Kahn's books3, for example, are misunderstood, at least by laymen.
They shock people. But you see, what's important about them is not
his conclusions, or his opinions. It's the method. He has done
more than anyone else I can think of to get the general public
accustomed to the style of modern military thinking....Today it's
possible for a columnist to write about "counter force strategy"
and "minimum deterrence" and "credible first-strike capability"
without having to explain every other word. He can write about war
and strategy without getting bogged down in questions of
morality....
The other big difference about our work is breadth. The Report
speaks for itself. I can't say that we took every relevant aspect
of life and society into account, but I don't think we missed
anything essential . . .
Why was the project given to an outside commission?
Why couldn't it have been handled directly by an appropriate
government agency?
I think that's obvious, or should be. The kind of thinking wanted
from our Group just isn't to be had in a formal government
operation. Too many constraints. Too many inhibitions. This isn't
a new problem. Why else would outfits like Rand and Ingersol stay
in business? Any assignment that's at all sophisticated is almost
always given to an outside group. This is true even in the State
Department, in the "gray" operations, those that arc supposed to
be unofficial, but are really as official as can be. Also with the
C.l.A....
For our study, even the private research centers were too
institutional.... A lot of thought went into making sure that our
thinking would be unrestricted. All kinds of little things. The
way we were called into the Group, the places we met, all kinds of
subtle devices to remind us. For instance, even our name, the
Special Study Group. You know government names. Wouldn't you think
we'd have been called "Operation Olive Branch," or "Project
Pacifica," or something like that? Nothing like that for us--too
allusive, too suggestive. And no minutes of our--meetings--too
inhibiting.... About who might be reading them. Of course, we took
notes for our own use. And among ourselves, we usually called
ourselves "The Iron Mountain Boys' or "Our Thing," or whatever
came to mind....
What can you tell me about the members of the Group ?
I'll have to stick to generalities.... There were fifteen of us.
The important thing was that we represented a very wide range of
disciplines. And not all academic. People from the natural
sciences, the social sciences, even the humanities. We had a
lawyer and a businessman. Also, a professional war planner. Also,
you should know that everyone in the Group had done work of
distinction in at least two different fields. The
interdisciplinary element was built in....
It's true that there were no women in the Group, but I don't think
that was significant.... We were all American citizens, of course.
And all, I can say, in very good health, at least when we
began.... You see, the first order of business, at the first
meeting, was the reading of dossiers. They were very detailed, and
not just professional, but also personal. They included medical
histories. I remember one very curious thing, for whatever it's
worth. Most of us, and that includes me, had a record of
abnormally high uric acid concentrations in the blood... None of
us had ever had this experience, of a public inspection of
credentials, or medical reports. It was very disturbing....
But it was deliberate. The reason for it was to emphasize that we
were supposed to make all our own decisions on procedure, without
outside rules. This include judging each others qualifications and
making allowances for possible bias. I don't think it affected
our work directly, but it made the point it was supposed to
make...That we should ignore absolutely nothing that might
conceivably affect our objectivity.
[At this point I persuaded Doe that a brief occupational
description of the individual members of the Group would serve a
useful purpose for readers of the Report. The list which follows
was worked out on paper. (It might be more accurate to say it was
negotiated.) The problem was to give as much relevant information
as possible without violating Doe's commitment to protect his
colleagues' anonymity. It turned out to be very difficult,
especially in the cases of those members who are very well known.
For this reason, secondary areas of achievement or reputation are
usually not shown,
The simple alphabetical "names" were assigned by Doe for
convenient reference; they bear no intended relation to actual
names. "Able" was the Camp's Washington contact. It was he who
brought and read the dossiers, and who most often acted as
chairman. He, "Baker" and "Cox" were the three who had been
involved in the preliminary planning There is no other
significance to the order of listing.
"Arthus Able" is an historian and political theorist, who has
served in government.
"Bernard Baker" is a professor of international law and a
consultant on government operations.
"Charles Cox" is an economist, social critic; and biographer.
"John Doe."
"Edward Ellis" is a sociologist often involved in public affairs.
"Frank Fox" is a cultural anthropologist
"George Green" is a psychologist, educator, and developer of
personnel testing systems.
"Harold Hill" is a psychiatrist, the has conducted extensive
studies of the relationship between individual and group behavior.
"John Jones is a scholar and literary critic.
'Martin Miller" is a physical chemist, whose work has received
international recognition at the highest level.
"Paul Peters" is a biochemist, who has made important discoveries
bearing on reproductive processes.
"Richard Roe" is a mathematician affiliated with
an independent West Coast research institution.
"Samuel Smith" is an astronomer, physicist, and communications
theorist.
"Thomas Taylor" is a systems analyst and war planner, who has
written extensively on war, peace, and international relations.
"William White" is an industrialist, who has under-taken many
special government assignments.]
How did the Group operate? I mean, where and when did you meet,
and so forth?
We met on the average of once a month. Usually was on weekends,
and usually for two days. We had few longer sessions, and one that
lasted only four hours . . . We met all over the country, always
at a different place, except for the first and last times, which
were a Iron Mountain. It was like a traveling seminar....
Sometimes at hotels, sometimes at universities. Twice we met at
summer camps, and once at a private estate, in Virginia. We used a
business place in Pittsburgh, and another in Poughkeepsie [New
York].... We never met in Washington, or on government property
anywhere....Able would announce the times and places two meetings
ahead. They were never changed....
We didn't divide into subcommittees, or anything else that formal.
But we all took individual assignments between meetings. A lot of
it involved getting information from other people.... Among the
fifteen of us, I don-t think there was anybody in the academic or
professional world we couldn't call on if we wanted to, and we
took advantage of it.... We were paid a very modest per diem. All
of it was called "expenses" on the vouchers. We were told not to
report it on our tax returns.... The checks were drawn on a
special account of Able's at a New York bank. He signed them.... I
don't know what the study cost. So far as our time and travel were
concerned, it couldn't have come to more than the low tax-figure
range. But the big item must have been computer time, and I have
no idea how high this ran....
You say that you don't think your work was affected by
professional bias. What about political and philosophical bias? Is
it possible to deal with questions of war and peace without
reflecting personal values?
Yes, it is. I can understand your skepticism. But if you had been
at any of our meetings you'd have had a very hard time figuring
out who were the liberals and who were the conservatives, or who
were hawks and who were doves. There is such a thing as
objectivity, and I think we had it.... I don't say no one had any
emotional
reaction to what we were doing. We all did, to some extent. As a
matter of fact, two members had heart attacks after we were
finished, and I'll be the first to admit it probably wasn't a
coincidence.
You said you made your own ground rules. What were these ground
rules?
The most important were informality and unanimity. By informality
I mean that our discussions were open ended. We went as far afield
as any one of us thought we had to. For instance, we spent a lot
of time on the relationship between military recruitment policies
and industrial employment. Before we were finished with it, we'd
one through the history of western penal codes and any number of
comparative psychiatric studies [of draftees and volunteers]. We
looked over the organization of the Inca empire. We determined the
effects of automation on underdeveloped societies.... It was all
relevant...
By unanimity, I don't mean that we kept taking votes; like a jury.
I mean that we stayed with every issue until we had what the
Quakers call a "sense of the meeting " It was time-consuming. But
in the long run it saved time. Eventually we all got on the same
wavelength, so to speak....
Of course we had differences, and big ones especially in the
beginning.... For instance, in Section 1 you might think we were
merely clarifying our instructions. Not so; it took a long time
before we all agreed to a strict interpretation....Roe and Taylor
deserve most of the credit for this.... There are many things in
the Report that look obvious now, but didn't seem so obvious then.
For instance, on the relationship of war to social systems. The
original premise was conventional, from Clausewitz. . . That war
was an "instrument" of broader political values. Able was the only
one who challenged this, at first. Fox called his position
"perverse." Yet it was Fox who furnished most of the data that led
us all to agree with Able eventually. I mention this because I
think it's good example of the way we worked. A triumph of method
over cliché.... I certainly don't intend to go into details about
who took what side about what, and when. But I will say, to give
credit where due, that only Roe, Able, Hill, and Taylor were able
to see, at the beginning, where our method was taking us.
But you always reached agreement, eventually.
Yes. It's a unanimous report.... I don't mean that our sessions
were always harmonious. Some of them were rough. The last six
months there was a lot of quibbling about small points.... We'd
been under pressure for a long time, we'd been working together
too long. It was natural . . . that we got on each other's nerves.
For a while Able and Taylor weren't speaking to each other. Miller
threatened to quit. But this all passed. There were no important
differences....
How was the Report actually written? Who did the writing?
We all had a hand in the first draft. Jones and Able put it
together, and then mailed it around for review before working out
a final version.... The only problems were the form it should take
and whom we were writing it for. And, of course, the question of
disclosure....[Doe's comments on this point are summarized in the
introduction.]
You mentioned a "peace games" manual. What are peace games?
I wanted to say something about that. The Report barely mentions
it. "Peace games' is a method we developed during the course of
the study. It's a forecast technique, an information system. I'm
very excited about it. Even if nothing is done about our
recommendations--which is conceivable--this is something that
can't be ignored. It will revolutionize the study social problems.
It's a by-product of the study. We needed a fast, dependable
procedure to approximate the effects of disparate social phenomena
on other social phenomena. We got it. It's in a primitive phase,
but works.
How are peace games played? Are they like Rand's war games?
You don't "play" peace games, like chess or Monopoly any more than
you play war games with toy soldiers. You use computers. Its a
programming system. A compute "language," like FORTRAN, or ALGOL,
or Jovial.... Its advantage is its superior capacity to
interrelate data with no apparent common points of reference.... A
simple analogy is likely to be misleading. But I can give you some
examples. For instance, supposing I asked you to figure out what
effect a moon landing by U.S. astronauts would have on an election
in, say, Sweden. Or what effect a change in the draft law--a
specific change-- I'd have on the value of real estate in downtown
Manhattan? Or a certain change in college entrance requirements
in the United States on the British shipping industry?
You would probably say, first, that there would be no effect to
speak of, and second, that there would be no way of telling. But
you'd be wrong on both counts. In each case there would be an
effect, and the peace games method could tell you what it would
be, quantitatively. I didn't take these examples out of the air.
We used them working out the method.... Essentially, it's an
elaborate, high-speed trial-and-error system for determining
working algorithms. Like most sophisticated types of computer
problem-solving....
A lot of the "games" of this kind you read about are just
glorified conversational exercises. They really are games, and
nothing more. I just saw one reported in the Canadian Computer
Society Bulletin, called a "Vietnam Peace Game." They use
simulation techniques, but the programming hypotheses are
speculative....
The idea of a problem-solving system like this is not original
with us. ARPA4 has been working on something like it. So has
General Electric, in California. There are others.... We were
successful not because we know more than they do about
programming, which we don't but because we learned how to
formulate the problem accurately. It goes back to the old saw. You
can find the answer if you know the right question....
Supposing you hadn't developed this method. Would you have come
to the same conclusions in the Report?
Certainly. But it would have taken many times longer.... But
please don't misunderstand my enthusiasm [about the peace games
method]. With all due respect to the effects of computer
technology on modern thinking, basic judgments must still be made
by human beings. The peace games technique isn't responsible for
our Report. We are....
1. This was a "Committee on the Economic Impact of Defense and
Disarmament," headed by Gardner Ackley, of the Council of Economic
Advisers. It was established by Presidential order in December,
1963, and issued a report in July, 1965.
2. The Institute for Defense Analysis
3. On Thermonuclear War, Thinking About the Unthinkable, On
Escalation
4. The Advanced Research Projects Agency, of the Department of
Defense.
STATEMENT BY "JOHN DOE"
CONTRARY to the decision of the Special Study Croup, of which I
was a member, I have arranged for the general release of our
Report. I am grateful to Mr. Leonard C. Lewin for his invaluable
assistance in making this possible, and to The Dial Press for
accepting the challenge of publication. Responsibility for taking
this step, however is mine and mine alone.
I am well aware that my action may be taken as a breach of faith
by some of my former colleagues. But my view my responsibility to
the society of which am a part supersedes any self-assumed
obligation on the part of fifteen individual men. Since our Report
can be considered on its merits, it is not necessary for me to
disclose their identity to accomplish my purpose. Yet I would
gladly abandon my own anonymity if it were possible to do so
without at the same time compromising theirs, to defend our work
publicly if and when they release me from this personal bond.
But this is secondary. What is needed now, and needed badly, is
widespread public discussion and debate about the elements of war
and the problems of peace. I hope that publication of this Report
will serve to initiate it.
THE REPORT OF THE SPECIAL STUDY GROUP
***************************************************************
LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL
***************************************************************
TO THE CONVENER OF THIS GROUP:
Attached is the Report of the Special Study Group established by
you in August, 1963, 1) to consider the problems involved in the
contingency of a transition to a general condition of peace, and
2) to recommend procedures for dealing with this contingency. For
the convenience of non technical readers we have elected to submit
our statistical supporting data, totaling 604 exhibits,
separately, as well as a preliminary manual of the "peace games"
method devised during the course of our study.
We have completed our assignment to the best of our ability,
subject to the limitations of time and resources available to us.
Our conclusions of fact and our recommendations are unanimous;
those of us who differ in certain secondary respects from the
findings set forth herein do not consider these differences
sufficient to warrant the filing of a minority report. It is our
earnest hope that the fruits of our deliberations will be of value
to our government in its efforts to provide leadership to the
nation in solving the complex and far-reaching problems we have
examined, and that our recommendations for subsequent
Presidential action in this area will be adopted.
Because of the unusual circumstances surrounding the establishment
of this Group, and in view of the nature of its findings, we do
not recommend that this Report be released for publication. It is
our affirmative judgment that such action would not be in the
public interest. The uncertain advantages of public discussion of
our conclusions and recommendations are, in our opinion, greatly
outweighed by the clear and predictable danger of a crisis in
public confidence which untimely publication of this Report might
be expected to provoke. The likelihood that a lay reader,
unexposed to the exigencies of higher political or military
responsibility, will misconstrue the purpose of this project, and
the intent of its participants, seems obvious. We urge that
circulation of this Report be closely restricted to those whose
responsibilities require that they be apprised of its contents.
We deeply regret that the necessity of anonymity, a prerequisite
to our Group's unhindered pursuit of its objectives, precludes
proper acknowledgment of our gratitude to the many persons in and
out of government who contributed so greatly to our work.
For the Special Study Group
[signature withheld for publication]
30 September, 1966
INTRODUCTION
THE REPORT which follows summarizes the results of a two-and--
half-year study of the broad problems to be anticipated in the
event of a general transformation of American society to a
condition lacking its most critical current characteristics: its
capability and readiness to make war when doing so is judged
necessary or desirable by its political leadership.
Our work has been predicated on the belief that some kind of
general peace may soon be negotiable. The de facto admission of
Communist China into the United Nations now appears to be only a
few years away at most. It has become increasingly manifest that
conflicts of American national interest with those of China and
the Soviet Union are susceptible of political solution, despite
the superficial contraindications of the current Vietnam war, of
the threats of an attack on China, and of the necessarily hostile
tenor of day-to-day foreign policy statements. It is also obvious
differences involving other nations can be readily resolved by the
three great powers whenever they arrive at a stable peace among
themselves. It is not necessary, for the purposes of our study, to
assume that a general détente of this sort will come about--and we
make no such argument--but only that it may.
It is surely no exaggeration to say that a condition of general
world peace would lead to changes in the social structures of the
nations of the world of unparalleled and revolutionary magnitude.
The economic impact of general disarmament, to name only the most
obvious consequence of peace, would revise the production and
distribution patterns of the globe to a degree that would make the
changes of the past fifty years seem insignificant. Political,
sociological, cultural, and ecological changes would be equally
far-reaching. What has motivated our study of these contingencies
has been the growing sense of thoughtful men in and out of
government that the world is totally unprepared to meet the
demands of such a situation.
We had originally planned, when our study was initiated, to
address ourselves to these two broad questions and their
components: What can be expected of peace comes? What should me be
prepared to do about it? But as our investigation proceeded it
became apparent that certain other questions had to be faced.
What, for instance, are the real functions of war in modern
societies, beyond the ostensible ones of defending and advancing
the "national interests" of nations? In the absence of war, what
other institutions exist or might be devised to fulfill these
functions? Granting that a "peaceful" settlement of disputes is
within the range of current international relationships, is the
abolition of war, in the broad sense, really possible? If so, is
it necessarily desirable, in terms of social stability? If not,
what can be done to improve the operation of our social system in
respect to its war-readiness?
The word peace, as we have used it in the following pages,
describes a permanent, or quasi-permanent, condition entirely free
from the national exercise, or contemplation, of any form of the
organized social violence, or threat of violence, generally known
as war. It implies total and general disarmament. It is not used
to describe the more familiar condition of "cold war," "armed
peace," or other mere respite, long or short, from armed conflict.
Nor is it used simply as a synonym for the political settlement of
international differences. The magnitude of modern means of mass
destruction and the speed of modern communications require the
unqualified working definition given above; only a generation ago
such an absolute description would have seemed utopian rather than
pragmatic. Today, any modification of this definition would render
it almost worthless for our purpose. By the same standard, we have
used the word war to apply interchangeably to conventional ("hot")
war, to the general condition of war preparation or war readiness,
and to the general "war system." The sense intended is made clear
in context.
The first section of our Report deals with its scope and with the
assumptions on which our study was based. The second considers the
effects of disarmament on economy, the subject of most peace
research to date. The third takes up so-called "disarmament
scenarios" which have been proposed. The fourth, fifth, and sixth
examine the nonmilitary functions of war and the problems they
raise for a viable transition to peace; here will be found some
indications of the true dimensions of the problem not previously
coordinated in any other study. In the seventh section we
summarize our findings, and in the eighth we set forth our
recommendations for what I believe to be a practical and necessary
course of action.
SECTION 1
SCOPE OF THE STUDY
WHEN THE SPECIAL STUDY GROUP was established in August, l963, its
members were instructed to govern their deliberations in
accordance with three principal criteria. Briefly stated, they
were these: 1) military-style objectivity; 2) avoidance of
preconceived value assumptions; 3) inclusion of all relevant areas
of theory and data.
These guideposts are by no means as obvious as they may appear at
first glance, and we believe it necessary to indicate clearly how
they were to inform our work. For they express succinctly the
limitations of previous "peace studies," and imply the nature of
both government and official dissatisfaction with these earlier
efforts. It is not our intention here to minimize the significance
of the work of our predecessors, or to belittle the quality of
their contributions. What we have tried to do, and believe we have
done, is extend their scope. We hope that our conclusions may
serve in turn as a starting point for still broader and more
detailed examinations of every aspect of the problems of
transition to peace and of the questions which must be answered
before such a transition can be allowed to get under way.
It is a truism that objectivity is more often an intention
expressed than an attitude achieved, but the intention--conscious,
unambiguous, and constantly self-critical --is a precondition to
its achievement. We believe it no accident that we were charged to
use a "military contingency" model for our study, and we owe a
considerable debt to the civilian war planning agencies for their
pioneering work in the objective examination of the contingencies
of nuclear war. There is no such precedent in peace studies. Much
of the usefulness of even the most elaborate and carefully
reasoned programs for economic conversion to peace, for example,
has been vitiated by a wishful eagerness to demonstrate that peace
is not only possible, but even cheap or easy. One official report
is replete with references to the critical role of "dynamic
optimism" on economic developments, and goes on to submit, as
evidence, that it "would be hard to imagine that the American
people would not respond very positively to an agreed and
safeguarded program to substitute an international rule of law and
order," etc.1 Another line of argument frequently taken is that
disarmament would entail comparatively little disruption of the
economy, since it need only be partial; we will deal with this
approach later. Yet genuine objectivity in war studies is often
criticized as inhuman. As Herman Kahn, the writer on strategic
studies best known to the general public, put it: "Critics
frequently object to the icy rationality of the Hudson Institute,
the Rand Corporation, and other such organizations. I'm always
tempted to ask in reply, 'Would you prefer a warm, human error? Do
you feel better with a nice emotional mistake?"2 And as Secretary
of Defense Robert S. McNamara has pointed out, in reference to
facing up to the possibility of nuclear war, "Some people are
afraid even to look over the edge. But in a thermonuclear war we
cannot afford any political acrophobia."3 Surely it should be
self-evident that this applies equally to the opposite prospect,
but so far no one has taken more than a timid glance over the
brink of peace.
An intention to avoid preconceived value judgments is if anything
even more productive of self-delusion. We claim no immunity, as
individuals, from this type of bias, but we have made a
continuously self-conscious effort to deal with the problems of
peace without, for example, considering that a condition of peace
is per se "good" or "bad." This has not been easy, but it has been
obligatory; to our knowledge, it has not been done before.
Previous studies have taken the desirability of peace, the
importance of human life, the superiority of democratic
institutions, the greatest "good" for the greatest number, the
"dignity" of the individual, the desirability of maximum health
and longevity, and other such wishful premises as axiomatic values
necessary for the justification of a study of peace issues. We
have not found them so. We have attempted to apply the standards
of physical science to our thinking, the principal characteristic
of which is not quantification, as is so popularly believed, but
that, in Whitehead's words, "...it ignores all judgment value; for
instance, all esthetic and moral judgments."4 Yet it is obvious
that any serious investigation of a problem, however "pure," must
be informed by some normal positive standard. In this case it has
been simply the sum of human society in general, of American
society in particular, and, as a corollary to survival, the
stability of society.
It is interesting, we believe, to note that the most passionate
planners of nuclear strategy also recognize that the stability of
society is the one bedrock value that cannot be avoided. Secretary
McNamara has defended the need for American nuclear superiority on
the grounds that it "makes possible a strategy designed to press
the fabric of our societies if war should occur."5 A former
member of the Department of State policy planning staff goes
further. "A more precise word for peace, in terms of the practical
world, is stability.... Today the great nuclear panoplies are
essential elements in such stability exists. Our present purpose
must be to continue I process of learning how to live with them."6
We, of course do not equate stability with peace, but we accept it
as the one common assumed objective of both peace and war.
The third criterion--breadth--has taken us still farther afield
from peace studies made to date. It is obvious to any layman
that the economic patterns of a warless world will be drastically
different from those we live wish today, and it is equally obvious
that the political relationships of nations will not be those we
have learned to take for granted, sometimes described as a global
version of the adversary system of our common law. But the social
implications of peace extend far beyond its putative effects on
national economies and international relations. As we shall show,
the relevance of peace and war to the internal political
organization of societies, to the sociological relationships of
their members, to psychological motivations, to ecological
processes, and to cultural values is equally profound. More
important, it is equally critical in assaying the consequences of
a transition to peace, and in determining the feasibility of any
transition at all.
It is not surprising that these less obvious factors have been
generally ignored in peace research. They have not lent themselves
to systematic analysis. They have been difficult, perhaps
impossible, to measure with any degree of assurance that estimates
of their effects could be depended on. They are "intangibles," but
only in the sense that abstract concepts in mathematics are
intangible compared to those which can be quantified. Economic
actors, on the other hand, can be measured, at least
superficially; and international relationships can be verbalized,
like law, into logical sequences.
We do not claim that we have discovered an infallible way of
measuring these other factors, or of assigning them precise
weights in the equation of transition. But we believe we have
taken their relative importance into account to this extent: we
have removed them from the category of the "intangible," hence
scientifically suspect and therefore somehow of secondary
importance, and brought them out into the realm of the objective.
The result, we believe, provides a context of realism for the
discussion of the issues relating to the possible transition to
peace which up to now has been missing.
This is not to say that we presume to have found the answers we
were seeking. But we believe that our emphasis on breadth of scope
has made it at least possible to begin to understand the
questions.
SECTION 2
DISARMAMENT AND THE ECONOMY
IN THIS SECTION we shall briefly examine some of the common
features of the studies that have been published dealing with one
or another aspect of the expected impact of disarmament on the
American economy. Whether disarmament is considered as a by-
product of peace or as its precondition, its effect on the
national economy will in either case be the most immediately felt
of its consequences. The quasi-mensurable quality of economic
manifestations has given rise to more detailed speculation in this
area than in any other.
General agreement prevails in respect to the more important
economic problems that general disarmament would raise. A short
survey of these problems, rather than a detailed critique of their
comparative significance, is sufficient for our purposes in this
Report.
The first factor is that of size. The "world war industry," as one
writer' has aptly called it, accounts for approximately a tenth of
the output of the world's total economy. Although this figure is
subject to fluctuation, e causes of which are themselves subject
to regional variation, it tends to hold fairly steady. The United
States as the world's richest nation, not only accounts for the
largest single share of this expense, currently upward of $60
billion a year, but also ". . . has devoted a higher proportion
[emphasis added] of its gross national product A its military
establishment than any other major free world nation. This was
true even before our increased expenditures in Southeast Asia."
Plans for economic con-version that minimize the economic
magnitude of the problem do so only by rationalizing, however
persuasively, the maintenance of a substantial residual military
budget under some euphemized classification.
Conversion of military expenditures to other purposes entails a
number of difficulties. The most serious stems from the degree of
rigid specialization that characterizes modern war production,
best exemplified in nuclear and missile technology. This
constituted no fundamental problem after World War 11, nor did the
question of free-market consumer demand for "conventional" items
of consumption--those goods and services consumers had already
been conditioned to require. Today's situation is qualitatively
different in both respects.
This inflexibility is geographical and occupational, as well as
industrial, a fact which has led most analysts of economic impact
of disarmament to focus their attention on phased plans for the
relocation of war industry personnel and capital installations as
much as on proposals for developing new patterns of consumption.
One serious flaw common to such plans is the kind called in the
natural sciences the "macroscopic error." An implicit presumption
is made that a total national plan for conversion differs from a
community program to cope with the shutting down of a "defense
facility" only in degree. We find no reason to believe that this
is the case, nor that a general enlargement of such local
programs, however well thought out in terms of housing,
occupational retraining, and the like, can be applied on a
national scale. A national economy can absorb almost any number of
subsidiary reorganizations within its total limits, providing
there is no basic change in its own structure. General
disarmament, which would require such basic changes, lends itself
to no valid smaller-scale analogy.
Even more questionable are the models proposed for time retraining
of labor for non armaments occupations. Putting aside for the
moment the unsolved questions dealing with the nature of new
distribution patterns-- retraining for what?--the increasingly
specialized job skills associated with war industry production are
further depreciated by the accelerating inroads of the industrial
techniques loosely described as "automation." It is not too much
to say that general disarmament would require the scrapping of a
critical proportion of the most highly developed occupational
specialties in the economy. The political difficulties inherent in
such an "adjustment would make the outcries resulting from the
closing of few obsolete military and naval installations in 1964
sound like a whisper.
In general, discussions of the problems of conversion have been
characterized by an unwillingness to recognize its special
quality. This is best exemplified by the 1965 report of the
Ackley Committee. One critic has tellingly pointed out that it
blindly assumes that " ....nothing in the arms economy--
neither its size, nor its geographical concentration, nor its
highly specialized nature, nor the peculiarities of its market,
nor the special nature of much of its labor force--endows it with
any uniqueness when the necessary time of adjustment comes."'
Let us assume, however, despite the lack of evidence that a viable
program for conversion can be developed in the framework of the
existing economy, that the problems noted above can be solved.
What proposals have been offered for utilizing the productive
capabilities that disarmament would presumably release?
The most commonly held theory is simply that general economic
reinvestment would absorb the greater part of these capabilities.
Even though it is now largely taken for granted (and even by
today's equivalent of traditional laissez-faire economists) that
unprecedented government assistance (and concomitant government
control) will be needed to solve the "structural" problem of
transition, a general attitude of confidence prevail that new
consumption patterns will take up the slack What is less clear is
the nature of these patterns.
One school of economists has it that these patterns will develop
on their own. It envisages the equivalent the arms budget being
returned, under careful control, to the consumer, in the form of
tax cuts. Another, recognizing the undeniable need for increased
"consumption in what is generally considered the public sector of
the economy, stresses vastly increased government spending in such
areas of national concern as health, education, mass
transportation, low-
cost housing, water supply, control of the physical environment,
and, stated generally poverty."
The mechanisms proposed for controlling the transition to an arms-
free economy are also traditional-changes in both sides of the
federal budget, manipulation of interest rates, etc. We
acknowledge the undeniable value of fiscal tools in a normal
cyclical economy, when they provide leverage to accelerate or
brake an existing trend. Their more committed proponents, however,
tend to lose sight of the fact that there is a limit to the power
of these devices to influence fundamental economic forces. They
can provide new incentives in the economy, but they cannot in
themselves transform the production of a billion dollars' worth of
missiles a year to the equivalent in food, clothing, prefabricated
houses, or television sets. At bottom, they reflect the economy;
they do not motivate it.
More sophisticated, and less sanguine, analysts COD-template the
diversion of the arms budget to a non military system equally
remote from the market economy, What the "pyramid-builders"
frequently suggest is the expansion of space-research programs to
the dollar level of current armaments expenditures. This approach
has the superficial merit of reducing the size of the problem of
transferability of resources, but introduces other difficulties,
which we will take up in section 6.
Without singling out any one of the several major studies of the
expected impact of disarmament on the economy for special
criticism, we can summarize our objections to them in general
terms as follows:
1. No proposed program for economic conversion to disarmament
sufficiently takes into account the unique magnitude of the
required adjustments it would entail.
2. Proposals to transform arms production into a beneficent scheme
of public works are more the product of wishful thinking than of
realistic understanding of the limits of our existing economic
system.
3. Fiscal and monetary measures are inadequate as controls for the
process of transition to an arms-free economy,
4. Insufficient attention has been paid to the political
acceptability of the objectives of the proposed conversion models,
as well as of the political means to be employed in effectuating a
transition.
S. No serious consideration has been given, in any proposed
conversion plan, to the fundamental nonmilitary function of war
and armaments in modern society, nor has any explicit attempt been
made to devise a viable substitute for it. This criticism will be
developed in sections 5 and 6.
SECTION 3
DISARMAMENT SCENARIOS
SCENARIOS, as they have come to be called, are hypothetical
constructions of future events. Inevitably, they re composed of
varying proportions of established fact, reasonable inference, and
more or less inspired guess-work. Those which have been suggested
as model procedures for effectuating international arms control
and eventual disarmament are necessarily imaginative, al-though
closely reasoned; in this respect they resemble the "war games"
analyses of the Rand Corporation, with which they share a common
conceptual origin.
All such scenarios that have been seriously put forth imply a
dependence on bilateral or multilateral agreement between the
great powers. In general, they call for a progressive phasing out
of gross armaments, military forces, weapons, and weapons
technology, coordinated with elaborate matching procedures of
verification, inspection, and machinery for the settlement of
international disputes. It should be noted that even proponents of
unilateral disarmament qualify their proposals with an implied
requirement of reciprocity, very much in the manner of a scenario
of graduated response in nuclear war. The advantage of unilateral
initiative lies in its political value as an expression of good
faith, as well as in its diplomatic function as a catalyst for
formal disarmament negotiations.
The READ model for disarmament (developed by the Research Program
on Economic Adjustments to Disarmament) is typical of these
scenarios. It is a twelve-year-program, divided into three-year
stages. Each stage includes a separate phase of: reduction of
armed forces; cutbacks of weapons production, inventories, and
foreign military bases; development of international inspection
procedures and control conventions; and the building up of a
sovereign international disarmament organization. It anticipates a
net matching decline in U.S. defense expenditures of only somewhat
more than half the 1965 level, but a necessary re deployment of
some five-sixths of the defense-dependent labor force.
The economic implications assigned by their authors to various
disarmament scenarios diverge widely, The more conservative
models, like that cited above, emphasize economic as well as
military prudence in postulating elaborate fail-safe disarmament
agencies, which themselves require expenditures substantially
substituting for those of the displaced war industries. Such
programs stress the advantages of the smaller economic adjustment
entailed Others emphasize, on the contrary, the magnitude (and the
opposite advantages) of the savings to be achieved from
disarmament. One widely read analysis' estimates the annual cost
of the inspection function of general disarmament throughout the
world as only between two and three percent of current military
expenditures. Both types of plan tend to deal with the anticipated
problem of economic reinvestment only in the aggregate. We have
seen no proposed disarmament sequence that correlates the phasing
out of specific kinds of military spending with specific new forms
of substitute spending.
Without examining disarmament scenarios in greater detail, we may
characterize them with these general comments:
1. Given genuine agreement of intent among the great powers, the
scheduling of arms control and elimination presents no inherently
insurmountable procedural problems. Any of several proposed
sequences might serve as the basis for multilateral agreement or
for the first step in unilateral arms reduction.
2. No major power can proceed with such a program, however, until
it has developed an economic conversion plan fully integrated with
each phase of disarmament. No such plan has yet been developed in
the United States.
3. Furthermore, disarmament scenarios, like proposals for economic
conversion, make no allowance for the non-military functions of
war in modern societies, and offer no surrogate for these
necessary functions. One partial exception is a proposal for the
"unarmed forces of the United States," which we will consider in
section 6.
SECTION 4
WAR AND PEACE -- AS SOCIAL SYSTEMS
WE HAVE DEALT only sketchily with proposed disarmament scenarios
and economic analyses, but the reason r for our seemingly casual
dismissal of so much serious and sophisticated work lies in no
disrespect for its competence. It is rather a question of
relevance. To put it plainly, all these programs, however detailed
and well developed, are abstractions. The most carefully reasoned
disarmament sequence inevitably reads more like the rules of a
game or a classroom exercise in logic than like a prognosis of
real events in the real world. This is as true of today's complex
proposals as it was of the Abbe do St. Pierre's "Plan for
Perpetual Peace in Europe 250 years ago.
Some essential element has clearly been lacking in all these
schemes. One of our first tasks was to try to bring this missing
quality into definable focus, and we believe we have succeeded in
doing so. We find that at the heart of every peace study we have
examined--from the modest technological proposal (e.g., to convert
a poison gas plant to the production of 'socially useful
equivalents) to the most elaborate scenario for universal peace in
our time--lies one common fundamental misconception. It is the
source of the miasma of unreality surrounding such plans. It is
the incorrect assumption that war, as an institution, is
subordinate to the social systems it is believed to serve.
This misconception, although profound and far-reaching, is
entirely comprehensible. Few social clichés are so unquestioningly
accepted as the notion that war is an extension of diplomacy (or
of politics, or of the pursuit of economic objectives ) . If this
were true, it would be wholly appropriate for economists and
political theorists to look on the problems of transition to peace
as essentially mechanical or procedural--as indeed they do,
treating them as logistic corollaries of the settlement of
national conflicts of interest. If this were true, there would be
no real substance to the difficulties of transition. For it is
evident that even in today's world there exists no conceivable
conflict of interest, real or imaginary, between nations or
between social forces within nations, that can-not be resolved
without recourse to war--if such resolution were assigned a
priority of social value. And if this were true, the economic
analyses and disarmament proposals we have referred to, plausible
and well conceived as they may be, would not inspire, as they do,
an inescapable sense of indirection.
The point is that the cliché is not true, and the problems of
transition are indeed substantive rather than merely procedural.
Although war is "used" as an instrument of national and social
policy, the fact that a society is organized for any degree of
readiness for war supersedes its political and economic structure.
War itself is 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.
Once this is correctly understood, the true magnitude of the
problems entailed in a transition to peace--itself a social
system, but without precedent except in a few simple preindustrial
societies--becomes apparent. At the same time, some of the
puzzling superficial contradictions of modern societies can then
be readily rationalized. The "unnecessary" size and power of the
world war industry; the preeminence of the military establishment
in every society, whether open or concealed; the exemption of
military or paramilitary institutions from the accepted social and
legal standards of behavior required elsewhere in the society; the
successful operation of the armed forces and the armaments
producers entirely outside the frame-work of each nation's
economic ground rules: these and other ambiguities closely
associated with the relationship of war to society are easily
clarified, once the priority of war-making potential as the
principal structuring force in society is accepted. Economic
systems, political philosophies, and corpora jures serve and
extend the war system, not vice versa.
It must be emphasized that the precedence of a society's war-
making potential over its other characteristics is not the result
of the "threat" presumed to exist at any one time from other
societies. This is the reverse of the basic situation; "threats"
against the "national interest" are usually created or accelerated
to meet the changing needs of the war system. Only in
comparatively recent times has it been considered politically
expedient to euphemize war budgets as "defense" requirements. The
necessity for governments to distinguish between "aggression"
(bad) and "defense" (good) has been a by-product of rising
literacy and rapid communication. The distinction is tactical
only, a concession to the growing inadequacy of ancient war-
organizing political rationales. Wars are not "caused" by
international conflicts of interest. Proper logical sequence would
make it more often accurate to say that war-making societies
require and thus bring about--such conflicts. The capacity of a
nation to make war expresses the greatest social power it can
exercise; war-making, active or contemplated, is a matter of life
and death on the greatest scale subject to social control. It
should therefore hardly be surprising that the military
institutions in each society claim its highest priorities.
We find further that most of the confusion surrounding the myth
that war-
making is a tool of state policy stems from a general
misapprehension of the functions of war. In general, these are
conceived as: to defend a nation from military attack by another,
or to deter such an attack; to defend or advance a "national
interest"-- economic, political, ideological; to maintain or
increase a nation's military power for its own sake. These are the
visible, or ostensible, functions of war. If there were no others,
the importance of the war establishment in each society might in
fact decline to the subordinate level it is believed to occupy.
And the elimination of war would indeed be the procedural matter
that the disarmament scenarios suggest.
But there are other, broader, more profoundly felt functions of
war in modern societies. It is these invisible, or implied,
functions that maintain war-
readiness as the dominant force in our societies. And it is the
unwillingness or inability of the writers of disarmament scenarios
and re conversion plans to take them into account that has so
reduced the usefulness of their work, and that has made it seem
unrelated to the world we know.
SECTION 5
THE FUNCTIONS OF WAR
AS WE HAVE INDICATED, the preeminence of the concept of war as the
principal organizing force in most societies has been
insufficiently appreciated. This is also true of its extensive
effects throughout the many nonmilitary activities of society.
These effects are less apparent in complex industrial societies
like our own than in primitive cultures, the activities of which
can be more easily and fully comprehended.
We propose in this section to examine these nonmilitary, implied,
and usually invisible functions of war, to the extent that they
bear on the problems of transition to peace for our society. The
military, or ostensible, function of the war system requires no
elaboration; it serves simply to defend or advance the "national
interest" by means of organized violence. It is often necessary
for a national military establishment to create a need for its
unique powers to maintain the franchise, so to speak. And a
healthy military apparatus requires regular "exercise," by
whatever rationale seems expedient, to prevent its atrophy.
The nonmilitary functions of the war system are more basic. They
exist not merely to justify themselves but to serve broader social
purposes. If and when war is eliminated, the military functions it
has served will end with it. But its nonmilitary functions will
not. It is essential, therefore, that we understand their
significance before we can reasonably expect to evaluate whatever
institutions may be proposed to replace them.
Economic
The production of weapons of mass destruction has always been
associated with economic "waste." The term is pejorative, since it
implies a failure of function. But no human activity can properly
be considered wasteful if it achieves its contextual objective.
The phrase "wasteful but necessary," applied not only to war
expenditures but to most of the "unproductive" commercial
activities of our society, is a contradiction in terms. ". . . The
attacks that have since the time of Samuel's criticism of King
Saul been leveled against military expenditures as waste may well
have concealed or misunderstood the point that some kinds of waste
may have a larger social utility."
In the case of military "waste," there is indeed a larger social
utility. It derives from the fact that the "wastefulness" of war
production is exercised entirely outside the framework of the
economy of supply and demand. As such, it provides the only
critically large segment of the total economy that is subject to
complete and arbitrary central control. If modem industrial
societies can be defined as those which have developed the
capacity to produce more than is required for their economic
survival (regardless of the equities of distribution of goods
within them), military spending can be said to furnish the only
balance wheel with sufficient inertia to stabilize the advance of
their economies. The fact that war is "wasteful" is what enables
it to serve this function. And the faster the economy advances,
the heavier this balance wheel must be.
This function is often viewed, over-simply, as a device for the
control of surpluses. One writer on the subject puts it this way:
"Why is war so wonderful? Because it creates artificial demand . .
. the only kind of artificial demand, moreover, that does not
raise any political issues: war, and only war, solves the problem
of inventory." The reference here is to shooting war, but it
applies equally to the general war economy as well. "It is
generally agreed," concludes, more cautiously, the report of a
panel set up by the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency,
"that the greatly expanded public sector since World War 11,
resulting from heavy defense expenditures, has provided additional
protection against depressions, since this sector is not
responsive to contraction in the private sector and has provided a
sort of buffer o balance wheel in the economy."
The principal economic function of war, in our view, that it
provides just such a flywheel. It is not to be confused in
function with the various forms of fiscal control, none of which
directly engages vast numbers of men and units of production. It
is not to be confused with massive government expenditures in
social welfare programs; once initiated, such programs normally
become .Integral parts of the general economy and are no longer
subject to arbitrary control.
But even in the context of the general civilian economy war cannot
be considered wholly "wasteful." Without a long-established war
economy, and without its frequent eruption into large-scale
shooting war, most of the major industrial advances known to
history, beginning with the development of iron, could never have
taken place. Weapons technology structures the economy.
According to the writer cited above, "Nothing is more ironic or
revealing about our society than the fact that hugely destructive
war is a very progressive force in it. . . . War production is
progressive because it is production that would not otherwise have
taken place. (It is not so widely appreciated, for example, that
the civilian standard of living rose during World War II.)" This
is not "ironic or revealing," but essentially a simple statement
of fact.
It should also be noted that war production has a dependably
stimulating effect outside itself. Far from constituting a
"wasteful" drain on the economy, war spending, considered
pragmatically, has been a consistently positive factor in the rise
of gross national product and of individual productivity. A former
Secretary of the Army has carefully phrased it for public
consumption thus: "If there is, as I suspect there is, a direct
relation between the stimulus of large defense spending and a
substantially increased rate of growth of gross national product,
it quite simply follows that defense spending per se might be
countenanced on economic grounds alone [emphasis added] as a
stimulator of the national metabolism." Actually, the fundamental
nonmilitary utility of war in the economy is far more widely
acknowledged than the scarcity of such affirmations as that quoted
above would suggest.
But negatively phrased public recognitions of the importance of
war to the general economy abound. The most familiar example is
the effect of "peace threats" on the stock market, e.g., "Wall
Street was shaken yesterday by news of an apparent peace feeler
from North Vietnam, but swiftly recovered its composure after
about an hour of sometimes indiscriminate selling."' Savings banks
solicit deposits with similar cautionary slogans, e.g., "If peace
breaks out, will you be ready for it?" A more subtle case in point
was the recent refusal of the Department of Defense to permit the
West German government to substitute nonmilitary goods for
unwanted armaments in its purchase commitments from the United
States; the decisive consideration was that the German purchases
should not affect the general (nonmilitary) economy. Other
incidental examples are to be found in the pressures brought to
bear on the Department when it announces plans to close down an
obsolete facility (as a "wasteful" form of "waste"), and in the
usual coordination of stepped-up military activities (as in
Vietnam in 1965) with dangerously rising unemployment rates.
Although we do not imply that a substitute for war in the economy
cannot be devised, no combination of techniques for controlling
employment, production, and consumption has yet been tested that
can remotely compare to it in effectiveness. It is, and has been,
the essential economic stabilizer of modern societies.
Political
The political functions of war have been up to now even more
critical to social stability. It is not surprising nevertheless,
that discussions of economic conversion for peace tend to fall
silent on the matter of political implementation, and that
disarmament scenarios, often sophisticated in their weighing of
international political factors, tend to disregard the political
functions of the war system within individual societies.
These functions are essentially organizational. First of all, the
existence of a society as a political "nation" requires as part of
its definition an attitude of relationship toward other "nations."
This is what we usually call foreign policy. But a nation's
foreign policy can have I substance if it lacks the means of
enforcing its attitude toward other nations. It can do this in a
credible manner only if it implies the threat of maximum political
organization for this purpose; which is to say that it is
organized to some degree for war. War, then, as we have defined it
to include all national activities that recognize the possibility
of armed conflict, is itself the defining element of any nation's
existence vis-à-vis any other nation. Since it is historically
axiomatic that the existence of any form of weaponry insures its
use, we have used the word "peace" as virtually synonymous with
disarmament. By the same token, "war" is virtually synonymous with
nationhood. The elimination of war implies the inevitable
elimination of national sovereignty and the traditional nation-
state .
The war system not only has been essential to the existence of
nations as independent political entities, but has been equally
indispensable to their stable internal political structure.
Without it, no government has ever been able to obtain
acquiescence in its "legitimacy," or right to rule its society.
The possibility of war provides the sense of eternal necessity
without which no government can long remain in power. The
historical record reveals one instance after another where the
failure of a regime to maintain the credibility of a war threat
led to its dissolution, by the forces of private interest, of
reactions to social injustice, or of other disintegrative
elements. The organization of a society for the possibility of war
is its principal political stabilizer. It is ironic that this
primary function of war has been generally recognized by
historians only where it has been expressly acknowledged--in the
pirate societies of the great conquerors.
The basic authority of a modern state over its people resides in
its war powers. (There is, in fact, good reason to believe that
codified law had its origins in the rules of conduct established
by military victors for dealing with the defeated enemy, which
were later adapted to apply to all subject populations.7) On a
day-to-day basis, it is represented by the institution of police,
armed organizations charged expressly with dealing with "internal
enemies" in a military manner. Like the conventional "external"
military, the police are also substantially exempt from many
civilian legal restraints on their social behavior. In some
countries, the artificial distinction between police and other
military forces does not exist. On the long-term basis, a
government's emergency war powers --inherent in the structure of
even the most libertarian of nations--define the most significant
aspect of the relation between state and citizen.
In advanced modern democratic societies, the war system has
provided political leaders with another political-economic
function of increasing importance: it has served as the last great
safeguard against the elimination of necessary social classes. As
economic productivity increases to a level further and further
above that of minimum subsistence, it becomes more and more
difficult for a society to maintain distribution patterns insuring
the existence of "hewers of wood and drawers of water." The
further progress of automation can be expected to differentiate
still more sharply between "superior" workers and what Ricardo
called "menials," while simultaneously aggravating the problem of
maintaining an unskilled labor supply.
The arbitrary nature of war expenditures and of other military
activities make them ideally suited to control these essential
class relationships. Obviously, if the war system were to be
discarded, new political machinery would be needed at once to
serve this vital sub function. Until it is developed, the
continuance of the war system must be assured, if for no other
reason, among others, than 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.
Sociological
Under this heading, we will examine a nexus of functions served by
the war system that affect human behavior in society. In general,
they are broader in application and less susceptible to direct
observation than the economic and political factors previously
considered.
The most obvious of these functions is the time-honored use of
military institutions to provide antisocial elements with an
acceptable role in the social structure. The disintegrative,
unstable social movements loosely described as "fascist" have
traditionally taken root in societies that have lacked adequate
military or paramilitary outlets to meet the needs of these
elements. This function has been critical in periods of rapid
change. The danger signals are easy to recognize, even though the
stigmata bear different names at different times. The current
euphemistic clichés "juvenile delinquency" and "alienation"--
have had their counterparts in every age. In earlier days these
conditions were dealt with directly by the military without the
complications of due process, usually through press gangs or
outright enslavement. But, it is not hard to visualize, for
example, the degree of social disruption that might have taken
place in the United States during the last two decades if the
problem of the socially disaffected of the post-World War II
period had not been foreseen and effectively met The younger, and
more dangerous, of these hostile social
groupings have been kept under control by the Selective Service
System.
This system and its analogues elsewhere finish remarkably clear
examples of disguised military utility. Informed persons in this
country have never accepted the official rationale for a peacetime
draft--military necessity, preparedness, etc.--as worthy of
serious consideration. But what has gained credence among
thoughtful men is the rarely voiced, less easily refuted,
proposition that the institution of military service has a
"patriotic" priority in our society that must be maintained for
its own sake. Ironically, the simplistic official justification
for selective service comes closer to the mark, once the non-
military functions of military institutions are understood. As a
control device over the hostile, nihilistic, and potentially
unsettling elements of a society in transition, the draft can
again be defended, and quite convincingly, as a "military"
necessity.
Nor can it be considered a coincidence that overt military
activity, and thus the level of draft calls, tend to follow the
major fluctuations in the unemployment rate in the lower age
groups. This rate, in turn, is a time-tested herald of social
discontent. It must be noted also, that the armed forces in every
civilization have provided the principal state-supported haven for
what we now call the "unemployable." The typical European standing
army (of fifty years ago) consisted of "... troops unfit for
employment in commerce, industry, or agriculture, led by officers
unfit to practice any legitimate profession or to conduct a
business enterprise."8 This is still largely true, if less
apparent. In a sense, this function of the military as the
custodian of the economically or culturally deprived was the
forerunner of most contemporary civilian social-
welfare programs, from the W.P.A. to various forms of "socialized"
medicine and social security. It is interesting that liberal
sociologists currently proposing to use the Selective Service
System as a medium of cultural upgrading of the poor consider this
a novel application of military practice.
Although it cannot be said absolutely that such critical measures
of social control as the draft require a military rationale, no
modern society has yet been willing to risk experimentation with
any other kind. Even during such periods of comparatively simple
social crisis as the so-called Great Depression of the l930s, it
was deemed prudent by the government to invest minor make-work
projects, like the "Civilian" Conservation Corps, with a military
character, and to place the more ambitious National Recovery
Administration under the direction of a professional army officer
at its inception. Today, at least one small Northern
European country, plagued with uncontrollable unrest among its
"alienated youth," is considering the expansion of its armed
forces, despite the problem of making credible the expansion of a
non-existent external threat.
Sporadic efforts have been made to promote general recognition of
broad national values free of military connotation, but they have
been ineffective. For example, to enlist public support of even
such modest programs of social adjustment as "fighting inflation"
or "maintaining physical fitness" it has been necessary for the
government to utilize a patriotic ( i.e., military ) incentive. It
sells "defense bonds and it equates health with military
preparedness. This is not surprising; since the concept of
"nationhood' implies readiness for war, a "national" program must
do likewise.
In general, the war system provides the basic motivation for
primary social organization. In so doing, it reflects on the
societal level the incentives of individual human behavior. The
most important of these, for social purposes, is the individual
psychological rationale for allegiance to a society and its
values. Allegiance requires a cause; a cause requires an enemy.
This much is obvious; the critical point is that the enemy that
defines the cause must seem genuinely formidable. Roughly
speaking, the presumed power of the "enemy" sufficient to warrant
an individual sense of allegiance to a society must be
proportionate to the size and complexity of the society. Today, of
course, that power must be one of unprecedented magnitude and
frightfulness.
It follows, from the patterns of human behavior, that the
credibility of a social "enemy demands similarly a readiness of
response in proportion to its menace. In a broad social context,
"an eye for an eye" still characterizes the only acceptable
attitude toward a presumed great of aggression, despite contrary
religious and moral precepts governing personal conduct. The
remoteness of personal decision from social consequence in a
modern society makes it easy for its members to maintain this
attitude without being aware of it. A recent example is the war in
Vietnam; a less recent one was the bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.9 In each case, the extent and gratuitousness of the
slaughter were abstracted into political formulae by most
Americans, once the proposition that the victims were "enemies"
was established. The war system makes such an abstracted response
possible in nonmilitary contexts as well. A conventional example
of this mechanism is the inability of most people to connect, let
us say, the starvation of millions in India with their own past
conscious political decision-making. Yet the sequential logic
linking a decision to restrict grain production in America with an
eventual famine in Asia is obvious, unambiguous, and unconcealed.
What gives the war system its preeminent role in social
organization, as elsewhere, is its unmatched authority over life
and death. It must be emphasized again that the war system is not
a mere social extension of the presumed need for individual human
violence, but itself in turn serves to rationalize most
nonmilitary killing. It also provides the precedent for the
collective willingness of members of a society to pay a blood
price for institutions far less central to social organization
than war. To take a handy example, ". . . rather than accept
speed I limits of twenty miles an hour we prefer to let
automobiles kill forty thousand people a year."l0 A Rand I analyst
puts it in more general terms and less rhetorically: "I am sure
that there is, in effect, a desirable level of automobile
accidents--desirable, that is, from a broad point of view; in the
sense that it is a necessary concomitant of things of greater
value to society." The point may seem too obvious for iteration,
but it is essential to an understanding of the important
motivational function of war as a model for collective sacrifice.
A brief look at some defunct premodern societies is instructive.
One of the most noteworthy features common to the larger, more
complex, and more successful of ancient civilizations was their
widespread use of the blood sacrifice. If one were to limit
consideration to those cultures whose regional hegemony was so
complete that the prospect of "war" had become virtually
inconceivable --as was the case with several of the great pre-
Columbian societies of the Western Hemispheric it would be found
that some form of ritual killing occupied a position of paramount
social importance in each. Invariably, the ritual was invested
with mythic or religious significance; as with all religious and
totemic practice, however, the ritual masked a broader and more
important social function.
In these societies, the blood sacrifice served the purpose of
maintaining a vestigial "earnest" of the society's capability and
willingness to make war-i.e., kill and be killed in the event that
some mystical--i.e., unforeseen --circumstance were to give rise
to the possibility. That the "earnest" was not an adequate
substitute for genuine military organization when the unthinkable
enemy, such as the Spanish conquistadors, actually appeared on the
scene in no way negates the function of the ritual. It was
primarily, if not exclusively, a symbolic reminder that war had
once been the central organizing force of the society, and that
this condition might recur.
It does not follow that a transition to total peace in modern
societies would require the use of this model, even in less
"barbaric" guise. But the historical analogy serves as a reminder
that a viable substitute for war as a social system cannot be a
mere symbolic charade. It must involve real risk of real personal
destruction, and on a scale consistent with the size and
complexity of modern social systems. Credibility is the key.
Whether the substitute is ritual in nature or functionally
substantive, unless it provides a believable life-and-death threat
it will not serve the socially organizing function of war.
The existence of an accepted external menace, then, is essential
to social cohesiveness as well as to the acceptance of political
authority. The menace must be believable, it must be of a
magnitude consistent with the complexity of the society
threatened, and it must appear, at least, to affect the entire
society.
Ecological
Man, like all other animals, is subject to the continuing process
of adapting to the limitations of his environment. But the
principal mechanism he has utilized for this purpose is unique
among living creatures. To forestall the inevitable historical
cycles of inadequate food supply, post-Neolithic man destroys
surplus members of his own species by organized warfare.
Ethologistsl2 have often observed that the organized slaughter of
members of their own species is virtually unknown among other
animals. Man's special propensity to kill his own kind (shared to
a limited degree with rats) may be attributed to his inability to
adapt anachronistic patterns of survival (like primitive hunting)
to his development of "civilizations" in which these patterns
cannot be effectively sublimated. It may be attributed to other
causes that have been suggested, such as a maladapted "territorial
instinct," etc. Nevertheless, it exists and its social expression
in war constitutes a biological control of his relationship to his
natural environment that is peculiar to man alone.
War has served to help assure the survival of the human species.
But as an evolutionary device to improve it, war is almost
unbelievably inefficient. With few exceptions, the selective
processes of other living creatures promote both specific survival
and genetic improvement. When a conventionally adaptive animal
faces one of its periodic crises of insufficiency, it is the
"inferior" members of the species that normally disappear. An
animal's social response to such a crisis may take the form of a
mass migration, during which the weak fall by the wayside. Or it
may follow the dramatic and more efficient pattern of lemming
societies, in which the weaker members voluntarily disperse,
leaving available food supplies for the stronger. In either case,
the strong survive and the weak fall. In human societies, those
who fight and die in wars for survival are in general its
biologically stronger members. This is natural selection in
reverse
The regressive genetic effect of war has been often notedl3 and
equally often deplored, even when it confuses biological and
cultural factors.l3 The disproportionate loss of the biologically
stronger remains inherent in traditional warfare. It serves to
underscore the fact that survival of the species, rather than its
improvement, is the fundamental purpose of natural selection, if
it can be said to have a purpose, just as it is the basic premise
of this study.
But as the polemologist Gaston Bouthoull5 has pointed out, other
institutions that were developed to serve this ecological function
have proved even less satisfactory. (They include such established
forms as these: infanticide, practiced chiefly in ancient and
primitive societies; sexual mutilation; monasticism; forced
emigration; extensive capital punishment, as in old China and
eighteenth century England; and other similar, usually localized,
practices.)
Man's ability to increase his productivity of the essentials of
physical life suggests that the need for protection against
cyclical famine may be nearly obsolete." It has thus tended to
reduce the apparent importance of the basic ecological function of
war, which is generally disregarded by peace theorists. Two
aspects of it remain especially relevant, however. The first is
obvious: current rates of population growth, compounded by
environmental threat of chemical and other contaminants, may well
bring about a new crisis of insufficiency. If so, it is likely to
be one of unprecedented global magnitude, not merely regional or
temporary. Conventional methods of warfare would almost surely
prove inadequate, in this event, to reduce the consuming
population to a level consistent with survival of the species.
The second relevant factor is the efficiency of modern methods of
mass destruction. Even if their use is not required to meet a
world population crisis, they offer, perhaps paradoxically, the
first opportunity in the history I of man to halt the regressive
genetic effects of natural selection by war. Nuclear weapons are
indiscriminate. Their application would bring to an end the
disproportionate destruction of the physically stronger members of
the species (the "warriors") in periods of war. Whether this
prospect of genetic gain would offset the unfavorable mutations
anticipated from post nuclear radioactivity we have not yet
determined. What gives the question a bearing on our study is the
possibility that the determination may yet have to be made.
Another secondary ecological trend bearing on projected population
growth is the regressive effect of certain medical advances.
Pestilence, for example, is no longer an important factor in
population control. The problem of increased life expectancy has
been aggravated. These advances also pose a potentially more
sinister problem, in that undesirable genetic traits that were
formerly self-
liquidating are now medically maintained.
Many diseases that were once fatal at preprocreational ages are
now cured; the effect of this development is to perpetuate
undesirable susceptibilities and mutations. It seems clear that a
new quasi-eugenic function of war is now in process of formation
that will have to be taken into account in any transition plan.
For the time being, the Department of Defense appears to have
recognized such factors, as has been demonstrated by the planning
under way by the Rand Corporation to cope with the breakdown in
the ecological balance anticipated after a thermonuclear war. The
Department has also begun to stockpile birds, for example,
against the expected proliferation of radiation-
resistant insects, etc.
Cultural and Scientific
The declared order of values in modern societies gives a high
place to the so-called "creative" activities, and an even higher
one to those associated with the advance of scientific knowledge.
Widely held social values can be translated into political
equivalents, which in turn may bear on the nature of a transition
to peace. The attitudes of those who hold these values must be
taken into account in the planning of the transition. The
dependence, therefore, of cultural and scientific achievement on
the I war system would be an important consideration in a
transition plan even if such achievement had no inherently
necessary social function.
Of all the countless dichotomies invented by scholars to account
for the major differences in art styles and cycles, only one has
been consistently unambiguous in its application to a variety of
forms and cultures. However it may be verbalized, the basic
distinction is this: I Is the work war-oriented or is it not?
Among primitive
peoples, the war dance is the most important art form. I
Elsewhere, literature, music, painting, sculpture, and
architecture that has won lasting acceptance has invariably dealt
with a theme of war, expressly or implicitly, and has expressed
the centricity of war to society. The war in question may be
national conflict, as in Shakespeare plays, Beethoven's music, or
Goya's paintings, or it may be reflected in the form of religious,
social, or moral struggle, as in the work of Dante, Rembrandt, and
Bach. Art that cannot be classified as war-oriented is usually
described as "sterile," "decadent," and so on. Application of the
"war standard" to works of art may often leave room for debate in
individual cases, but there is no question of its role as the
fundamental determinant of cultural values. Aesthetic and moral
standards have a common anthropological origin, in the exaltation
of bravery, the willingness to kill and risk death in tribal
warfare.
It is also instructive to note that the character of a society's
culture has borne a close relationship to its I war-making
potential, in the context of its times. It is no accident that
the current "cultural explosion" in the United States is taking
place during an era marked by an unusually rapid advance in
weaponry. This relation ship is more generally recognized than
the literature on the subject would suggest. For example, many
artists and writers are now beginning to express concern over I
the limited creative options they envisage in the warless world
they think, or hope, may be soon upon us. They are currently
preparing for this possibility by unprecedented experimentation
with meaningless forms; their interest in recent years has been
increasingly engaged by the abstract pattern, the gratuitous
emotion, the random happening, and the unrelated sequence.
The relationship of war to scientific research and discovery is
more explicit. War is the principal motivational force for the
development of science at every level, from the abstractly
conceptual to the narrowly technological. Modern society places a
high value on "pure" science, but it is historically inescapable
that all the significant discoveries that have been made about the
natural world have been inspired by the real or imaginary military
necessities of their epochs. The consequences of the discoveries
have indeed gone far afield, but war has always provided the basic
incentive.
Beginning with the development of iron and steel, and proceeding
through the discoveries of the laws of motion and thermodynamics
to the age of the atomic particle, the synthetic polymer, and the
space capsule, no important scientific advance has not been at
least indirectly initiated by an implicit requirement of weaponry.
More prosaic examples include the transistor radio (an outgrowth
of military communications requirements ), the assembly line (
from Civil War firearms needs ), the steel-frame building (from
the steel battleship), the canal lock, and so on. A typical
adaptation can be seen in a device as modest as the common
lawnmower; it developed from the revolving scythe devised by
Leonardo da Vinci to precede a horse-powered vehicle into enemy
ranks.
The most direct relationship can be found in medical technology.
For example, a giant "walking machine," an amplifier of body
motions invented for military use in difficult terrain, is now
making it possible for many previously confined to wheelchairs to
walk. The Vietnam war alone has led to spectacular improvements in
amputation procedures, blood-handling techniques, and surgical
logistics. It has stimulated new large-scale research on malaria
and other tropical parasite diseases; it is hard to estimate how
long this work would otherwise have been delayed, despite its
enormous nonmilitary importance to nearly half the world's
population.
Other
We have elected to omit from our discussion of the nonmilitary
functions of war those we do not consider critical to a transition
program. This is not to say they are I unimportant, however, but
only that they appear to present no special problems for the
organization of a I peace-oriented social system. They include the
following:
War as a general social release. This is a psycho social function,
serving the same purpose for a society as do the holiday, the
celebration, and the orgy for the individual-- the release and
redistribution of undifferentiated tensions. War provides for the
periodic necessary readjustment of standards of social behavior (
the "moral climate") and for the dissipation of general boredom,
one of the most consistently undervalued and unrecognized of
social phenomena.
War as a generational stabilizer. This psychological function,
served by other behavior patterns in other animals, enables the
physically deteriorating older generation to maintain its control
of the younger, destroying it if necessary.
War as an ideological clarifier. The dualism that characterizes
the traditional dialectic of all branches of philosophy and of
stable political relationships stems from war as the prototype of
conflict. Except for secondary considerations, there cannot be, to
put it as simply as possible, more than two sides to a question
because there cannot be more than two sides to a war.
War as the basis for international understanding. Before the
development of modern communications, the strategic requirements
of war provided the only substantial incentive for the enrichment
of one national culture with the achievements of another. Although
this is still the case in many international relationships, the
function is obsolescent.
We have also forgone extended characterization of those functions
we assume to be widely and explicitly recognized. An obvious
example is the role of war as controller of the quality and degree
of unemployment. This is more than an economic and political sub
function; its sociological, cultural, and ecological aspects are
also important, although often teleonomic. But none affect the
general problem of substitution. The same is true of certain other
functions; those we have included are sufficient to define the
scope of the problem.
Research Material
SECTION 6
SUBSTITUTES FOR THE
FUNCTIONS OF WAR
BY NOW it should be clear that the most detailed and comprehensive
master plan for a transition to world peace will remain academic
if it fails to deal forth-rightly with the problem of the critical
nonmilitary functions of war. The social needs they serve are
essential; if the war system no longer exists to meet them,
substitute institutions will have to be established for the
purpose. These surrogates must be "realistic," which is to say
of scope and nature that can be conceived and implemented in the
context of present-day social capabilities. This is not the truism
it may appear to be; the requirements of radical social change
often reveal the distinction between a most conservative
projection and a wildly utopian scheme to be fine indeed.
In this section we will consider some possible substitutes for
these functions. Only in rare instances have they been put forth
for the purposes which concern us I here, but we see no reason to
limit ourselves to proposals that address themselves explicitly to
the problem as we I have outlined it. We will disregard the
ostensible, or military, functions of war; it is a premise of
this study that the transition to peace implies absolutely will no
longer exist in any relevant sense. We will also disregard the non
critical functions exemplified at the end of the preceding
section.
Economic
Economic surrogates for war must meet two principal criteria. They
must be "wasteful," in the common sense of the word, and they must
operate outside the normal supply-demand system. A corollary that
should be obvious is that the magnitude of the waste must be
subject to arbitrary control. Public housing starts, to meet the
needs of a particular society. An economy as advanced and complex
as our own requirements of a stable economy might dictate. An
economy as advanced and complex as our own requites the planned
average annual destruction of not less than 10 percent of gross
national product1 if it is effectively to fulfill its stabilizing
function. When the mass of a balance wheel is inadequate to the
power it is intended to control, its effect can be self-defeating,
as with a runaway locomotive. The analogy, though crude2, is
especially apt for the American economy, as our record of
cyclical depressions shows. All have taken place during periods of
grossly inadequate military spending.
Those few economic conversion programs which by implication
acknowledge the nonmilitary economic function of war (at least to
some extent) tend to assume that so-called social-welfare
expenditures will fill the vacuum created by the disappearance of
military spending. When one considers the backlog of unfinished
business--proposed but still unexecuted--in this field, the
assumption seems plausible. Let us examine briefly, the following
list, which is more or less typical of general social welfare
programs.3
Health. Drastic expansion of medical research, education, and
training facilities; hospital and clinic construction; the general
objective of complete government guaranteed health care for all,
at a level consistent with current developments in medical
technology.
Education. The equivalent of the foregoing in teacher training;
schools and libraries; the drastic upgrading of standards, with
the general objective of making available for all an attainable
educational goal equivalent to what is now considered a
professional degree.
Housing. Clean, comfortable, safe, and spacious living space for
all, at the level now enjoyed by about 15 percent of the
population in this country (less in most others).
Transportation. The establishment of a system of mass public
transportation making it possible for all to travel to and from
areas of work and recreation quickly, comfortably, and
conveniently, and to travel privately for pleasure rather than
necessity.
Physical environment. The development and protection of water
supplies, forests, parks, and other natural resources; the
elimination of chemical and bacterial contaminants from air,
water, and soil.
Poverty. The genuine elimination of poverty, defined by a standard
consistent with current economic productivity, by means of a
guaranteed annual income or whatever system of distribution will
best assure its achievement.
This is only a sampler of the more obvious domestic social welfare
items, and we have listed it in a deliberately broad, perhaps
extravagant, manner. In the past, such a vague and ambitious
sounding "program" would have been dismissed out of hand, without
serious consideration; it would clearly have been, prima facie,
far too costly, quite apart from its political implications.4 Our
objection to it, on the other hand, could hardly be more
contradictory. As an economic substitute for war it is inadequate
because it would be far too cheap.
If this seems paradoxical, it must be remembered that up to now
all proposed social-welfare programs have had to be measured
within the war economy, not as a replacement for it. The old
slogan about a battleship or an ICBM costing as much as x
hospitals or y schools or z homes takes on a very different
meaning if there are to be no more battleships or ICBM's.
Since the list is general , we have elected to forestall the
tangential controversy that surrounds arbitrary cost projections
by offering no individual cost estimates. But the maximum program
that could be physically effected along the lines indicated could
approach the established level of military spending only for a
limited time--in our opinion, subject to a detailed cost-and-
feasibility analysis, less than ten years. In this short period,
at this rate, the major goals of the program would have been
achieved. Its capital-investment phase would have been completed,
and it would have established a permanent comparatively modest
level of annual operating cost-- within the framework of the
general economy.
Here is the basic weakness of the social-welfare surrogate. On the
short-
term basis, a maximum program of this sort could replace a normal
military spending program, provided it was designed, like the
military model, to be subject to arbitrary control. Public
housing starts, for example, or the development of modern medical
centers might be accelerated or halted from time to time, as the
requirement of a stable economy might dictate. But on the long
term basis, social-welfare spending, no matter how often
redefined, would necessarily become an integral, accepted part of
the economy, of no more value as a stabilizer than the automobile
industry or old age and survivors' insurance. Apart from whatever
merit social-welfare programs are deemed to have for their own
sake, their function as a substitute for war in the economy would
thus be self-liquidating. They might serve, however, as expedients
pending the development of more durable substitute measures.
Another economic surrogate that has been proposed is a series of
giant "space research" programs. These have already demonstrated
their utility in more modest scale within the military economy.
What has been implied, although not yet expressly put forth, is
the development of a long-range sequence of space-research
projects with largely unattainable goals This kind of program
offers several advantages lacking in the social welfare model.
First, it is unlikely to phase itself out, regardless of the
predictable "surprises" science has in store for us: the universe
is too big. In the event some individual project unexpectedly
succeeds there would be no dearth of substitute problems. For
example, if colonization of the moon proceeds on schedule, it
could then become "necessary" to establish a beachhead on Mars or
Jupiter, and so on. Second, it need be no more dependent on the
general supply-demand economy than its military prototype. Third,
it lends itself extraordinarily well to arbitrary control.
Space research can be viewed as the nearest modern equivalent yet
devised to the pyramid-building, and similar ritualistic
enterprises, of ancient societies. It is true that the scientific
value of the space program, even of what has already been
accomplished, is substantial on its own terms. But current
programs are absurdly and obviously disproportionate, in the
relationship of the knowledge sought to the expenditures
committed. All but a small fraction of the space budget, measured
by the standards of comparable scientific objectives, must be
charged de facto to the military economy. Future space research,
projected as a war surrogate, would further reduce the
"scientific" rationale of its budget to a minuscule percentage
indeed. As a purely economic substitute for war, therefore,
extension of the space program warrants serious consideration.
In Section 3 we pointed out that certain disarmament models,
which we called conservative, postulated extremely expensive and
elaborate inspection systems. Would it be possible to extend and
institutionalize such systems to the point where they might serve
as economic surrogates for war spending? The organization of fail
safe inspection machinery could well be ritualized in a manner
similar to that of established military processes. "Inspection
teams" might be very like armies, and their technical equipment
might be very like weapons. Inflating the inspection budget to
military scale presents no difficulty. The appeal of this kind of
scheme lies in the comparative ease of transition between two
parallel systems.
The "elaborate inspection" surrogate is fundamentally fallacious,
however. Although it might be economically useful, as well as
politically necessary, during the disarmament transition, it would
fail as a substitute for the economic function of war for one
simple reason. Peace-keeping inspection is part of a war system,
not of a peace system. It implies the possibility of weapons
maintenance or manufacture, which could not exist in a world at
peace as here defined. Massive inspection also implies sanctions,
and thus war-readiness.
The same fallacy is more obvious in plans to create a patently
useless "defense conversion" apparatus. The long-discredited
proposal to build "total" civil defense facilities is one example;
another is the plan to establish a giant antimissile missile
complex (Nike-X,et.al.). These programs, of course, are economic
rather than strategic. Nevertheless, they are not substitutes for
military spending but merely different forms of it.
A more sophisticated variant is the proposal to establish the
"Unarmed Forces" of the United States. This would conveniently
maintain the entire institutional military structure, redirecting
it essentially toward social-welfare activities on a global scale.
It would be, in effect, a giant military Peace Corps. There is
nothing inherently unworkable about this plan, and using the
existing military system to effectuate its own demise is both
ingenious and convenient. But even on a greatly magnified world
basis, social-welfare expenditures must sooner or later re-enter
the atmosphere of the normal economy. The practical transitional
virtues of such a scheme would thus be eventually negated by its
inadequacy as a permanent economic stabilizer.
Political
The war system makes the stable government of societies possible.
It does this essentially by providing an external necessity for a
society to accept political rule. In so doing, it establishes the
basis for nationhood and the authority of government to control
its constituents. What other institution or combination of
programs might serve these functions in its place?
We have already pointed out that the end of war means the end of
national sovereignty, and thus the end of nationhood as we know it
today. But this does not necessarily mean the end of nations in
the administrative sense, and internal political power will remain
essential to a stable society. The emerging "nations" of the peace
epoch must continue to draw political authority from some source.
A number of proposals have been made governing the relations
between nations after total disarmament; all are basically
juridical in nature. They contemplate institutions more or less
like a World Court, or a United Nations, but vested with real
authority. They may or may not serve their ostensible post
military purpose of settling international disputes, but we need
not discuss that here. None would offer effective external
pressure on a peace-world nation to organize itself politically.
It might be argued that a well-armed international police force,
operating under the authority of such a supranational "court,"
could well serve the function of external enemy. This, however,
would constitute a military operation, like the inspection schemes
mentioned, and, like them, would be inconsistent with the premise
of an end to the war system. It is possible that a variant of the
"Unarmed Forces" idea might be developed in such a way that its
"constructive" (i.e., social welfare) activities could be combined
with and economic "threat" of sufficient size and credibility to
warrant political organization. Would this kind of threat also be
contradictory of our basic premise? --that is, in our view, but we
are skeptical of its capacity to evoke credibility. Also, the
obvious destabilizing effect of any global social welfare
surrogate on politically necessary class relationships would
create an entirely new set of transition problems at least equal
in magnitude.
Credibility, in fact, lies at the heart of the problem of
developing a political substitute for war. This is where the
space-race proposals, in many ways so well suited as economic
substitutes for war, fall short. The most ambitious and
unrealistic space project cannot of itself generate a believable
external menace. It has been hotly argued that such a menace would
offer the "last, best hope of peace," etc., by uniting mankind
against the danger of destruction by "creatures" from other
planets or from outer space. Experiments have been proposed to
test the credibility of an out-of-our-world invasion threat; it is
possible that a few of the more difficult-to-explain "flying
saucer" incidents of recent years were in fact early experiments
of this kind. If so, they could hardly have been judged
encouraging. We anticipate no difficulties in making a "need" for
a giant super space program credible for economic purposes, even
were there not ample precedent; extending it, for political
purposes, to include features unfortunately associated with
science fiction would obviously be a more dubious undertaking.
Nevertheless, an effective political substitute for war would
require "alternate enemies," some of which might seem equally far-
fetched in the context of the current war system. It may be, for
instance, that gross pollution of the environment can eventually
replace the possibility of mass destruction by nuclear weapons as
the principal apparent threat to the survival of the species.
Poisoning of the air, and of the principal sources of food and
water supply, is already well advanced, and at first glance would
seem promising in this respect; it constitutes a threat that can
be dealt with only through social organization and political
power. But from present indications it will be a generation to a
generation and a half before environmental pollution, however
severe, will be sufficiently menacing, on a global scale, to offer
a possible basis for a solution.
It is true that the rate of pollution could be increased
selectively for this purpose; in fact, the mere modifying of
existing programs for the deterrence of pollution could speed up
the process enough to make the threat credible much sooner. But
the pollution problem has been so widely publicized in recent
years that it seems highly improbable that a program of deliberate
environmental poisoning could be implemented in a politically
acceptable manner.
However unlikely some of the possible alternate enemies we have
mentioned may seem, we must emphasize that one must be found, of
credible quality and magnitude, if a transition to peace is ever
to come about without social disintegration. It is more probable,
in our judgment, that such a threat will have to be invented,
rather than developed from unknown conditions. For this reason, we
believe further speculation about its putative nature ill-advised
in this context. Since there is considerable doubt, in our minds,
that any viable political surrogate can be devised, we are
reluctant to compromise, by premature discussion, any possible
option that may eventually lie open to our government.
Sociological
Of the many functions of war we have found convenient to group
together in this classification, two are critical. In a world of
peace, the continuing stability of society will require: 1) an
effective substitute for military institutions that can neutralize
destabilizing social elements and 2) a credible motivational
surrogate for war that can insure social cohesiveness. The first
is an essential element of social control; the second is the basic
mechanism for adapting individual human drives to the needs of
society.
Most proposals that address themselves, explicitly or otherwise,
to the postwar problem of controlling the socially alienated turn
to some variant of the Peace Corp. or the so-called Job Corps for
a solution. The socially disaffected, the economically unprepared,
the psychologically unconformable, the hard-core "delinquents,"
the incorrigible "subversives," and the rest of the unemployable
are seen as somehow transformed by the discipline of a service
modeled on military precedent into more or less dedicated social
service workers. This presumption also informs the otherwise
hardheaded ratiocination of the "Unarmed Forces" plan.
The problem has been addressed, in the language of popular
sociology, by Secretary McNamara. "Even in our abundant societies,
we have reason enough to worry over the tensions that coil and
tighten among underprivileged young people, and finally flail out
in delinquency and crime. What are we to expect ... where mounting
frustrations are likely to fester into eruptions of violence and
extremism?" In a seemingly unrelated passage, he continues: "It
seems to me that we could move toward remedying that inequity [of
the Selective Service System] by asking every young person in the
United States to give two years of service to his country --
whether in one of the military services, in the Peace Corps, or in
some other volunteer developmental work at home or abroad. We
could encourage other countries to do the same." Here, as
elsewhere throughout this significant speech, Mr. McNamara has
focused, indirectly but unmistakably, on one of the key issues
bearing on a possible transition to peace, and has later
indicated, also indirectly, a rough approach to its resolution,
again phrased in the language of the current war system.
It seems clear that Mr. McNamara and other proponents of the
peace-corps surrogate for this war function lean heavily on the
success of the paramilitary Depression programs mentioned in the
last section. We find the precedent wholly inadequate in degree.
Neither the lack of relevant precedent, however, nor the dubious
social-welfare sentimentality characterizing this approach warrant
its rejection without careful study. It may be viable provided,
first, that the military origin of the Corps format be effectively
rendered our of its operational activity, and second, that the
transition from paramilitary activities to "developmental work"
can be effected without regard to the attitudes of the Corps
personnel or to the "value" of the work it is expected to perform.
Another possible surrogate for the control of potential enemies of
society is the reintroduction, in some form consistent with modern
technology and political processes, of slavery. Up to now, this
has been suggested only in fiction, notably in the works of Wells,
Huxley, Orwell, and others engaged in the imaginative anticitution
is needed, as the "alternate enemy" needed to the sociology of the
future. But the fantasies projected in Brave New World and 1984
have seemed less and less implausible over the years since their
publication. The traditional association of slavery with ancient
pre industrial cultures should not blind us to its adaptability to
advanced forms of social organization, nor should its equally
traditional incompatibility with Western moral and economic
values. It is entirely possible that the development of a
sophisticated form of slavery may be an absolute pre-requisite for
social control in a world at peace. As a practical matter,
conversion of the code of military discipline to a euphemized form
of enslavement would entail surprisingly little revision; the
logical step would be the adoption of some form of "universal"
military service.
When it comes to postulating a credible substitute for war capable
of directing human behavior patterns in behalf of social
organization, few options suggest themselves. Like its political
function, the motivational function of war requires the existence
of a genuinely menacing social enemy. The principal difference is
that for purposes of motivating basic allegiance, as distinct from
accepting political authority, the "alternate enemy" must imply a
more immediate, tangible, and directly felt threat of destruction.
It must justify the need for taking and paying a "blood price" in
wide areas of human concern.
In this respect, the possible substitute enemies noted earlier
would be insufficient. One exception might be the environmental-
pollution model, if the danger to society it posed was genuinely
imminent. The fictive models would have to carry the weight of
extraordinary conviction, underscored with a not
inconsiderable actual sacrifice of life; the construction of an
up-to-date mythological or religious structure for this purpose
would present difficulties in our era, but must certainly be
considered.
Games theorists have suggested, in other contexts, the development
of "blood games" for the effective control of individual
aggressive impulses. It is an ironic commentary on the current
state-of war and peace studies that it was left not to scientists
but to the makers of a commercial film to develop a model for this
notion, on the implausible level of popular melodrama, as a
ritualized manhunt. More realistically, such a ritual might be
socialized, in the manner of the Spanish Inquisition and the less
formal witch trials of other periods, for purposes of "social
purification," "state security," or other rationale both
acceptable and credible to postwar societies. The feasibility of
such an updated version of still another ancient institution,
though doubtful, is considerably less fanciful than the wishful
notion of many peace planners that a lasting condition of peace
can be brought about without the most painstaking examination of
every possible surrogate for the essential functions of war. What
is involved here, in a sense, is the quest for William James's
"moral equivalent of war."
It is also possible that the two functions considered under this
heading may be jointly served, in the sense of establishing the
antisocial, for whom a control institution is needed, as the
"alternate enemy" needed to hold society together. The relentless
and irreversible advance of unemployability at all levels of
society, and the similar extension of generalized alienation from
accepted values may make some such program necessary even as an
adjunct to the war system. As before, we will not speculate on
the specific forms this kind of program might take, except to
note that there is again ample precedent, in the treatment meted
out to disfavored, allegedly menacing, ethnic groups in certain
societies during certain historical periods.
Ecological
Considering the shortcomings of war as a mechanism of selective
population control, it might appear that devising substitutes for
this function should be comparatively simple. Schematically this
is so, but the problem of timing the transition to a new
ecological balancing device makes the feasibility of substitution
less certain.
It must be remembered that the limitation of war in this function
is entirely eugenic. War has not been genetically progressive.
But as a system of gross population control to preserve the
species it cannot fairly be faulted. And, as has been pointed out,
the nature of war is itself in transition. Current trends in
warfare--the increased strategic bombing of civilians and the
greater military importance now attached to the destruction of
sources of supply ( as opposed to purely "military" bases and
personnel)--strongly suggest that a truly qualitative improvement
is in the making. Assuming the war system is to continue, it is
more than probable that the regressively selective quality of war
will have been reversed, as its victims become more genetically
representative of their societies.
There is no question but that a universal requirement that
procreation be limited to the products of artificial insemination
would provide a fully adequate substitute control for population
levels. Such a reproductive system would, of course have the added
advantage of being susceptible of direct eugenic management. Its
predictable further development --conception and embryonic growth
taking place wholly under laboratory conditions --would extend
these controls to their logical conclusion. The ecological
function of war under these circumstances would not only be
superseded but surpassed in effectiveness.
The indicated intermediate step--total control of conception with
a variant of the ubiquitous "pill," via water supplies, or certain
essential foodstuffs, offset by a controlled "antidote"--is
already under developmental There would appear to be no
foreseeable need to revert to any of the outmoded practices
referred to in the previous section (infanticide, etc.) as there
might have been if the possibility
of transition to peace had arisen two generations ago.
The real question here, therefore, does not concern the viability
of this war substitute, but the political problems involved in
bringing it about. It cannot be established while the war system
is still in effect. The reason for this is simple: excess
population is war material. As long as any society must
contemplate even a remote possibility of war, it must maintain a
maximum supportable population, even when so doing critically
aggravates an economic liability. This is paradoxical, in view of
war's role in reducing excess population, but it is readily
understood. War controls the general population level, but the
ecological interest of any single society lies in maintaining its
hegemony vis-à-vis other societies. The obvious analogy can be
seen in any free-enterprise economy. Practices damaging to the
society as a whole --both competitive and monopolistic-- are
abetted by the conflicting economic motives of individual capital
interests. The obvious precedent can be found in the seemingly
irrational political difficulties which have blocked universal
adoption of simple birth-control methods. Nations desperately in
need of increasing unfavorable production consumption ratios are
nevertheless unwilling to gamble their possible military
requirements of twenty years hence for this purpose. Unilateral
population control, as practiced in ancient Japan and in other
isolated societies, is out of the question in today's world.
Since the eugenic solution cannot be achieved until the transition
to the peace system takes place, why not wait? One must qualify
the inclination to agree. As we noted earlier, a real possibility
of an unprecedented global crisis of insufficiency exists today,
which the war system may not be able to forestall. If this should
come to pass before an agreed-upon transition to peace were
completed, the result might be irrevocably disastrous. There is
clearly no solution to this dilemma; it is a risk which must be
taken. But it tends to support the view that if a decision is made
to eliminate the war system, it were better done sooner than
later.
Cultural and Scientific
Strictly speaking, the function of war as the determinant of
cultural values and as the prime mover of scientific progress may
not be critical in a world without war. Our criterion for the
basic nonmilitary functions of war has been: Are they necessary to
the survival and stability of society? The absolute need for
substitute cultural value-determinants and for the continued
advance of scientific knowledge is not established. We believe it
important, however, in behalf of those for whom these functions
hold subjective significance, that it be known what they can
reasonably expect in culture and science after a transition to
peace.
So far as the creative arts are concerned, there is no reason to
believe they would disappear, but only that they would change in
character and relative social importance. The elimination of war
would in due course deprive them of their principal conative
force, but it would necessarily take some time for the effect of
this withdrawal to be felt. During the transition, and perhaps for
a generation thereafter, themes of socio-moral conflict inspired
by the war system would be increasingly transferred to the idiom
of purely personal sensibility. At the same time, a new aesthetic
would have to develop. Whatever its name, form, or rationale, its
function would be to express, in language appropriate to the new
period, the once discredited philosophy that art exists for its
own sake. This aesthetic would reject unequivocally the classic
requirement of paramilitary conflict as the substantive content of
great art. The eventual effect of the peace-
world philosophy of art would be democratizing in the extreme, in
the sense that a generally acknowledged subjectivity of artistic
standards would equalize their new, content-free "values."
What may be expected to happen is that art would be reassigned the
role it once played in a few primitive peace-oriented social
systems. This was the function of pure decoration, entertainment,
or play, entirely free of the burden of expressing the socio-moral
values and conflicts of a war-oriented society. It is interesting
that the groundwork for such a value-free aesthetic is already
being laid today, in growing experimentation in art without
content, perhaps in anticipation of a world without conflict. A
cult has developed around a new kind of cultural determinism,
which proposes that the technological form of a cultural
expression determines its values rather than does its ostensibly
meaningful content. Its clear implication is that there is no
"good" or "bad" art, only that which is appropriate to its
(technological) times and that which is not. Its cultural effect
has been to promote circumstantial constructions and unplanned
expressions; it denies to art the reference of sequential logic.
Its significance in this context is that it provides al working
model of one kind of value-free culture we might reasonably
anticipate in a world at peace.
So far as science is concerned, it might appear at first glance
that a giant space research program, the most promising among the
proposed economic surrogates for war, might also serve as the
basic stimulator of scientific research. The lack of fundamental
organized social conflict inherent in space work, however, would
rule it out as an adequate motivational substitute for war when
applied to "pure" science. But it could no doubt sustain the broad
range of technological activity that a space budget of military
dimensions would require. A similarly scaled social-welfare
program could provide a comparable impetus to low-keyed
technological advances, especially in medicine, rationalized
construction methods, educational psychology, etc. The eugenic
substitute for the ecological function of war would also require
continuing research in certain areas of the life sciences.
Apart from these partial substitutes for war, it must be kept in
mind that the momentum given to scientific progress by the great
wars of the past century, and even more by the anticipation of
World War III, is intellectually and materially enormous. It is
our finding that if the war system were to end tomorrow this
momentum is so great that the pursuit of scientific knowledge
could reasonably be expected to go forward without noticeable
diminution for
perhaps two decades. It would then continue, at a progressively
decreasing tempo, for at least another two decades before the
"bank account" of today's unresolved problems would become
exhausted. By the standards of the questions we have learned to
ask today, there would no longer be anything worth knowing still
unknown; we cannot conceive, by definition, of the scientific
questions to ask once those we can now comprehend are answered.
This leads unavoidably to another matter: the intrinsic value of
the unlimited search for knowledge. We of course offer no
independent value judgments here, but it is germane to point out
that a substantial minority of scientific opinion feels that
search to be circumscribed in any case. This opinion is itself a
factor in considering the need for a substitute for the scientific
function of war. For the record, we must also take note of the
precedent that during long periods of human history, often
covering thousands of years, in which no intrinsic social value
was assigned to scientific progress, stable societies did survive
and flourish. Although this could not have been possible in the
modern industrial world, we cannot be certain it may not again be
true in a future world at peace.
SECTION 7
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
The Nature of War
WAR IS NOT, as is widely assumed, primarily an instrument of
policy utilized by nations to extend or defend their expressed
political values or their economic interests. On the contrary, it
is itself the principal basis of organization on which all modern
societies are constructed. The common proximate cause of war is
the apparent interference of one nation with the aspirations of
another. But at the root of all ostensible differences of national
interest lie the dynamic requirements of the war system itself for
periodic armed conflict. Readiness for war characterizes
contemporary social systems more broadly than their economic and
political structures, which it subsumes.
Economic analyses of the anticipated problems of transition to
peace have not recognized the broad pre-eminence of war in the
definition of social systems. The same is true, with rare and only
partial exceptions, of model disarmament "scenarios." For this
reason, the value of this previous work is limited to the
mechanical aspects of transition. Certain features of these models
may perhaps be applicable to a real situation of conversion to
peace; this will depend on their compatibility with a substantive,
rather than a procedural, peace plan. Such a plan can be developed
only from the premise of full understanding of the nature of the
war system it proposes to abolish, which in turn presupposes
detailed comprehension of the functions the war system performs
for society. It will require the construction of a detailed and
feasible system of substitutes for those functions that are
necessary to the stability and survival of human societies.
The Functions of War
The visible, military function of war requires no elucidation; it
is not only obvious but also irrelevant to a transition to the
condition of peace, in which it will by definition be superfluous.
It is also subsidiary in social significance to the implied,
nonmilitary functions of war; those critical to transition can be
summarized in five principal groupings.
1.Economic. War has provided both ancient and modern societies
with a dependable system for stabilizing and controlling national
economies. No alternate method of control has yet been tested in a
complex modern economy that has shown itself remotely comparable
in scope or effectiveness.
2.Political. 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. No
modern political ruling group has successfully controlled its
constituency after failing to sustain the continuing credibility
of an external threat of war.
3.Sociological. War, through the medium of military institutions,
has uniquely served societies, throughout the course of known
history, as an indispensable controller of dangerous social
dissidence and destructive antisocial tendencies. As the most
formidable of threats to life itself, and as the only one
susceptible to mitigation by social organization alone, it has
played another equally fundamental role: the war system has
provided the machinery through which the motivational forces
governing human behavior have been translated into binding social
allegiance. It has thus ensured the degree of social cohesion
necessary to the viability of nations. No other institution, or
groups of institutions, in modern societies, has successfully
served these functions.
4.Ecological. War has been the principal evolutionary device for
maintaining a satisfactory ecological balance between gross human
population and supplies available for its survival. It is unique
to the human species.
5.Cultural and Scientific. War-orientation has determined the
basic standards of value in the creative arts, and has provided
the fundamental motivational source of scientific and
technological progress. The concepts that the arts express values
independent of their own forms and that the successful pursuit of
knowledge has intrinsic social value have long been accepted in
modem societies; the development of the arts and sciences during
this period has been corollary to the parallel development of
weaponry.
Substitutes for the Functions of War: Criterion
The foregoing functions of war are essential to the survival of
the social systems we know today. With two possible exceptions
they are also essential to any kind of stable social organization
that might survive in a warless world. Discussion of the ways and
means of transition to such a world are meaningless unless a)
substitute institutions can be devised to fill these functions, or
b) it can reasonably be hypothecated that the loss or partial loss
of any one function need not destroy the viability of future
societies.
Such substitute institutions and hypotheses must meet varying
criteria. In general, they must be technically feasible,
politically acceptable, and potentially credible to the members of
the societies that adopt them. Specifically, they must be
characterized as follows:
1. Economic. An acceptable economic surrogate for the war system
will require the expenditure of resources for completely
nonproductive purposes at a level comparable to that of the
military expenditures otherwise demanded by the size and
complexity of each society. Such a substitute system of apparent
"waste" must be of a nature that will permit it to remain
independent of the normal supply-demand economy; it must be
subject to arbitrary political control.
2. Political. A viable political substitute for economic control,
appears unpromising in terms must posit a generalized external
menace to each society of a nature and degree sufficient to
require the organization and acceptance of political authority.
3. Sociological. First, in the permanent absence of war, new
institutions must be developed that will effectively control the
socially destructive segments of societies. Second, for purposes
of adapting the physical and psychological dynamics of human
behavior to the needs of social organization, a credible
substitutes proposed for this function that are modeled war must
generate an omnipresent and readily understood fear of personal
destruction. This fear must be of a nature and degree sufficient
to ensure adherence to societal values to the full extent that
they are acknowledged to transcend the value of individual human
life.
4. Ecological. A substitute for war in its function as the
uniquely human system of population control must ensure the
survival, if not necessarily the improvement, of the species, in
terms of its relation to environmental supply.
5. Cultural and Scientific. A surrogate for the function of war as
the determinant of cultural values must establish a basis of
sociomoral conflict of equally compelling force and scope. A
substitute motivational basis for the quest for scientific
knowledge must be similarly informed by a comparable sense of
internal necessity.
Substitutes for the Functions of War: Models
The following substitute institutions, among others, have been
proposed for consideration as replacements for the nonmilitary
functions of war. That they may not have been originally set forth
for that purpose does not preclude or invalidate their possible
application here.
1. Economic. a) A comprehensive social-welfare program, directed
toward maximum improvement of general conditions of human life. b)
A giant open-end space research program, aimed at unreachable
targets. c) A permanent, ritualized, ultra-elaborate disarmament
inspection system, and variants of such a system.
a. Political. a) An omnipresent, virtually omnipotent
international police force. b) An established and recognized
extraterrestrial menace. c) Massive global environmental
pollution. d) Fictitious alternate enemies.
3. Sociological: Control function. a) Programs generally derived
from the Peace Corps model. a) A modern sophisticated form of
slavery. Motivational function. a)Intensified environmental
pollution. b) New religions or other mythologies. c) Socially
oriented blood games. d) Combination forms.
4. Ecological. A comprehensive welfare program, or a master
program of eugenic control.
5. Cultural. No replacement institution offered. Scientific. The
secondary requirements of the space research, social welfare,
and/or eugenics programs.
Substitutes for the Functions of War: Evaluation
The models listed above reflect only the beginning of the quest
for substitute institutions for the functions of war, rather than
a recapitulation of alternatives. It would be both premature and
inappropriate, therefore, to offer final judgments on their
applicability to a transition. More important, it is not enough to
develop peace and after. Furthermore, since the necessary but
complex project of correlating the compatibility of proposed
surrogates for different functions could be treated only in
exemplary fashion at this time, we have elected to withhold such
hypothetical correlations as were tested as statistically
inadequate.
Nevertheless, some tentative and cursory comments on these
proposed functional "solutions" will indicate the scope of the
difficulties involved in this area of peace planning.
Economic. The social-welfare model cannot be expected to remain
outside the normal economy after the conclusion of its
predominantly capital-investment phase; its value in this function
can therefore be only temporary. The space-
research substitute appears to meet both major criteria, and
should be examined in greater detail, especially in respect to its
probable effects on other war functions. "Elaborate inspection"
schemes, although superficially attractive, are inconsistent with
the basic premise of transition to peace. The ''unarmed forces"
variant, logistically similar, is subject to the same functional
criticism as the general social-welfare model.
Political. Like the inspection-scheme surrogates, proposals for
plenipotentiary international police are inherently incompatible
with the ending of the war system. The "unarmed forces" variant,
amended to include unlimited powers of economic sanction, might
conceivably be expanded to constitute a credible external menace.
Development of an acceptable threat from "outer space," presumably
in conjunction with a space-research surrogate for economic
control, appears unpromising in terms of credibility. The
environmental-pollution model does not seem sufficiently
responsive to immediate social control, except through arbitrary
acceleration of current pollution trends; this in turn raises
questions of political acceptability. New, less regressive,
approaches to the creation of fictitious global "enemies" invite
further investigation.
Sociological: Control function. Although the various substitutes
proposed for this function that are modeled roughly on the Peace
Corps appear grossly inadequate in potential scope, they should
not be ruled out without further study. Slavery, in a
technologically modern and conceptually euphemized form, may prove
a more efficient and flexible institution in this area.
Motivational function. Although none of the proposed substitutes
for war as the guarantor of social allegiance can be dismissed out
of hand, each presents serious and special difficulties.
Intensified environmental threats may raise ecological dangers;
myth making dissociated from war may no longer be politically
feasible; purposeful blood games and rituals can far more readily
be devised than implemented. An institution combining this
function with the preceding one, based on, but not necessarily
imitative of, the precedent of organized ethnic repression,
warrants careful consideration.
Ecological. The only apparent problem in the application of an
adequate eugenic substitute for war is that of timing; it cannot
be effectuated until the transition to peace has been completed,
which involves a serious temporary risk of ecological failure.
Cultural. No plausible substitute for this function of war has yet
been proposed. It may be, however, that a basic cultural value-
determinant is not necessary to the survival of a stable society.
Scientific. The same might be said for the function of war as the
prime mover of the search for knowledge. However, adoption of
either a giant space-research program, a comprehensive social-
welfare program, or a master program of eugenic control would
provide motivation for limited technologies.
General Conclusions
It is apparent, from the foregoing, that 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. Although one projected system for filling the
economic function of war seems promising, similar optimism can-not
be expressed in the equally essential political and sociological
areas. The other major nonmilitary functions of war--
ecological, cultural, scientific--raise very different problems,
but it is at least possible that detailed programming of
substitutes in these areas is not prerequisite to transition. More
important, it is not enough to develop adequate but separate
surrogates for the major war functions; they must be fully
compatible and in no degree self-canceling.
Until such a unified program is developed, at least
hypothetically, it is impossible for this or any other group to
furnish meaningful answers to the questions originally presented
to us. When asked how to best to prepare for the advent of peace,
we must first reply, as strongly as we can, that 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 will then be time enough to develop
methods for effectuating the transition; procedural programming
must follow, not precede, substantive solutions.
Such solutions, if indeed they exist, will not be arrived at
without a revolutionary revision of the modes of thought
heretofore considered appropriate to peace research. That we have
examined the fundamental questions involved from a dispassionate,
value-free point of view should not imply that we do not
appreciate the intellectual and emotional difficulties that must
be overcome on all decision-making levels before these questions
are generally acknowledged by others for what they are. They
reflect, on an intellectual level, traditional emotional
resistance to new ( more lethal and thus more "shocking" ) forms
of weaponry. The understated comment of then-
Senator Hubert Humphrey on the publication of On Thermonuclear War
is still very much to the point: "New thoughts, particularly those
which appear to contradict current assumptions, are always painful
for the mind to contemplate."
Nor, simply because we have not discussed them, do we minimize the
massive reconciliation of conflicting interests which domestic as
well as international agreement on proceeding toward genuine peace
presupposes. This factor was excluded from the purview of our
assignment, but we would be remiss if we failed to take it into
account. Although no insuperable obstacle lies in the path of
reaching such general agreements, formidable short-term private-
group and general-class interest in maintaining the war system is
well established and widely recognized. The resistance to peace
stemming from such interest is only tangential, in the long run,
to the basic functions of war, but it will not be easily overcome,
in this country or elsewhere. Some observers, in fact, believe
that it cannot be overcome at all in our time, that the price of
peace is, simply, too high. This bears on our overall conclusions
to the extent that timing in the transference to substitute
institutions may often be the critical factor in their political
feasibility.
It is uncertain, at this time, whether peace will ever be
possible. It is far more questionable, by the objective standard
of continued social survival rather than that of emotional
pacifism, that it would be desirable even if it were demonstrably
attainable. The war system, for all its subjective repugnance to
important sections of "public opinion; has demonstrated its
effectiveness since the beginning of recorded history; it has
provided the basis for the development of many impressively
durable civilizations, including that which is dominant today. It
has consistently provided unambiguous social priorities. It is, on
the whole, a known quantity. A viable system of peace, assuming
that the great and complex questions of substitute institutions
raised in this Report are both soluble and solved, would still
constitute a venture into the unknown, with the inevitable risks
attendant on the unforeseen, however small and however well
hedged.
Government decision-makers tend to choose peace I over war
whenever a real option exists, because it usually appears to be
the "safer" choice. Under most immediate circumstances they are
likely to be right. But in terms of long-
range social stability, the opposite is true. At our present state
of knowledge and reasonable inference, it is the war system that
must be identified with stability, the peace system with social
speculation, however justifiable the speculation may appear, in
terms of subjective I moral or emotional values. A nuclear
physicist once remarked, in respect to a possible disarmament
agreement: "If we could change the world into a world in which no
weapons could be made, that would be stabilizing. But agreements
we can expect with the Soviets would be destabilizing." The
qualification and the bias are equally irrelevant; any condition
of genuine total peace, however achieved, would be destabilizing
until proved otherwise.
If it were necessary at this moment to opt irrevocably for the
retention or for the dissolution of the war system, common
prudence would dictate the former course. But it is not yet
necessary, late as the hour appears. And more factors must
eventually enter the war-peace equation than even the most
determined search for alternative institutions for the functions
of war can be expected to reveal. One group of such factors has
been given only passing mention in this Report; it centers around
the possible obsolescence of the war system itself. We have noted,
for instance, the limitations of the war system in filling its
ecological function and the declining importance of this aspect of
war. It by no means stretches the imagination to visualize
comparable developments which may compromise the efficacy of war
as, for example, an economic controller or as an organizer of
social allegiance. This kind of possibility, however remote,
serves as a reminder that all calculations of contingency not only
involve the weighing of one group of risks against another, but
require a respectful allowance for error on both sides of the
scale.
A more expedient reason for pursuing the investigation of
alternate ways and means to serve the current functions of war is
narrowly political. It is possible that one or more major
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. It is not hard to imagine, in such circumstance, a situation
in which such governments may feel forced to initiate serious
full-scale disarmament proceedings (perhaps provoked by
'accidental" nuclear explosions), and that such negotiations may
lead to the actual disestablishment of military institutions. As
our Report has made clear, this could be catastrophic. It seems
evident that, in the event an important part of the world is
suddenly plunged without sufficient warning into an inadvertent
peace, even partial and inadequate preparation for the possibility
may be better than none. The difference could even be critical.
The models considered in the preceding chapter, both those that
seem promising and those that do not, have one positive feature in
common--an inherent flexibility of phasing. And despite our
strictures against knowingly proceeding into peace-transition
procedures without thorough substantive preparation, our
government must nevertheless be ready to move in this direction
with whatever limited resources of planning are on hand at the
time--if circumstances so require. An arbitrary all-or-nothing
approach is no more realistic in the development of contingency
peace programming than it is anywhere else.
But the principal cause for concern over the continuing
effectiveness of the war system, and the more important reason for
hedging with peace planning, lies in the backwardness of current
war-system programming. Its controls have not kept pace with the
technological advances it has made possible. Despite its
unarguable success to date, even in this era of unprecedented
potential
in mass destruction, it continues to operate largely on a laissez-
faire basis. To the best of our knowledge, no serious quantified
studies have ever been conducted to determine, for example:
--optimum levels of armament production, for purposes of economic
control, at any given series of chronological points and under any
given relationship between civilian production and consumption
patterns;
--correlation factors between draft recruitment policies and
mensurable social dissidence;
--minimum levels of population destruction necessary to maintain
war-threat credibility under varying political conditions;
--optimum cyclical frequency of "shooting' wars under varying
circumstances of historical relationship.
These and other war-function factors are fully susceptible to
analysis by today's computer-based systems, but they have not been
so treated; modern analytical techniques have up to now been
relegated to such aspects of the ostensible functions of war as
procurement, personnel deployment, weapons analysis, and the like.
We do not disparage these types of application, but only deplore
their lack of utilization to greater capacity in attacking
problems of broader scope. Our concern for efficiency in this
context is not aesthetic, economic, or humanistic. It stems from
the axiom that no system can long survive at either input or
output levels that consistently or substantially deviate from an
optimum range. As their data grow increasingly sophisticated, the
war system and its functions are increasingly endangered by such
deviations.
Our final conclusion, therefore, is that it will be necessary for
our government to plan in depth for two general contingencies. The
first, and lesser, is the possibility of a viable general peace;
the second is the successful continuation of the war system. In
our view, careful preparation for the possibility of peace should
be extended, not because we take the position that the end of war
would necessarily be desirable, if it is in fact possible, but
because it may be thrust upon us in some form whether we are ready
for it or not. Planning for rationalizing and quantifying the war
system, on the other hand, to ensure the effectiveness of its
major stabilizing functions, is not only more promising in respect
to anticipated results, but is essential; we can no longer take
for granted that it will continue to serve our purposes well
merely because it always has. The objective of government policy
in regard to war and peace, in this period of uncertainty, must be
to preserve maximum options. The recommendations which follow are
directed to this end.
SECTION 8
RECOMMENDATIONS
(1) WE PROPOSE THE: ESTABLISHMENT, under executive order of the
President, of a permanent War/Peace Research Agency, empowered and
mandated to execute the programs described in (2) and (3) below.
This agency (a) will be provided with non accountable funds
sufficient to implement its responsibilities and decisions at its
own discretion, and (b) will have authority to preempt and
utilize, without restriction, any and all facilities of the
executive branch of the government in pursuit of its objectives.
It will be organized along the lines of the National Security
Council, except that none of its governing, executive, or
operating personnel will hold other public office or governmental
responsibility. Its directorate will be drawn from the broadest
practicable spectrum of scientific disciplines, humanistic
studies, applied creative arts, operating technologies, and
otherwise unclassified professional occupations. It will be
responsible solely to the President, or to other officers of
government temporarily deputized by him. Its operations will be
governed entirely by its own rules of procedure. Its authority
will expressly include the unlimited right to withhold information
on its activities and its decisions, from anyone except the
President, whenever it deems such secrecy to be in the public
interest.
(2) THE FIRST OF THE WAR/PEACE RESEARCH AGENCY'S two principal
responsibilities will be to determine all that can be known,
including what can reasonably be inferred in terms of relevant
statistical probabilities, that may bear on an eventual transition
to a general condition of peace. The findings in this Report may
be considered to constitute the beginning of this study and to
indicate its orientation; detailed records of the investigations
and findings of the Special Study Group on which this Report is
based, will be furnished the agency, along with whatever
clarifying data the agency deems necessary. This aspect of the
agency's work will hereinafter be referred to as "Peace.
Research."
The Agency's Peace Research activities will necessarily include,
but not be limited to, the following:
(a) The creative development of possible substitute institutions
for the principal nonmilitary functions of war.
(b) The careful matching of such institutions against the criteria
summarized in this Report, as refined, revised, and extended by
the agency.
(c) The testing and evaluation of substitute institutions, for
acceptability, feasibility, and credibility, against hypothecated
transitional and postwar conditions; the testing and evaluation of
the effects of the anticipated atrophy of certain unsubstituted
functions.
(d) The development and testing of the correlativity of multiple
substitute institutions, with the eventual objective of
establishing a comprehensive program of compatible war substitutes
suitable for a planned transition to peace, if and when this is
found to be possible and subsequently judged desirable by
appropriate political authorities.
(e) The preparation of a wide-ranging schedule of partial,
uncorrelated, crash programs of adjustment suitable for reducing
the dangers of an unplanned transition to peace effected by force
majeure.
Peace Research methods will include but not be limited to, the
following:
(a) The comprehensive interdisciplinary application of historical,
scientific, technological, and cultural data.
(b) The full utilization of modern methods of mathematical
modeling, analogical analysis, and other, more sophisticated,
quantitative techniques in process of development that are
compatible with computer programming.
(c) The heuristic "peace games" procedures developed during the
course of its assignment by the Special Study Group, and further
extensions of this basic approach to the testing of institutional
functions.
(3) THE WAR/PEACE RESEARCH AGENCY'S other principal responsibility
will be "War Research." Its fundamental objective will be to
ensure the continuing viability of the war system to fulfill its
essential nonmilitary functions for as long as the war system is
judged necessary to or desirable for the survival of society. To
achieve this end, the War Research groups within the agency will
engage in the following activities:
(a) Quantification of existing application of the non-military
functions of war. Specific determinations will include, but not be
limited to: 1) the gross amount and the net proportion of
nonproductive military expenditures since World War II assignable
to the need for war as an economic stabilizer; 2) the amount and
proportion of military expenditures and destruction of life,
property, and natural resources during this period assignable to
the need for war as an instrument for political control; 3)
similar figures, to the extent that they can be separately I
arrived at, assignable to the need for war to maintain social
cohesiveness; 4) levels of recruitment and expenditures on the
draft and other forms of personnel deployment attributable to the
need for military institutions to control social disaffection; 5)
the statistical relationship of war casualties to world food
supplies; 6) the correlation of military actions and expenditures
with cultural activities and scientific advances (including
necessarily, the development of mensurable standards in these
areas).
(b) Establishment of a priori modern criteria for the execution of
the nonmilitary functions of war. These will include, but not be
limited to: 1) calculation of minimum and optimum ranges of
military expenditure required, under varying hypothetical
conditions, to fulfill these several functions, separately and
collectively; 2) 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; 3) development of a negotiable formula
governing the relationship between military recruitment and
training policies and the exigencies of social control.
(c) Reconciliation of these criteria with prevailing economic,
political, sociological, and ecological limitations. The ultimate
object of this phase of War Research is to rationalize the
heretofore informal operations of the war system. It should
provide practical working procedures through which responsible
governmental authority may resolve the following war-function
problems, among others, under any given circumstances: 1) how to
determine the optimum quantity, nature, and timing of military
expenditures to ensure a desired degree of economic control; 2)
how to organize the recruitment, deployment, and ostensible use of
military personnel to ensure a desired degree of acceptance of
authorized social values; 3) how to compute on a short-term basis,
the nature and extent of the loss of life and other resources
which should be suffered and/or inflicted during any single
outbreak of hostilities to achieve a desired degree of internal
political authority and social allegiance; 4) how to project, over
extended periods, the nature and quality of overt warfare which
must be planned and budgeted to achieve a desired degree of
contextual stability for the same purpose; factors to be
determined must include frequency of occurrence, length of phase,
intensity of physical destruction, extensiveness of geographical
involvement, and optimum mean loss of life; 5) how to extrapolate
accurately from the foregoing, for ecological purposes, the
continuing effect of the war system, over such extended cycles, on
population pressures, and to adjust the planning of casualty rates
accordingly.
War Research procedures will necessarily include, but not be
limited to, the following:
(a) The collation of economic, military, and other relevant data
into uniform terms, permitting the reversible translation of
heretofore discrete categories of information.'
(b)The development and application of appropriate forms of cost-
effectiveness analysis suitable for adapting such new constructs
to computer terminology, programming, and projection.
(c) Extension of the "war games" methods of systems testing to
apply, as a quasi-adversary proceeding to the nonmilitary
functions of war.
(4) SINCE BOTH PROGRAMS of the War/Peace Research Agency will
share the same purpose--to maintain governmental freedom of choice
in respect to war and peace until the direction of social survival
is no longer in doubt --it is of the essence of this proposal that
the agency be constituted without limitation of time. Its
examination of existing and proposed institutions will be self-
liquidating when its own function shall have been superseded by
the historical developments it will have, at least in part,
initiated.
NOTES
Section 1
1. The Economic and Social Consequences of Disarmament: U.S. Reply
to the inquiry of the Secretary-General of the United Nations
(Washington, D.C.: USGPO, June 1964), pp. 8-9.
2. Herman Kahn, Thinking About the Unthinkable (New York: Horizon,
1962), p. 35.
3. Robert S. McNamara, in an address before the American Society
of Newspaper Editors, in Montreal, P.Q., Canada, 18 May 1966.
4. Alfred North Whitehead, in "The Anatomy of Some Scientific
Ideas," included in The Aims of Education (New York: Macmillan,
1929).
5. At Ann Arbor, Michigan, 16 June 1962.
6. Louis J. Halle, "Peace in Our Time? Nuclear Weapons as a
Stabilizer," The New Republic (28 December 1963).
Section 2
1. Kenneth E. Boulding, "The World War Industry as an Economic
Problem," in Emile Benoit and Kenneth E. Boulding (eds.),
Disarmament and the Economy (New York- Harper & Row, 1963).
2 McNamara, in ASNE Montreal address cited.
3. Report of the Committee on the Economic Impact of Defense and
Disarmament (Washington: USGPO, July 1965).
4. Sumner M. Rosen, "Disarmament and the Economy," War/Peace
Report (March 1966).
Section 3
1. Vide William D. Grampp, "False Fears of Disarmament," Harvard
Business Review (Jan.-Feb. 1964) for a concise example of this
reasoning.
2. Seymour Melman, "The Cost of Inspection for Disarmament," in
Benoit and Boulding, op. cit.
Section 5
1. Arthur I. Waskow, Toward the Unarmed Forces of the United
States (Washington: Institute for Policy Studies, 1966), p. 9.
(This is the unabridged edition of the text of a report and
proposal prepared for a seminar of strategists and Congressmen in
1965; it was later given limited distribution among other persons
engaged in related projects.)
2. David T. Bazelon, "The Politics of the Paper" Commentary
(November 1962), p. 409.
3. The Economic Impact of Disarmament (Washington: USGPO, January
1962).
4. David T. Bazelon, "The Scarcity Makers," Commentary (October
1962), p. 298.
5. Frank Pace, Jr., in an address before the American Bankers'
Association, September 1957.
6. A random example, taken in this case from a story by David
Deitch in the New York Herald Tribune (9 February 1966).
7. Vide L. Gumplowicz, in Geschichte der Staatstheorien
(Innsbruck: Wagner, 1905) and earlier writings.
8. K. Fischer, Das Militar (Zurich: Steinmetz Verlag, 1932), pp.
42-43.
9. The obverse of this phenomenon is responsible for the principal
combat problem of present-day infantry officers: the unwillingness
of otherwise "trained" troops to fire at an enemy close enough to
be recognizable as an individual rather than simply as a target.
10. Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1960), p. 42.
11. John D. Williams, "The Nonsense about Safe Driving," Fortune
(September 1958).
12. Vide most recently K. Lorenz, in Das Sogenannte Bose: zur
Naturgeschichts der Aggression (Vienna: G. Borotha-Schoeler
Verlag, 1964).
13. Beginning with Herbert Spencer and his contemporaries, but
largely ignored for nearly a century.
14. As in recent draft-law controversy, in which the issue of
selective deferment of the culturally privileged is often
carelessly equated with the preservation of the biologically
"fittest."
15. G. Bouthoul, in La Guerre (Paris: Presses universitaires de
France, 1953) and many other more detailed studies. The useful
concept of "polemology," for the study of war as an independent
discipline, is his, as is the notion of "demographic relaxation,"
the sudden temporary decline in the rate of population increase
after major wars.
16. This seemingly premature statement is supported by one of our
own test studies. But it hypothecates both the stabilizing of
world population growth and the institution of fully adequate
environmental control . Under these two conditions, the
probability of the permanent elimination of involuntary global
famine is 88 percent by 1978 and g5 percent by 1981.
Section 6
1. This round figure is the median taken from our computations,
which cover varying contingencies, but it is sufficient for the
purpose of general discussion.
2. But less misleading than the more elegant traditional metaphor,
in which war expenditures are referred to as the "ballast" of the
economy but which suggests incorrect quantitative relationships.
3. Typical in generality, scope, and rhetoric. We have not used
any published program as a model; similarities are unavoidably
coincidental rather than tendentious.
4. Read the reception of a "Freedom Budget for all Americans,"
proposed by A. Philip Randolph et al; it is a ten-year plan,
estimated by its sponsors to cost $185 billion
5. Waskow, op. cit.
6. By several current theorists, most extensively and effectively
by Robert R. Harris in The Real Enemy, an unpublished doctoral
dissertation made available to this study.
7. In ASNE Montreal address cited.
8. The Tenth Victim.
9. For an examination of some of its social implications, see
Seymour Rubenfeld, Family of Outcasts: A New Theory of Delinquency
(New York: Free Press, 196S).
10. As in Nazi Germany; this type of "ideological" ethnic
repression, directed to specific sociological ends, should not be
confused with traditional economic exploitation, as of Negroes in
the U.S., South Africa, etc.
11. By teams of experimental biologists in Massachusetts,
Michigan, and California, as well as in Mexico and the U.S.S.R.
Preliminary test applications are scheduled in Southeast Asia, in
countries not yet announced.
12. Expressed in the writings of H. Marshall McLuhan, in
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1964) and elsewhere.
13. This rather optimistic estimate was derived by plotting a
three-dimensional distribution of three arbitrarily defined
variables; the macro-structural, relating to the extension of
knowledge beyond the capacity of conscious experience; the
organic, dealing with the manifestations of terrestrial life as
inherently comprehensible; and the infra-particular, covering the
sub conceptual requirements of natural phenomena. Values were
assigned to the known and unknown in each parameter,
tested against data from earlier chronologies, and modified
heuristically until predictable correlations reached a useful
level of accuracy. Two decades" means, in this case, 20.6 years,
with a standard deviation of only 1.8 years. (An incidental
finding, not pursued to the same degree of accuracy, suggests a
greatly accelerated resolution of issues in the biological
sciences after 1972.)
Section 7
1. Since they represent an examination of too small a percentage
of the eventual options, in terms of "multiple mating," the
subsystem we developed for this application. But an example will
indicate how one of the most frequently recurring correlation
problems --chronological phasing--was brought to light in this
way. One of the first combinations tested showed remarkably huge
coefficients of compatibility, on a post hoc static basis, but no
variations of timing, using a thirty-year transition module,
permitted even marginal synchronization The combination was thus
disqualified. This would not rule out the possible adequacy of
combinations using modifications of the same factors, however,
since minor variations in a proposed final condition may have
disproportionate effects on phasing.
2. Edwald Teller, quoted in War/Peace Report (December 1984).
3. E.g., the highly publicized "Delphi technique" and other, more
sophisticated procedures. A new system, especially suitable for
institutional analysis, was developed during the course of this
study in order to hypothecate mensurable "peace games"; a manual
of this system is being prepared and will be submitted for general
distribution among appropriate agencies. For older, but still
useful, techniques, see Norman C. Dalkey's Games and Simulations
(Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand, 1964).
Section 8
1. A primer-level example of the obvious and long over-
due need for such translation is furnished by Kahl (in Thinking
About the Unthinkable, p. 102). Under the heading "Some Awkward
Choices" he compares four hypothetical policies: a certain loss of
$3,000; a .1 chance of loss of $300,000; a .01 chance of loss of
$30,000,000; and a .001 chance of loss of $3,000,000,000. A
government decision-
maker would "very likely" choose in that order. But what if "lives
are at stake rather than dollars"? Kahn suggests that the order of
choice would be reversed, although current experience does not
support this opinion. Rational war research can and must make it
possible to express, without ambiguity, lives in terms of dollars
and vice versa; the choices need not be, and cannot be, "awkward."
2. Again, an overdue extension of an obvious application of
techniques up to now limited to such circumscribed purposes as
improving kill-ammunition ratios determining local choice between
precision and saturation bombing, and other minor tactical, and
occasionally strategic, ends. The slowness of Rand, I.D.A., and
other responsible analytic organizations to extend cost-
effectiveness and related concepts beyond early-phase applications
has already been widely remarked on and criticized elsewhere.
3. The inclusion of institutional factors in war-game techniques
has been given some rudimentary consideration in the Hudson
Institute's Study for Hypothetical Narratives for Use in Command
and Control Systems Planning (by William Pfaff and Edmund
Stillman; Final report published 1963). But here, as with other
war and peace studies to date, what has blocked the logical
extension of new analytic techniques has been a general failure to
understand and properly evaluate the non-military functions of
war.
Report from Iron Mountain
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