Edited for clarity 6/23/09

The authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers
--Lt. Col. L. Fletcher Prouty

Now largely considered a hoax, the anonymously written 1967 book Report from Iron Mountain: On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace offered what purported to be a fascinating insight into the thoughts of those most powerful. The author, an unnamed Midwestern academic referred to by the editors of Dial Press as ‘John Doe,’ claimed that he had taken part in a covert study group (dubbed the Special Study Group, or SSG) initiated by President John Kennedy and his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. According to this report, Kennedy and McNamara wanted to formulate strategies on how to create and maintain world peace.

Comprised of fourteen scholars and one defense contractor, the SSG came to a rather startling conclusion. After an endless series of computerized “peace games” (similar to data-crunching war games, but with the winning objective of permanently ending conflict), the members all opined that world peace was not only impossible, but dangerous. War, as repugnant as it is, provided a number of stabilizing functions for the civilized society. Without war, they argued, economies would collapse because the production and sales necessary to build a war machine had tentacles to all sorts of other financial interests. Beating tanks into plowshares would lead to a chain reaction of business failures. Furthermore, war provided political benefits in terms of ideological and moral clarification, thus leading to public loyalty and forbearance to the political system that ran it. Sociologically, war provided a secure place for “antisocial” elements of society, misfit killers who would presumably cause chaos if left with the general population. Although an unpleasant “truth,” war offered ecological benefits because it killed off “excess” men and women, thus prohibiting or reducing their ability to reproduce, thereby lowering the amount of food, water, energy and other resources that a society needs to sustain itself.

Of course, everyone (except the truly twisted) regards war as the epitome of evil. So the SSG began to formulate what they called “war substitutes,” or in other words conditions that could satisfy the individual functions that war served. Among these would be the creation of economic systems predicated on the necessity of waste (i.e., continual planned obsolescence), the re-institution of slavery, the state-organized abuse of ethnic and religious minorities, and the introduction of new religions. The SSG didn’t, however, seem to take the possibility of even these measures very seriously:

Here is the basic weakness of the social-welfare [war] 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 requirements 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.

In 1972, Leonard Lewin, the man credited with writing the introduction claimed that he penned Report from Iron Mountain in its entirety as a hoax, a satire. Curious thing, though: he did this in the context of decrying the Pentagon Papers. Lewin stated in effect that since he confessed his hoax, Daniel Ellsberg, who presented copies of the somewhat similarly themed Pentagon Papers to The Washington Post and The New York Times, should be man enough to reveal his hoax too.

Obviously, the irony here lay in the fact that ample evidence would shortly emerge proving the Pentagon Papers to be anything but a hoax. They were quite real. Furthermore, they represented the type of work produced by the very kind of secret study group John Doe and his peers allegedly participated in.

Before I go on, I should note that the premises, assumptions and conclusions presented in Report on Iron Mountain are seriously flawed for reasons I will address in the next post. Be that as it may, however, that doesn’t preclude the possible existence of John Doe, his SSG, and the study itself. A number of factors lend to its credibility, starting with its publisher. Dial Press was no fly-by-night operation, but a respected house featuring some of the most important writers of their generation. Founded in 1923, it currently exists as a subsidiary of Bantam/Dell (no relation). After checking out its citations and noting its scholarly style, firm President Richard Baron and noted author E.L. Doctorow, then an editor at Dial, agreed to release the book as non-fiction.

Further corroboration came in the form of an a-list economist, Dr. John Kenneth Galbraith (Harvard), who confirmed in several sources, among them a review of Report from Iron Mountain appearing in the Washington Post, that he had personally consulted with the SSG in question. Galbraith denied writing the report himself, suggesting that the final draft might have been done by Lewin, US Ambassador Clare Booth Luce, or US Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

Then too, as Jim Marrs wrote in his 2000 book Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History that Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids, one can see many of the recommendations of the SSG coming to pass. The introduction of New Age occultism, especially as spearheaded by the well-connected Lucis Trust, the expansion of the penal system into an over-representative minority populated quasi slave-labor camps (with inmates earning anywhere between nine cents to a dollar per hour working for large corporate firms), and the seduction of the poor and disadvantaged to enlist in the military in order to secure a college education and job preferences seem perfectly consistent with this hypothesis.

Then again, when one gets down to the nitty-gritty, perhaps it doesn’t matter if Report from Iron Mountain is a hoax or not. Any astute social critic might have come to see the study’s recommendations as inevitable. Any hawk, believing in the necessity of the Vietnam War—especially because of his/her financial interest--could have asserted a bunch of silly things as inept alternatives to violence to further his/her own agenda.

“But wait, X. Dell,” you’re saying to yourself (probably numerous times by now), “What does this have to do with MJ-12, alien autopsies and the like?”

Well, as a possible “war substitute,” the SSG proposed fabricating a potential conflict between us Earthlings and a non-existent alien race. That way, people around the globe would organize to support their leaders (as in the movie Independence Day), who would then offer them protection in the form of weapons and pretty words in exchange for loyalty and obedience.

In other words, they proposed a psychological operation (PSYOP), one in which they would pull the strings of a fictional beast, a paper tiger whose growl would frighten the people of the Earth into seeking the protection of a metaphorical parent-figure—i.e., the established authority.

While the SSG seriously considered a false alien conflict as a possible “war substitute,” they realized that it had one major problem to overcome: namely, the difficulty in getting large enough segments of society to believe in a manufactured extraterrestrial threat:

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....

Okay. So not only can one dispute (actually, rip to shreds) the findings of Report from Iron Mountain, but also dispute its authorship, origins, purpose, and effects. Because we have no reason to take Report from Iron Mountain at its word, we can only say, “Well, that’s interesting,” and subsequently think of something more important, such as video games or HNT photos.

Still, we have other provably non-fictional studies that outline the potential of UFOs as a brilliant PSYOP, designed for the purpose of depicting the interests of those in power as those of the public.