Rating: 
Summary: Be Prepared if Peace Breaks Out
Review: The Foreword tells of a "Special Study Group" that produced a Secret Report. It concluded that "peace is not in the best interest of a stable society". The space program, the anti-ballistic missile, the fallout-shelter programs were all designed to spend vast sums of tax dollars. The purpose of this book is to explain "aspects of American policy otherwise incomprehensible by the ordinary standards of common sense", and warn about the schemes of the ruling class. But not all readers will appreciate this subtle satire. Does the "high uric acid" symbolize something wrong (p.xxii)?Section 1 says their mission was to study the effects of peace on society. Section 2 tells of problems in converting war factories to peaceful use (p.22). Section 3 discusses the problems of disarmament: economic reinvestment, or "the non-military functions of war in modern societies" (p.25). Section 4 points out that plans for peace assume wars support the social systems. War resolves conflicts of interest between nations or classes (p.28). Since conflicts of interest are eternal, so is war. Peace is what breaks out between wars (p.29). Section 5 discusses the function of war: it is used by and for a ruling class to defend "the national interest". Its non-military function is to subject the economy to complete and arbitrary central control (p.35). It stabilizes the economy of industrial societies by creating an artificial demand, and protects against another depression. The civilian standard of living rose during WW II. A military force is needed both for a foreign policy, and to assure the legitimacy and existence of a government (p.39); it can absorb the unemployed. One item in this satire is to link restrictions on grain production in America to "famine in Asia"! Another is to claim a lower speed limit would save 40,000 lives a year (p.46)! But the funniest item is the claim that the Department of Defense is stockpiling birds (p.51)! "War is the principal motivational force for the development of science at every level." From poison gas to atomic bombs. Section 6 says substitutes for the functions of war must be "wasteful", and operate free of the supply-demand system. All depressions occurred during low military spending (p.58). Alternatives to military spending are inadequate because they cost too little (p.60). The uncontrolled and arbitrary spending on space research make it a good alternative. The end of war would mean the end of national sovereignty. There would be no effective external pressure for a nation to organize itself politically. How to employ the unemployed? The WPA and CCC provide examples. An expanded prison system ("slavery"?) holds the unemployed. Do we need a "menacing social enemy" to serve a function? Would we need to re-create the Spanish Inquisition or witch hunts for "national security" (p.71)? Should procreation be limited to artificial insemination and laboratory embryos to control population levels (p.73)? Would birth control pills be put into water and essential foods? An excess population is war material (p.74). Would scientific progress cease in a peaceful world (p.78)? Section 7 has a Summary and Conclusions. War is not a means to an end but the purpose of modern societies. War has five non-military functions: economic, political, sociological, ecological, and cultural-scientific. They discuss the criteria, models, and evaluation of substitutes for the functions of war. "Genuine total peace ... would be destabilizing" (pp.90-91) Our government should plan for the possibility of a general peace because of its dangers to society (p.94). Section 8 has their recommendations. The best satire is the last sentence in the book (p.101). But the book seems to use a lot of words to say very little. It wasn't written by a George Orwell or Aldous Huxley.
Rating:
Summary: you can fool some of the people all of the time
Review: Though they differ in obvious ways, the political Left and the extreme-libertarian Right share one similarity : they are utopian. Both posit the notion that Man in the State of Nature led a peaceful and bucolic existence--for the Left a communal one, for the Right a rugged-individualist one--where want was unknown, evil did not exist, and no man coveted the goods of another. Where conservatism and Judeo-Christianty generally assume that Man carried a flaw (the capacity for sin) deep within himself, these two philosophies instead assume that it was artificial human institutions that corrupted Man. The Left believes that the problem is capitalism. The Right blames government. But both view these intermediary structures as having a baleful influence on the relationships among men and are certain that if they could only be removed we'd return to Paradise. It's entirely predictable then that Report from Iron Mountain, which began as a satire of capitalism and the military-industrial complex, ended up hoodwinking both Left and Right and becoming conspiracy fodder for the loons at both ends of the political spectrum. The book is presented in the form of a secret report, prepared by an anonymous government commission, on the feasability of moving towards a society based on permanent peace instead of permanent war. At the heart of the hoax lies the patently absurd, but profoundly Leftist, idea that for capitalism to succeed the economy must be structured around governmental preparations for and prosecution of war. This is a concept that Paul M. Kennedy more than adequately debunked in his poorly timed but eminently worthwhile book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (1987)(Paul Kennedy 1945-). But even a casual observer might have been expected to notice how rare a large military budget was in America's first 150 reasonably capitalist years and how poorly the economy was faring under the increasing strains of permanent war. At any rate, when the book came out, in 1967, its thesis meshed perfectly with the belief that the U.S. was a war-mongering, imperialist, hegemony. Little wonder that Leonard Lewin's hoax--aided and abetted by folks like Victor Navasky, E. L. Doctorow, and J. K. Galbraith--was accepted by many as a genuine leak of a serious government report. Oliver Stone notoriously adopted the basic argument about capitalism requiring war as the rationale for why Kennedy was killed in the immensely silly film JFK. If the problem Mr. Lewin identified appealed to the delusions of the Left though, the remedy he proposed played to the paranoia of the Right, particularly the latter-day militias and white separatists of the 1990s. For in the section of the report titled "Substitutes for the Function of War", we are presented with an array of totalitarian government actions, up to and including a global police force, eugenics, and slavery. For guys who fear the black helicopters of the U.N. this was music to their ears. So when the Feds descended on the militias after the Oklahoma City bombing, one of the surprising things they found was that a whole new generation of extremists, this time from the Right instead of the Left, had accepted the Report from Iron Mountain as the gospel truth. The book is really most interesting for its hoax effect and for its demonstration of the odd convergence of Far Left and Far Right. It's an amusing curio, but not much more. It offers definitive proof that, as H. L. Mencken said (or nearly said) : no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. GRADE : C
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