(Note: It is all good
and well to talk about balancing the Federal Budget and cutting the deficit but
the reality is that this will not be done until the two largest areas of
Federal spending are somehow dealt with. The two areas are Government funded
entitlement programs and Defense spending. War and preparation for war have
been nearly constant conditions for our country over the last century and have
long been justified as necessary for the security of the United States. If we are to ever rise to a higher level as a
nation both economically and morally then we must get past these
considerations. To do so requires a knowledge
of the factors that seem to make war so necessary. Behind every persistent negative condition
there exists a lie. So let’s crank up our confront of evil and take a short
look at the subject of “war” on our planet Earth.)
A
few months before he was assassinated in 1963 it is claimed by some that President
John F. Kennedy commissioned a group
of scholars, economists and other specialists to do a unique study. The group
was to look into and report on the barriers that could be expected to be
encountered in the event that the United States should shift away from the
confrontation policy of the Cold War and start pursuing a policy of attaining a
permanent peace. The group was also to recommend possible solutions to those
barriers. Though Kennedy was killed in November of ’63 the group continued to
meet over the next two years. Their initial meeting took place at “Iron Mountain” in the state of New York
where a number of major corporations maintained underground records and
administration facilities to be used in the event of nuclear war. It is from
this initial meeting ground that the group’s final report, completed in the mid
‘60s, took its title: “Report from Iron
Mountain on the Possibility and
Desirability of Peace”.
The report concluded that, even if it
was possible to attain a condition of permanent peace it would probably not be
desirable to do so. The reason? War
served to fulfill certain important social functions. Among these functions were population control
and the fact that war served as an economic whip for a society, spurring the
need for production. The main reason, however, that the special group concluded
that war should not be turned away from was that it appeared to them that the
special power of a government to control its population resided in its war
powers. They concluded that the power to make war and mobilize its citizenry
for war was practically synonymous with the concept of nationhood. Based on
this the study group concluded that until a reliable surrogate was found that
fulfilled all the conditions that war fulfilled in accomplishing these social
functions we should not be looking to eliminate war as a condition on planet Earth.
“Report
from Iron Mountain…” was released to the public in book form in the mid ‘60s.
The man who released it claims he obtained the report from one of the study
group members who broke security because he had second thoughts about his
involvement in the group and felt the public should be aware of the
recommendations being made to their government officials by the group. Upon its
release the report was immediately attacked as a hoax. There are those,
however, who claim otherwise. L. Fletcher
Prouty, who for many years
coordinated the military support for CIA covert operations around the world in
the 50s and early 60s, in his book “JFK:
The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy” refers to “Report
from Iron Mountain…” and states that the concepts of the report are
representative of the thought processes of many of the cold warrior types in government
at the time he was there.
This starts to give you some insight
into why to date on this planet it has been impossible to do away with the
blight of war as a constant condition. But there are other reasons as well. Let’s
take a short look at the recent history of war just as regards the United States.
Consider the following, and while doing so keep in mind that the founding
fathers through the first 20 years of our existence as a nation worked very,
very hard to keep the United States out of war. Their stated policy was to stay
out of foreign and particularly European entanglements and wars. A huge reason
for this was economic...they knew the country could not afford it and would
inevitably wind up in the back pocket of the bankers if they went the war
route. So they worked hard to stay out.
This effort to stay out of war
succeeded until the war of 1812 in which we fought the British for a 2nd
time. This was followed by the Mexican War in the 1840s, the Civil War in 1861 and the Spanish American war
at the close of the 19th century. Moving into the 20th
century we have WWI followed by WWII. In both of these wars our enemy on the
continent of Europe was Germany. It may interest you to know that in World War
I the chairman of the German Reichsbank, the
central bank of Germany, was a man named Max
Warburg. At the time Max’s brother, Paul
Warburg was the chairman of the fledgling Federal Reserve Bank in the US, and thus you had the unique
condition of the two brothers being Chairmen of the Central banks of the two
warring nations.
Do you suppose these guys at the minimum had a conflict of
interest?
Well, WWI ends and Germany is defeated. But within 14 years Adolph Hitler rises to power and Germany
rearms itself and within 20 years after the end of WWI the world is engulfed in
WW II. How is that possible.?
In his insightful book, “Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler”,
researcher Antony Sutton chronicles
the support given to the 3rd Reich by Wall Street bankers and firms
who funneled money into Germany and formed corporate connections with companies
in Germany, including the German chemical giant IG Farben, the company infamous for its production of the poison
gas used in Nazi mass murder schemes.
Farben
in the early 30s was a giant company that had an American corporation as well
as a German one. Directors on the board of American Farben sound like a who’s
who of the top industrialists and bankers of the day, including Edsel Ford of Ford Motor Co., C.E. Mitchel of the Fed Reserve Bank Of
NY, Walter Teagle, director of the Fed Reserve Bank of NY and of Standard Oil
of New Jersey as well as the omni-present Paul
Warburg, first Chairman of the US Fed Reserve Bank. Of course the
aforementioned Max Warburg, Paul’s brother
was a Farben director in Germany. Three
American Farben board members were found guilty at the Nuremberg War Crime trials after WWII but this did not include the ubiquitous Paul Warburg,
Edsel Ford, or the Fed Reserve bankers.
Often representing Farben and its
American subsidiaries was the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, two prominent members of which at this time were John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles. John Foster would go on to
become Secretary of State under Dwight Eisenhower
in the 50s during the height of the Cold War. Allen would be director of the
CIA from the early ‘50s until he was fired by John Kennedy in 1961 following
the ill fated invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs by a brigade of Cubans that
the CIA had trained and equipped to retake Cuba from Castro.
Many believe that it was Kennedy’s
firing of Dulles and other top CIA officials as well as his decision to move
away from the policy of confrontation and war (as evidenced by his famous
speech at American University in June 1963, where he said we as a nation must
re-examine our basic notions about the Soviet Union and ourselves “for we all breathe the same air and we all
cherish our children’s future”)
that led to his assassination in 1963. It is a matter of record that JFK was
going to pull the plug on the Vietnam War, having already ordered the first
thousand troops home at the time he was killed. It is also a matter of record
that within 24 hrs after Kennedy’s death his directives regarding Vietnam were
countermanded by the new President Lyndon
Johnson. Sadly, the Vietnam War was
about to start for real. Before it was through some 58,000 Americans would die
and by some estimates 2 million Vietnamese.
In addition to the above Allen Dulles,
prior to the establishment of the CIA and even after (CIA was established in
1947) was one of the principles in getting the NAZI intelligence apparatus
turned over to the US as well as helped to relocate ex Nazi’s to the West who
were considered to have value in the Cold War effort against the Soviet Union. You
can see then, that the connections of Wall Street to the NAZIs were instrumental
in creating the conditions that led to WWII and continued unabated into the
Cold War against the Soviets.
The pattern has been repeated through
the administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter,
Reagan, Bush One, Clinton and Bush Two. Also consider that each of these
administrations was dealt nearly impossible situations to deal with that had them at effect from practically the word go. JFK had the Bay of Pigs debacle within the first 3 months of his
administration. Reagan and Ford both had assassination attempts
near the start of their terms, Nixon had Watergate and Bush two had 9/11 within
the first 8 months of his administration.
Across the same time, within the
context of the Cold War which lasted from 1945 until the Iron Curtain came down
in ’89-90 we have had the Korean War, the Vietnam War, as well as the US
Military interventions in Libya, Grenada, Panama, the Balkans, The first Iraq
war and now the second Iraq war and the Afghan War.
The question that must be seriously asked here is a simple
one:
Who
benefits from all of these wars and military actions?
Certainly
not the millions who died during WWI and II and the wars since.
The fact is that, as noted in “Report from Iron Mountain…” war is big business.
Defense is currently the second largest item in the federal budget annually
with $100s of billions being spent. While I disagree with much of what
President Obama stands for and many
of the actions he is taking, to expect him or any President to be able to
balance our budget and reduce our deficit in the face of the types of pressures
I have out lined above is ludicrous until the factors of the equation change in
this country. And while there may be some mental factor shared by the peoples
of this planet that helps to pre-dispose us to war, the simple truth is that
the Central Banks of Europe and our own Federal Reserve have operated as hidden
influences to bring about the conditions of war that have devastated this
planet, indebted the nations of the world and killed and brought despair to
millions while inventing elaborate justifications like those in “Report from Iron Mountain…” so they can sleep better at night.
It is high time we changed the equation…don’t
you think?
Copyright ©
2013
By Mark Arnold
All Rights
Reserved
