Michelle Walling – In 1967 a report created by a “think tank” called the Special Study Group funded by a quasi-governmental agency, assigned itself the responsibility of considering the possibility and desirability of long term peace. The conclusions of the report were; that lasting peace, while theoretically possible, would not be in the best interests of a stable society to achieve it.
The participants in the study were civilians with no direct connection to the government. They were all highly respected and well-known members of society in a diversity of fields.
The report was released by one of the participants who believed that the purely scientific argument, lacking in any semblance of spirituality, would be inappropriately applied.
Their conclusions:
- All social systems are subservient to the war-making process
- War stabilizes economies.
- War is the foundation of a stable government.
- War supplies the basis for political authority
- War enables class distinction
- War subordinates the citizen to the state
- War controls social dissonance.
- War binds social allegiance.
- War corrects the balance between gross human population and the resources available to sustain it.
- War creates the basic standards of value in the creative arts.
- War provides the fundamental motivational source of scientific and technological progress.
The salient issue was that war is absolutely essential as a cohesive force; in fact the only cohesive force of civilized society; that a condition of general peace would lead to changes of unprecedented magnitude and likely destroy the civilization itself. The very power of government is created by war.