Financial Obligations: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as Presented in Behold a Pale Horse pp. 319-322

Protocol 20

After the shortest of Protocols I think we come to the longest. This Protocol is six pages long and it is predictably unfocused. This week we’ll focus on the tax plan set forth by the Elder. 

I think my favorite thing about when conspiracy theorists get into financial conspiracies is that they have no idea what they are talking about. We saw this when I covered None Dare Call it Conspiracy; as soon as Allen attempted to dive into financial ties it he was lost. Economics is never as simple as balancing a checkbook, but it is an easy way to enrage people who pretend to be concerned about deficit spending and that sometimes “the poors” get stuff for free. 

The conspirators here are going to redesign an entire economic system from the ground up. They are going to do this in order to hide the fact, that in the real world, the Russian Tsar is out of money but that we shouldn’t worry about that because the Jews are behind it. 

The elder begins oddly, well oddly for this book, “…which I put off to the end of my report as being the most difficult, the crowning and decisive point of our plans.”

Since when has this been a report? The entire thing has been framed as the directions and instruction of the Elder to the Cabal. The myth is that these are the minutes of a meeting taking place in a cemetery in Prague; it’s never been a report. The only thing that almost makes the leap is that it’s a copy of the minutes made by an agent of the Okhrana; but then we wouldn’t be using the “I” if that were the case.

The other odd thing is that this isn’t the end either.  There’s still five Protocols left in this book. I wondered if this was one of those cases where the plagiarst copied directly from the Joly work without checking it–but no. Financial plans begin on page 113 and there’s still 40 pages left there. 

Let’s move past that…the Elder addresses a topic that I am always curious about–how is the conspiracy funded? The original Men In Black (1997), had a fun scene where Agent Kay explained that they held patents on things like velcro and CDs for funding. But nowhere else do we actually see this. How is the Flat Earth conspiracy funded? Who paid for the 9/11 inside job? What was the line item for faking the Moon Landing? 

Then again, why does it need to be funded in the first place? If the cabal controls everything there isn’t a need they have to pay for things, they just take it. You could hide such purchases in the nebulous world of “credit” and just make it vanish. Of course, given that the larger scope of this anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is that the Jews control the gold and diamonds–the funding of the conspiracy isn’t that much of a problem. 

The point of this protocol isn’t to explain how “they” are funding the operation but why the Russian government has no money. Remember how we read this: everything the Elder is going to recommend we are supposed to hate. This is going to be important to remember because the Elder’s recommendations will actually make sense to a lot of us. 

The first rule is that “…the king will enjoy the legal fiction that everything in his State belongs to him (which may easily be translated into fact), will be enabled to resort to the lawful confiscation of all sums of every kind for the regulation of the their circulation in the State.” 

First, the phrase “legal fiction” does not mean imaginary. Think of a corporation like Microsoft. Microsoft is real in the sense that it produces products, has employees, and can be located. The “corporation” though is a legal arrangement, it’s fictional in that a person can’t touch it. When the elder says that the king enjoys this legal fiction, it’s within the power of the king, When it gets translated into fact, that power has been enabled. The Elder is merely describing a standard autocrat here–they own everything in the state, there is no private property. 

What this is actually about is an appeal against the Socialism that was sweeping Europe at the time. We know this because of the last part of the sentence, “regulation of their circulation in the state.” This is very similar to the modern “you will own nothing and be happy;” mantra that conspiracy theorists repeat but take out of context and still fail to understand. Legally, the Tsar owned your house, but he had little need for peasant hovels and goats. The moral panic surrounding the Socialist movement was that your neighbor, or gasp, a poor person would also need your goat. 

The elder then makes the claim that the rich will be taxed at a higher rate than the poor. In this the elder is repeating something not from Karl Marx, but from Adam Smith who wrote that it is “not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue but something more than in that proportion.”

It’s very amusing to read the Adam Smith Institute try and weasel out of that direct quote from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. 

The reasoning is, again, straight from Smith. Because the rich enjoy more privileges from the state in the form of protection and maintenance they should pay more. Park illegally in one of the wealthier neighborhoods of my city and you’ll find a traffic ticket very quickly, unlike parking illegally in my neighborhood (though not my street–I live on an ambulance route and that’s a special case). The Elder first concentrates on property for this reason. Then he quickly moves over to taxing capital as well. 

We should be quite aware that what’s happening is a response to the Socialism of the late 19th century, the word “capital” gets brought up quite frequently as a reference for people that know “Das Kapital” is a book but have never read it. 

One of the most interesting things that comes up in this Protocol is why progressive taxation makes sense. The Elder is concerned with the idea of revolution and he claims that burdening the poor with the highest of taxes is the seed of revolution. This is an odd turn for a cabal that seemed, throughout this book, to have no concern over the public other than dominating them. Now, he seems to care for the people in such a way that he will prevent revolution by throwing them a lifeline, “such a measure (progressive taxation) would destroy the hatred of the poor man for the rich in which he will see a necessary financial support of the state.” 

The poor will not hate the rich, because their taxation (on both property and capital) will support the very things that they need. A plan like this could amend some of the wealth inequality in our current world. People like me might see that people like Musk actually contribute something to the general weal rather than not being just obscenely wealthy but also parasites on the system. 

As a book plagiarised for the general public I’m not quite certain what the point of this is supposed to be. Is an early 20th century beet farmer in Western Russia supposed to read this and then think, “Those dastardly Jewish overlords! Attempting to make the local Duke and I equal! I’ll die before he is forced to share borscht with me!” 

We’re supposed to hate this, but I can’t see one reason that we should. Was the lie of unregulated capitalism rampant in Tsarist Russia? I cannot see that the fictional beet farmer would think to themselves that hard work was going to elevate them beyond the rank of peasant farmer. That’s a lie sold to the poor in societies with representative governments not monarchies. 

I Know Aristotle: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as presented in Behold a Pale Horse pp. 317-318

 Protocol 18

This week’s protocols is weird. It’s spaceman, UFO weird; and the only anti-Semitism in it is a few “goys” and “Goyims” thrown in there as if to remind us what this book is supposed to be; but generally this protocol is weird because it is so bland. This is one of those protocols I’d have one of my classes read because it’s short but it also doesn’t say anything. The subject of this protocol is the ruler of the conspiracy. 

We are 66 pages (according to the PDF of Cooper’s book acquired from the internet archive) in and there is little that we know about the rulers of the conspiracy. What little we do know is almost always contradicted by something else. On one hand the kings and rulers must be members of the conspiracy on the other hand they can be regular people who are blackmailed by the conspiracy. The problem is one of consistency, does the conspiracy want to control things from the throne or from behind the throne? Throughout most of the book, and indeed, all other conspiracy works; we have the impression of the “hidden hand” which guides everything. Yet, if you have total authority, then why hide? The rulers only gain the security of anonymity from concealment. 

Lest anyone be confused, I’ve framed this debate much more interestingly than the Elder (or our plagiarist) has.

The first paragraph begins with a discussion of surveillance and control. The control will be achieved through the use of good speakers. Remember, this was written in the late 19th century and then plagiarized in the very early 20th–so a good speaker is entertainment. Of particular interest is that they are going to “astroturf” the crowd and somehow this will give the conspiracy a pretext to search and follow the crowd. I don’t quite understand how. Unless, the speaker is going to attack the state and the conspiracy itself; but that detail is left to our imagination. 

Then we get my favorite part “…”

These ellipses are increasing in frequency and I suspect that our plagiarist is getting bored with his own book, but there is another possibility: that these sections are failed attempts at ideas. This happens to me–it happens to everyone that writes; you get an idea in your head and you begin writing only to find out that the idea has no traction. My notebooks (because I handwrite a lot of stuff) are full of abandoned ideas. If I begin a new word document, it starts as document “36” because there are 35 ideas I’ve had to abandon. Sometimes I save them, most times I do not. What I certainly don’t do is submit them for publication. When Cooper does this, or Alex Jones, I get it–they think length equals authority. So very little gets cut, and I suppose that the plagiarist deserves some moderate credit for making it obvious when the subject is being changed. 

The subject is changed, and our second subject concerns security of the ruler. The suggestion is strange, the conspiracy’s ruler (either figurehead or real) will have only the thinnest of guards. The thinking is that, “we shall not admit so much as a thought that there could exist against him any sedition with which he is not strong enough to contend and is compelled to hide from it.” 

So there plan is to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that there are no threats to the ruler? That seems like a plan that is doomed to fail. Pretending the ruler doesn’t need elaborate security isn’t enough to protect them from the times that they do. I get the point that the Elder is going for, but this is just a bad plan. 

In the preceding paragraph we are told that the discovery of frequent conspiracies against the ruler is a sign of weakness. This is borrowed directly from the actual Machiavelli, who, in the Discourses discussed conspiracies as being legitimate threats against the state; and his recommendation is to not do things that will earn the enmity of those people that have the power to conduct them. The solution offered by the conspiracy is “According to strictly enforced outward appearances our ruler will employ his power only for the advantage of the nation and in no wise for his own or dynastic profits.”

In Aristotle’s Politics, he describes a tyrant as someone that acts for themselves. A ruler that seeks their own profit rather than one that puts the kingdom first. One of his recommendations to prevent tyranny is for the tyrant to act in a manner beneficial to the people to secure his own authority. So, for selfish reasons, he should appear altruistic. The effect is the same because, ala Kant, we do not have insight into the internal motivations of a person. Aristotle would use this same reasoning in his rather tepid defense of slavery–the slave is incapable of ruling therefore must be ruled, but the master must rule toward the virtue of the slave. In effect, this becomes a worker/owner relationship that Marx thought was exploitative, the difference according to Marx was in terminology and I’ll avoid long philosophical discourse here. The point is that if the secret Jewish conspiracy is going to rule to our benefit in order to appear to be benefactors, then it’s no different than if they were our benefactors. The conspiracy is saying, we’ll help you so you want us in charge. This isn’t the problem that the intended audience is supposed to think it is. It’s also telling because it reveals that the Tsar, who has elaborate security and does not act in beneficence of the people, is supposed to be the good guy here.  

This is just a boring Protocol. The final two recommendations is that the ruler will always look at petitions from the crowd so the crowd can never deny that the ruler has seen it. Ok, good. This isn’t a bad thing. While the final one is that criminals within the conspiracy, within the ruler’s orbit will be arrested and punished immediately so as to eliminate any appearance of corruption. 

Again, I’m in. I’m beginning to think that maybe this Cabal should rule the world. 

Presidents: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as Presented in Behold a Pale Horse pp. 290

Protocol 10

The people that Cooper is writing for claim to believe in one thing above all: The US Constitution. It’s almost always clear that they have never read it, do not understand it, and think it says things that it does not. These are the people that think the Declaration of Independence is a legally binding document, are aware of something called the Federalist Papers but that’s about it, and they usually tip in favor of odd sovereign citizen positions. It’s important also to remember that this book was written in the 1990s and the right-wing militia movement hated Bill Clinton. To be fair, they didn’t like George H.W. Bush either, but nothing like their vitriol for Bill Clinton. 

In my opinion, there was nothing that Clinton did to earn their ire. I think that he took office in 1992 and it just coincided with right-wing conspiracism as a movement. Yet he’s the president, by default, he must be part of the conspiracy. The conspirators could not allow someone to wield that much power without being in their thrall. Protocol 10, actually makes this case. 

I’m actually surprised here because unlike most of the ambiguous bullshit we’ve been reading, Protocol 10 can be considered specific…well, comparatively. 

The Elder spends the first page of the Protocol discussing something that he’s covered before: keeping the people focused on ideas and concepts rather than specifics. Instead of enumerating specific rights to individuals, they’ll call it “liberty” or “freedom.” Let the conspiracy theorists talk about “the Constitution” rather than having discussions about the actual Constitution. The Elder explains, “The reason for keeping silence in this respect is that by not naming a principle we leave ourselves freedom of action, to drop this or that out of it without attracting notice; if they were all categorically named they would all appear to have been given.”

By not being specific they can do what they please. This is why it is foolish of a conspiracy theorist to make precise claims. It’s always, “They’re taking our freedoms” but never what freedoms those are. Their champions can help us gain more ground against “them” but because they are never specific we can never gauge success or not. Theorists like Alex Jones or Joe Rogan, can gain followers and money pretty effectively by doing this; as long as you have a talent for playing on the fears of an audience it makes no difference if Monday “they” are losing, Tuesday “we” are winning, and by Wednesday the “end of the world is just around the corner.” 

The Elder goes on a strange tangent about using Democracy to undermine the state. Again, we have to remind ourselves that everything the Elder says we are supposed to hate. His argument is that democracy destroys the aristocracy, and the aristocracy is the thing that keeps the state sovereign. The aristocrats cannot be swayed (as he said in Protocol 7) because they have land and means; no matter which king is in charge. Depose the current monarch, and replace it with another doesn’t mean anything. Democracy though can change everything because it gives everyone a voice and makes them all equal. The aristocracy disappears in authority and is rendered useless as a political power. Remember, the point is to hate this idea and want, instead, a tyrant supported by an elaborate hierarchy. 

The voting will elect a singular person, for which the Elder uses the word “President.” Another quick reference point, this is not an American document. This was originally plagiarized to support the Russian Tsar during the times before the revolution that would wipe them out. “President” can mean any head of state, but the French Revolution initially wanted something like the American system, and as the original document that the Protocols was plagiarized from is about the French, this is why the term is being used instead of “Prime Minister” or whatever (I’m aware that Prime Minister is usually a term for parliamentary style governments). 

The Elder’s plan is to appoint someone to be in charge that will be the focus of the people, but will largely be ineffective at doing anything. The primary reason is that no one will be elected to “President” without having some stain on their character, i.e. that they can be blackmailed into obedience. 

Then the Elder gets odd. Here is where the original document, Joly’s work, gets philosophical and the plagiarist (and Cooper) are unable to understand what is being said. The Machiavelli character in Joly’s work (page 60) makes two arguments. The first is that the power of the president can be guaranteed during a “state of siege.” This is an emergency situation that requires a suspension of rights and laws in order to secure the state. Montesquieu, his dialogue partner, remarks that this is what Augustus did to become Emperor of Rome thus destroying the Republic. There was, for instance, the consulship but there were no consuls. 

Machiavelli argues that such a move, is responsible as a leader. Here’s the problem: Machiavelli’s point concerns Cincinattus, Scipio, and Sullla; who took drastic actions to preserve Rome; but then that power was returned to the state. In the actual Machiavellian philosophical works, the philosopher makes the point that this is sometimes necessary but there is a great danger in the office of dictator. Montesquieu the character agrees but because the actual figure argues for a parliamentary style government he wonders if the legislative body can be used to restrict the head of state. Machiavelli, the character, argues that this is unimportant because the head of state can restrict or diminish the legislative body at will, to which there must be some protections. 

From a political philosophy standpoint this is a very interesting debate. In the Protocols it is less so because the plagiarist does not understand what is being said. The plagiarist seemingly ignores the fact that this is a debate between two characters and combines ideas ignorant of the back and forth between them. For example the elder writes, “we are compelled to introduce into the constitutions of States to prepare for the transition to an imperceptible abolition of every kind of constitution and then the time is come to turn every form of government into our despotism.” 

In the original  Montesquieu asks if there could be any guarantee of some basic rights for the individuals in the state. The Machiavelli character responds, “I see that philosophical sensibility returns to you. Be reassured: I would not make any modification of the fundamental basis of the constitution without submitting it for the acceptance of the people by means of universal suffrage.” 

The idea is similar in that there is no permanent basis for rights but the Elder misses the point that while Machiavelli would not guarantee protections against despotism, he also would not do so without the people’s vote. While the Elder also relies on democracy, here, Joly is making the claim that you would still need the people to want to give up their protections. The plagiarist does not comprehend the discussion, but it’s not important that he does. He’s just got to pepper his discussion with the word “Goyim” so that the reader knows its the Jews’ fault. What are they at fault for? That’s never specified, and this is why this book is so dangerous. The Jews through X ruined the Constitution, and that’s why the bad thing happened to you. It’s much more effective than naming the thing they did, which is why the Elder’s original point is important. 

Education: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as Presented in Behold a Pale Horse; pp. 287-288

Protocol 8

So far, the Elder, has been quite disappointing. This is, after all, a book which has done so much damage throughout the world. It was named dropped in the original Hamas Charter, it has been referred to in Mein Kempf, and fascist parties in Greece have read from it; but this book, it seems, is only giving a concentrated version of anti-Semitism. I guess, I expect more out of this (there is the possibility that I’ve read too much of these books to be surprised). 

Protocol 8 is one of those that diverge from the original source that it plagiarizes from. Protocol 8 follows an idea in Dialogue 8 (the numbers do not always match up), but the Protocols makes some shifts. Throughout our discussion of the Protocols I’ve mentioned that it is a plagiarism, and I’ve noted in the past that author Jonathan Kay argues that 60% of the Protocols is word for word (barring translation) lifted directly from the original source. I’ve referred a few times to that source and I’ve noticed that the divergence occurs because Joly understands his characters. Namely Machiavelli. 

Niccolo Machiavelli is the reason I have a PhD. I went to graduate school wanting to write about his political philosophy, I had read all of his works–minus his “Dialogue on Language” before starting. I did not get along with or have much regard for the political philosopher in my department and then…a bunch of odd things happened to get me where I am now. An aspect of Machiavelli’s writing is that he offers a hypothesis or a question (i.e. is it better to be loved or feared?); he analyzes the question a little and then goes into examples from both his time (Renaissance Italy) and ancient Rome. If one is unfamiliar with his examples, his writing comes across as boring. The Protocols mostly diverge when Joly’s Machiavelli does the historical analysis. This is important because the audience for the Protocols isn’t going to read it. 

This section of the book follows the same pattern. The Elder repeats his same schtick from Protocol 5 about taking over the administrative state. They’re not going to conquer the kingdoms and declare themselves monarchs; they’ll hide in the shadows and control every avenue of power that the official king needs to conduct business. In the Protocols, this is considered a bad thing, in the Dialogues, Machiavelli is making the point that you need jurists, administrators, diplomats, and publicists; to operate a state. They’re just important people who understand things. 

The Protocols frame this as evil. This is part of the plan, “These persons will have cognisance of all the secrets of the social structure, they will know all the languages that can be made up by political alphabets and words; they will be made acquainted with the whole underside of human nature, with all it sensitive chords on which they will have to play.”

What the Elder wants, and what the author of the Protocols wants you to despise; are educated people in charge of the various facets of society. The idea, which is a running theme throughout the Protocols, is that anyone educated in a specialized subject is part of the conspiracy. If the common rabble do not understand something it’s not because they lack education or lack curiosity, it’s because it is a secret they are prevented from learning by “them.” The sentiment is not an innocuous one either–the rebellion against advanced education continues to the present day. If teaching the kids something makes the older generation feel stupid/bad/guilty; then it needs to be banned and no longer taught. It’s part of the conspiracy that you do not understand advanced economic theory rather than the truth–that you didn’t study economics. 

The Elder claims the Goyim (which Cooper wants us to read as “Sheep”) cannot do these jobs because they are too stupid. They, “are accustomed to perform their administrative work without giving themselves the trouble to think what its aim is, and never consider what it is needed for.“

Wouldn’t it be better to have those people doing the tasks as opposed to people that do understand? The former cannot fathom the purposes and, importantly, also don’t care about it. The latter can use that information, they can try and carve out their own little fiefdom and become a challenge to the elder? In a normal conspiracy, this makes sense, but the endemic racism here claims that all Jewish people work together–they would never betray their own kind. 

The elder then claims that after some time this will establish an abyss between the elders and the common people so that this last point, about the possibility of betrayal, would never occur without the penalty of criminal charges or just disappearance. I don’t understand how this is supposed to work; if someone is going to betray the elders, they already understand the penalty for not being successful. 

In the original, the abyss language is used but it’s much different: “One must arrange things so as to give them to men whose antecedents and characters place an abyss between them and other men, each of whom only expects death or exile in case of a change of government or the necessity of defending all that exists to their last breaths.”

Machiavelli claims that special education and positions will weave themselves into the person’s character so that they will defend their state to the death. The secretary of defense, for example, will be so tied to their position in their state that by betraying it they will betray themselves. This is derived from an idea that Machiavelli had regarding the loyalty that Scipio Africanus extracted from the Roman nobility after their defeat at Cannae. Scipio made them so afraid to break their oaths that they would rather die, and then he defeated the Carthaginians. 

I still doubt that Cooper has read the Protocols with as much certainty as I doubt that many of the people who purchased this book never read past the first chapter. So far, the conspiracy is just, “they control everything” but it’s still very short on details. 

The Cycle: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as presented in Behold a Pale Horse; pp. 280-281 (Protocol 4)

I’ve decided that as we read through this book within a book, I need to make a change to the format. I’ve always had the intent to do a walkthrough of the Protocols. I was preparing to do it two books from now. With a book as infamous and as anti-Semitic as this I needed a book break and was planning on doing something light first. Yet, Cooper has thrown me into it anyway so, here we are. I’ve always known that the Protocols was in Behold a Pale Horse, but I assumed that it was an abridged version, or that there would be commentary to it. I never assumed it would be the whole bloody thing. 

So the format change is super minor but here it is: the Protocols are divided up by Protocol. I’m not going to do more than one protocol a week, but some of the longer ones may take more than one post. I mention this because where we are now, Protocol 4, is a short one. 

The original document that the Protocols is a plagiarism of, is a work by an opponent of Napoleon III named Maurice Joly. The original title is “A Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.”

I know, I’ve mentioned it several times, but I repeat it now because the first paragraph of Protocol 4 steals its idea from Machiavelli. The Elder writes of the fluid changing of governments, of a cycle of evolution of kinds of governments. The elder writes:

“Every Republic passes through several stages. The first of these is comprised in the early days of mad raging by the blind mob, tossed hither and thither, right and left: the second is demagogy, from which is born anarchy, and that leads inevitably to despotism–not any longer legal and overt, and therefore responsible despotism,…”

In Plato, there are three types of governments: Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy. Democracy, according to Plato was the worst form of government because that’s the kind that killed Socrates. Plato had little trust in the people to make the right decision and therefore created his Republic which was a kind of Aristocracy. His student Aristotle, adjusted Plato’s view–improving it between virtuous forms of government and vicious ones. According to Aristotle there was Monarchy and there was Tyranny, Aristocracy, and Oligarchy; finally ending with Democracy and Anarchy. Each of the latter is a corruption of the former. A good king was better than a bad group of oligarchs. Machiavelli took these six and created a historiagraphical cycle. 

A loose gathering of people elects a king from among their ranks to lead them and protect them from outside hostilities. This is a good king, but his children or his grandchildren do not remember the struggles and behave for themselves, becoming tyrants. The tyrant is eventually overthrown by a group of people who rule as aristocrats. These people keep checks on one another and make decisions based on the good of all. However, after a time they too begin ruling for themselves, until the populace overthrows them. Deciding instead that the common good would be better decided by the common people. This maintains until the population breaks apart returning to the original anarchic groups that crowned a king to begin with. 

The elder’s position is at the end: that despotism is the best form of government. He continues on:

“…but to unseen and secretly hidden, yet nevertheless sensibly felt despotism in the hands of some secret organisation or other, whose acts are the more unscrupulous inasmuch as it works behind a screen, behind the backs of all sorts of agents, the changing of whom not only does not injuriously affect but actually aids the secret force by saving it, thanks to continual changes, from the necessity of expending its resources on the rewarding of long services.” 

Here the elder is discussing the bureaucracy, the true deep state. Reagan believed the deep state existed, but not the deep state of Q-anon and Trump; but the administrators and secretaries who worked in government no matter who was in charge. Imagine if every secretary in the White House doesn’t like your idea–it’s not getting done. They can lose a form, things can be miss stamped, and one of those manila inter-office envelopes can be sent to the wrong department over and over again. Sure, they may not be able to stop an idea, but they can sure as hell slow it down. The elder believes that by infiltrating these people, they will effectively control the governments of the world. This can work, in real life, for a bit; but eventually, these schemes will be figured out and the people replaced. Reagan was speaking in the same vein as his anti-union sentiment; you can’t just fire people who won’t play along; here, this is a plan. 

This deep state will work because the people will be distracted by their need for gold. They will be pushed into industry and trades; they will be set against each other so that they never see what is going on. All of this will be pitched toward a boiling point that will result in the population working against the only people who can expose the secret–the intellectuals. 

There is an out-of-place section in this protocol about how the goyim could survive if they only had faith in god and walked hand in hand with each other as equal children of god. The Elder says that to deal with this threat they will undermine the people’s faith and destroy the very idea of a Godhead. The paragraph is a non-sequitur, it doesn’t relate to anything before or after it. The paragraph must be one of the additions that Serge Nilus added to the work, it’s implicitly against how Christians portray their worldview, especially in late 19th century Europe. Religion will come back, so we’ll deal with it in more detail as the elder does. 

This Protocol is now over. It’s only of note because it’s the first writing where we can identify a conspiracy that will become the “deep state,” which is troubling. After all, I had no idea that the conspiracy theory had anti-Semitic origins. 

Foundation: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion presented within Behold a Pale Horse: pp. 268-274

We begin our journey into another chapter that Cooper didn’t write (I think this is five so far, and I’m not counting the interview because Cooper actually did that). This is a very anti-Semitic work that one cannot divorce from the racism. What Cooper could have done was rewrite the entire thing, eliminate all references to race and religion, and then claim that the Illuminati wrote it. It would still have been bad, but it would have been better. He could have found the original document by Maurice Joly, which essentially does that, and reprinted it. Instead, Cooper is telling us to replace the word “Goyim” with the word “Cattle,” the word “Jews” with “Illuminati,” and the word “Zion” with “Sion.” 

Two things about this approach: the first is that he could do this. Instead, he tells us to do it while reading. When Alex Jones interviewed Kanye West last year, you could tell by listening to it (and the Podcast Knowledge Fight points this out frequently about Jones’ show) that there was a game being played by Jones. He’s willing to tolerate anti-Semitism on his show as long as it doesn’t get too overt. Jones only pushed back on West when West would talk about how great Hitler was, or when he would name “the Jews” overtly as being responsible for whatever it was West was complaining about. He plays this game because Jones knows that if he comes down too hard on anti-Semitism he loses a good portion of his audience. I can’t say if Cooper is doing the same thing here; the mid-90s conspiracy crowd was tied up with the militia movement which was also tied up with a growing Neo-Nazi movement (which then became the Proud Boys and groups like that today). Cooper could have been catering to them. Again, I cannot say for sure.

The second thing is that the third example “Zion” = “Sion” is just nonsense. Does Cooper think that the person who is repulsed by anti-Semitic conspiracy theories is going to keep reading because now he’s referencing the “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” conspiracy theory? Absolutely not. Furthermore, the person is just going to think “They spell it two ways.” 

This is the leader of the Jewish elders speaking to the group. He’s laying out how his group is going to take over the world and overthrow good Christian society. I’ve read this pamphlet before and I don’t prefer the translation that Cooper is using, but we will keep to it: “It must be noted that men with bad instincts are more in number than the good, and therefore the best results in governing them are attained by violence and terrorisation, and not by academic discussion.” 

I teach philosophy and this is a debatable point. In the original text, this is put into the mouth of Machiavelli; which I dispute the accuracy of doing so because the man’s work is not accurately reflected by his reputation, e.g. he never wrote that the ends justify the means. 

The sentiment here would be something that accurately reflects the work of 17th-century English Philosopher Thomas Hobbes or this is a sentiment that Aristotle communicated in the Nichomachean Ethics. For the former, the idea is that people will get away with whatever they can until the force of violence stops them. For the latter, Aristotle believed that only the truly wise would have no need of the law to compel them to right action. Most people though, need a carrot and a stick to behave morally. 

It’s an actual good question but so far we haven’t gotten anything terrible. The work continues to describe that “political freedom” isn’t something that can be defined. Ok, again, this is true. What would it mean to say that an individual is “politically free”? Is it anarchy? Because then we are back in the Hobbesian state of nature, where we may have no laws personally, but we are subject to the whims of the unrestrained actions of our neighbors. Another English Philosopher, John Locke, would agree, but his state of nature was one of abundance and thus peace. Hobbes famously believed that life in the state of nature would be “nasty, brutish, and short.” The short-lived pirate kingdom of the late 1600 and early 1700s would be an example, but there a rudimentary government system was created until the English Navy destroyed it. 

The problem is that being politically free means nothing. The libertarian dream of people like Ayn Rand pretending they want no government but then they have no plan for who runs the roads or the sewers. So far, other than this work allegedly coming from the mouth of an unnamed and unidentifiable Jewish group who met at a cemetery in Prague there is nothing bad here. 

“In our day the power which has replaced that of the rulers who were liberal is the power of Gold.“

Ok, I agree (?), there is too much money in politics. However, that is not what this means. Remember, this is supposedly coming from the “Jew” and the canard here is that the banks, run by the Jewish cabal, control the money. The claim is that all governments can be controlled by the flow of gold. When the original work by Joly was written, all nations were on the gold standard for their economy. We would call it “capital” in modern terms. What’s happening is that the elder is claiming that with gold, they can turn any liberal, i.e. politically free, state into a despotism by injecting gold into the mix. The goal is to subvert any society into despotism through the use of what matters most to the populace–gold. 

Sure, you’re thinking, that makes some sense when you talk about campaign finance or banks; but not regular people. To which, I disagree, you can promise the people free healthcare or lower taxes. Which one do they choose: in the US, we chose lower taxes. We do this quite frequently because the promise of personal wealth means more than the common good and those abstract poor people can all die. 

I know I keep saying it, but these are all good questions from a political philosophy position. The elder continues by explaining the fundamentals of this plan, “The political has nothing in common with the moral. The ruler who is governed by the moral is not a skilled politician, and therefore is unstable on his throne.”

In the original, these words are spoken by Machiavelli–and this is an accurate representation of his belief. He argues in the Prince, The Discourses, and the History of Florence; that great leaders are not afraid to commit immoral actions in service to their state. However, his case for this is war. There is a larger case that Machiavelli is making though that gets ignored. Italian princes in the 1500s were almost exclusively Catholic. This prevented them from going to war with their own forces unless they could get a dispensation from the Church–which could easily be purchased. Unless, of course, the Pope was a Sforza; you were a Medici, and the war you wanted was against the Sforza. One way around this was to hire condottiere or mercenaries to do your fighting for you. Then you didn’t impugn the morality of your state, because it wasn’t your army that did the fighting. The hair-splitting involved here is impressive but it’s well within Aquinas’s Doctrine of Double Effect to call it moral. Machiavelli’s longer point was that a prince should just swallow up the immorality and create their own army to do their fighting for them. The army would be loyal because they were fighting for their homeland. They wouldn’t switch sides or feel “not up to fighting” on some days (these were problems Machiavelli points out with hired soldiers).

What the elder is arguing though is a bit convoluted. This is because Joly has to hide his claims from the censor of Napolean III who can have him killed, and the person who plagiarized him to make the Protocols was an idiot who didn’t understand it is less a good question of political philosophy but a convoluted conspiracy theory. 

1) People are idiots: It is necessary to have regard to the rascality, the slackness, the instability of the mob, its lack of capacity to understand and respect the conditions of its own life, or its own welfare. 

2) We will exploit their greed (as I said above). 

3) We will bring down the state by equivocating: If every State has two foes and if in regard to the external foe, it is allowed and not considered immoral to use every manner and art of conflict, as for example to keep the enemy in ignorance of plans of attack and defence, to attack him by night or in superior numbers, then in what way can the same means in regard to a worse foe, the destroyer of the structure of society and the commonweal, be called immoral and not permissible?

They will frame the struggle as being an existential one and thus any means to win are permitted. Those, like Cooper, who push the NWO/Illuminati/Jewish conspiracy frame it just like this. Oh sure, China is bad, but look what these liberals are doing to our kids. 

4) Here, the “liberal,” has no position, their dream is too ideological (As I explained in the beginning of this post), so they are clearly trying to bring down this society therefore we must destroy them. 

Therefore: “Out of the temporary evil we are now compelled to commit will emerge the good of an unshakeable rule, which will restore the regular course of the machinery of the national life, brought to naught by liberalism.” 

Those who wish for freedom cannot be allowed to exercise those wishes. The elder, believes that people will prefer what they are used to rather than anything new. Thus, the temporary evil they will be “forced” to commit will be in service to the maintenance of the status quo. Machiavelli agreed with this idea but he didn’t think it was good. 

One of the appeals of this work is not only is it anti-Semitic, but that it attacks all forms of permissiveness (i.e. liberalism in the modern sense). It believes that any group allowed to govern itself will fall to the same victimization provided above. This is because the mob cannot be trusted to live their own lives. The author exploits neophobia here. If only the youth would just listen to their fathers, then they would not have to intervene in this manner. Since the right-wing conspiracy crowd is, by necessity, conservative (especially in Tsarist Russia at the end), this hits a chord with them. The kids are all drinking and cavorting with one another–why can’t they just listen to us? They claim to want simple “freedom” but then cannot define it, so we must give it to them in our own way. 

The abstraction of freedom has enabled us to persuade the mob in all countries that their government is nothing but the steward of the people who are the owners of the country, and the steward may be replaced like a worn-out glove.

The people who want revolution, who protest for rights, etc? Those people are controlled by the Jewish elders and are the problem because they challenge the status quo in the name of “freedom.” 

Treason!: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 240-250

We’ve finished with Cooper’s strange foray into the UFO world. I call it strange because that overly long chapter was supposed to be about the secret government of the world and instead, it was only tangentially about that. What we did get was Cooper’s belief in the UFO conspiracy, which undoubtedly inspired the X-Files; a very odd and impossible JFK assassination, and then the secret government which supports the rest of it.  

We begin a new chapter this week titled: 

       “Treason in High Places: The United Nations Treaty and The United Nations Participation Act vs. The Sovereignty of the United States of America” 

And then there’s an apocryphal quote from Benjamin Franklin about having created a Republic, “if you can keep it.” It’s possible that Franklin said this, but it’s just as likely that it is a good story. Cooper does this thing that conspiracy theorists cannot help themselves from doing: word blasting at the very outset. Part of this is the emotional aspect of their writing, they’re excited; they get ahead of themselves. They write and speak like four-year-olds trying to tell a joke–they are too impatient to get to the punch line. Disciplined writers will do something different: let their own words do the work in the body. “Treason in High Places” is a perfectly acceptable chapter title, the rest of it is just too much. 

Our chapter begins with Cooper directly quoting Article VI of the US Constitution. I’ll give him credit that he’s actually, possibly read the Constitution, unlike posers such as Alex Jones or David Icke with the Magna Carta. He’s got it word for word, which is great, but this is done without context. We’ve no idea why he’s doing this. Once accomplished we move right into the next section titled: Have We Already Joined a One-World Government?

Cooper already thinks we have, so I’ll just spoil that part of the book right now. However, we must understand just how influential the claims that he is making are. The mistrust of the United Nations and any international cooperative body has been the boogeyman of the conspiratorial right wing since the 1940s. Barry Goldwater railed against the Tri-lateral Commission until he began an earnest run for president and needed to not appear as a John Birch Society lunatic. This fear of the “Illuminati” or any global puppet master has always been the pornography the right wing has tossed to its base. 

Here is how bad it is: in 2012 the US Senatorial Foreign Relations Committee recommended the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Disabled. It’s one of those UN declarations that try to make the world a better place by, in this case, recognizing that disabled people are still people and that states should make an effort to facilitate their lives. It’s modeled, in part, after the Americans with Disabilities Act signed by President George H.W. Bush in 1990. It’s a convention modeled after a law signed into action by a Republican president, and the Republican congress in 2012 voted against ratification. The reasoning is that the conspiratorial base that has been fed for decades on the type of conspiracy theories that Cooper is writing here will not agree to anything that they think impedes American sovereignty–even if it involves signing a convention that basically states, “that law you guys made in 1990 that’s a good law the world agrees with it.” (there are a dozen conventions like this, and the US has only signed 3)

Cooper explains that the UN is the child of the CFR and the JASON society. Ok, blah blah blah, we’ve heard this in the last chapter. These kinds of “facts” are only important for believers who need to toss out their yarn charts to bewilder the doubters. I want the argument.

Cooper lays out pretty quick. He quotes Article 25 of the UN Charter: “Member nations agree to ACCEPT and CARRY OUT the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the PRESENT CHARTER.”

This is the entire article, and Cooper has some thoughts on it. I should remind the reader that we have seen Cooper’s grasp of legal documents–and it’s bad. He’s a proto-sovereign citizen who confuses technical terms with colloquial terms. 

For example, he capitalizes “PRESENT CHARTER” because he thinks, “the word ‘present,’ indicating that there might be OTHER charters.” 

No, it just means that this charter is where 25 binds. If the UN dissolves the charter to create a new one, Article 25 no longer applies. There’s no secret charter. If there was, Article 25 would not apply to it because of the wording of Article 25. 

Then Cooper lays out the usual anti-UN bullshit. Because, in his mind, Article 25 says that members must abide by the laws of the UN the US Constitution no longer applies. For example, if the Security Council unanimously approves a law banning guns, Cooper has to get rid of his guns because UN law supersedes the Constitution; except no, that’s not at all what is happening. The UN specifically respects the sovereign authority of the member states in Article 2 of the charter. Gun ownership would fall within the domestic operations of the US and thus not within the legal authority of the UN. The caveat to this would be if the US was sending guns to Mexico in order to destabilize the government. Then the UN could pass a resolution to stop it, but that resolution would get vetoed by the US; because, at its core, the UN is a profoundly weak organization. 

This misunderstanding of the legal system operates at the core of the anti-UN conspiracy theories. Cooper includes a letter to the editor, which agrees with him; it’s another, but different misunderstanding of how treaties operate. What’s important to understand is that people like Cooper are arguing that Congress can enter no treaty with another country. We cannot give something to them, change our policies, anything in a normal treaty. This state of affairs would be the end result of their position. 

This letter is followed by another one which states the same sentiment only with more quoting and name-dropping. The second letter, I assume it’s a letter, we aren’t really given a context for where this appears is just longer. It attempts to state that the Constitution is a contract between “We the People” and the government that the document creates. Article IV prevents the UN rules from overwriting the law of the US but the US continues to change under the UN proclamation. This is an interesting argument because they have only two examples: one is a migratory bird act that the Supreme Court rules on…which has nothing to do with the UN only that there was no rule and the Court had to make a rule out of nothing to resolve it. The second is the UN involvement in Katanga, during the 1960s Congo crisis. There’s too much history here for me to go over, but the short of it is that the UN ordered Belgium to remove its forces, it protested, there was a civil war, and the UN sent in troops. That’s the only example the second letter writer claims. 

Stripping away the misunderstanding of what a treaty is, there is nothing here. The central belief of these people comes at the end of the second letter (?), “This would the World on notice that we were once more HONORING OUR OWN CONSTITUTION (CHARTER OF FREEDOM) AS THE SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND, AND REINSTATING IT TO ITS FORMER SUPREME POSITION.”

They believe that the “Constitution” is under attack. Not the actual document, but the mythical one. Yet, they cannot point to a single case of it. The US entered the UN through the legal channels. You can disagree with it, you can not like it, you can even implore your representatives to pass a resolution to leave it; but this kind of technicality bullshit is childish. I would love for one of these conspiracy theories to cite something specific that the UN did to impugn American sovereignty. 

With that, this chapter closes. We’ve learned only what people like Cooper believe about the UN, what we do not know is why. Why do they hate international cooperation? I puzzle over this. 

Stellar Confusion: Behold a Pale Horse pg. 76-78

Secret societies need members and special knowledge. Otherwise, believers would realize that the Illuminati was just an 18th-century group of nerds who read too much philosophy and wanted to educate the population. It’s boring unless you can trace it back to something special or new. The secret society of the Dragon needs members and Cooper is happy to oblige.  

Cooper wants to put all the famous thinkers in history into this group. His first candidate is Plato. As a Ph.D. in philosophy, I really want to spend 2k words on why this is bullshit and how, if Plato had access to the secret knowledge, why does his theory of the forms fail the third man objection? Cooper writes, “Plato’s initiation encompassed three days of entombment in the Great Pyramid, during which he died (symbolically), was reborn, and was given secrets that he was to preserve. Plato’s writings are full of information on the Mysteries.”

I’ve read a considerable amount of Plato. One could argue that Plato’s access to secret knowledge is all of his philosophical works but that is being overly generous. Plato learned his philosophy from Socrates, the Pythagoreans, and some of the other precursors to Hellenic philosophy. The rest of his claim: not only is it not correct, but I cannot even figure out where it comes from. Searching turns up references to this book, some other esoteric books, or pages on Platonic solids. This is where we take a pass. If Cooper comes back to Plato, so will I, but my doctorate is tempting me to spend the rest of my day on why this is wrong. 

So, begrudgingly we move on…space stuff. One of the telltale signs of omni-conspiracy theories is when the theorist tries to marry the occult with science. David Icke does it when he pushes his lizard aliens into ancient Sumeria. Cooper is better at it because he’s using actual science such as Antony Hewish’s 1974 Nobel Prize in physics. Cooper claims that Hewish discovered radio signals originating from a star that exploded in 4000 b.c.e. and he ties that into the creation of the Giza Pyramid. 

None of this is true. I’m making the assumption that Cooper has read this somewhere and his source is incorrect. Hewish designed and built a type of radio telescope that allowed his research assistant Jocelyn Bell to discover, for the first time, a pulsar. A pulsar is a rotating neutron star, which ejects a beam of magnetic radiation. Due to the specific rotation of the star, the beam can be detected at regular intervals, or “pulses.” It was not an exploding star and the specific one they discovered is located in the constellation Vulpecula. 

Cooper cites a crank astronomer who tried to tie together Atlantis, Babylon, and a star exploding. His name is George Michanowsky, and his book “The Once and Future Star,” is a strong contender for the next book in this blog. It looks delightful. 

Cooper then makes a mistake, he offers a prediction. Not some vague bullshit either, he offers a specific prediction based on Michanowsky’s book. He begins quoting Michanowsky, “An accurate star catalogue now stated  that the blazing star that had exploded within the triangle [made of stars: Zeta Puppis, Gamma Velorum, and Lambda Velorum] would again be seen by man in 6000 years.’ According to the Freemason’s calendar it will occur in the year 2000, and indeed it will.” 

It did not. 

Cooper then moves toward Galileo, the craft not the person. His claim here is that the probe will orbit Jupiter under the guise of a science mission. In reality, the probe contains 49.7 pounds of plutonium-238 “supposedly being used as batteries to power the craft. When its final orbit decays in December of 1999, Galileo will deliver its payload into the center of Jupiter.”

Why? Because when the gravitational force of Jupiter crushes the Pu-238 it will result in an atomic explosion that will ignite the hydrogen and helium atmosphere resulting in the birth of a new star which has already been named LUCIFER. He begins discussing this plan and how it likely won’t work, because the society in charge–the JASON society is just flexing their technology. Cooper says that this is overkill because “as the documents that I read while in Naval Intelligence states that Project Galileo required only five pounds of Plutonium to ignite Jupiter and possibly stave off the coming ice age.“

Where to begin? 

Galileo did have Pu-238 as a power source. This is a really cool thing that NASA and the JPL do to power spacecraft and planetary rovers. A radioactive isotope is used to power the machines through the Seebeck effect, which exploits a temperature difference between the radioactive material and another. So they weren’t exactly batteries but they weren’t far off from that either. Anyway, Pu-238 is not a weapons-grade isotope of Plutonium, that’s Pu-239. It could work, but as far as we know, 238 doesn’t decay the correct way for our use. There’s no reason to think that JASON would send 238 into Jupiter when they could have sent 239. Secondly, Jupiter’s atmosphere wouldn’t ignite to form a new star. This is evidence of Cooper filling the gaps of his ignorance with how he thinks it works. A star isn’t “on fire.” You can’t take a failed star like Jupiter and just turn it on. Jupiter never collected enough mass to begin the process of stellar fusion. We could send every nuclear weapon on Earth into Jupiter and the only thing it would accomplish is making the atmosphere more radioactive. Third, the probe deliberately crashed into Jupiter’s atmosphere in 2003 and nothing happened.  

Why create this LUCIFER star? Cooper’s theory is that LUCIFER will be used to stave off the coming ice age because global warming is a hoax. The coming ice age is a concept that conservatives love to trot out now to disprove climate change. It’s not that they believe the ice age is coming, it’s that they like to believe that if science was wrong once it’s wrong always so we don’t need to worry about climate change. What they purposefully fail to understand is that the ice age hypothesis was based on a minority position and was never the scientific consensus. Conservatives will then offer the Galileo gambit–which is a conspiracy theory tactic claiming that the consensus was against Galileo too and he was right. The gambit ignores a few things–importantly that Galileo wasn’t against scientific consensus he was against religious theocracy and if he hadn’t kept insulting the Pope he would have been fine. The other thing that they ignore is all the times the consensus of science was correct and then evolved into new ideas as more information was provided. New knowledge means that we get to change our position. 

Though the coming ice age was offered primarily in sensationalist and conspiracy literature. It occupied pseudo-science television shows like Leonard Nimoy’s “In Search Of…” (season 2 ep. 23) where most people were exposed to it. When people trot the ice age argument out, I like to commit my own fallacy of “guilt by association” and ask them about the other theories offered on shows like that: ancient aliens, Bermuda Triangle, and Sasquatch. 

For our purposes with Cooper: LUCIFER would not fix the problem of a coming ice age. A new star in the place of Jupiter would solve all future issues as it would rip the Earth into being caught between the two stars. The gravity forces would pull them together and suck the Earth into the new gravitational well. 

I don’t understand who the audience is for this claim. It’s an utter mystery to me because if JASON can do this doesn’t it mean that JASON controls the world? Why aren’t we more focused on that? Cooper is losing the thread. In a paragraph or two he gets it back and we’ll be back into the MYSTERIES next week. 

Genesis: Behold a Pale Horse…Pg. 76

In my course I offer the class a particular reason that conspiracy theorists are very difficult to argue with: the same rules that apply to us in arguing, i.e. facts, standards of evidence, and the rules of argumentation; do not apply to them. The most important rule that we have that they do not is: not to make things up. I call it argumenta ex ficta; an argument from fiction. Conspiracy theorists have two methods of doing this: the first is presenting known fictional works as fact. People like David Icke think The Matrix is a documentary, or The Truman Show, or any other work like that. Conspiracy theorists during the Covid Years talk about “med beds” from the movie Elysium. 

The second type of method is just to create the argument out of nothing. Fabricate the entire body of evidence and the skeptic will get bogged down trying to separate out the claims. In an online argument, they might even get a skeptic to waste a considerable amount of time trying to find the sources being discussed. Conspiracy theorists that cite a secret society will perform both arguments. They’ll use the 2001 Joshua Jackson movie “The Skulls” to claim that “this is how it really works” and then they will just fabricate the rest. Why not? No one can disagree with them because no one really knows. 

All of that is a preamble to Cooper. Cooper has been, for the last two weeks of this blog, trying to describe the operation of secret societies in the ancient world. We have no reason to believe that anything he is claiming has a basis. By the very nature of the things he is claiming no one could know what they were doing. It’s a secret. 

In the last book that we did, I mentioned that Robison’s real motive was he didn’t like the changes in the world around him: the average person was beginning to argue for representative democracy, literacy was spreading to not only the poors but also the womenfolk, and most scandalously the women were attending the opera baring their arms (not guns, but their uncovered appendages). Cooper’s complaint is different. I cannot comment on his social stances, yet, but his problem is that the state is not interested in helping the people rather, “governmental bodies of every nation have been involved with maintaining the status quo to defend the establishment against minority groups that sought to function as states within states or to oust the constituted authority and take over the place.”

I’m sympathetic to this claim though I do not agree that there is anything conspiratorial to it. Those in power protect themselves over the interest of justice. Unless you are on the top of the hierarchy, you know painfully that there are two legal systems in the US: one for the rich and one for the rest of us. I’ve seen too many people get into cars absolutely blasted drunk from a charity fundraiser, in front of police officials, and nothing happens to them. That’s just a small thing but Cooper’s claim here can be seen in where the laws are applied, where the police do most of their patrols, etc. It’s objective at this point. The problem for Cooper, and people like him, is that they make this defensible claim and then claim the people responsible are the Illuminati/aliens/Jews. 

A guy like Cooper could have been a force of good if he just stopped short of naming the people responsible. So far, he’s been kind of elusive about the groups, and his nebulous discussions of who they are and how they function do not give us any solid information that we can fact-check. We should be excited because this is the chapter where he is going to do that. And, we get disappointed pretty quickly.

“The most important of all of these groups is the Brotherhood of the Snake, or Dragon, and was simply known as the Mysteries.”

He mentioned this two weeks ago, and I have to reiterate that outside of this book and the Conan stories I have read; the Brotherhood of the Snake is brand new to me. I must remind the reader, this subject is my academic profession. I’m sure Icke has it in his works because of the shapeshifting reptile aliens, but I only recall that they formed the Illuminati. There was no “Brotherhood of the Snake” as a proper noun. 

Cooper claims that “The snake and the dragon represent wisdom. The father of wisdom is Lucifer, the Light Bearer. 

This quote is what I am referring to in the beginning. In what culture does a snake represent wisdom? I get the metaphor Cooper is creating: the snake tempts Eve with the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, therefore the snake is a symbol of wisdom. I get that, but worshipping the snake is just something Cooper is creating his evidence. 

The part which argues the most for my position is the next sentence: “The focus of worship for the Mysteries was Osiris, another name of Lucifer. Osiris was the name of a bright star that the ancients believed had been cast down onto the earth.”

By what source is Cooper equating Osiris and Lucifer? I know that through the history of Christian mythology; the religion has taken Pagan gods and recast them in their roles as demons. The word “demon” for example is derived from “daimon” which is a non-malevolent voice in the Greek world. Socrates blamed/credited his life’s work on a daimon. Osiris, for those unfamiliar, is the Egyptian god of the underworld. Being the god of the afterlife doesn’t make you evil, like Hades of the Greek world, it just means that this was the deity in charge. Yet, no text associates Osiris with being the god of wisdom in ancient Egypt. Osiris is also not a snake. 

The weird claims about Osiris are strange because they are so easily researched. Not just today on the internet but history sections in libraries would have a book on the Egyptian world with a list of gods. I am not referring to some academic tome either but something like a national geographic book on the Pyramids. Cooper is inventing this stuff, and it doesn’t make sense: “The ancients saw the sun as the representation of Osiris, or more correctly Lucifer.”

No, they did not. The ancients would have associated Ra with the sun because he was the sun god in the way that Apollo was the god of the sun for the Greeks. The evidence that Cooper provides is merely cherry-picking quotes. He begins with Confederate General, Klan member, and Mason Albert Pike, “Osiris was represented by the sun.”

No, again, that was Ra, but if we put that disagreement aside this out-of-context quote doesn’t prove or even argue for anything. It’s just an incorrect claim about an ancient god.

The next line doesn’t help Cooper either, “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer…”

Cooper correctly attributes this to Isaiah 14:12, which is the only place in the entire Bible that mentions the name “Lucifer.” Lucifer means “light bringer” and while the common understanding now is that Lucifer, Satan, and the Devil are all the same, there is very little biblical justification for this position. Satan is a character, it references the Devil a few times, but independently of this Lucifer character. Again, the line doesn’t do anything, and the full 14:12 continues, “…how art though cut down to the ground, which didst weaken nations.”

Finally, Cooper ends with “…it is claimed that, after Lucifer fell from heaven, he brought with him the power of thinking as a gift of mankind.”

The line here is attributed to “Frank Gittings” but Cooper means “Frank Gettings” who wrote a book Cooper reports as “Symbolism in Occult Art” but he means “Secret Symbolism in Occult Art.” Misspellings aside the entire line is bunk because Gettings is qualifying it with the weasel phrase “it is claimed that…” 

Which, biblically, no one claims that. The tree held the power of thinking, and the snake convinced Eve to eat from the thinking tree. Assuming the snake was Lucifer still doesn’t get us to Cooper’s claim. Putting all of that to the side we are still bereft of a point. 

The last word here is that none of this makes any sense. Cooper is making things up. If he wants to tie Lucifer to Egypt just say Lucifer and Ra were the same thing. Cooper then moves on to Plato and that needs its own post. 

History Lessons: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 1-41

I know that last week I said I was going to skip the very long introduction, though I did also say that there were some bits that needed to be explained…so we’re going to cover the entire 40-page introduction in this post. There are some points that need to be covered as I think it gives us some insight into the author himself. One of my academic interests in this subject is how people got into it. What motivates a person to wake up one day and accept the conspiracy world as true. With Robison and Allen before him; the motivating factor seems to be a loss of control over the world. Not personal control but the shifting of the status quo for which they enjoyed an elevated position. In both works, the authors try their best to explain how it is that the world had changed around them and both blame it on nefarious controllers. So, with Cooper, it’s going to be more interesting (hopefully). 

The first 20 pages are a family history which is just biographical. It’s not that interesting. We see that Cooper has an idealized view of his family. It would seem that his father did not show affection, which is standard for the time. His mother was the platonic ideal of a southern belle…it’s not much really. 

On page 19 (of the PDF remember) Cooper joins the Air Force. He wanted the Navy but his disposition to sea sickness negated that. He is assigned to the 495th Bomber Wing of the Strategic Air Command. This is where his story gets odd. First off there was never a 495th bomber wing….ever. There was a 494, so we might want to chalk this up to a simple error. However, I’ve known plenty of veterans (my father was one for example) and this isn’t a mistake you make. This is a pretty egregious error, people in the military remember with pride the units they were assigned. The second odd thing is that he claims the unit’s designation was changed from 495 to 4245. However, this is not right, in fact, it was the opposite. The 4245 was replaced with the 494th, though this change is in name only. Cooper is correct that the 494 was a strategic bombing wing and thus would have been a fleet of atomic bombers. What’s puzzling here is that Cooper is claiming that his unit was real tight, they went to clubs and drank a lot together–but was that in the 495th, 494th, or the 4245th? It is here that Cooper hears a story about a unit that retrieves downed UFOs. 

That’s right folks, Cooper isn’t just a New World Order (NWO) theorist, he’s a UFO guy too. 

In the 19502 and 1960s, there was a golden age of new technology. The Cold War was in full swing and the race to test new technology often crossed with creating new ways to detect technology. I have no idea if Cooper is making this up, if the sergeant that told him the story made it up, or if this one of those things where the U in UFO, does all the lifting here. It’s possible if the story is true and that this “Sgt. Meese” was in a unit that recovered crashed recon planes and atomic detection equipment (which is what actually crashed at Roswell). This part of the story ends with Cooper watching on Nov. 22 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated. 

Cooper claims he watched this live on the break room television set. However, like the false memory of thousands of school kids who claim they watched the Challenger explode on television; this is the same thing. Kennedy’s motorcade was important in Dallas, but nationally, it was another stop on a campaign tour. The motorcade might have been broadcast locally in Dallas, but not at Sheppard airbase 150 miles away. After a few harrowing days under DEFCON 2; I can find no evidence that the US military was placed on DEFCON 2. However, the Strategic Air Command, would have a different state of readiness from the NORAD DEFCON that we are familiar with. According to official documents the US has only ever been at DEFCON 3 (claims that we were under 2 during the Cuban Missile Crisis are apparently a mistake). 

Cooper leaves the Air Force in 1965; only to join the Navy. Which he admits was difficult because of his seasickness. He’s stationed in Hawaii on the USS Tiru, the last of the WWII era Balao Submarines. He makes two friends on the Tiru: an African American named Lincoln Loving and a Native American that they called, sigh, “Geronimo.” Cooper recounts the shenanigans they got into aboard the Tiru, and having met two sailors in my day–it all tracks. Then Cooper relates the story of the UFO he saw in the sky. 

It’s a very X-Files story. Cooper sees it, an Ensign Ball, his pal Geronimo, they track it in the sky on radar, and then someone comes with a camera. According to the story, “It was a metal machine, of that there was no doubt whatsoever. It was intelligently controlled, of that I was equally sure. It was a dull color, kind of like pewter. There were no lights. There was no glow. I thought I had seen a row of what looked like portholes, but could not be certain.”

When the Tiru is docked back at US Naval headquarters at Pearl Harbor, everyone who saw the UFO is interviewed by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) where he’s told to be quiet and that he saw nothing. 

My issue with this entire story is that he was supposed to be on a submarine. The sub he described, the Tiru, didn’t have radar. Why was everyone on deck? I know submarines surface for various reasons, but this story is just so odd. Cooper keeps quiet and moves from various jobs to job in the Navy. Finally, he ends up commanding a patrol boat (think of the boat in Apocalypse Now) and operates in the Da Nang river. A friend of his is lost in combat and now the war became personal. Cooper brags about the number of combat missions his boat was involved in and how many enemy engagements he survived. He complains about the war in a way that is familiar to me from the numerous books I’ve read on the subject. The constant rotation of people in and out of areas made it difficult to create unit cohesion or to be effective in combat.

I read in a book about the Vietnam war this same complaint. One Army infantry unit would be stationed in the Mekong Delta and then after a year they would be transferred to this very dangerous area around a bridge, then a year later somewhere safer. The author of the book (I cannot remember the name of it), complained that being near the bridge sucked, but after a few months, the platoon became familiar with the terrain. They would know when something was out of place and they could rely on the other members to do the same only to get rotated out to somewhere that, on paper, seemed safer, but because they didn’t know it was actually more dangerous. I don’t doubt his Vietnam story, I do doubt that UFOs were really the U in that initialism. I’m sure all of the lights, over an active war zone (I’m sorry–peacekeeping operation), are very explainable. 

After ‘Nam, Cooper is back at Pearl working for ONI. He’s given “Q-Clearance” (yes the same Q level clearance that Q-anon claims) where he learns that ONI killed JFK. The Secret Service agent who is driving the Limo killed Kennedy. An impressive feat when you consider that JFK was behind and to the right of the driver and the fatal shot which killed Kennedy was to the right side of the president’s head. He also learned about Project Galileo, the coming ice age, the New World Order, and “Alternatives 1, 2, & 3.”

Cooper is discharged and avoids two assassination attempts as he tries to leak this information to a reporter. The book we are about to read is that information. Every paranoid UFO conspiracy theory is in this book. In fact, it’s the genesis for a bit of it. Cooper book is an amalgamation of a number of different conspiracy theories as he gained prominence in the UFO movement spearheaded by Stanton Friedman. As Cooper’s star faded, he jumped into the conspiracy movement. With his Naval history he had a certain clout that others did not. Moreso because his Naval work is verifiable. While liars like Bob Lazar can claim all this history in Area 51, Cooper can show discharge papers. 

The rest of the introduction is a mix of his life with his wife and child–which is sad because of how it ends (it’s not in the book but I know the rest of the story); and his fights with other conspiracy theorists at the dawn of the “patriot movement” in the 80s. Cooper was a violent alcoholic and was likely suffering from PTSD from Vietnam. The UFO community exorcised him because he was notoriously difficult to get along with and he became more paranoid seeing every misfortune as a plot against him. 

Next week we will begin chapter 1: Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars.