When it comes to writing about the conspiracy theory landscape in the 1990s, the obvious place to start is with Milton William “Bill” Cooper, and his book Behold a Pale Horse. My used copy of the book consists of 500 pages, with 17 chapters and 7 appendices; to begin with, sources for various claims appear at the end of each chapter, but as the work progresses, the citations cease.
The book is usually credited to Cooper, even though large parts of it were not written by him – in fact, chapters 1, 3, 4, 10, 14, 15, and 17, plus all of the appendices, were written by other people, and at other points Cooper introduces material published elsewhere, to which he merely adds some commentary or conclusion.
The book is thus a mishmash of chapters that do not connect; each of them can be read independently of the other. The objective of some of those chapters is that they would be documents that reinforce the author’s central idea that there is a secret cabal dedicated to the destruction of the United States. In fact, the book contains two of the most notorious pieces of conspiratorial writing – one reproduced in its entirety, the other just in selected pieces: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars.
The protocols were published in 1903 in Russia, purporting to recount a plan by the Jews to control the world. The fact that the book was a hoax, and a plagiarism of several works, did not stop it spreading throughout the world over the decades following its publication.
The most interesting part of Cooper’s republishing of the text is in the author’s note he includes by way of introduction:
Author’s Note: This is an exact reprint of the original text. This has been written intentionally to deceive people. For clear understanding, the word “Zion” should be “Sion”; any reference to “Jews” should be replaced with the word “Illuminati”; and the word “goyim” should be replaced with the word “cattle.”
Cooper clearly understands that the Protocols are an antisemitic work, yet he is happy to use them because the message they contain supports his narrative. So how does he solve this problem? By claiming that the Illuminati manipulated the work, and by asking the reader to replace any terms that have a Jewish connection with conspiratorial “neutral” terms. Other conspiracy authors, such as Stan Deyo in The Cosmic Conspiracy follow the same approach:
The protocols are real; they do exist; and they have been exercised with alarming precision by some group for more than 100 years. They were truly written by the Illuminati… that same Illuminati whose Hermetic code insists on secrecy… and a ‘low profile’. The Jews and Masons have been made the scapegoat for something they have not done… even though some of both groups have at times aided the cause by their own ignorance.
Deyo, The Cosmic Conspiracy, page 66
What is the advantage of having the Protocols as a work that is part of your canon, given all the baggage the original text carries? Given that text is a fraudulent and a clearly antisemitic document, you’d think that using or referencing this work would be automatically disqualifying, or at the very least, highly problematic. However, this is precisely one of the chief reasons for including such texts, because of a concept outlined by political scientist Professor Michael Barkun, called “Stigmatized Knowledge”:
In the first place, stigmatization itself is taken to be evidence of truth – for why else would a belief be stigmatized if not to suppress the truth? Hence stigmatization, instead of making a truth claim appear problematic, is seen to give it credibility, by implying that some malign forces conspired to prevent its becoming known.
Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, page 28
So, according to this principle, the problematic aspects of a theory become its strength; society rejects the Protocols not because it is antisemitic or even a proven fraud, but because it is actually telling the truth – the truth that They don’t want you to know. And why does the rest of society scorn and criticise the text? Not because it is an incendiary and deceptive piece of propaganda whose aim when it was written was to stoke racist fears and attack minority groups, but because it is a true account of the mendacious plans of an evil group.
There is also another reason to graft texts like the Protocols into books like Behold a Pale Horse: the construction of a canon. As Jovan Byford points out:
To address the tricky issue of evidence, conspiracy writers tend to interpret the world around them through the work of other conspiracy theorists, past and present, and invoke their authority as a substitute for direct proof.
Byford 2011, page 110
Conspiracy theories are narratives claiming that truth has been hidden and suppressed by society. Authors like Cooper will use whatever material they can to prove themselves correct; the more they use, the better, as it creates the notion of a gigantic canon of material that all confirms what he claims.
The second work grafted into Cooper’s book alongisde the Protocols is Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, which shares a very similar structure to the former work, in that the material purported to be extracts of an evil cabal’s plan to dominate the world. The document demonstrates how to carry out an invisible war against North American society, in order to take control of it. Those responsible would be the Elite (Illuminati), the Council of Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group and (of course) the Rothschilds. In addition to telling the reader why this war is being carried out, it out lines the reasons, methods and theoretical aspects of the war – as if the text had been for internal use by the evil cabal, but had been leaked to the general public.
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars sometimes stumbles and goes beyond what could plausily be accepted to be an “official” document. However, the important thing is the language, and what the text says: that the American government is slowly attacking its population with various techniques in order to pressure and weaken them. In a book like Behold a Pale Horse, this is enough for both the reader and the author to accept, as it confirms what they want to be true, regardless of the structure or logical errors in the texts. Any issues that are too obvious to ignore are easy to deal with: as Cooper stated earlier, they’re just evidence that the text has been tampered with to hide the truth, so the apparent mistakes actually merely prove the text to be true.
This is merely a brief introduction to Bill Cooper’s material in his book; I intend to go into more depth on on the book and its author in future articles.
