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Diary of a madman.
It's not too difficult to understand how "Behold a Pale Horse" has become "the best selling underground book of all time"(according to a blurb on one pro-Cooper website)--after all, people want to(and do) believe in outlandish things. The problem with the late Bill Cooper's book is that it damages any serious attempt to examine the reasonable premise that every aspect of world affairs is controlled by a handful of wealthy, powerful men. Cooper believed this, Cooper was a nut...therefore it follows that everyone who agrees with the basic hypothesis is a nut, too. Rightly or wrongly, this is what people believe. (If you're looking for a serious treatment of this subject, albeit from the POV of someone who thought it was a good thing, take a gander at Carroll Quigley's monumental "Tragedy and Hope".)
To all the "if you can't handle the truth, don't read this book!" reviewers who know little to nothing about Bill Cooper: I invite you to do a Google search on the man and acquaint yourselves with another truth, the real truth. Milton William Cooper was a certifiable headcase. Numerous former friends and acquaintances have described him as a hard-drinking, ill-tempered, violent man who was also incredibly easy to fool. Cooper's contention that John F. Kennedy was killed by William Greer, the driver of his limo in Dallas, is of course well-known...but he also believed, and told audiences at his lectures, that the extraterrestrials on the Fox television show "Alien Nation" were *real* aliens. He wasn't kidding. Cooper would hear or read an outlandish tidbit of information, then take it--and repeat it!--as gospel. Fellow "fringe" writers and researchers like Bob Lazar shunned Cooper after he accused them of being government agents who were out to discredit him. There was, of course, no need for anyone else to discredit him: he took care of that himself. Nowhere in this rambling patchwork quilt of a book(mostly documents and articles from other sources, really, with a comment here and there by Cooper himself) is there a shred of proof to back up his extraordinary claims. Cooper made no attempt to verify the info he included, and it would have been impossible to do so in almost every instance, anyhow.
I'll go on record as saying that I believe the circumstances of Cooper's death were suspicious. Perhaps, at the close of his life, he actually had succeeded in riling up the wrong people (as he claimed to have spent most of his adult life doing). I feel badly for the man because he came to such an ignoble end, and because his affection for his wife and daughter is so evident in the introduction to "Pale Horse". This was a human being with real feelings...but he was very, very disturbed. There are countless other books which examine this subject more rationally; so many that "Behold a Pale Horse" should NEVER become any conspiracy theorist's bible.
July 2006 · Books