Milton William Cooper

Milton William "Bill" Cooper (born May 6, 1943 , † November 6, 2001 in Eagar , Arizona ) was an American non-fiction author , radio journalist and conspiracy theorist .

Life

Bill Cooper was the son of an officer of the US Air Force . Due to the different places of his father's work, he grew up at various air force bases overseas. In 1961 he dropped out of high school in Japan . He then joined the American Air Force and moved to the Navy in 1965 . According to his own account, he made it to the petty officer . In the Vietnam War , he commanded a patrol boat . According to his own information, he then worked for the navy secret service . After his honorable discharge in 1975, he studied at a junior college in California and then worked for various vocational schools .

Cooper later claimed he had been warned repeatedly not to speak publicly about the secrets he learned from the Secret Service. Because he refused to remain silent, he was twice pushed off the road by the same car; in the second accident he lost a leg. However, this only confirmed him in bringing the truth to light. Since 1988, Cooper has publicly claimed that he had documents proving the presence of aliens on Earth and the conspiracy the American government was using to cover it up. This information largely corresponded to publications by ufologists about the alleged Majestic 12 committee, but Cooper claimed to have obtained his knowledge independently of it in the 1970s, when he was allegedly working for the secret service. On July 2, 1989, Cooper explained his theses at a UFO congress in Las Vegas .

In 1991 Cooper published his book Behold a Pale Horse (the title quotes Rev 6,8  EU ), which was widely distributed. In it he summarized various allegations and speculations about UFOs, government conspiracies , secret societies and corruption into a highly complex "super-conspiracy theory". Since 1992 he has also spread his view on the radio program "Hour of the Time", which was broadcast by a shortwave station. Since the late 1990s he joined the discourse of the right-wing extremist militia movement and claimed that he was speaking on behalf of an otherwise unknown "Second Continental Army of the Republic (Militia)". The British religious scholar Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke describes Cooper's ideological motivation as the " anarcho-libertarian spirit of rebellion". In 1998, a tax evasion arrest warrant was issued against Cooper, but was not executed. Although he on the list of "main refugees" (since autumn 2000, major fugitives ) of the United States Marshals Service was, the federal authorities made no effort to enforce the arrest warrant: They wanted to avoid bloodshed, because Cooper had threatened that he would not be caught alive to let. In the fall of 2001, he got into conflict with the sheriff of Apache County , where he lived , over an entirely different matter : he had expelled a fellow citizen from a piece of land that did not belong to him, followed him home and had him with the Firearm threatened, which he always carried with him in his car. As a result, deputies attempted to lure him from his home in Eagar, Arizona on the night of November 6, 2001, to arrest him. Cooper left his property in the car, the officers followed him, he killed one of them with a headshot and was shot in the ensuing exchange of fire.

Theories

Cooper spread conspiracy theories on various subjects. In his ufological publications of the late 1980s, he suggested that the Trilateral Commission and Delta Force were an integral part of the Majestic 12 conspiracy, making his version of conspiracy theory compatible with anti-government rights . In 1954, President Eisenhower signed a secret treaty with extraterrestrial space travelers from Betelgeuse that would allow them to set up huge underground bases and abduct people in Area 51 and elsewhere in the southwestern United States . This would involve implantations, which allegedly affects every 40th US citizen. In addition, concentration camps would be prepared for “patriots” who would oppose an alien takeover; the CIA played a central role in all of this. Defense Secretary James V. Forrestal did not commit suicide in 1949, but was murdered because he wanted to make this information public. Secret agents in the Vatican had also found out that the then secret third of the prophecies of Fatima , which he believed to be the work of aliens, concerned the coming of the Antichrist and the end times . In a 1989 petition to Congress , Cooper accused President George HW Bush of being in league with the aliens and called for those who knew about it to be punished; anyone who refuses to help uncover this conspiracy will be brought to justice. The American political scientist Michael Barkun sees parallels to the threats in a 1986 call for a tax boycott from circles of the radical right-wing Christian Identity movement .

According to the British daily The Guardian, his book Behold a pale horse was a “manifesto” of the far-right militia movement. Goodrick-Clarke describes it as a “chaotic mish-mash of conspiracy myths, interspersed with printed laws, official papers, reports and other source material that the show the threatening prospect of a world government imposed on the American people against their will and in open defiance of the Constitution ”. In this work, Cooper collects supposed evidence that the United States government plane allegedly with the help of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the Federal Emergency Management Agency the emergency call out and a totalitarian dictatorship to build. Its goal is to transfer wealth from the masses to the elites; undesirable minorities such as African American , Hispanic and homosexuals should be eradicated by diseases such as the supposedly man-made HI virus ; Tobacco fields were deliberately sprayed with radioactive waste to cause lung cancer ; in Bluemont , VA an underground city was ready to become the new capital; He warned patriots and right-wing people of the impending persecution. Cooper also printed the text of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion , an anti-Semitic forgery designed to make a world Jewish conspiracy credible around 1900 . Like the conspiracy theorists Nesta Webster in 1921 and William Guy Carr in 1957, he reinterpreted the text and emphasized that instead of “Jew” one should always read “Illuminat” and instead of “ Goyim ” cattle , ie “cattle”. The Illuminati - in truth an Enlightenment secret society that was banned in 1785 - are much older than commonly assumed, their founder Adam Weishaupt (1748–1830) merely revived a " Luciferian plot" from the Middle Ages , namely the conspiracy of the Knights Templar . As evidence, Cooper carried the Great Seal of the United States with the motto Novus ordo seclorum , which he translated as " New World Order ": This is the goal of the Illuminati, which they in very different secret societies such as the Bilderbergers , the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations , the Jesuits , the Communists and the Nazis would try to establish: An unchristian, supranational and freedom-hostile world government. Cooper expected the revelation of this world dictatorship, combined with cosmic events such as the emergence of a new star named Lucifer, in the year 2000.

Cooper related this conspiracy theory to the UFOs in two ways: at times he claimed that the Illuminati invented the fairy tale of the flying saucers in 1917 to frighten people and thereby force them to obey; Then again it was said that the aliens were real, part of the Illuminati conspiracy or even in truth the driving force behind it, as they supposedly needed genetic material from humans to survive. The Cold War was only faked because in truth the Soviet Union also belonged to the conspiracy with the aim of establishing the "New World Order". This is necessary for ecological reasons in order to drastically reduce the number of the world's population and to prepare for a colonization of space . Although Cooper repeatedly insisted on rejecting any anti-Semitism, he gave recognizably Jewish traits in interviews to some of the evil " gray " aliens he described ; by repeatedly emphasizing that Jews were part of the conspiracy he described, he made his speculations compatible with anti-Semites.

From 1995 onwards, Cooper revised these ufological views and said that UFO conspiracy theories and science fiction films were being instrumentalized by the “global elite” to scare the sovereign states into subordinate themselves to a world government led by the United Nations . Now he primarily polemicized against the American government: The income tax was illegal, government officials were involved in the terrorist attack in Oklahoma , President Bill Clinton was a socialist Illuminate who was after him personally.

Shortly before his death, Cooper posted conspiracy theories on his website as of September 11, 2001 . Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are not benefiting the Arab world but, according to speculation, the Bush family, the oil industry , the military-industrial complex , the United Nations and Israel , it is likely that those behind them will also benefit would stuck: Your goal is to instrumentalize the national emergency to establish a "tyranny in the name of security".

reception

After his violent death, White Power webcast host Hal Turner and other right-wing extremists spread the conspiracy theory that the sheriff's staff intentionally killed Cooper to silence him. Ufologists were more cautious as Cooper had recently declared their speculation to be an Illuminati lie. Outside the United States, his theses are received by the right-wing esotericists David Icke and Jan Udo Holey alias Jan van Helsing, who literally take over entire passages from Behold a pale horse in their works .

Cooper himself is also variously assigned to right-wing extremism . Hubert Michael Mader from the Austrian National Defense Academy calls him a right-wing extremist activist who actively fought against indigenous land rights claims and called for the genocide of the Indian nations to continue.

Individual evidence

1. ^ William Cooper, Behold a Pale Horse Light Technology Publishing, Flagstaff, AZ 1991, p. 22.
2. ↑ Michael Barkun : A Culture of Conspiracy. Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2013, p. 60.
3. ^ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke : Black Sun. Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity . NYU Press, New York 2002, p. 284.
4. ↑ Michael Barkun: A Culture of Conspiracy. Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2013, p. 60.
5. ^ William Cooper: Behold a Pale Horse . Light Technology Publishing, Flagstaff, AZ 1991; German: The Apocalyptic Horsemen . Michaels-Verlag, Peiting 1996; Michael Barkun: A Culture of Conspiracy. Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2013, p. 60 (here the quote).
6. ↑ Michael Barkun: A Culture of Conspiracy. Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2013, p. 96.
7. ↑ "anarcho-libertarian spirit of rebellion". Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: Black Sun. Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity . NYU Press, New York 2002, p. 288.
8. ^ Arizona Militia Figure Is Shot to Death . In: Los Angeles Times, November 7, 2001, accessed April 12, 2015; Michael Barkun: A Culture of Conspiracy. Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2013, p. 96 f. and 165 f.
9. ^ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: Black Sun. Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity . NYU Press, New York 2002, pp. 287 f .; Angela Hague: UFOs . In: Peter Knight (Ed.): Conspiracy Theories in American History. To Encyclopedia . ABC Clio, Santa Barbara, Denver and London 2003, Vol. 2, p. 704; Michael Barkun: A Culture of Conspiracy. Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2013, pp. 92-96.
10. ↑ Michael Barkun: A Culture of Conspiracy. Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2013, p. 135.
11. ↑ Michael Barkun: A Culture of Conspiracy. Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2013, pp. 92-97.
12. ^ Ed Vulliamy and Bruce Dirks: New trial may solve riddle of Oklahoma bombing . In: The Guardian, November 3, 1997 ( online , accessed August 2, 2013).
13. ↑ " Behold a Pale Horse is a chaotic farrago of conspiracy myths interspersed with reprints of executive laws, official papers, reports and other extraneous materials designed to show the looming prospect of a world government imposed on the American people against their wishes and in flagrant contempt of the Constitution. "Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: Black Sun. Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity . NYU Press, New York 2002, pp. 284 f.
14. ^ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: Black Sun. Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity . NYU Press, New York 2002, pp. 285 f.
15. ^ Daniel Pipes : Conspiracy. Fascination and Power of the Secret , Gerling Akademie Verlag Munich 1998, p. 206.
16. ↑ Michael Barkun : A Culture of Conspiracy. Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2013, pp. 60 f. and 146.
17. ^ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: Black Sun. Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity . NYU Press, New York 2002, p. 288.
18. ↑ Michael Barkun: A Culture of Conspiracy. Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2013, pp. 60 f. and 146.
19. ↑ Michael Barkun: A Culture of Conspiracy. Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2013, pp. 143 f.
20. ↑ Michael Barkun: A Culture of Conspiracy. Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2013, pp. 36, 85 and 96.
21. ↑ Michael Barkun: A Culture of Conspiracy. Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2013, p. 165.
22. ↑ Michael Barkun: A Culture of Conspiracy. Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2013, p. 166 f.
23. ^ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: Black Sun. Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity . NYU Press, New York 2002, pp. 291-297.
24. ^ Hubert Michael Mader: Studies and reports. Political esotericism - a right-wing extremist challenge. National Defense Academy, Vienna 1999. p. 77.

Web links

• Milton William Cooper in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Biography, free Behold a Pale Horse e-book (PDF) , radio broadcasts (CDs and free podcast) and DVDs on Cooper's official website at hourofthetime.com