Mental Issues: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 142-145

We're still on the good doctor's Pabst's blue ribbon "contribution" to Cooper's book, we have never learned what kind of doctor he was. The only thing we know about him is that his former address is now a veterinary clinic. I'm going to raise my suspicion once again that there is no Dr. Pabst, or if there was, this is not a contribution of his. As this section goes on the writing becomes more like Cooper's. This also happened in the "Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars" chapter which was allegedly a government document welcoming new recruits. If Cooper is pretending to be other people, the most important question is: Why? Cooper doesn't need to go to this much trouble to push his view. He was a big enough name on the UFO circuit and he's got a good name in the 90s for the NWO conspiracy as well. 

This section is titled "Mental Cooperation in Takeover Plans," which is a terrible name for a section but it's effective in that we know what he's about to discuss. Conspiracy theorists have a very strange love/hate relationship with mental health. On the one hand, it seems obvious, because generally, society considers conspiracy theorists to be wackos, loonies, or crazies. This is polemical and harmful to the conversation. It's also unfair to the conspiracy theorist because in general, it's not their fault. Actor Mel Gibson went on a famous anti-Semitic tirade after being pulled over by the police, but if you know anything about his father Hutton Gibson, Mel's tirade is only surprising by how tame it was. Hutton Gibson was a straight-up Holocaust Denier, holds a very strange conspiracy theory on the election of Pope John XXIII. Obviously, Mel Gibson has access to the kind of information that should disabuse him of these views and chooses to ignore them (upbringing can be very hard to shake off) so he's not innocent but we should still understand where the views come from. 

That aside, aside; the mental health views of conspiracy theorists are probably defensive. They claim that mental health issues are a plot by the government (if they are right-wing conspiracy theorists) or big pharma (if they are left-wing) to make the conspiracy theorist into a person that we do not have to listen to. Now, people like Alex Jones go on tirades about mental health medication because they can blame that for all the false flags they attribute to every mass shooting. Mental health as a concept is almost systemically opposed by the older Boomer generations and modern conservative punditry. Cooper/Pabst is going to attack a 1948 Pamphlet "Mental Health and World Citizenship."

I have an idea of what the attack is going to be, but let's look at the pamphlet itself. It was the culmination of a conference held shortly after WWII. So quickly that the Berlin Wall isn't even up yet but the reconstruction efforts have begun. The Pamphlet states, as its purpose, "This Congress is not organised to initiate social reform but to help to infuse a scientific spirit into the movements of reform and reconstruction under way in many countries, especially in those countries which suffered most from the recent war."

The history of WWII talks about the reconstruction effort but rarely takes into account the psychological trauma of having lived through it. This is especially true in the US where American citizens not actively engaged in fighting were not touched by the horrors of the war. Aside from Pearl Harbor and a few of the Japanese firebomb balloons, a US citizens was never in direct peril from Nazi bombs or Japanese bullets. The pamphlet is addressing this, mental health causes to prevent another war, and a growing acceptance that such issues are indeed real and medical. 

Pabst/Cooper is not going to like this. First off, they call it a UN Pamphlet. It is not. While it was founded around the same time as the UN and the WHO; the World Congress on Mental Health is its own organization. This could be an honest mistake or it could be one of those that doesn't matter because everything is controlled by the Illuminati so there is no difference between this, the WHO, and the UN. I'm leaning somewhere in between, it's a mistake because our author(s) do not understand the difference. We go back in time to 1946 where a Canadian Health Minister claimed that wealth gaps may cause neurotic reactions in people at the bottom. Which could be true, but this claim is being used to justify wealth redistribution. It's a bit of a reach, and I'm quite shocked because I thought that we were going to the standard mind control route not branching over to Communism. This book is surprising sometimes. 

Though it is not surprising in how inconsistent it is. One thing that makes this book more difficult to write about than "None Dare Call it Conspiracy" or "Proofs of a Conspiracy..." is that it jumps between times. We are writing in the late 80s early 90s, and Cooper/Pabst's first proof is a document in 1948. Then he moves back to the 1930s and a Soviet NKVD office whose name is spelled phonetically claiming that psychology was the tool of brainwashing. Then we jump back to the 1950s and the Alaska Mental Health Bill. 

This bill was opposed from the start by anti-Communists in the US as being a Communist plot. Initially, it was opposed by a group known as the American Public Relations Forum. This was a group made up of regular Americans who reported on perceived Communist plots in the US. They viewed all psychology and psychiatry as Pro-Communist, anti-Christian, and pro-Jewish. The book makes this observation, "It granted approximately $12 Million and 1 million acres of public land to Alaska so that it could develop its own mental health program. Now, this was a little abnormal since Alaska only had a little over 400 people who were classified as mentally ill."

If we put these claims together we view a frightening picture. The government will just declare someone mentally ill, grab them off the street, take their property and land (this is the difference between personal and real property), and you will never be heard from again. Since the rest of the section is more errant data supporting this claim, there is no reason to move past it. 

First off, I cannot find the court case that he's speaking of. The only thing that comes close is a lawsuit against the Ford Motor Company in which the plaintiff alleged that Ford built a defective design in the Y block engine. Even then, that case isn't online so we have to leave it. 

Let's tackle the rest of it. Initially, the Alaskan Mental Health Bill's opposition claimed that the state was going to build an asylum in Alaska, and that was a problem because Alaska is close to Siberia, which is in the USSR, so it's clearly a Communist plot. After all, what does Alaska need with 1 million acres? Like all things in the world of conspiracy theories, the truth is easily explainable but much more boring. 

In the 1950s 99% of the land in Alaska was owned by the Federal Government. The Alaskan Mental Health Bill granted the state the land as a way to fund the bill. The state would lease out the land for resource rights, take that revenue, and then fund the services detailed in the bill. That is all this bill does. There is no provision to build a massive asylum near Siberia. 

Finally, there are two things that people get wrong about mental health incarceration in the US. Usually, the misconception is that it is a way for real criminals to get out of serving their sentences. Take, for instance, the man who shot Reagan--John Hinckley. Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity, which caused an immense outcry. However, he was incarcerated in a mental health facility for over 30 years, and was on restricted leave for ten more. Sure, he wasn't in Sing Sing, but he was also not free to do whatever he wanted. It's also very difficult to get this kind of judgment, and even Hinckley under a more relaxed standard (his trial made the standards stricter) had a hard time using insanity as a defense. 

The other misconception is the exact opposite side of this coin, e.g. that the government has an easy time getting a ruling of mental incompetence. Firstly, the state has no real interest in doing this except in extreme cases. There are plenty of people that just my city should be helping with mental issues but the voters do not really care about it; so there is no funding or will. Secondly, the legal standard is very high to prevent just the sort of thing that Cooper/Pabst is claiming. A psychological expert has to perform an examination and then that examination must be ruled on by a judge. It's not an easy or quick process. 

But sure, you say playing devil's advocate, they could just put their thumb on the scale for people that the state doesn't like. This is true, but then why pretend to have the laws, rules, and regulations in the first place? Just grab the people off of the street and disappear them. Cooper/Pabst already believe that this is happening anyway so the whole mental health claim is just another layer of complication. 

Overall, the Cooper/Pabst problem is just one of ignorance. They (he) believe that mental health is one thing and then will spend thousands of words trying to attack that notion. It's not that much different from what mental health opponents do today.