Plagues: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 170-178

First, we begin with a correction. I made a mistake when we covered the first chapter "Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars." I claimed that Cooper may have written it himself, but this is incorrect. Cooper did not write it, it was a document that had been floating around the UFOlogy and conspiracy circuit for a while that he just inserted in his book. I have to credit fellow "The Skeptic" writer Thiago Vahia Malliagros for the tip, which he cited from the excellent biography of Bill Cooper "Pale Horse Rider." This is a rather embarrassing mistake because I have read that book and even cited it in my dissertation. 

This week we continue with population controls and Cooper's assertion that "they" are going to use plagues to do it. To recap the story that Cooper is telling us, WWII ended, and the models that "they" predicted were going to result in overpopulation. So, a way to stem the growth was needed. The first method was by normalizing birth control and homosexuality; while the second was to determine a way of lowering the population after the boom following WWII. 

The solution that the "Club of Rome" settled on was a plague. The Club of Rome is another one of the several think tanks that were created after WWII. They join the ranks of the Bilderberg Group, the Tri-Lateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations (though this last group was created before WWII). Each one of these groups, and several others, all have conspiracy theories attached to them. The Club of Rome is lesser known in the United States, though they come up in literature like this. I'll repeat what I said a few years ago when I examined "None Dare Call it Conspiracy;" these groups are conspiracy fodder because conspiracy theorists do not know what they do but they do know that important people attend them. 

Cooper is going to place the responsibility of the coming plague on the Club of Rome and its founder "Dr. Aurelio Peccei" who is not a doctor in any respect. Peccei was an Italian industrialist who restarted Fiat after WWII and revitalized the company. The Club of Rome was a group he founded in order to address the problems that humanity would face in the future. The reason that this obscure group ended up on the plate of the conspiracy world as a target is because in 1972 they issued a report titled "Limits to Growth." 

"Limit to Growth" is a projection of sustainability over the next one hundred years using computer models. I want to stress that these were computer models made in 1971 at MIT. So cutting edge, but cutting edge for 1971. I will not delve into the claims of the book, only that I will bet that Cooper has never read it. I say this with confidence because instead of citing the book, he dances around it. Using a plague, Cooper claims is because no one can be blamed for it. It's not like a food shortage where someone can be the face. 

"He (Peccei) advocated that a plague be introduced that would have the same effect as the famous Black Death of history. The chief recommendation was to develop a microbe which would attack the auto-immune system and thus render the development of the vaccine impossible."

We can stop reading right there to make two observations. The first is that this is the exact argument that vaccine and Covid-denialists used with Event 201 and Bill Gates. The ties between Gates and Event 201 are exactly the same...their respective business ventures provided the money that eventually funded the conference (in Gates' case) or the book (in Peccei's case). This is not a coincidence either. While criticisms of Limits to Growth focused on the inadequacy of the computer models, the conclusions were based on certain assumptions, and a few other technical issues. There has always been the conspiracy theorist's accusation that they are planning to kill the population. I have attempted to read this book, but I found it a bit boring.

The second observation is that Cooper is setting us on the path to the AIDS conspiracy theory. Because this is my academic field, I know where this is heading, he's going to claim that Fort Detrick developed AIDS as part of their role in the Club of Rome's plan. 

Cooper cites HB 15090 (1969) as the bill that provided the Department of Defense with 10M in funding to develop this pathogen. There are a few things that Cooper is ignoring. The first is that the US had a biological weapons program in 1969 headquartered at Detrick. I bring this up because funding biological warfare was not unusual in 1969...or at least it wouldn't have been if Richard Nixon hadn't ended the program that year. This may seem mysterious but the funding bill did not know that Nixon was going to cancel the program. 

We move into AIDS fairly quickly. His claim is that the ex-roommate of Pope John Paul II was the mastermind behind the Hepatitis B vaccine which was rolled out in 78-80. This was the mechanism for delivery: "Whatever causes AIDS was in the vaccine. The vaccine was manufactured and bottled in Phoenix, Arizona."

I lived through the AIDS crisis, by the 90s it was well-known that the HIV virus caused AIDS. I do not know if Cooper is unaware of this or if he's purposefully ignorant in order to push his theory. 

Last week, I commented on how coherent the opening pages of this chapter were. This week's selection throws all of that in the garbage. I think Cooper would have been an excellent blogger but long-form writing is not his forte. He takes on a long path: we go from smallpox in Africa, to AIDS, to fake civil wars if third-world countries do not agree to the plan (instigated by the CIA and the Jesuits), the Haig-Kissinger plan (no idea), the Global 2000 report presented to President Jimmy Carter, to Vietnam and Iran. After this alleged tour of evidence for his position, we return back to MK-NAOMI which was the biological weapons program that was ended in 1969. 

This raises two questions for me: the first is how his evidence is supposed to work. He's trying to prove his current thesis that "they" are going to depopulate the Earth, but all of his evidence is from the 70s at the latest. This is similar to Dr. Pabst's claims where he was complaining about the coming New World Order but could only use evidence from the Executive Orders of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. If he drilled down on the AIDS conspiracy theory it would be more temporally relevant and then I could spend an entire post describing how this conspiracy theory was a Soviet operation designed to reduce trust between maligned groups of people and the government. 

The second question this raises: wasn't the point of this chapter to describe the logic of the new world order? That's what the subtitle (one of them anyway) promised. Instead, we've got a combination of fictional allegations and actual government incompetence. Cooper wants to know why all the smokers are getting lung cancer because lung cancer was once rare. He wants to know why more Americans are getting diagnosed with heart disease when that used to be rare (the easy answer is that medicine just found better ways to test for these conditions), but I want to know what the alliance in the New World order is. 

He tells a dizzying story, but that's because he's got himself all turned around. He needed an editor, someone who could send his writing back with notes like "Title this chapter something different." He gave us three pages of decent setup, but eight which are completely irrelevant. Cooper is also missing the mark with the motive. "They" want to depopulate the world because resources will not sustain the population above a certain limit. Encouraging contraception and recognizing LGBTQIA+ groups as being deserving of human rights isn't a bad method of doing so. I would claim that the latter is a moral imperative while the former is a practical method. Cooper seems done with population control and I wonder if he's going to get back on track in the next section.