Treason! Behold a Pale Horse pp. 240-250

We've finished with Cooper's strange foray into the UFO world. I call it strange because that overly long chapter was supposed to be about the secret government of the world and instead, it was only tangentially about that. What we did get was Cooper's belief in the UFO conspiracy, which undoubtedly inspired the X-Files; a very odd and impossible JFK assassination, and then the secret government which supports the rest of it.  

We begin a new chapter this week titled: 

       "Treason in High Places: The United Nations Treaty and The United Nations Participation Act vs. The Sovereignty of the United States of America" 

And then there's an apocryphal quote from Benjamin Franklin about having created a Republic, "if you can keep it." It's possible that Franklin said this, but it's just as likely that it is a good story. Cooper does this thing that conspiracy theorists cannot help themselves from doing: word blasting at the very outset. Part of this is the emotional aspect of their writing, they're excited; they get ahead of themselves. They write and speak like four-year-olds trying to tell a joke--they are too impatient to get to the punch line. Disciplined writers will do something different: let their own words do the work in the body. "Treason in High Places" is a perfectly acceptable chapter title, the rest of it is just too much. 

Our chapter begins with Cooper directly quoting Article VI of the US Constitution. I'll give him credit that he's actually, possibly read the Constitution, unlike posers such as Alex Jones or David Icke with the Magna Carta. He's got it word for word, which is great, but this is done without context. We've no idea why he's doing this. Once accomplished we move right into the next section titled: Have We Already Joined a One-World Government?

Cooper already thinks we have, so I'll just spoil that part of the book right now. However, we must understand just how influential the claims that he is making are. The mistrust of the United Nations and any international cooperative body has been the boogeyman of the conspiratorial right wing since the 1940s. Barry Goldwater railed against the Tri-lateral Commission until he began an earnest run for president and needed to not appear as a John Birch Society lunatic. This fear of the "Illuminati" or any global puppet master has always been the pornography the right wing has tossed to its base. 

Here is how bad it is: in 2012 the US Senatorial Foreign Relations Committee recommended the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Disabled. It's one of those UN declarations that try to make the world a better place by, in this case, recognizing that disabled people are still people and that states should make an effort to facilitate their lives. It's modeled, in part, after the Americans with Disabilities Act signed by President George H.W. Bush in 1990. It's a convention modeled after a law signed into action by a Republican president, and the Republican congress in 2012 voted against ratification. The reasoning is that the conspiratorial base that has been fed for decades on the type of conspiracy theories that Cooper is writing here will not agree to anything that they think impedes American sovereignty--even if it involves signing a convention that basically states, "that law you guys made in 1990 that's a good law the world agrees with it." (there are a dozen conventions like this, and the US has only signed 3)

Cooper explains that the UN is the child of the CFR and the JASON society. Ok, blah blah blah, we've heard this in the last chapter. These kinds of "facts" are only important for believers who need to toss out their yarn charts to bewilder the doubters. I want the argument.

Cooper lays out pretty quick. He quotes Article 25 of the UN Charter: "Member nations agree to ACCEPT and CARRY OUT the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the PRESENT CHARTER."

This is the entire article, and Cooper has some thoughts on it. I should remind the reader that we have seen Cooper's grasp of legal documents--and it's bad. He's a proto-sovereign citizen who confuses technical terms with colloquial terms. 

For example, he capitalizes "PRESENT CHARTER" because he thinks, "the word 'present,' indicating that there might be OTHER charters." 

No, it just means that this charter is where 25 binds. If the UN dissolves the charter to create a new one, Article 25 no longer applies. There's no secret charter. If there was, Article 25 would not apply to it because of the wording of Article 25. 

Then Cooper lays out the usual anti-UN bullshit. Because, in his mind, Article 25 says that members must abide by the laws of the UN the US Constitution no longer applies. For example, if the Security Council unanimously approves a law banning guns, Cooper has to get rid of his guns because UN law supersedes the Constitution; except no, that's not at all what is happening. The UN specifically respects the sovereign authority of the member states in Article 2 of the charter. Gun ownership would fall within the domestic operations of the US and thus not within the legal authority of the UN. The caveat to this would be if the US was sending guns to Mexico in order to destabilize the government. Then the UN could pass a resolution to stop it, but that resolution would get vetoed by the US; because, at its core, the UN is a profoundly weak organization. 

This misunderstanding of the legal system operates at the core of the anti-UN conspiracy theories. Cooper includes a letter to the editor, which agrees with him; it's another, but different misunderstanding of how treaties operate. What's important to understand is that people like Cooper are arguing that Congress can enter no treaty with another country. We cannot give something to them, change our policies, anything in a normal treaty. This state of affairs would be the end result of their position. 

This letter is followed by another one which states the same sentiment only with more quoting and name-dropping. The second letter, I assume it's a letter, we aren't really given a context for where this appears is just longer. It attempts to state that the Constitution is a contract between "We the People" and the government that the document creates. Article IV prevents the UN rules from overwriting the law of the US but the US continues to change under the UN proclamation. This is an interesting argument because they have only two examples: one is a migratory bird act that the Supreme Court rules on...which has nothing to do with the UN only that there was no rule and the Court had to make a rule out of nothing to resolve it. The second is the UN involvement in Katanga, during the 1960s Congo crisis. There's too much history here for me to go over, but the short of it is that the UN ordered Belgium to remove its forces, it protested, there was a civil war, and the UN sent in troops. That's the only example the second letter writer claims. 

Stripping away the misunderstanding of what a treaty is, there is nothing here. The central belief of these people comes at the end of the second letter (?), "This would the World on notice that we were once more HONORING OUR OWN CONSTITUTION (CHARTER OF FREEDOM) AS THE SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND, AND REINSTATING IT TO ITS FORMER SUPREME POSITION."

They believe that the "Constitution" is under attack. Not the actual document, but the mythical one. Yet, they cannot point to a single case of it. The US entered the UN through the legal channels. You can disagree with it, you can not like it, you can even implore your representatives to pass a resolution to leave it; but this kind of technicality bullshit is childish. I would love for one of these conspiracy theories to cite something specific that the UN did to impugn American sovereignty. 

With that, this chapter closes. We've learned only what people like Cooper believe about the UN, what we do not know is why. Why do they hate international cooperation? I puzzle over this.