The End: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 332

The strangest thing about this post is that I do not know exactly how to write it. I’d always intended to cover this book—in fact, it was going to follow Behold a Pale Horse. However, the framing of this book within another book changes things because of the context. I had also known that the Protocols were in this book as well, but I assumed they were abridged in some fashion and not just plagiarized entirely. That changes things a little bit, but by that much.

The first thing I want to say about it is that this is definitely a case of something I would like to call “the Mona Lisa Effect.” Think of the Mona Lisa. Ok, how big is that painting? In most people’s heads it looms large, but it’s about the size of a normal portrait (it’s actually 30 by 21), not tiny but not the wall covering monolith that we picture it because of its reputation. This is similar to Machiavelli’s “The Prince.” That book can be read in a few hours, it’s very short; but it has a reputation. The Protocols are like this as well. I was expecting a vast testament to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories but instead, we got what we got.

This book is cited in the original Hamas Charter, it’s been read by political parties aloud during rallies, and it’s taught as history in Saudi Arabian history textbooks…but this book only “works” if you know what it’s about ahead of time. We have to be primed for this book to work because otherwise it’s pretty bland. Sure, it has the makings of a vast conspiracy in it with anti-Semitic language sprinkled throughout; but if we took Cooper’s recommendation and removed words like “Goyim” from it…it wouldn’t change in any essential way. It’s also racist in a way that doesn’t make sense. Instead of saying “we will control the state” the Elder says, “we will control the goyim’s state.” A person wouldn’t talk like this who wasn’t trying real hard to make the point that he’s a racist.

This does not make him correct. As I said in the beginning of the Protocols divergence, the reason this book is inside Cooper’s book is because he’s pandering to the right-wing militias of the 90s. He could have just ignored it, but this book is competing against the Turner Diaries which is entirely racist, misogynist, and anti-Semitic. Conspiracy theorists have this illusion that the longer a work is the truer it is therefore they pad their work out. They don’t understand that the Communist Manifesto is less than fifty pages; you can attract a wide influence and have a centuries’ long impact—but people like Cooper only understand that some books are long. It’s also important to have that length because it means that their audience isn’t going to read it carefully. This book is here to pad out the book.

Cooper knows what he’s doing which is why he has put the caveat in the front telling us to replace those specific words. However, with the internet and his movement spreading this book around it would have been a glaring omission for him to not mention it at all. He could have mentioned the book as a distraction by the Illuminati to plunge us into internal race wars while they took over and then dropped it.

It’s also clear, especially towards the end that the original author does not understand the world he lives in. The early stuff is easy and is nice and general, but when the Joly work gets specific Nilus can’t follow it. He tries to hide a good deal of the work behind the ellipses, but that leaves us wondering what is happening. There are no hard targets that the “Elder” claims to control aside from the press, which was the only well written part of the book.

The issue with that is it comes so clearly from the Joly text which is leagues above the writing ability of Nilus. The Joly book had a point, it made its point, and it was written by someone who was familiar enough with both politics and philosophy to make it interesting.

It feels weird to call it a disappointment, but it is. This book has more bodies underneath it than anything outside of a religious primary text and it’s just so poorly written. I’m glad to be finally done with it.