Posted on 12/10/2001 9:58:53 AM PST by Senator Pardek
Milton William Cooper finally got what he expected on November 6, 2001.
It was shortly past midnight on that day when a group of Apache County sheriff's deputies entered his property in Edgar, Arizona, to serve a warrant for aggravated assault. Cooper, by police accounts—which Cooper's own official Web site agrees are true—drove off to avoid them. He turned back when he encountered their vehicles, and "attempted to run over a sergeant before heading back to his residence," as a sheriff's department press release put it. Ignoring orders to halt, Cooper ran toward his house and fired a handgun at the police, seriously wounding a deputy.
The police then shot and killed him, helping to write the final scene of a paranoid drama authored by Cooper himself. Cooper was a well-known—notorious, even—figure in American fringe culture. He first rose to such demi-prominence in UFO circles in 1988, claiming to have oodles of secret information gleaned from his days with U.S. Naval Intelligence. (His detractors point out that this experience seemed to be nothing more than working as an aide in an audio-visual department.)
I met Cooper once, at a 1992 convention in Atlanta dedicated to conspiratorial thinking. Even among a gaggle of flamboyant obsessives convinced that secret societies such as the Illuminati and Skull & Bones ran the world (or at least fascinated by such notions), Cooper stood out. Here was a man who swore that the Zapruder film clearly showed one of Kennedy's guards turning around and shooting the doomed president with a deadly shellfish toxin, the true cause of JFK's death. He also made an admirably precise, if almost certainly falsified, prediction that by 1998 we'd all be languishing in concentration camps run by the masters of the New World Order (who were in fact outer-space aliens).
Cooper was a kook's kook, in the worst sense. His tirades and accusations against other UFO researchers made him anathema even among that band of outsiders. Anyone who didn't believe everything Cooper said was branded as a CIA agent and/or dupe of the vast alien conspiracy. He was known for plagiarizing the "research" of other UFOlogists and claiming that he first saw all this stuff in Naval Intelligence documents in the early '70s—including things the UFOlogists made up as jokes. Although his reputation was built on his 1991 book, Behold A Pale Horse (which strangely became a favorite of Louis Farrakhan), he later backed off on its central claim of alien influence on global politics.
Over time, he began talking less like a UFOlogist and more like a militia type, convinced that the Internal Revenue Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms weren't really legitimate U.S. government agencies. He hitched his paranoia to a more traditional, though no less consuming, belief in human-centered conspiracies bent on creating a One World Government of secularist tyranny. With characteristically baroque complexity, Cooper's conspiracy--which he called "Majestytwelve"--covered everything from the Star Wars films to the first World Trade Center bombings.
Cooper's fate is sad, despite--or perhaps because of--his own role in it. He believed he was up against demons and that they were out to get him. Then he made it so. According to the Arizona Republic, when Cooper faced charges related to income taxes in 1998, he told a friend that he was "not going to submit to arrest." The friend added, "He's not going to retreat…I think he is expecting to be murdered by the FBI." In the end, a different law enforcement agency pulled the trigger, but close enough.
Some people set themselves in such uncompromising opposition to the world and its authorities that martyrdom is the only possible—indeed, the only acceptable—outcome to them. Through powerful acts of imagination, they transform their enemies into co-conspirators, the necessary heavies in a gruesome show directed by the martyr.
It's not right to say that such people get what they deserve. But it might not be wrong to say that figures as diverse as Cooper, recently killed marijuana advocates Tom Crosslin and Rollie Rohm, and orgone theorist and Food and Drug Administration scofflaw Wilhelm Reich, who died in federal custody in 1957, got exactly what they wanted on some level.
All avidly embraced a worldview in which they were brave and lone fighters against conspiracies and tyrannies too large and byzantine to fully comprehend, much less defeat. (Reich, for instance, believed the whole world suffered from an "emotional plague" he alone could diagnose, and that part of the sickness involved unyielding hostility toward the diagnostician.) The only logical ending for the rebel in such a script is death at the hands of the authorities, or in prison. Those mourning Cooper can console themselves with this: At least, he went out the way he wanted.
I was taken aback by that, too. In their minds, they must rationalize it thusly - "Cooper was against big government, ergo - Cooper must be a righteous dude".
Using their logic, I should join the Klan. They're against affirmative action and our current tax code, right?
So sad, yet true. Just another symptom of the madness of our times, I suppose.... Thanks for the interesting post, Senator Pardek. Bumpety-bump! best, bb.
Shhh - OWK might be listening ;)
Perhaps if the Feds were strict constitutionalists, they wouldn't be so paranoid and fixated on those who buck the System in earnest.
Scott Garms, Eagar's police chief, said he had urged federal law officers to stay away from Cooper's two-story compound, high on a mesa overlooking Round Valley, because militia group members do not recognize the legitimacy of federal law officers. "We certainly didn't want to make him a martyr," Garms said.
As long as folks like Cooper get the Klayman treatment (and are ascribed a certain influence in the making of terrorists like Tim McVeigh), it's doubtful they're going to start a movement of any appreciable strength.
Just because most folks much prefer to go along nice and peaceful like and pay their taxes doesn't mean we need support the Feds in their targeting of those who don't.
But it's a moot point anyway. With any luck, folks like Cooper will just start disappearing for good cause now that the Government's terrorizing of him or the Branch Davidians or Randy Weaver has effectively propagandized the protesters -- most of whom are dead, of course -- as the Real threats to the American Way.
Sure it is.
As for "uncompromising", though, you can add my name to that list. I'll be damned if I'm going to bend Objective Truth to accomodate a slate of craven equivocators on the Supreme Court or some "hopeful" take of our President and his wife on the use of human life as Resource for research and profit.
With any luck, we can make being delusional, paranoid or bent on being a "strict constitutionalist" grounds for immediate detention and a more compassionate execution.
When I think of the kid gloves corporations don to delicately deal with the wackos whose suits and complaints stand solely on the Feds' affording them Title protections, it makes me positively ill to see the government's ADA-style compassion belied by its handling of its own "troublemakers" among the citizenry.
Cooper's death was not the result of any unyielding stance for Objective Truth regarding illegitimate taxation by the Washington Leviathan. It was precipitated by bizarre and violent behavior towards a fellow non-government civilian. And BTW, Cooper drew first blood (by a member of the Sheriff's offfice, whose authority the Cooper-types fully recognize).
As I showed above, sometimes dangerous screwballs can be right about some things (such as the Klan), but that does not mean they are not dangerous screwballs; nor does it mean they should be revered (I always laugh when I see someone at this site claim the Northern Alliance/U.S. crackpots are just peachy-keen, because they are against The Taliban/U.S. government).
Unfortunately, every tale does not have a hero.
You mean like the libertarians?
Federal jury convicts 12 in tax-protest case
Askel, its nice to know they can find juries made up of people that don't think like you.
I find it obnoxious that the american haters over look simple facts like Cooper drew first blood by shooting a deputy.
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