Nor will I adopt the rancorous ranting of the extreme right wing, with its alarmism about the octopus-like "New World Order." There is probably much truth in their claim of an Illuminati/secret government conspiring behind the scenes to control world events; I too believe that conspiracy forms a cornerstone principle of how governments really operate. Our own American government (the secret branch of which Walter Bowart, in Operation Mind Control, so cleverly dubbed "the cryptocracy") is no exception, with the seminal act of this cryptocracy the "coup d'etat in the U.S." assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Nevertheless, just as it is at best naive or at worst disingenuous - even conspiratorially complicit - for the orthodox news media to claim American conspiracies do not exist, so too is it simplistic of the John Birchers and other right wing nuts to insist a single, vast conspiracy interpenetrates all political events. As Oglesby observes, "Clandestinism is not the usage of a handful of rogues, it is a formalized practice of an entire class in which a thousand hands spontaneously join." Even so, the conspiratorial dynamic in America is "conflict-wracked and dialectical rather than serene and hierarchical, in which results constantly elude every faction's intentions because all conspire against each and each against all." (pp. 26.) And even that maven of conspiracy writers, Robert Anton Wilson, does not proclaim a unified conspiracy to overtake the planet. Interviewed in Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth , Wilson denies the existence of "One Big Conspiracy that controls everything," concluding that "(t)he world would make some kind of sense if there was one group of 'insiders' who really run everything. Since the world obviously doesn't make any sense, there is no such group. There are just rival coalitions trying to become the group that runs the world, which is probably just as hopeless as trying to become God and 'run' the universe." (pp. 146.)

Oglesby similarly argues in his 1976 tome that division amongst America's ruling elites underlies the greatest upheavals in our national history since 1960: the assassination of JFK and the Quagmire of Vietnam (he suggests both led to the Watergate crimes and cover-up). Oglesby characterizes this tension as a split between the model of Yankee and Cowboy. Yankee represents the semiaristocratic lineage of the old money Eastern Establishment: schooled in the Ivy League, allied with the European democracies across the North Atlantic, proponent of "white cultural destiny transcending national boundaries" culminating in the New World Order/One World system. Banker and financier David Rockefeller personifies the Yankee, and the multinational corporation, which cares not whether it deals with capitalist, communist, or Nazi in its pursuit of power and privilege, embodies Yankee ideals. Cowboy is the new wealth entrepreneurial tycoon of Texas and southern California: militaristically bellicose, aggressively nationalistic, rejecting the Yankee continuity with Europe, "oriented to an expanding wilderness Frontier and based on an advanced pacific strategy." Aerospace magnate Howard Hughes personifies the Cowboy; as a group they "never suffered a moment of war-wariness" in the Vietnam bloodbath.

Instead of a unified conspiracy to kill Kennedy, Oglesby suggests that "(w)hat cost Kennedy his life was his attempt to impose Camelot Atlanticism on a Frontier-minded defense and security elite...JFK was killed by a rightist conspiracy formed out of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, the Syndicate, and a Cowboy oligarchy, supported by renegade CIA and FBI agents." (pp. 66, 324.) Palace conflict between the Yankees and Cowboys, not a consolidated effort of the American ruling class, unleashed the JFK assassination. Bob Frissell in Something in This Book is True suggests a more top-down conspiracy. Two precipitating factors led to JFK's demise, according to Frissell's sources. Kennedy meddled with MJ-12 (the super-secret, allegedly top echelon national security group which directs the UF0 cover-up and negotiates with extraterrestrial entities) by threatening to reveal to the world the nature of the UFO/ET situation, and he dared to print a new form of currency not backed by the Federal Reserve. Kennedy certainly made many enemies (the leading Freemasons hated him for being Catholic and making anti-secret society statements, the Mafia hated him for Attorney General RFK's crackdown, the CIA wanted to beat Kennedy to the punch after the President decided to "scatter the CIA into a thousand pieces" after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, Texas oil tycoons hated him because...you get the picture.) Perhaps JFK's foolhardy, brazenly idealistic affronts to the mighty MJ-12 and the Fed fomented that hatred into the assassination conspiracy cabal, the Operation Mongoose dirty work of David Ferrie and Allen Dulles (godfather of MK-Ultra and CIA director fired by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs) which sealed his doom. Tucson conspiracist Mark Zepezauer wrote me of these notions that

“Your take on the JFK conundrum seems entirely plausible to me, too. Jack fucked with way too many poobahs than was healthy for him (and part of the explanation could be that he was pumped so full of steroids that he had an exaggerated sense of what he could get away with). The two you mention, MJ-12 and the Fed, are definitely the nastiest (and the latter group, in an earlier form, may well have been behind the shootings of Presidents Jackson and Lincoln). But what strikes me when examining JFK's Enemies List is the degree to which they overlap. For instance, the CIA-did-it and the Mob-did-it theories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. What probably happened is that word came down from the very top, the Bilderberg group or whatever. Once David Rockefeller and Prince Bernhard and Queen Elizabeth let it be known that, gosh, it sure would be nice if Jack wasn't around to bother us, then the new paradigm filtered down through the power structure. And as it became conventional wisdom in those circles that fortune would smile on Brutus, Jack's protection was withdrawn and whatever plots were out there were allowed to proceed. Remember that there were plots against Jack in Miami and Chicago in the weeks before Dallas, and also in Los Angeles in 1960, before he was elected. But it was in Mayor Cabell's city [which falls near the 33rd parallel, corresponding to the 33rd or highest degree of Masonic initiation – ed.] that it finally took place."

I harp on the JFK assassination not to flog a dead horse (we certainly can't flog his dead brain, since it was stolen from the National Archives!). Rather, one's opinions on "who killed JFK" are an ideological litmus test. Also, the events of Dealey Plaza are historically crucial because they flowed from prior cancers in the American body-politic. The primal betrayal of our national soul in the dirty deal between American military-intelligence leaders Dulles and "Wild Bill" Donovan and Nazi spymaster Reinhard Gehlen to establish the Nazi spy network within the fledgling CIA, as the conduit for Russian intelligence throughout the Cold War, perverted American politics at her core. The MK-Ultra mind control/drug experiment program, where in America we "became what we beheld" in our fear of Soviet brainwashing, reached fruition in "Manchurian Candidate" everyman-for-everyone Lee Harvey Oswald. And Kennedy's failure to send in air support at the Bay of Pigs, perceived as betrayal by the CIA and the anti-Castro exiles, led directly to his murder.

The JFK assassination also let loose the floodgates of an ugly future. It added brutal insult to the injury done by the National Security Act of 1947, ushering in a brazen new era of the clandestine national security state (to lift a phrase from that wag Gore Vidal) replacing the republic of Jefferson and the Enlightenment visions of our founding (Masonic) fathers. The meat grinder of Vietnam, plunged into the point of no return under the false pretense of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The no-lone nut slayings of MLK and RFK, Gerald Posner's slick whitewashings notwithstanding. The dissolution of the 60s counterculture with a little help from our friends (COINTELPRO's handy agents provocateurs, the weird entanglements of Leary & the CIA & the Acid capers, and with friends like Abbie "blackmail the promoters of Woodstock for $50K" Hoffman who needs enemies?). Watergate and the litany of other "gates" (October Surprisegate, Irancontragate, Gulf War Diseasegate, now Chinagate). The Reagan Counterrevolution and Bill Casey's Nicaraguan contra's bayonets plunged into baby's bellies...all eerie sagas where purple mountain majesties turn bloody, as the price of these perfidious games.

I insist that accepting at least the principle of conspiracy in appraising these historical events is a precondition for maintaining intellectual integrity, and that a corresponding sense of indignation is a moral necessity in confronting the betrayal of the dream of democracy and human decency. Even so, I am keenly aware that conspiratorial thinking can be a "slippery slope," that it can be closely aligned with groups at once intellectually crude and morally repugnant: the John Birch Society, the bunker hunkering militia movement, the neo-nazi Liberty Lobby. I repudiate the viciously xenophobic rhetoric of these groups (especially their anti-Semitism and racism), and I'm here to inform any lefty conspiracy buff colleagues that the Liberty Lobby is a font of Holocaust-denying disinformation, despite their work in bringing to light other outrages in their paper The Spotlight.

I call upon my fellow humane conspiracy buffs to help sort out some of the true riddles posed by Oglesby's Yankee/Cowboy conception. What of George Bush: a Texan oil tycoon Cowboy by birth and home state, an internationalist Yankee by education (A Skull and Bones Yalie) and affiliation (Trilateral Commission, CFR, 33rd degree Freemason)? Did his presidency represent a unification of the Yankee/Cowboy split, or something else? What of 33rd degree Cowboy Ross Perot? Or Yankee-at-heart Henry Kissinger? What of NASA as a space frontierist Cowboy agency (even as it's allegedly dominated by the internationalist Masons)? How does the New World Order stand against the militant Muslims and the Red Chinese, or the anti-Masonic Christian right, or the Light Warriors of the New Age Movement? Where do Yankee and Cowboy stand vis-a-vis the extraterrestrial/UFO contact and cover-up question?

What follows are original essays and links to help the discerning "wacko conspiracy buff" (in Zepezauer's self-effacing phrase) to separate the wheat from the chaff.

(Return to Politix and Conspiracy Corner)