The Yankee and Cowboy War: Carl Oglesby (1975). Here’s a little gem for everyone interested in the real world and real history. It’s a must-watch!

I wanted to share this video a while ago. It describes the division within the American deep state between the Yankee group and the Cowboy group. This division has existed for a long time, and the entire history of the U.S. is covered in this video. I thought I’d treat you to one of the best historical lectures I know—this is a real must-watch.

“It turns political parties that we once thought were strong and forceful and meant something into pawns, manipulated counters on a stage controlled by hidden forces. The act of government itself is turned most fundamentally into an act of murder. The facts, storming at us sometimes after 10 years of delay, demand above all a new comprehension—a new conception of the political world that we live in.

The Yankee-Cowboy theory that I’ll now try to describe aims to provide an overarching framework within which it will be possible to understand the ultimate fundamental logic being worked out in Dallas and other sites of major conspiracy over the past 10 or so years. In other words, what we in the ARB are trying to do is confront the diffuse, pervasive American illusion that things like Dallas happen because there are a few oddballs like Oswald, with a completely alternative theory.”

4:18

“What we are proposing is that, on the minimal question of whether or not we know the basic truth about Dallas, it’s now possible and indeed necessary to come to a new consensus: we don’t. We can tell from the way that we don’t know; we can tell from how the truth has been kept from us, that it has been kept from us intentionally. And because of the size of the truth and the kind of energy, organizational skill, and political weight that we can imagine would be needed for a cover-up of that magnitude to succeed against all odds, we have to imagine that the conspiracy cabal is still in place—a difficult and frightening idea.”

We could easily swap the word “Dallas” with “Nord Stream,” and it would apply to our current situation.

4:57

“We have to imagine that people in high positions are still uninterested, ten years later, in examining the evidence of Wallace and the assassinations—particularly the Dallas assassination—and in coming to the indicated conclusion that we need a purge of the political system. This purge needn’t be fiery or traumatic, although I don’t imagine it could happen without being as frightening as Watergate was. But it’s clear that it would have to happen.”

47:33

“The Vietnam War, for one brief moment, was about not to take place, at least not in the form in which it happened. Then there was Dallas. The day after Dallas, Johnson signed National Security Agency Memorandum 278, a classified document that, according to those who’ve seen it, reverses Kennedy’s policy of de-escalation and secretly installs Johnson’s policy: a big strategic war to maintain the American position in Vietnam.

Johnson had to win the election, so he kept it down, stayed quiet. He positioned himself as the peace candidate in the 1964 election against Goldwater, just another cowboy. This shows the power of assassination—when you hit the right guy, you take over the whole apparatus at once. You have the Democratic Party, the Republican Party; you can stage the whole thing. If you want a warrior to come across as a peacenik, you put a worse warrior against him to make him look good—a technique basic to Nixon’s political history from the very beginning.

This is where we find the liberal failure during that time. The real shame of liberalism was its failure to confront the implications of Dallas, to let the cover story go unchallenged. How could liberalism fight against the coming of the Vietnam War while clinging to the belief that Johnson was just Kennedy, only better, because he was both right-wing and left-wing? Liberals just went along with the Great Society pap, not understanding that Johnson’s domestic programs were gutting what little there was of the welfare state, not building it out, but holding the very idea of social progress up to ridicule. The liberals went along with it; they weren’t raising questions then, and they’re not raising many today. But it was worse then.”

And it’s even worse now.

56:28

“The right wing gets it faster than the left wing because the left traditionally orients itself to a European worldview, while the right wing traditionally orients itself to a frontier, anti-European standpoint. The right sees America as poisoned by continued relationships and entanglements in Europe, viewing America as liberated—a land where democracy and capitalism coexist happily only if the frontier keeps moving, expanding the world space available to our enterprise, to entrepreneurs like Howard Hughes, H.L. Hunt, Getty, and other Southwestern moguls.

Entrepreneurial capitalists are much wealthier as individuals than their Yankee counterparts, but they command nothing like the empires of Yankee scope. For example, Howard Hughes is said to be worth three or four billion dollars, whereas David Rockefeller is worth just a few hundred million. However, the empire that Hughes sits on ends with him and his four billion. The empire that David Rockefeller sits on could be worth 400 billion—who really knows? But in this disparity of relationships, we can sense the interstices in which the cowboy-Yankee conflict takes place. We have an individual cowboy like Hughes, with enormous personal leverage, up against a highly institutionalized power center like the Rockefellers, where individuals don’t have much room for maneuver. The main job of captains in such a center is to keep the vast link-up of institutions moving together rationally.

Hughes, for example, doesn’t have that problem—he’s an entrepreneur, not a monopolist. The frontier made it possible for entrepreneurs to get rich because it constantly recreated a situation in which entrepreneurial capitalism flourished. Following behind were the Yankees, who would come and assimilate these small personal empires into larger ones, providing modern-style rationalization. The cowboys kept moving away, out into new clear wilderness, land that nobody lives in—because the Indians, the Hawaiians, the Filipinos, and, at another point, the Chinese weren’t considered people. Then it was the turn of the Koreans and the Vietnamese not to be people. These Reds, like the Redskins of the old days, perform the same service—bowing to our genocidal needs. They give us space and a sense of righteousness, manifesting our destiny in all kinds of signs.

But now that very process was facing a fundamental challenge with the victory of the Chinese Revolution, which is probably the real meaning of this century. It closes the door once and for all on the movement of Western culture into dominant relationships over Eastern cultures. That’s what was really behind Korea. Our effort in the Korean War was to keep that door open somehow. When that failed, it broke out in Vietnam—we had to fight it all over again. How many times would it have to be fought? How many exasperations would a cowboy mind have to endure?

The bombings in Southeast Asia were not the result of some psychological problem Nixon had. Those bombings were carried out because of the political configuration at the moment, as the people who ran the country saw it. They moved to fight the war because they wanted it, not because they drifted or stumbled. The cowboys wanted the war because they believed that without America maintaining her position—that kind of position on an open door to the East—traditional ways were all going to have to change. And maybe they were right. Maybe when that frontier closes, the traditional ways are going to have to change. And maybe that’s precisely the kind of question confronting us.”

1:36:18

The perception that clandestinism is deeply embedded in our society and is not altogether new. Even though we may feel like we are the first to recognize the extent to which conspiracy, assassination, and cabals influence our world, and that they can eliminate presidents and continue unchecked, this awareness is not unprecedented. As we develop this consciousness about the state of our self-government, it may be reassuring to know that our forefathers, the ones we celebrate during the Bicentennial, grappled with similar concerns.

Bernard Bailyn’s book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, offers insight into this. Although Bailyn might not appreciate my interpretation, I’ll share a few passages to illustrate how these issues have recurred throughout history.

In Chapter 3, titled “Power and Liberty: A Theory of Politics,” Bailyn discusses the theory of politics that emerged from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary year 1775—our year, 200 years ago. This theory rests on the belief that behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy was the disposition of power. This concept makes us contemporaries with Jefferson because we, too, are trying to understand the disposition of power. It’s not about conspiracy theory or paranoia, but about studying power as it is—how it configures itself, how coalitions form and dissolve, what drives them, and what causes them to collapse.

The colonists’ acute awareness of this problem is one of the most striking aspects of 18th-century literature for a 20th-century reader. It connects the Revolutionary generation to our own in a deeply intimate way. Bailyn notes that discussions of power during the pre-Revolutionary period often focused on its aggressive nature, its endlessly propulsive tendency to expand beyond legitimate boundaries. To express this central thought, which explained more of politics past and present than any other single consideration, writers of the time used a variety of metaphors, similes, and analogies.

The most common image was that of power as an act of trespassing. Power was described as having an “encroaching nature,” and if left unchecked, it “creeps by degrees and quickly subdues the whole.” Sometimes, power was likened to a human hand, “reaching out to clutch and seize.” It was seen as “grasping and tenacious in its nature,” retaining whatever it seized. Other times, power was compared to the ocean, resistant to any limits being fixed upon it, or to a cancer, “eating faster and faster every hour.”

One particularly poignant observation comes from Thomas Jefferson. In one of the most closely reasoned pamphlets of 1774, Jefferson unambiguously stated that while “single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day,” a “series of oppressions begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers” clearly indicates a “deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.”

This serves as a powerful reminder of the enduring nature of these concerns.

So, when some of us talk about Kennedy, 9/11, Nord Stream, just as we say: “Even though we may feel like we are the first to recognize the extent to which conspiracy, assassination, and cabals influence our world, and that they can eliminate presidents and continue unchecked, this awareness is not unprecedented.” But, to tell you the truth, for me, this isn’t something positive but rather disheartening. Look at how long people have known about these things, yet it’s still not common knowledge. Meanwhile, the general knowledge of the population regarding world affairs declines. Anyway, this is one of the best historical lectures I’ve found, so for anyone thirsty for some truth and real history—enjoy it!