Samizdat

I received this as part of an email…  it reminded me of a conversation this weekend when I mentioned Copintelpro in exactly this context and the person with whom I was speaking had no idea what I was talking about.  Here then, is one person’s transcription of another person’s reflection, as cut and pasted by a blogger who is amazed daily by the lack of continuity in transmission of truth…

In light of the recent "Deep Throat" revelation, a word from Noam Chomsky
on Watergate.  I think you’ll find it very interesting, even though its not
directly about deepthroat.

 

(Took me almost an hour to type this in…)

 

From Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky pages
117-120

[In response to Chomsky's claim that the corporate news media
serves the interests of state-corporate power rather than as a check on its'
power.]

Man: But how do you explain Watergate, then? Those reporters
weren’t very sympathetic to power–they toppled a President.

Chomsky: And
just ask yourself why he was toppled–he was toppled because he had made a very
bad mistake: he had antagonized people with power.

See, one of the
serious illusions we live under in the United States, which is a major part of
the whole system of indoctrination, is the idea that the government is the
power–and the government’s not the power, the government is one segment of
power. Real power is in the hands of the people who own the society; the
state-managers are usually just servants. And Watergate is actually perfect
illustration of the point—because right at the time of Watergate, histor y
actually ran a controlled experiment for us. The Watergate exposures, it turns
out, came at exactly the same time as the COINTELPRO exposures–I don’t know if
you know what I mean.

Man: COINTELPRO?

Chomsky: See, you probably
don’t–but that already makes my point, because the COINTELPRO exposures were a
thousand times more significant than Watergate. Remember what Watergate was
after all: Watergate was a matter of a bunch of guys from the Republican
National Committee breaking in a Democratic Party office for essentially unknown
reasons and doing no damage. Okay, that’s petty burglary, it’s not a big deal.
Well, at the exact time that Watergate was discovered, there were exposures in
the courts and through the Freedom of Information Act of massive FBI operations
to undermine political freedom in the United States, running through every
administration back to Roosevelt, but really picking up under Kennedy. It was
called "COINTELPRO" (short for "Counterintellige nce Program"), and it included
a vast range of things.

It included Gestapo-style assassination of a
Black Panther leader; it included organizing race riots in an effort to destroy
the black movements; it included attacks on the American Indian Movement, on the
women’s movement, you name it. It included fifteen years of FBI disruption of
the Socialist Worker’s Party–that meant regular FBI burglaries, stealing
membership lists and using them to threaten people, going to businesses and
getting members fired from their jobs, and so on. Well, that fact alone-the fact
that for fifteen years the FBI had been burglarizing and trying to undermine a
legal political party–is already vastly more important than the fact that a
bunch of Keystone Kops broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters
one time. The Socialist Workers Party is a legal political party, after all–the
fact that they’re a weak political party doesn’t mean they have less rights than
the Democrats. A nd this wasn’t a bunch of gangsters, this was the national
political police: that’s very serious. And it didn’t happen once in the
Watergate office complex, is was going on for fifteen years, under every
administration. And keep in mind, the Socialist Workers Party episode is just
some tiny footnote to COINTELPRO. In comparison to this, Watergate is a tea
party.

Well, look at the comparison in treatment–I mean, you’re aware
of the comparison in treatment, that’s why you know about Watergate and you
don’t know about COINTELPRO. So what does that tell you? What it tells you is,
people in power will defend themselves. The Democratic Party represents about
half of corporate power, and those people are able to defend themselves; the
Socialist Workers Party represents no power, the Black Panthers don’t represent
any power, the American Indian Movement doesn’t represent any power–so you can
do anything you want to them.

Or take a look at the Nixon
administration’s famous "Enemies List," which came out in the course of
Watergate…You’ve heard of that, but did you hear about the assassination of Fred
Hampton? No. Nothing ever happened to any of the people who were on the Enemies
List, which I know perfectly well, because I was on it–and it wasn’t because I
was on it that it made the front pages. But the FBI and the Chicago police
assassinated a Black Panther leader as he lay in his bed one night during the
Nixon administration (On December 4, 1969). Well, if the press had any integrity
at all, if the Washington Post had any integrity, what they would have said is,
"Watergate is totally insignificant and innocuous, who cares about any of that
in comparison with these other things." But that’s not what happened, obviously.
And that just shows again, very dramatically, how the press is lined up with
power.

The
real lesson of Nixon’s fall is that the President shouldn’t call Thomas
Watson (Chairman of IBM) and McGeorge Bundy (former Democratic
official) bad names–that means the Republic’s collapsing. And the
press prides itself on having exposed this fact. On the other hand, if
you want to send the FBI to organize the assassination of a Black
Panther leader, that’s fine by us; it’s fine by the Washington Post
too.

Incidentally, I think there is
another reason why a lot of powerful people were out to get Nixon at the
time–and it had to do with something a lot more profound than the Enemies List
and Watergate burglary. I suspect it had to do with the events of the summer of
1971, when the Nixon administration basically broke up the international
economic arrangement that had existed for the previous twenty-five years ( i.e.
the so-called "Bretton Woods" system…) the Vietnam War had already badly
weakened the United States economically relative to its industrial rivals, and
one of the ways the Nixon administration reacted to that was by simply tearing
apart the Bretton Woods system, which had been set up to organize the world
economy after World War II. The Bretton Woods system had made the United States
the world’s banker, basically–it had established the US dollar as a global
reserve currency fixed to gold, and it imposed conditions about no import
quotas, and so on. And Nixon just tore the whole thing to shreds: he went off
the gold standard, he stopped the convertibility of the dollar, he raised import
duties. No other country would have had the power to do that, but Nixon did it.
And that made him a lot of powerful enemies–because multinational corporations
and international banks relied on that system, and they did not like it being
broken down. So if you look back, you’ll find that Nixon was being attacked in
places like the Wall Street Journal at the time, and I suspect that from that
point on there were plenty of powerful people out to get him. Watergate just
offered an opportunity.

In fact, in this respect, I think Nixon was
treated extremely unfairly. I mean, there were real crimes of the Nixon
administration, and he should have been tried–but not for any of the Watergate
business. Take the bombing of Cambodia, for instance: the bombing of Cambodia
was infinitely worse than anything that came up in the Watergate hearing–this
thing they call the "secret bombing" of Cambodia, which was "secret" because the
press didn’t talk about what they knew. The US killed maybe a couple hundred
thousand people in Cambodia, they devastated a peasant society. The bombing of
Cambodia did not even appear in Nixon’s Articles of Impeachment. It was raised
in the Senate hearing, but only in one interesting respect–the question that
was raised was, why hadn’t Nixon informed Congress? It wasn’t, why did you carry
out one of the most intense bombings in history in densely populated areas of
peasant country, killing maybe 150,000 people? That never came up. The only
question was, why didn’t you tell Congress? In other words, were people with
power granted their prerog atives? And once again, notice what it means is,
infringing on the rights of powerful people in unacceptable: "We’re powerful, so
you’ve got to tell us–then we’ll tell you, ‘Fine, go bomb Cambodia.’ " In fact,
that whole thing was a gag–because there was no reason fro Congress not to have
known about the bombing, just as there was no reason for the media not to have
known: it was completely public.

So in terms of all the horrifying
atrocities the Nixon government carried out, Watergate isn’t even worth laughing
about. It was a triviality. Watergate is a very clear example of what happens to
servants when they forget their role and go after the people who own the place:
they are very quickly put back into their box, and somebody else takes over. You
couldn’t ask for a better illustration of it than that–and it’s even more
dramatic because this is the great exposure that’s supposed to demonstrate what
a free and critical press we have. What Watergate really shows is what a
submissive and obedient press we have, as the comparisons to COINTELPRO and
Cambodia illustrate very clearly.