by Noam Chomsky
Rethinking Watergate
MAN: But how do you explain Watergate, then? Those reporters weren’t very sympathetic to power—they toppled a President.
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 a perfect illustration of the point—because right at the time of Watergate, history 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?
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 into 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 same time that Watergate was discovered, there were exposures in the courts and through the Freedom of Information Act of massive F.B.I. 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 “Counterintelligence Program”], and it included a vast range of things.
It included the straight 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 F.B.I disruption of the Socialist Workers Party—that meant regular F.B.I. burglaries, stealing membership lists and using them to threaten people, going to businesses and getting members fired from their jobs, and so on. 33 Well, that fact alone—the fact that for fifteen years the F.B.I 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. And 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, it 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 [exposed in 1973, the document named 208 Americans from various professions under the title “Opponents list and political enemies project”]. 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 F.B.I. 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 I.B.M.] 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 F.B.I. 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 that time—and it had to do with something a lot more profound than the Enemies List and the 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, established in 1944 at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire]. See, by 1971 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 U.S. 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 hearings—this thing they call the “secret bombing” of Cambodia, which was “secret” because the press didn’t talk about what they knew. 34 The U.S. killed maybe a couple hundred thousand people in Cambodia, they devastated a peasant society, 35 The bombing of Cambodia did not even appear in Nixon’s Articles of Impeachment. It was raised in the Senate hearings, 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 a 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 prerogatives? And once again, notice that what it means is, infringing on the rights of powerful people is 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 for 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.
Escaping Indoctrination
MAN: But do you think things are ever going to change? Aren’t we always going to have people entrenched in power, left or right, who want to preserve that power, and will use all of the means at their disposal to do it—and all we can really do is just sit back and complain about it?
That’s the attitude of people who thought that there was nothing you could do about feudalism and slavery. And there was something you could do about feudalism and slavery, but not by sitting and complaining about it. John Brown didn’t sit and complain about it.
MAN: He didn’t get very far.
He did. They overthrew slavery, and the Abolitionists played a big role in that.
[Brown’s 1859 attempt to set off a slave revolt by seizing a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, electrified the country and intensified the Abolitionist movement.]
MAN: So as long as we criticize, try to offer constructive criticism, there’s hope of changing the system?
If the constructive criticism leads to the point where mass popular movements form that do something to change the system, sure, then there’s hope. I mean, there wouldn’t have been an American Revolution if people had been writing pamphlets but not doing anything more than that.
WOMAN: Then what’s the trick to holding on and not giving up—because it seems like a lot of people need it.
The trick is not to be isolated—if you’re isolated, like Winston Smith in 1984, then sooner or later you’re going to break, as he finally broke. That was the point of Orwell’s story. In fact, the whole tradition of popular control has been exactly that: to keep people isolated, because if you can keep them isolated enough, you can get them to believe anything. But when people get together, all sorts of things are possible.
MAN: It just seems so hopeless, though, because you make it sound like the entire press organization is locking dissidents out.
That’s largely true—but like I say, there’s a lot of flexibility possible. I mean, it’s true that the ideological barrier in the U.S. media is extreme—other countries have more openings for dissidence in the mainstream than we do, even though their economic systems are basically the same. But still there is quite a range of possibility for opening up the press here, even as it now stands: it doesn’t have to be .0001 percent open to dissident perspectives, it could be .1 percent or something. So I actually think there are plenty of changes possible in the United States, even from within the institutions.
Remember that the media have two basic functions. One is to indoctrinate the elites, to make sure they have the right ideas and know how to serve power. In fact, typically the elites are the most indoctrinated segment of a society, because they are the ones who are exposed to the most propaganda and actually take part in the decision-making process. For them you have the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and so on. But there’s also a mass media, whose main function is just to get rid of the rest of the population—to marginalize and eliminate them, so they don’t interfere with decision-making. And the press that’s designed for that purpose isn’t the New York Times and the Washington Post, it’s sitcoms on television, and the National Enquirer, and sex and violence, and babies with three heads, and football, all that kind of stuff. But the approximately 85 percent of the population that is the main target of that media, they don’t have it in their genes that they’re not interested in the way the world works. And if they can escape from the effects of the de-education and indoctrination system, and the whole class system it’s a part of—it’s after all not just indoctrination that keeps people from getting involved in political life, by any means—if they can do that, then yeah, they’re a big audience for an alternative, and there’s some hope.
In fact, there’s a very interesting history about this in England. For a long time in England, there was a mass, popular, daily labor press of quite good newspapers, with a huge readership—a much bigger readership than all the elite press in England combined, actually. It was the Daily Herald and the News Chronicle and the Sunday Citizen. And this was not just Alex Cock-burn once a month in the Wall Street Journal, but every day there were newspapers giving a picture of the world and expressing a set of values radically different from those of the business community. And not only did they have a big circulation, but their audience was also very much involved—for instance, there were surveys showing that people actually read those newspapers much more than subscribers to things like the Guardian and the London Times. But they disappeared in the 1960s, and they disappeared due to market pressures—it didn’t have anything to do with the number of readers they had, it had to do with the amount of capital they could attract. Could you get advertisers, could you get capital for investment? In short, could you appeal to the business community, which happens to hold the real power? And over time, they couldn’t. 36
It’s the same thing here: for instance, in the United States there isn’t even any such thing as a “labor reporter” anymore (except in the business press, actually)—but there are plenty of “business reporters.” And again, that doesn’t reflect people’s interests: a lot more people are interested in the problems of workers than are interested in the bond market, if you count their numbers—but if you multiply their numbers by their power in the society, then yeah, it’s true, the market for news about money and stocks is much greater than the market for news about issues which matter to working people.
But that’s just the fact about an inegalitarian system: when you have a serious disproportion of power, independent forces are likely to collapse—just because they can’t get access to enough capital in the end. Like in England, some media corporation didn’t come along and try to offer this huge mass audience another paper with a social-democratic line. Business doesn’t work that way—it’s not trying to educate people to overthrow it, even if you could make a profit off it. I mean, if you could convince Rupert Murdoch that he can make a ton of money by publishing a newspaper which has a social-democratic or even more radical line, something calling for workers’ management of corporations for instance, he wouldn’t do it—because there are some things that are more important than profits, like maintaining the entire system of power.
In fact, this is also pretty much the same reason why American elites want military spending instead of social spending: if it turned out, as is likely, that using taxpayers’ money for socially useful purposes was even more profitable than sending it through the military system, that still wouldn’t change the decision to prefer military spending—because social spending is going to interfere with the basic prerogatives of power, it’s going to organize popular constituencies, and have all these other negative side effects that you want to avoid.
WOMAN: So what you’re saying is, even if there were a major cultural change, with people at the grassroots level actually demanding a much more open press, there still wouldn’t he the capital to support that press?
No, people would have to take control of that capital. I mean, for one thing, if there really were a mass of people demanding that kind of press, they would have the capital—not at the level of big corporations, but like unions, say. When unions are a mass organization, they can accumulate strike funds, even though they can’t compete with management and ownership in terms of total resources. But for another thing, there’s no law of nature which says that control over capital has to be in a few hands—that’s like saying that political power has to be in a few hands. Why? There wasn’t a law that said that the king and the nobles had to run everything, and there isn’t a law that says
that corporate owners and managers have to run everything either. These are social arrangements. They developed historically, they can be changed historically.
Understanding the Middle East Conflict
MAN: If I can just change the topic a little, Professor—I’d like you to talk a bit about the situation in the Middle East these days. People say the Palestinians are utilizing the media more than they ever have before to draw attention to Israeli repression [i.e. during the Palestinian uprising of the late 1980s]. I’m wondering whether you think that will have any effect on Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the future?
[Editors’ Note: The following discussion of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict forms the foundation of Chomsky’s analysis of the so-called “peace process” that began in the early 1990s, which is discussed in chapters 5 and 8.]
Well, this business about the Palestinians “using the media” is mostly racist garbage, in my view. The fact of the matter is that the Intifada is a big, mass, popular revolution in reaction to the absolutely brutal treatment the Palestinians have been living under—and it’s going on in places where there are no television cameras, and places where there are.
See, there’s a whole racist line which is very common in the United States. One of my favorite versions of it appeared in the journal Commentary, in an article written by some professor in Canada. It said: the Palestinians are “people who breed, and bleed, and advertise their misery.” 37 Straight Nazi propaganda. I mean, imagine if somebody said that about Jews: “Jews are people who breed, and bleed, and advertise their misery.” But that’s the kind of thing you hear—it’s a particularly vulgar version of it, but the line is: look, the Palestinians are just doing it for the cameras because they’re trying to discredit the Jews.