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. OK, that's petty burglary ... Well, at the exact time that Watergate was discovered, there were exposures in the courts and through FOIA 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' ... 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 Workers 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 ... 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 ... 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. ... 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 ... 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 ... The real lesson of Nixon's fall is that the President shouldn't call Thomas Watson and McGeorge Bundy 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 ... it had to do with ... tearing apart the Bretton Woods system ... 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 ... Watergate just offered an opportunity. In fact, in this respect, I think Nixon was treated extremely unfairly. 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 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. 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.

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