Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

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...