Response
to Watergate
Richard
Nixon had been terribly unpopular at UCLA amongst student
activists prior to the Watergate Scandal that generated from the Jun
17, 1972 arrest of burglars at the Watergate Office Building in D.C.
By 1973, UCLA activism was imbued with such profound cynicism, with
"liberal protest" giving way towards ambitions of "revolution,"
that Watergate was somewhat inconsequential to the general morale
of the school.
There
is a sense that Watergate only confirmed peoples' burgeoning disillusionment
with the U.S. Government and Nixon. Escalations in Vietnam and the
overall conservatism pervasive in the government made many numb to
being particularly incensed by Nixon's crimes.
Instead,
as in the flyer below, many UCLA activists responded to Watergate
by impugning the U.S. as a whole. Radical groups like SDS and MWO
had made it clear that their shared sense of disgust applied to the
entirety of the American economic-political system.
Flyer
from Bruin Walk Dated October 10, 1973
Watergate
is a direct consequence of the American political-economic system,
a system whereby a few giant corporations control the daily lives
of the majority of American working people without consulting them
and without caring about their wishes. Our political leaders learned
to manipulate others in the field of business and high finance, where
manipulation of others is the rule and not the exception.
Yet
the public is bombarded by Establishment propaganda which claims that
Watergate is merely a temporary straying from the basic soundness
of the American political system. Even news commentators are careful
to distinguish between the allegedly guilty persons in Watergate and
the overall innocence of the American political system, claiming in
fact that Watergate will improve the system, as though murder improves
the legal system.
Politicians
try to tell us that Watergate is the first time that such a thing
has ever happened in America, and that therefore the system
cannot be at fault. But what about Johnson's bombing of Vietnam and
the cover-up and lying which surrounded it, as revealed by the Pentagon
Papers? The truth is that the American economic-political system has
always been a gigantic Watergate, holding back the power of the people.
M.W.O.
Bulletin
(This
article has been printed because of the unwillingness and inability
of FANSHEN, SDS, and other groups to print a coherent account of Watergate.)
by Max
Nagano 