Daniel Ellsberg, US Regime, Part II

  

Daniel Ellsberg, US Regime, II

Peter Schultz

 

                  An email exchange regarding my post on Daniel Ellsberg, the US regime, and Vietnam:

 

The Reply:

“Selection From Nixon

“YOUNG WOMAN: You don't want the war.  We don't want the war.  The Vietnamese don't want the war.  So why does it go on?
Nixon hesitates, out of answers.
“YOUNG WOMAN: Someone wants it...  (a realization)  You can't stop it, can you?  Even if you wanted to.  Because it's not you.  It's the system.  And the system won't let you stop it...
“NIXON: There's a lot more at stake here than what you want.  Or even what I want...
“YOUNG WOMAN: Then what's the point?  What's the point of being president?  You're powerless.
“The girl transfixes him with her eyes.  Nixon feels it.  The nausea of the Beast[1] makes him reel.  The students press in on him from all sides.
“NIXON: (stumbling)  No, no.  I'm not powerless.  Because...because I understand the system.  I believe I can control it.  Maybe not control it totally.  But...tame it enough to make it do some good.
“YOUNG WOMAN: It sounds like you're talking about a wild animal.
“NIXON: Maybe I am.

 

“[1] "After 'The Last Press Conference' he was finished.  He should have disappeared, but he didn't.  In order for Nixon to have become President in 1968, Jack Kennedy had to die, Lyndon Johnson had to be forced into retirement, Dr. King had to die, Bobby Kennedy had to die, Hubert Humphrey had to be eviscerated in Chicago.  It almost seemed that Nixon was being helped, helped by something dark, something sinister, something frightening.  Some thing.
"And we called it The Beast.
"The Beast became a metaphor for the darkest organic forces in American Cold War politics: the anti-Communist crusade, secret intelligence, the defense industry, organized crime, big business.  People and entities with apparently divergent agendas.  But at a certain moment in history, their interests converged.”

 

My response:

Thanks. This is wonderfully illuminating about American politics and about Stone. The American regime, as usual, controls, not even but especially presidents…..because, after all, they are elected to preside over that regime. Hence, the title of “president.” Although they don’t know it, the regime is what Nixon and the young woman are talking about.

 

But then Stone goes off, obfuscating things with the idea of “the Beast.” It isn’t a beast, it’s a regime, as Aristotle and others understood. But the Beast makes it melodramatic! And the beast successfully hides the truth about the political. And thus Stone obscures the worth of Nixon’s claim that he might be able to “tame” what he calls “the system.” 

 

A “taming politics” is definitely not a progressive politics. It may be said that the Anti-Federalists wanted a tamed politics, whereas the Federalists wanted a progressive politics. But even Nixon doesn’t fully understand what he’s talking about, doesn’t understand the choices to be made and that were made, e.g., the embrace and extension of slavery. He’s just trying “to relate.” And Stone also doesn’t understand the political or what’s at stake. 

 

It’s not "a wild animal" that’s being dealt with. It’s the political!