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Naomi Klein How did you feel on 9/12? So stunned you couldn't figure out a next move? Desperate for an explanation, any explanation? Filled with a desire for someone powerful to do something big --- or as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman would later say about the invasion of Iraq, “What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, basically saying, 'Which part of this sentence don't you understand?'” Most of the people I know in New York experienced all that. But only briefly. And then --- although our city got the worst of it --- we were flooded with empathy, eager to unite and help, and, above all, desperate to understand. Which is, I believe, why the book most bought --- and read, and discussed --- in my crowd in the weeks after 9/11 was Ahmed Rashid's Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. Maybe you felt as my friends and I did. If so, Naomi Klein sends you congratulations --- you are likely to see through (and, later, resist) the business-take-all power grab that she says is the likely follow-up to any disaster, natural or political. If so, Naomi Klein warns you to be damn careful. If our government doesn't leave you to save yourself (as in New Orleans), an outsourced army like Blackwater might decide you're trouble and decide to re-educate or kill you (as in Iraq). Either way, if Klein is remotely right, you can pretty much kiss goodbye your fantasies of American “goodness” and “good will” and even “democracy” --- when the interests of an American corporation that's tight with the government are at stake, the usual rules don't apply. Terror, torture, mayhem, murder: The techniques are technicalities. All that counts: the triumph of business interests, a continued flow of money and power to the inner circle. And this will happen more and more, Klein says, if “disaster capitalism” --- that is, “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophe” --- continues to prevail. In her book, Klein asks how this happened. Her answer: an alternative history of the last 30 years. The tightly-reported, intensely-sourced story she tells is not unfamiliar to people outside America and to progressives here at home. Still, to see her connect the dots between Pinochet in Chile and Bremer in Iraq is dazzling and disturbing --- this book will be an eye-opener for some, a mind-closer for others. A cast of thousands sweeps through the 466 pages of her book, but only two men are key. One is the economist Milton Friedman. The other is Dr. Ewen Cameron, a Canadian psychiatrist. Even people who know almost nothing about economics have heard of Milton Friedman. He taught at the University of Chicago and influenced generations of students. He advised Presidents and world leaders. He won the Nobel Prize. When he died, in 2006, the obituaries were glowing. Friedman's big idea was free markets. He was beloved by conservatives not for his opposition to Marxism but for his rejection of Keynesian economic theory. Unlike Keynes's liberal disciples, he believed government should, if possible, never meddle with the economy. But Friedman's views were actually more complicated. “Only a crisis --- real or perceived --- produces real change,” he said. And he advised government leaders in Chile and England to do more than meddle; he urged them to use crisis to introduce radical political and economic re-engineering. Almost no one can identify Ewen Cameron, but in the 1950s, he did important research for the CIA. Using electroshock, LSD, sustained isolation and other techniques, he showed that he could inflict sufficient shock to a patient's brain to erase memory. And then he could build a new personality in its place. Klein's thesis in “The Shock Doctrine” is that exceedingly clever disciples of Friedman saw how Cameron's psychological techniques could be used on entire countries. Let's say a new government comes to power with an ardent pro-business agenda. Instead of changing policy one piece at a time in the hope that it can legislate significant change before anyone notices, new governments should trumpet their agenda. And then they should use whatever muscle is necessary to shock the population into cowed acceptance. Klein's no fool; she emphasizes that it's impossible to hold ideologues directly responsible for crimes committed by their followers. At the same time, like anyone with an overarching theory, she connects dots that are unrelated and ignores exceptions. My guess: Most readers will have trouble with her large perceptions: In South America, the greatest supporers of “free market” capitalism have been dictators; in the United States, war profiteers are the government; in Iraq, Saddam's real crime was signing oil contracts with the Russians and negotiating with a French company. I suspect what readers will remember are the facts they've never encountered before. Samples: In 2001, there were two security-oriented lobbying firms in Washington. In 2006, there were 543. “Shock and Awe” was literal. In the 1991 Gulf War, the United States dispatched 300 cruise missiles in 5 weeks. In 2003, we fired off 380 in a single day. Between March 20 and May 3, we dropped 30,000 bombs and launched 20,000 cruise missiles --- 67% of the total number ever made. In Thailand, within 24 hours of the tsumani, some developers sent private security guards to fence in beach property they did not own so they could build luxury hotels there. In New Orleans, FEMA paid a contractor $175 a square foot to put tarp owned by FEMA on the roofs of houses. The workers who actually applied the tarp got $2 an hour. In the first year of deployment for Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld cut 55,000 jobs in the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs. Lockheed Martin doesn't just build aircraft. It sorts our mail, writes Social Security checks and counts the census --- it “writes more code than Microsoft.” One fact in particular jumps out: The Defense Authorization Act (2006) gives the president the power to declare martial law and use the Armed Forces and National Guard to restore order in the event of an emergency. What's new about that? Previously, the president only had that power in the event of insurrection. If you've got a paranoid imagination.... A depressing book? Well, sometimes reality's a bummer. But the end is not at all doom-and-gloom. Around the world, Klein says, people are understanding how disaster capitalism works --- and fighting back. Obviously, she hopes her book will start that process here. --- Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com To buy “The Shock Doctrine” from Amazon.com, click here. For John Cusack's extremely explicit interview with Naomi Klein, click here. For Naomi Klein's web site, click here. Copyright 2007 by Head Butler Inc. |
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