The
second colonial pillage and planned misery
The Shock Doctrine:
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Naomi Klein
New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007
Pp. 558
JD 30.000 (hardcover)
Extreme violence may blind
people to the interests it serves. For example, the war
in Iraq is commonly attributed to the Bush
administration’s quest for oil or its special
combination of ignorance and audacity, when in fact the
project is much bigger.
According to award-winning
journalist Naomi Klein, attacking Iraq was a “rational
policy decision”, since the architects of the invasion
“could not crack open the closed economies of the Middle
East by peaceful means… the level of terror was
proportional to what was at stake”. (p. 327)
It was assumed that “while
Iraqis were consumed with daily emergencies, the country
could be auctioned off discreetly and the results
announced as a done deal”. (p. 326)
In “The Shock Doctrine”,
Klein unmasks the motives for coups, arrests, torture,
“disappearances” and the impoverishment of the many,
from Latin America in the 70s, Poland in the 80s and
Russia in the 90s, up to the creation of crises like the
1997 Asian stock market crash, and exploitation of
disasters like the tsunami and Hurricane Katarina.
In each case, she carefully
documents who benefited, who lost and what mechanisms
were at work. In each case, Western governments,
advisers, World Bank and IMF officials imposed a “crisis
solution” that included price hikes, sweeping
privatisation and deregulation of trade and financial
markets. In each case, a select group of multinationals
and the local elite made super profits, while the
majority of the population suffered from the sellout of
national enterprises and resources in the form of
massive lay-offs, the gutting of public health,
education and social security systems, and lowered
standards of living.
“In much of the Southern
Hemisphere, neoliberalism is frequently spoken of as
‘the second colonial pillage’.” (p. 244)
It can also be termed
“planned misery” or “an extraordinarily violent armed
robbery”. As an Argentine journalist told Klein, “It was
as if that blood, the blood of the disappeared, covered
up the cost of the economic programme”. (p. 125)
It all began in the 50s,
with CIA-funding of Dr Ewen Cameron’s experiments at
McGill University (Montreal). He subjected mental
patients to a mix of extreme sensory deprivation, huge
doses of electroshock and a cocktail of drugs. The idea
was to erase their minds, create a blank slate, in order
to recreate their personalities. The result was total
breakdown, regression to an infantile state and lasting
memory losses.
Also in the 50s, there was
another “Doctor Shock” who became much more famous.
University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman preached
the doctrine of the free market, unfettered by state
control. Chicago School economics, also termed
neoliberalism or neoconservatism, meant a frontal attack
not only on communism but also on America’s New Deal and
Third World developmentalists striving to harness their
country’s resources for its advancement.
A generation of young
economists, including many from Latin America and Asia,
were trained in Friedman’s theories and later put them
into practice. Crises were considered a blessing,
destroying the status quo, creating a blank slate, so
that truly free market economies could emerge. While US
leaders were initially sceptical about applying
Friedman’s shocks at home, they were seized upon as a
way of expanding global control.
The 1965 coup in Indonesia
was the first test for “the shock doctrine”, followed by
Chile’s 1973 coup which featured “three distinct forms
of shock, a recipe that would be duplicated in
neighbouring countries and would reemerge, three decades
later, in Iraq”.
Added to the shock of the
coup itself was a heavy dose of Chicago School economics
and Cameron’s methods “now codified as torture
techniques… and disseminated through extensive CIA
training programs”. (p. 71)
People would be so
disoriented by these triple shocks that they would be
unable to react to the new economic regime being imposed
on their country.
And it worked for many
years; the “free market” economies installed during
states of emergency proved resilient to political
changes, but not forever. Klein finds the most hopeful
signs of countries challenging “disaster capitalism”
today in Latin America, where people are recovering from
the legacy of dictatorships.
This is a must read for
anyone who wants to know what is really happening in the
world and to understand the underpinnings of US policy.
According to Klein, “the
entire 30-year history of the Chicago School experiment
has been one of mass corruption and corporatist
collusion between security states and large
corporations”. (p. 241)
The Bush administration has
taken this to its logical extreme with the unprecedented
use of private contractors in everything from torture to
reconstruction in Iraq, while outsourcing vital services
at home, such as health, education, prisons, public
safety and disaster relief, once viewed as government
responsibility.
Only in one place does the
book fall short: Palestine/Israel. Klein accurately
pinpoints the economic disincentives for Israel to
pursue peace - it has less need of access to Arab
markets now that it is profiting enormously from selling
hi-tech security equipment and expertise for the global
“war on terrorism”. But the analysis stops there,
overlooking Israel’s history as a prototype “shock
therapy” state.
The book can be found at Al
Bustan bookstore.
Sally Bland
