Shock Proof!

[Joanne98]

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/view.php?aid=6312
Shock Proof

Acclaimed journalist and author Naomi Klein takes on the Disaster-Capitalism Complex

Naomi Klein’s latest book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is adorned with gushing blurbs from Hollywood celebrities and popular fiction writers, alongside the usual venerable lefties. But the argument Klein is making isn’t the type usually gobbled up by the Hollywood elite.

Thousands of high-school students cut their political teeth on Klein’s first bestseller No Logo, transforming themselves into brand-based consumer activists; The Economist lamely dismissed her work then as the “incoherence and self-righteous disgust of the alienated adolescent.” Klein is now taking on much bigger targets – with well-honed analysis earned from years of intrepid reporting – and The Economist would do well to listen. She is out to puncture the most cherished narrative of the global economic order: that the triumph of deregulated capitalism was born of freedom, and that the free market is the natural sibling of democracy.

This popular account of globalization neglects to mention the decisive shocks – economic, figurative, and all-too-literal – that accompanied its rise. Klein wants to correct the record; from Chile to China, Poland and Russia, to the Katrina disaster and the invasion and occupation of Iraq, fundamentalist capitalism has been consistently escorted by brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective body politic as well as on innumerable individual bodies.

The Shock Doctrine is to date the most creative attempt to disentangle the connections between the rise of global corporate supremacy and U.S.-led wars that have been the focus of international protests over the last decade. Her analysis is conspiratorial, many of her critics will bluster. There is no truth to this claim. The book’s great strength lies in Klein’s ability to meticulously document the historical and intellectual roots of this radical economic vision – while dramatizing the suffering and struggle of those on the receiving end. She writes with flair and passion, with an eye for telling anecdotes and an ear for evocative metaphors.

Others will complain she ignores the crimes of different ideologies. Klein doesn’t dispute that totalitarian communists and fascists have used similar, brutal tactics. But these ideologies have been held accountable for their crimes, whereas contemporary capitalism has never faced its reckoning. Coups and wars to install and protect pro-corporate regimes have been written off as dictatorial excesses, Cold War collateral damage, or inevitable consequences of the current War on Terror. They have never been explained as part of the fight to advance pure capitalism.

The book is also a clarion call to progressive movements to elevate economic thinking to its former importance. Too many people glaze over when they hear acronyms or words like “WTO” or “monetary theory,” while much of the left today seems to learn its economics from conspiracy theories. Klein’s book returns to economics its gritty, bloody, human dimension, in muckraking’s finest tradition.

Naomi Klein spoke to CKUT about her new book last week. The following is a shortened transcription of her interview.


– Martin Lukacs


CKUT: What is the “Shock Doctrine”?


Naomi Klein: I start the book with a quote from Milton Friedman. Someone just described Friedman to me as Marx for capitalists, the guru for the totally unfettered free market. The quote reads: “Only a crisis, real or perceived, produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the change depends on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function:” to keep the ideas ready for when the next crisis hits.

So that’s the shock doctrine: it’s the idea that this radical vision of unfettered free markets that Friedman represents is actually incompatible with everyday, non-apocalyptic reality. When we are not in a state of crisis or shock, we organize to block these policies. They can advance incrementally, but you’re not going to have the economic shock therapy – a total country make-over, like you had in Russia in the nineties, or in Latin America in the seventies and eighties – without some kind of crisis to exploit.


CKUT: Where does Canada fit into the rise of disaster capitalism?


NK: This 35-year campaign I’m tracking, this campaign to destroy what’s sometimes called the welfare state, or a mixed economy that has elements of socialism within a market system, has thrived on crisis. In Canada, we have only been colonized by this idea partially. We often talk about Canada being a little bit of a boring place to live, that nothing ever happens here. But to some extent, I think we should really be happy about that.

It’s those very eventful moments – when history moves into fast forward – that have often been exploited, it’s then that this agenda leaps forward. The fact that we still have remnants of the welfare state, that we still have remnants of culture outside the logic of the marketplace, embattled as they are, is at least partially the result of our being spared some of these total economic meltdowns that have been the facilitator of this ideology.

That said, we saw what happened at the Montebello summit. I think the Security and Prosperity Partnership is a classic example of what I’m describing as a shock doctrine, because the shock of 9/11 was harnessed by the business community in Canada to push a radical agenda of “security” and integration with the United States. That would’ve been totally impossible without that crisis to ride.

On the last day of the Montebello summit, they had that press conference, and they said, “Don’t worry, there is nothing happening here, look away, keep moving, it’s just about jelly beans and children’s toys – except, if there is another disaster, a terrorist attack or an avian flu outbreak, or a natural disaster, then there will be greater integration in our responses.” So essentially what they were saying was this SPP agenda will leap forward when this next disaster hits, when the next crisis hits.

What I’m saying in the book is disasters are used to advance the agenda, but then it becomes normalized, then it becomes everyday. So we need to understand this mechanism so we can protect against it when the next crisis hits.


CKUT: In the book, you talk about the link between crisis and privatization. You describe the situation of crisis in Iraq during which resources were privatized. How has Canada participated in this privatization?


NK: I’ve been saying that this agenda has moved forward through army tanks and also through think tanks – the think tanks are the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks. I wanted to mention another example in which Canada has been hit by this logic. These days in Canada the think tank infrastructure have really been pushing this agenda of security and integration, but in the nineties, it was all about deficits, it was about how Canada was supposedly about to go bankrupt. If we go back to 1993, 1994, there was this talk coming out of think tanks like the Fraser Institute and Business Council on National Issues , that Canada was about to hit the debt wall unless we radically cut social spending, unless unemployment insurance was eviscerated.

In fact, the reason why Canada had a soaring deficit was because interest rates had gone up – it wasn’t because we were spending too much on social programs. But that atmosphere of crisis was first of all created by the think tanks themselves, and then used by the think tanks to push through a historic neo-liberal budget in 1995, at the time when the Chrétien government had just been elected on a platform of “jobs, jobs, jobs.” So Canada has definitely been subject to versions of the shock doctrine. These atmospheres of crisis have been deliberately created and exploited.

In terms of Iraq, that’s where I decided to do this book. I was in Iraq on an assignment from Harper’s magazine, and I was looking at the shock and awe military campaign and the atmosphere of crisis that was so deliberately created. The reality of the crisis was harnessed by Paul Bremer, in those first key months, to push through a policies of privatizing 200 hundred key state companies, making Iraq the widest open economy in the world.

What happened in Iraq was people rejected this, they resisted, and then you have this third shock. You had shock and awe, you had economic shock therapy – but then you have the shock, the very real shocks, of torture on bodies. In the book, I look at torture as an enforcement mechanism for these policies that are so widely rejected.


CKUT: In The Shock Doctrine, you describe how torture is implicated in economic strategy. What is the connection?


NK: I think torture is both a tool of enforcement for these unwanted and dangerous policies, and it’s also a microcosm or a metaphor for what can happen to whole societies that go into a state of shock and then have their shock exploited.

I think torture has been an enforcement tool for these policies that would be impossible to impose otherwise. You see this so clearly in Latin America, where a country like Chile was really the first laboratory for this radical vision of capitalism. Chile had just elected Salvador Allende as their president. This was pretty much the worst place in the world you could choose to launch a capitalist revolution. It’s like launching a communist revolution in Beverly Hills! It’s just not the right place.

People are going to reject this, and so torture was used systematically as a tool of the state, not just to get information out of people, but to terrorize a whole society. Pinochet really used torture as form of mass communication. For it to work as a tool of social control it can’t only be secret – it has to be public, the stories have to leak out of the prisons. Whether it’s Saddam cutting off ears, or the images we’ve seen from Guantanamo, of prisoners in orange jumpsuits on their knees, in blackout goggles and headphones, being humiliated. These stories, they’re not all being uncovered be dogged investigative reporters; some of them are strategically leaked by the Pentagon, as part of the communications department, as way to say to the world, “This is what happens to you if you step out of line.” And that is a way of keeping all of us in line.

I also look at torture as a microcosm of disaster capitalism. If you read the CIA interrogation manuals that came out of those McGill experiments , they talk about putting prisoners in a state of total disorientation in which they lose their sense of time and space. The manuals draw actively on Donald Hebb’s experiments at McGill and Ewen Cameron’s work at the Allan Memorial hospital, which were all about unmaking people, so they don’t know who they are, where they are. It’s actually a tool of regression – that’s the phrase they use again and again. That’s straight out of the CIA interrogation manual. They also say when the prisoner is regressed, there is a window of opportunity that opens up, and it is in that moment that they’re most likely to comply with the wishes of their interrogator.

You know, when I first read that, I thought, “That’s a pretty good description of what happened after 9/11 to a whole society.” Where people just regressed and became childlike – they lost the script, they lost the narrative. We didn’t know where we fit in history anymore. And in that window of opportunity you had that Bush administration’s disaster capitalists sweep in, horde power in the executive branch, and then outsource it to all their friends in what I call the Disaster-Capitalism Complex.


CKUT: You talk about being communicated at – what kind of communication do we need amongst ourselves to resist these policies?


NK: Obviously, we need alternative tools of communication. I really do believe that information and analysis and narrative are a form of shock resistance. We go into shock when we lose the script, and that’s when we’re vulnerable. So when we tell each other stories that make us feel oriented in history, when we have a narrative to hold onto, that’s when we’re most shock resistant. That’s when we’re hardest to exploit. If we look at Latin America today, you have a continent that had all of these shocks exploited systematically – the shocks of the coups, the debt shock, currency shocks, price shocks. Now, there is this moment in which so many of these countries that were terrorized are coming out of shock. You haveCKUT: all of these ideas that were blasted out of the way by military tanks bubbling back up to the surface and asserting themselves in spaces like constituent assemblies in Bolivia and Ecuador and in cooperatives in Argentina and Venezuela.

I think the reason that they’re coming out of shock is because this is a continent that has really reckoned with its history. It has done something that psychologists call narrative therapy. There has been a much more rigorous attempt – an almost truth and reconciliation process – than anything we’ve ever attempted in North America. Really looking hard, not just at how people were victimized under regimes like Pinochet or Videla in Argentina, but also how regular people were complicit in those states of terror and how their desire for security was appealed to by these military regimes. How people turned in their neighbours, how people tuned out the screams, and understanding how you lose your rights and slide into fascism. And it is that process, I think, that makes societies shock-resistant.

It means that anything that builds stories, narratives, networks of communication, whether it’s alternative radio, whether it is fiction and playwriting, anything that stops us from feeling unmoored, is actually the most powerful form of shock resistance.
http://www.mcgilldaily.com/view.php?aid=6312


– compiled by Seth Porcello / courtesy of CKUT