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Hi everyone,
Thanks for all the comments and encouragement you sent or posted, after my review of Al Gore’s speech last week. The response was so positive that I thought I’d try it again, since another author came to town this weekend, talking about some rather important ideas that I’ve seen circulating here on DU, since I first started visiting the site back in early 2001. I can’t think of a better way to spend part of Canadian Thanksgiving, than by writing this post.
“The Shock Doctrine” came out several weeks ago, so you might have heard it being discussed on TV/radio, or in the newspapers or on the Web. The author is Naomi Klein, who has become fairly well-known since she wrote “No Logo”. Canadians may know her as filmmaker and CBC host Avi Lewis’s partner – and daughter-in-law to our former UN Ambassador Stephen Lewis.
If you’ve put off reading this book, because you’re concerned that it’s sad or depressing – let me reassure you – it’s very compelling, and it left me with an unexpected feeling of hope. I was curious to see how Ms. Klein presented it to the audience – turns out that she’s got a great sense of humor and doesn’t come across as preachy or overly intense. She screened a short film, which is available at the book’s website (www.shockdoctrine.org).
Not to say that she downplays the seriousness of the issues she’s been examining. I have to admit that at first, reading this book made me angry, thinking about what’s happened in other places around the world – Latin America, the Middle East, Asian communities hit hard by the tsunami, New Orleans neighborhoods devastated by Katrina.
During the section about what happened during the coups in Latin America, I had to put the book down and go out for a long walk in the rain. I was haunted by what happened to the writers and artists, teachers and community activists that dictators like Pinochet imprisoned and tortured. I was unavoidably connecting them with my friends and colleagues, and people I hear from online, here on DU and elsewhere – and imagining the horror and heartbreak, of losing those I love in such a way. When I think of the tens of thousands of people who died, and who continue to die, around the world, I feel that no matter how frightening or painful it is, to learn how they perished – it is even more important to learn, and celebrate, who they were as human beings, and how they lived. “Nunca Mais” -- “Never Again”, as they say in Argentina.
Volunteering for an election campaign, uttering a critical comment about economic theory in a classroom, drawing a humorous caricature of the boss, getting up onstage and making jokes about the government – we must remember that there have been (and still are) places where any of these things could result, not just in your abrupt disappearance, but intimidation of your family and friends. In effect, someone could decide to erase you, not only from existence, but from memory. We are told, from an early age, that it’s soldiers who guarantee our freedom … but I don’t think it denigrates those who serve in the military to remember that there are countries that have plenty of soldiers, and no freedom.
When I was very young, I was introduced to some other visitors at the home of a family friend. They were from a country I had never heard of before. The name of the country was Chile.
I can see them still, in my memory, and I am thinking of them as I write this. The couple sitting quietly in the corner were friendly in a polite way, and almost shy. They seemed old to me – this was partly because, when your age is still in the single digits, everyone else appears grown-up. (I now realize that they were a lot younger than I am now.) It wasn’t until much later that I learned about why they had come all the way to Canada, on the other side of the world. Thinking about it, there was something else made them appear older than they were – their eyes. They had what I now realize was the look of shock, as described by Ms. Klein.
* * *
The event, sponsored by a local independent bookstore, took place in what used to be a church. (Some of you may be amazed by the thought of me venturing into such a place – see Mom, I didn’t spontaneously combust!) I’ve been in this venue a few times before, and I like the building, with its stained glass and carved wood – I sat up in the balcony, with its graceful curved railing. The place was packed – more than 800 people of all ages, and I’m pretty sure I saw our local Member of Parliament in the crowd. I was glad there were so many people, because some of the things in the book were so disquieting, I really wanted to be with other people, if only to reassure myself that I wasn’t going mad.
The event organizer noted that a decade ago, the ideas in this book would have been viewed as fringe. He commented: “the tide hasn’t turned, but more people know there’s a tide”.
This was Ms. Klein’s last stop on her North American tour, that kicked off in New Orleans more than a month before. She told us this was a deliberate choice, because she wanted to be able to remind herself why it was so important to speak up, even when it seemed “impolite” to interrupt the government, the media, and assorted experts who were trying to tell us that everything is fine.
During the tour, the news broke about Blackwater in Iraq. People began asking her if she was “shocked”. Not exactly, she said. In fact, the research she’d done, and the stories she’d heard from many people around the world, were helping her work through the process of becoming “unshocked”. She explained that she is still learning how to connect what she’s seeing now, back to earlier stories – before the attacks on the US in 2001, before Chile in 1973, in the context of a 50-year-war against “the state”.
To laughter from the audience, Ms. Klein noted that her publishers seemed dismayed, that so many reviewers were writing things like “thoughtful and calming”, rather than “scares the hell out of you”. But she added:“when we’re calm, that’s when we’re ready to resist”.
And there are a lot of things to resist.
Just in a few minutes, the author related stories where “disaster capitalists” have swooped into afflicted areas around the world, promising to redevelop beachfront land into luxury tourist resorts, privatize water systems, or set up “export processing zones”, ostensibly to help with local recovery efforts, but with a very different long-term agenda. (After the recent Peruvian earthquake, Ms. Klein told us, a US corporation was given the contract to build camps for mostly-indigenous displaced people, complete with McDonald’s franchises.)
In many cases, policies have already been written – maybe not yet implemented, due to public disapproval and controversy, such as North America’s “Security and Prosperity Partnership”, but waiting in the wings. Bush and Harper have already admitted that it would not be possible to bring in this degree of “harmonization”, under normal circumstances – a sentiment unpleasantly reminiscent of what the Project for a New American Century said, long before 9/11, about how it would take another Pearl Harbor to get its neo-conservative agenda implemented.
Ms. Klein discussed the mushrooming of a new economic sector, “homeland security”, virtually overnight – fed by lucrative government contracts, and dominated by such corporations as Halliburton and Blackwater. It includes visible security functions (heavily-armed “private contractors” we see on the news), as well as many less-obvious tasks like electronic surveillance and data-mining. When she said this, I couldn’t help remembering a comment made by one of my professors, years ago, about a peculiar characteristic of economic indicators like the Gross National Product. When calculating GNP, damaging activities like wars and oil spills are actually counted on the positive side of the ledger. This is because somebody has to pay for things like fighter planes and artillery shells, and also to clean up the mess afterwards. Preventing an oil spill doesn’t bring immediate, quantifiable profit to anybody … but companies that specialize in cleanups can make millions, if one does occur. And all that money is counted as “economic activity”. (Just think how much profit’s going to be made in the decades to come, from treating all those Iraq War vets with post-traumatic stress disorder, and the 9/11 first responders in NYC who will be slowly dying of asbestos-induced cancers.)
Disaster, it seems, is a “hot market”. Ms. Klein noted that corporations are starting to realize that global warming will be increasing hazards worldwide (directly, as with stronger hurricanes and more frequent flooding; or indirectly, with the possibility of more conflicts due to environmental damage and resource scarcity). And they are rushing to cash in – not by developing mitigative technologies, such as alternative energy sources – but by selling us “the right to survive”. As someone who studies responses to climate disruption, I found this very disquieting. I don’t like to think that there are people who are so selfish and cold-hearted that they would actually WANT more disasters to happen so they can profit from them – but I’m afraid that we’ve all seen enough examples of such profiteering in recent years. Indeed, that’s what a lot of “The Shock Doctrine” is about.
If I were in charge of one of those transnational corporations with interests in the energy, real estate, and security sectors, I could well imagine channeling funding to global warming deniers in order to block progress on the new international climate treaty, then after lunch, orchestrating a land grab in some Gulf Coast community devastated by hurricanes or wildfire. (Oh, quit laughing! All right -- so I’d have an existential crisis, and commit the equivalent of “corporate seppuku” by giving back my enormous salary and restructuring the company as a public-directed non-profit organization dedicated to a sustainable, equitable economy. I bet the Human Resources division at Halliburton is slinging my resume into the wastebasket right now, saying, “Good thing we found that out before we hired her!”)
Back to Ms. Klein‘s talk. One of the key parts of her book is the description of how strong, mature individuals are rendered helpless and compliant. In essence, they can be “regressed” through shock, either through accident or design. In the latter case, Ms. Klein vividly describes how the experiments carried out by Dr. Ewan Cameron at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute were used to build a “scientific” foundation for brainwashing and torture techniques that are still being employed by intelligence agencies. (The stories of what happened to the patients – many of them with minor complaints such as anxiety or marital disagreements – are horrific reading. Repeated electroshocks and large doses of psychotropic drugs reduced sane, functioning adults to broken remnants of their former selves. Many of these unfortunate patients were women, who in the 1950s did not have the resources or legal power to oppose the damage that was being inflicted, against their will. Although these experiments were widely reported in the Canadian media, two decades ago or more, we are only now finding out what the research was used for.)
What Ms. Klein does is to take things a step further – she draws a direct parallel between what was done to individuals, in the name of psychiatric treatment (techniques since disowned by reputable medical professionals) – and the “economic shock treatments” affecting millions of people, that were administered to countries (particularly ones in the developing world) by ideologues obsessed with implementing what they see as pure free-market capitalism. How strange to think that they viewed the “mixed economy”, the familiar blend of public and private services, with not just disgust, but outright fear. Communism, in some ways, was less of a threat to them – it made a useful boogeyman.
One thing that the “experts” had in common, whether they were advocating “shock treatments” for individuals or entire countries, was the insistence that wiping out everything and starting from “a blank slate” was the best way to cure any problem. Dr. Cameron felt that, rather than talking to a patient and helping him or her understand what was causing the illness, it was faster and more effective to “de-pattern” that person’s mind, erasing troublesome memories. Or to use a more recent metaphor, install new software and reboot. Ms. Klein notes that economists like Milton Friedman also believed in creating ideal conditions from scratch: “Where Cameron dreamed of returning the human mind to that pristine state, Friedman dreamed of de-patterning societies, of returning them to a state of pure capitalism”. This is the free-market equivalent of the “Year Zero” or “Cultural Revolution” imposed by other totalitarian regimes. If a culture was trying to overcome a history of colonialism, inequality, and labor unrest, erasing cherished traditions and institutions and replacing them with a perfect capitalist model imposed from above (“above” being the University of Chicago Economics Department, in this case) was the cure.
“The Shock Doctrine” explores the social, economic, and political impacts of these treatments on various countries around the world, and what happened afterwards. Ms. Klein commented that since the book was written, even more people have approached her with stories detailing what they have observed, and how they have been affected by the fallout from these changes. There are countless examples of various emergencies being used to push through legislation that until then had been opposed by communities … one particularly interesting development that she mentioned was the trend towards using special events, like the Olympic Games in London (and Vancouver) to justify policies on public surveillance, labor legislation, and urban planning. So it doesn’t have to be an outright disaster that motivates drastic changes.
So that was on Saturday, and I’m still thinking about many of the points mentioned in the book, and Ms. Klein’s talk. This isn’t something that happens every time I encounter an author. When I consider the books that have influenced me in the past, -- Perrow’s “Normal Accidents”, Pryor’s “Britain BC”, Kunstler’s “Geography of Nowhere” -- I believe that “The Shock Doctrine” is even more important. I can feel the ideas working away inside my brain, even when I’m making breakfast, looking at the news, or drifting off to sleep at night.
Another sign is that I keep finding myself thinking about books I’ve already read, seeing new patterns emerge as I reconnect the dots. (By coincidence, this week I received a letter from a grade-school friend who’d moved to the States years ago … she lost her husband during the 2001 attacks, and September is a difficult time for her. I find myself reading and re-reading her letter, seeing parallels with what Naomi Klein said, about “shock wears off” – thinking about my friend rebuilding her life, speaking out about truth and accountability.)
Sometimes this is enjoyable, but it can also be profoundly disturbing. Several people I know reported feeling this same sensation after seeing films like “Fahrenheit 9/11”, “Sicko”, or “An Inconvenient Truth”.
Today I got out my copy of Dalton Trumbo’s “Johnny Got His Gun”, and looked at it again. In the book, Joe Bonham, a soldier with horrendous injuries, deprived of contact with the world, fights back to re-establish the things that keep him human – awareness, memory, sensory stimulation, even communication. (In an ironic twist, Timothy Bottoms, the actor who portrayed Joe in the film, later played George W. Bush – perhaps one of the least engaged presidents to roam the corridors of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.) Ms. Klein, in her chapter about the long-term effects of Ewan Cameron’s “blank slate” approach to psychiatry, noted that the attempts to erase the patients’ memories failed. Despite the damage to their psyches, fragments of who they were somehow persisted. Joe Bonham kept track of time by feeling the vibrations from his nurse’s footsteps. One of Dr. Cameron’s patients clung to sanity by listening for the roar of a passenger jet as it flew over the hospital at nine o’clock each morning.
Running through the entire book is the feeling – not always explicitly stated, but it’s there – that confused, frightened, unhappy people are easier to control and intimidate. If you know what’s happening to you, that’s the beginning of fighting back.
Knowledge is shock resistance. Curiosity is shock resistance. Laughter is shock resistance.
The author reminds us that “unshocking” ourselves IS possible, and describes numerous examples. We can do this through our understanding of history, our ability to tell stories that remind ourselves who we are and what we can do, and having a sense of humor. In Ecuador, Rafael Correa won the presidential election in November 2006, campaigning against the policies of the economic “shock doctors”, and the wealthy banana tycoon who was championing them. Believe it or not, President Correa’s official campaign song was Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Going to Take It”.
“Memory, both individual and collective, turns out to be the greatest shock absorber of all.”
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