The Shock Doctrine
The Shock Doctrine
By Naomi Klein
Picador, 2008
720 pages
“An armed conflict between nations horrifies us. But the economic war is no better than an armed conflict. This is like a surgical operation. An economic war is prolonged torture. And its ravages are no less terrible than those depicted in the literature on war properly so called. We think nothing of the other because we are used to deadly effects… the movement against war is sound. I pray for its success. But I cannot help the gnawing fear that the movement will fail if it does not touch the root of all evil – human greed.” M. K. Gandhi (p. 141)
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein is the book so far published in the 21st century that it is most vital to read if you have any activist concern or a real desire for chance in your blood.
Obama must deal in a sharply circumscribed arena practising the art of the possible with a new grace and politesse that can change the tone, but it would take 4 Obamas in succession to bring about the downfall of greed and hypocrisy that clogs the American air.
Klein has created a Weberian ideal type – a tool for explaining the planetary political situation since the late 60s. That tool, puts Chomsky, Zinn and many others into a common context that can be grasped by anyone who is willing read her 600 pages and do some thinking. The form she has created (the ideal type) maps the reality close enough to be extremely useful.
If read honestly, it makes one thing obvious: the economic constraints that the U.S. have foisted on the planet under the aegis of CIA money (thus using proxies), the U.S. Marines, and the IMF and the World Bank has produced as much death and destruction as Mao, Stalin or Pol Pot. A destruction that is more insidious for being done under cover of an economic theory that has little basis in fact and an abysmal track record, and runs counter to the economic history of the United States.
“Today I resigned from the staff of the International Monetary Fund after twelve years, and after 1000 days of official fund work in the field, hawking your medicine and your bag of tricks to governments and to peoples in Latin American and the Caribbean and Africa. To me resignation is a price less liberation, for with it I have taken the first big step to that place where I may hope to wash my hands of what in my mind’s eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples… the blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers. It dries up, too; it cakes all over me; sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the whole world to cleanse me from the things I did in your name.” Davison Budhoo (p. 329)
The doctrine itself, derived from mind control experiments of Ewen Cameron performed at McGill universities Allen Memorial Institute during the 1950s when the CIA was desperate to find ways to break prisoners suspected of being communists and double agents.
These programs were part of the Cold War hysteria – Google: Project Bluebird, Project Artichoke and MK-ULTRA or read Walter Bowart’s Operation Mind Control wherein my overt part in the mind control situation is discussed – that became part of the background “knowledge” in the intelligence community, used as training methods in CIA torture schools, employed during the economic breakdowns during the last 45 years, as demonstrated again and again in this book to a chilling degree and now featured in the torture reports emanating from Gitmo, rendition sites and Bagham, now all over the media. The discussion is now everywhere.
The disregard for human life that this book documents, particularly in the context of recent disclosures, makes any attempt by American political leaders to claim the moral high ground ludicrous.
We are complicit in the death of tens of millions; deaths that go back to initial experiments in sensory overload and sensory deprivation that I have been studying for over 50 years under the general rubric: STRESS.
Stress reduces the individual’s necessary relationship to the physical and emotional environment that maintains the basis sense of meaning, order and value which constitute our sense of self or identity.
Solitary confinement reduces sensory intake, a great part of which is the continual interaction with others. Without that interaction, regression and diseases begin to fill the vacated space. Recent research on many of our young who relate electronically, not physically, are showing physical and psychic disease patterns that are a warning signal that we must heed.
What Klein has demonstrated in case study after case study, in The Shock Doctrine, is the utter immoral nature of capitalism for it recognizes no boundaries and will destroy whatever attempts to impede it.
It is perhaps the most dangerous creation that humans have created, for the behaviour described in chapter after chapter in this book can only be called legal insanity. We have been torturing a good deal of the planet under the cover of economic medicine. Klein’s book can be considered as a footnote to that simple statement.
It is now poised to destroy the entire planet in its suboptimizing quest for profit at any cost.
Greenland is melting, the Antarctic is disintegrating, yet those who brought you subprimes, infinite leverage and billion dollar yearly pay checks are basically unrepentant, wishing as Goldman-Sachs to escape from government regulations, so that profit may rule and the people be damned.
It goes beyond Obama and his desire to restore equilibrium, to a deep survival instinct, to an unmitigatable anger, to the knowledge that those in charge of our daily bread and the environment that produces it care only about dollars and will destroy us in their greed driven quest for it.
The data is laid out clearly in The Shock Doctrine. The daily headlines scream it. Where is the anger that such behaviour should produce?
And deeper where are the actions that will return the planet to people who care for people and will rip the controls out of the hands of the crazies in charge.
