"...the city's residents studiously avoided hearing the screams..."

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein

Picador Press, 2007

(New York)

I had put off reading Shock Doctrine for a long, long time until a good friend had reminded me about it about a year ago.  It wasn’t necessarily about negligence or laziness; rather, it was more a situation where I almost knew what she was going to say.  Like the tough subject of her earlier book, No Logo, I knew the subject matter contained in Shock Doctrine fairly well due to my studies at university.  After reading No Logo I remember being depressed and sad, angry and outraged at corporations and the governemnts that allowed them to ply their wickedly effiecient trades.  I knew that Shock Doctrine would be the same: governments exploiting other governments and their peoples; “visionaries” in effieciency and technological advancement held up as idols to millions of believers; and piles upon piles of dead or dying, abused, tormented, broken victims, albeit flecked with a few equally broken but nevertheless defiant survivors.  And in spite of all this, I read it. 

I was (and still am) outraged, angry, depressed, and sad.  But nevertheless, it is a book more than worthy of your time.  Hereafter are my thoughts on the matter...

The book begins with an outline of the infamous McGill-CIA brainwashing experiments of the 1940s and 1950s, with Dr. Ewen Cameron as the star protagonist.  His special goals were to reduce patients to an infant-like state in order to be able to code whatever he wanted into their minds – tabula rasa style – in order to give the CIA ideal double-agents to fight the Cold War.  Of course, it didn’t work.  Patients were reduced to babies, their minds conveniently fucked but unable to speak or walk, thus making cultivating a good double agent a difficult and time consuming task.  With the parallel neatly set, Klein applies this idea (which is essentially experimental torture) to the government of the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s, where coup d’etats were all the rage.  Instead of Dr. Cameron we now are exposed to an even more menacing figure: an economist.  Milton Friedman is largely credited for essentially founding the free market ideology in its current incarnation, which Klein goes on to call, and rightly so, disaster capitalism.  In the 1970s, he and his infamous Chicago School Economics club pretty much ran the table in South America, to the detriment of the continent.  The most important idea that Friedman and his acolytes advocated was that any type of disaster (in the loosest understanding possible) was in fact an opportunity waiting to be pounced upon by men with ideas. 

Now, one might wonder (and rightly so) why this is such a bad thing.  Well, turns out that South America at that time was very left-leaning; which is to say that the U.S. regarded them as a domino away from becoming Soviets.  So, to curb this disturbing trend, hordes of willing students were recruited to study under Friedman in the U.S. to learn the acceptable tools of the trade.  Upon graduation they took their fully indoctrinated minds back home to South America to unleash the ideas they had learned on the populace.  Such ideas included, but were not limited to, slashing health programs, union breaking, suspending civil liberties, cutting health care, privatization of any money making national resources, torture of social and uncooperative business leaders, and of course, murder.  

This is pretty much par for the course if you know anything about neo-liberalism and the Washington Consensus, or the demands from loan-giving organizations like the World Bank and IMF.  Now, before someone objects, it wasn’t as if there were a bunch of economists recommending that Sally Salvatore be shot – it wasn’t that overt.  But after CIA-backed coups put some pretty ugly people in power, death squads in South America became as normal as me farting after eating Indian food.

Klein’s argument goes something like this.  The patients whom Cameron experimented on were systematically deprived and tortured to such a degree that they became blank and complacent.  They lost their identity in the race for simple survival.  The parallel between that and what Friedman et al. did was that, in the face of a disaster, in this case mostly caused by World Bank loans and demands, people were simply intent on surviving in a highly inflated and impoverished country, so they wouldn’t necessarily notice certain things: a passed law here, a decree there, a new owner or two over there, suspension of certain liberties, an abduction or disappearance now and again. 

An important aspect of her argument is rather existential.  As mentioned above, in order to allow such things to happen, a person must be punished and tortured into a state of complacence or torment great enough to demand inability or unwillingness to respond to outside actions.  Therefore, identity and personal or shared narratives must be destroyed; institutions and social bonds, broken; shared history and memories, erased.  Her elucidation on the pillaging of Iraq and the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurrican Katrina are particularly good examples of this idea. 

Klein is very thorough in her presentation and gives many examples of other such crucubles in the world, including: Israel, South Africa, Russia, China, Iraq, New York City post-9/11, Sri Lanka and New Orleans (disasters can be natural as well).  Reading the book gives you a sense that each new disaster unfolding in the world is met with muted cheers of joy from certain business leaders and stock market analysts. 

All shock therapists are intent on the erasure of memory.  Ewen Cameron was convinced  that he needed to wipe out the minds of his patients before he could rebuiold them.  The U.S. occupiers of Iraq felt no need to stiop the looting of Iraq’s museums and libraries, thinking it might make their jobs easier.  But...new narratives can be created.  Memory, both individual and collective, turns out to be the greatest shock absorber of all.  (p. 585-6)

So yes, I am angry and outraged at all of it.  And so should you.  But the ever-present optimist in us begins to speak up at the sight of it, like the lingering New Year’s resolution that lives in the corner of your brain, eating away at a valuable morsel of grey matter.  We can choose to keep the narratives alive; in spite of how much we forget in such a short space of time, we can always remember.