Neomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, spoke to a crowd upwards of 800 people in the center of Portland Friday night at the First Unitarian Church. She had just returned from Spain. She asked people there why, in response to their own terrorist bombings, they had voted out Jose Maria Asnar in favor of a socialist candidate. They said, “Because he reminded us of Franco.” The memory of fascism was still very much alive. Neomi Klein said that knowing history is our antidote to this poison of the savage capitalism. I had to leave the gathering, just like I had to skip over those portions in her book when she started showing video footage of the CIA torturing opponents of capitalism. The video ran the gamut of 60 years. In fact, the CIA has developed such excruciating torture techniques, which combine pain with psychological torture, that it puts crucifixion to shame. The amount of torture done by the CIA has been increasing steadily over the last 60 years. She makes the point admirably in her book’s introduction that people don’t see these crimes as crimes of capitalism, with the ideology baring culpability, in the same way people do the crimes which were the distortions of communist theory. Why not? she asks. The prisoners in Guantanamo bay, she reports, have cracked from the torture. These men now stand on their beds loudly shouting baby songs, they wrap sheets around themselves and roll around on the ground sucking their thumbs and they are now incontinent and unable to string two sentences together.
We don’t know our history of the last 60 years. For those of us who have been living in collective denial, The Shock Doctrineserves as a wakeup call. It is rare for a book on this subject to possess her stylistic qualities of understatement. For example, there is an elegance to her writing that Chomsky doesn’t possess.
What we are seeing, all over the world—at the point of a gun, is the elimination of the public sphere. In the name of free-markets and free-trade, small farmers are going out of business. Under pressure from American business, certain social services that were previously immune to privatization are now being taken away from the public sphere and being put into company hands: fire departments, tap-water resources, the military, city police forces, education, health-care…all these, and more, are being privatized here and abroad. The agenda of these savage capitalists is to break the state, to eliminate the state and the public sphere. The collection of quotes Neomi Klein has amassed in her book from the horses mouth, should leave no doubt about the nefariousness of the project. Some of the right-wingers she quotes are saying things like, “Drowning government in the bathtub; setting off nuclear bombs in the economies; purpusly causing inflation; cutting one hundred social services per day; making the economy scream in the name of tough love,” etc, etc. Neomi Klein advocates charging tarrufs on imports to encourage subsistive and sustainable economies away from the neoliberal and free-trade model which has caused poverty on a massive scale in the third world and is now being called Global Apartheid. In short, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has expanded to epidemic levels in the last 30 years. She has actually been criticized by the left for being too Kensenyan and not wanting to abolish capitalism altogether. They say she is only taking on a certain strain of capitalism. I don’t agree with these criticisms. During her speech she said, “All of these (referring to recent Latin American government movements like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Moralis in Bolivia) are variations ofn Social Democracies. In the book, I tried to show an alternative between authoritarian communism on one hand and complete leazre-faire free market on the other.” I believe it is this balance, the understatement and the practicality of her solutions (something lacking in Chomsky…and others) that is making The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism have such an impact.
Another memorable thing in her speech was her description of the way the policies of the IMF and the Worldbank have failed. She said they have been tried in every country in the world except North Korea, Cuba and the middle-east and so the army is now sent into the middle-east. And where they have been tried, they have failed. She lived in Argentina for a year around the time their crash happened. “They followed the policies of neoliberalism to the letter and their economy literally imploded,” she said.
In Argentina they followed the prescriptions of the IMF and Worldbank, massive privatizations, cuts to social services, torturing communists, it caused their economy to literally implode, she said. Inflation was so high that Argentine restaurants used paper money for wallpaper because it was cheaper than real wallpaper. In a few years Argentina went from being the most prosperous of the south American countries, with a vibrant middle-class, to one of the poorest. Before the era of the military dictatorships, the Argentine Peron government put tarrifs in imports. This was called communism and they were overthrown and then the economic shock treatment started, as well as less metaphorical forms of shock treatment met the writhing bodies of opponents to the extreme right.
John Perkins in his book the Confessions of An Economic Hit-Man explains how developing countries are coerced into accepting large lones which the lenders know in advance the countries will not be able to repay. It is called “trade” but the money usually never leaves the United States. The lones which Panama and Ecuador paid for never go to Panama or Ecuador. They are called “exports and imports” but it is really just transferring money from one American bank to another. He talks about how third-world countries are flooded with cheep subsidies, even causing agrobusiness to take losses, to force them away from growing crops for them and growing cheep GM crops for the global market. I’m reminded of the words an Indian women told an Indian activist living in the United States. “Tell the people in the United States that every time they drink a coca-cola, they are drinking the blood of my people.” We don’t know the history that is going on right under our noses. That is why it is allowed to happen. If American people knew what was happening, they would stop it…just like that, I’m convinced.
“The brutal regimes that implemented Chicago School ideas in the seventies,” Klein writes, “understood that for their idealized new nations to be born in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, whole categories of people and their cultures would need to be pulled up “from the root” (this phrase is from the internal documents of the disaster capitalists) In the countries that suffered the political cleansings, there have been collective efforts to come to terms with this violent history — truth commissions, excavations of unmarked graves and the beginnings of war crimes trials for the perpetrators. But the Latin American juntas did not act alone; they were propped up before and after the coups by Washington, as has been amply documented.”
Whatever faith I may have had in the ability of capitalism and markets “to work”, after reading The Shock Doctrine, it is completely down the tube. This book has not been advertised very much. Yet it is now on the New York Times bestseller list. Neomi Klein’s appearance in Portland was not promoted, yet one of the administraters of the event told me he stopped counting after 800 people. There is a reason why The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is doing so well. There is a hunger to know the history of the last 60 years. Knowing our history is the antidote to this horror because, with a historical memory, when these things come up we can recognize it and see it for what it is. People in Spain voted out Jose Maria Asnar because he reminded them of Franco. We have had periods of American history before which have been just as dark, just as fearful, but we don’t have a context for them and so these events repeat. If people knew their history and remembered, they would recognize the signs immediately: the disapperances, the arbitrary search and seizure, the attack on the public sphere. Argentines draw swastikas on the side of buildings and right over it Nunca mas…never again. In Spain they remember Franco and watch for the signs of fascism. If we use this dark period of American history to gain a collective memory then the next time the signs of fascism appear we can also say Nunca mas so there is never another Reagan, another Bush or another Nixon.
Whatever faith one may have had in capitalism and markets in the past will surely be down the tube after reading The Shock Doctrine. “Memory, both individual and collective, turns out to be the greatest shock absorber of all,” she writes.
