The Shock Doctrine: Book Review

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

Naomi Klein is the woman who wrote No Logo, which is considered a classic among broke-ass college age malcontents. Her latest, The Shock Doctrine, begins with a visit with a Canadian woman who fell victim to some insane scientist at a university in Canada back in the 1950s.

No, he didn't sedate her, prop her up against a chair and make sweet passionate love to her. That would have actually been preferable to what he did, if not genuinely enjoyable. (I'm not advocating that sort of thing, I'm just saying.) Instead, he subjected her to all sorts of electroshock and sensory deprivation, with the goal of erasing her memory.

The idea was that he could fix her personality by getting rid of the old one and then creating a new one, using audio tape. (I know.) It only half-worked. He managed to wipe out much of her old memory, but after that she was pretty much worthless. Her teeth were all shattered from the electroshock and her brain had turned to mush. Good for giving blow jobs, but not much else.

Klein uses this unfortunate ordeal as a metaphor for the economic "shock therapy" rendered in such Latin American shit holes as Chile and Bolivia by Milton Friedman and his gang of Chicago Boys, but it turns out there's also a literal connection, in the sense that in order to push such BS neoliberal economic policies on an unwilling populace, the tIs in said shit holes would often have to hook people up to the juice.

The Shock Doctrine traces the rise of disaster capitalism beginning with Milton Friedman's first experiment with economic shock therapy, in Chile in the early 1970s. Way back in the 1950s, he'd come up with the idea that the best way to achieve growth in GDP, which is what he desired in life even more so than the love of a beautiful woman, was to privatize everything, deregulate the business community, and cut public funds for social services. Not unlike what Reagan did here in the US back in the 1980s.

But Friedman couldn't very well achieve his goals here in the US. First of all, he wasn't an elected official or anything. And also, most of that shit wouldn't have been feasible politically even if he was, at least not at the time. So what he did is: he went to Latin America and got a bunch of their best economics students and gave them all a free education in BS economic policies at the University of Chicago, where he worked. They would then return to their home countries and attempt to implement said policies.

Only thing is, that shit wasn't that much more feasible in Latin America than it was here. To be sure, Latin America was fucked the fuck up back then, as it is now and as it always will be. (Let's face it.) But it was getting better. Much of Latin America was undergoing a phenomenon called developmentalism, which basically involved a more equitable distribution of wealth at the expense of overall economic growth. Good for your average bum on the street, bad for your average tall Israeli.

The theory put forth by Naomi Klein, which makes enough sense to me, is that the people in these countries knew better than to consent to such policies, because they knew it would only have the effect of growing the economy overall by taking wealth from the hands of the least fortunate and placing it in the hands of a relatively small ownership class. Just like they do here. And since Latin America is already fucked the fuck up anyway, there wasn't gonna be any of this shit where poor people can still afford 20" rims and Endless Shrimp at Red Lobster.

So what they did is: they had the military round up everyone who knew better - artists, intellectuals, activist-types, and what have you - kidnapped them, took them up in an airplane and tossed their asses out into a river, Drop Squad-style. Or sometimes they'd just send them to a secret prison, where they'd be locked in a tiny cages and zapped with a cattle prod - the better to get them to inform on their fellow terrorists. (Sound familiar?) At any rate, they were done away with. They came to be known as the disappeared.

And so it went, in several countries that followed in succession elsewhere in Latin America as well as in other notoriously shitty regions such as Eastern Europe and Asia. Basically, Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys would look for countries in desperate need of some help. Then, instead of actual aid, they would prescribe a litany of BS economic policies. Invariably, widespread death and destruction, not to mention ridonkulous levels of inequality, would ensue - though Friedman would maintain that he didn't have shit to do with the former.

And then, after what seems like two years of your life worth of stories about this sort of thing (really, she could've worked on condensing those Latin American chapters into one, and perhaps excising the chapter about Poland altogether - who gives a fuck about Poland anyway?), the book concludes with chapters on the War in Iraq, the tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the fucked up state of affairs over in Israel, all of which she portrays - correctly, I think - as the next stage in the same overall trend of the business community looking to profit from someone else's pain.

It's all pretty fascinating shit. In particular, her read on the Iraq War, which I believe is expanded from some stories she wrote for Harper's, goes a long way in explaining how the situation there got so fucked the fuck up after the initial invasion, which was relatively quick and painless (for me, at least!). I suppose I should've known that the sectarian violence and the overall level of instability over there has  had as much to do with economic sas it does the general Arab tendency to throw rocks (which, I'll, maintain, is quite strong none the less), but you know how racist I can be.

Probably the weakest part of the whole book - and I'm not even sure if this is an issue with the actual book as it is the overall state of things - is that it doesn't suggest how things might get better, save for a few anecdotes about how refugees in Thailand and, um, New Orleans have managed to get their lives back together despite what the business community might prefer. But the overall feeling that you get from The Shock Doctrine is that we're fucked. Best case scenario, maybe it doesn't happen to you; but it's gonna continue to happen as long as there's an economic incentive for the strong to prey on the weak.

***

BONUS: Here's a video trailer for the book made by Klein and Alfonso Cuaron, the guy who did Children of Men. Video trailers for books = next level shit.