naomi klein's
THE SHOCK DOCTRINE
reviewed by
JUAN SANTOS
Juan Santos is the author of the blog The
Fourth World.
Subcomandante
Marcos of the Zapatistas is a poet, but he is not just any poet:
he’s a poet armed not only with words, but with bullets
-- and not only with words and bullets, but with the heart of
the Mayan people of Chiapas. He is a poet and a revolutionary
who abandoned the ivory tower for the jungle -- for the Selva
Lacandona -- to live with, to fight with, and to die with los
de ‘bajo – the people on the bottom, who lives are
crushed beneath the weight of the pyramid of Empire. He has
taken their part, their lot, their future as his own.
Naomi
Klein is a writer, one who sees with the eyes of her heart,
one who backs the knowledge and vision of the heart with the
most rigorous research -- research she uses to build the sharpest
and most aggressively articulated and documented of cases, a
case developed as if our lives depended on it. They do. And
Klein, like Subcomandante Marcos, has taken sides, the side
of the poor. Marcos has said her latest book, The Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, “is one
of those books that is worth having in your hands. It is also
a very dangerous book.”
“Its
danger,” he says, “resides in that it is possible
to understand what it says.” In the clearest terms, The
Shock Doctrine lays bare the vicious nature of capitalist
globalization, and shows us how and why our world has been so
radically transformed over the last half-century; Klein spills
the blood of the lie that “free markets” mean free
people. She builds and proves a solid -- often breathtaking
-- case that the global “free market” has been imposed
around the world through terror. She calls it “shock”
-- with all the graphic undercurrents of electric shock treatments,
torture and deep trauma that the word implies -- spelled out
in exquisitely researched detail. Her tale is the tale of the
rise of “corporatism” -- a technical word for the
economic and political system called fascism -- on a global
scale. While a few Left pundits like Alexander Cockburn almost
dismiss Klein’s work for ignoring the precedents of capitalist
terrorism prior to the era of globalization, they miss entirely
that her book is focused on a particular period of history and
on stripping bare the real meaning of the time we have lived
through over the last generation. They also miss the power of
the writing and the sense of values and the heart-felt methodology
that guides and informs it.
Subcomandante
Marcos is right when he says that the book’s danger for
the rulers “resides in that it is possible to understand
what it says.” Klein has written a book on global political
economy -- one that is as gripping as the best murder mystery,
as well researched as the best investigative journalism -- on
a par with the work of a Seymour Hersh. The Shock Doctrine
is as accessible as a history by Howard Zinn, and nearly
as evocative in some of its storytelling as the writing of Eduardo
Galeano.
That’s
why The Shock Doctrine -- surprisingly for a scathing
and in-depth leftist critique of globalization -- is already
on the best seller lists in six countries. Klein tells a meaningful
and fully comprehensible story in human terms that makes sense
of the world we have lived in. It’s the global story of
our lives, one that contextualizes, crystallizes and personalizes
the meaning of what we’ve lived through and often only
dimly understood. She brings our recent history, the world around
us, and thus our lives themselves, into sudden clarity and focus.
Klein’s
central metaphor -- yes, this is a book on fascism and global
political economy that has a central metaphor -- is shock treatment;
its development as a means to wipe clean the meaning of a human
personality and to replace it with a newly programmed persona,
one in line with the electrical master’s wishes. At the
outset of her book, she talks in depth with -- she encounters
-- a survivor of electroshock -- one of the victims of the early
experiments that would be used by the CIA to write manuals on
torture -- as the woman struggles daily with the problems of
reclaiming a memory that has been erased, and with reconstructing
a life, a history and a personality that has been wiped out
by a man -- call him a doctor, call him a torturer -- sworn
to heal her, by a man sworn to do no harm.
In
The Shock Doctrine the personal and political are inseparable.
The lies, betrayals and brutal political manipulations of its
antagonists (who seek to wipe the slate clean in “maladjusted”
countries and bring them under their own control the way that
experts in electroshock and CIA torturers seek to wipe out human
memory and personality) and the valiant and often tragic resistance
of its protagonists, are told with an immediacy that is lacking
in any kind of “charitable” pity or condescension.
Instead, the immediacy and vividness of her story is empowered
and made more compelling by a consistently rigorous research
that, in Klein’s hands, nails the truth and makes its
emotional impact inescapable.
Although
she doesn’t bore us with the “correct” theoretical
arguments that critics like Cockburn would seem to prefer, Klein
is dealing in The Shock Doctrine with one of the core
contradictions of capitalism, the relationship between bourgeois
dictatorship and bourgeois democracy, and she shows us, through
example after compelling example, how, under capitalism and
imperialism, the reality of bourgeois dictatorship trumps the
illusion of bourgeois democracy every time.
She
shows us in vivid examples the reality behind the theory, how
“democracy” and negotiation and the power to make
decisions over our lives is reserved for the capitalist and
imperial elites, who then impose the end result of their of
their debates -- their desires -- on those who are most vulnerable
to them, and how they do so, consciously, just at the moments
when we are most critically vulnerable. As “free market”
economist Milton Friedman put it, “Only a crisis, actual
or perceived, produces real change.” The logic, actually,
the pathology, Klein exposes, is the now-global pathology of
the rapist, the serial killer, the fascist, of the torturers
of Abu Ghraib; of the Hannibal Lectors in business suits who
both run and gorge themselves on the world. Here the essence
of the world capitalist, who, as Marx put it, is the “soul
of capitalism personified.” The brutal pathology and machinations
of these men are shown, in concrete example after another, unmistakably
for what they are: the pathology and methodology of torturers
whose aim is not mere terror, but the gutting of people’s
lives and livelihoods -- the gutting of the world for their
own enrichment. Klein doesn’t rely, as such, on the terms
for them that I’ve just used. She’s not name-calling
or breathing hell and damnation. She lets the stories she tells
and the documentation that backs the stories -- the documentation
that makes them coherent extensions of one another across decades
and vast distances -- speak for themselves. They do just that,
and the conclusions to be drawn from the picture the stories
reveal are unavoidable.
What
do the iconic events of our era -- Pinochet's coup in Chile,
the death squads throughout Latin America, Tienanmen Square
and the capitalist conversion of China and Russia, the strangulation
of the liberation struggle in South Africa, NAFTA, the birth
of a new spirit of resistance in Latin America, the planes slamming
into the towers in New York, the “Shock and Awe”
unleashed against Iraq, the so -- called "War on Terror,"
and the preparations for fascism in the US have to do with one
another? What are globalization and neoliberalism, and how and
why did they arise? Klein lays it out in compelling detail.
See the finely produced short film that introduces the book
at the link below.
http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/short-film
For
all the horror and overwhelming power of the global elites that
Klein depicts, her conclusion is as hopeful as it is realistic.
She tells us, in effect, that systems based on shock, terror,
repression and exploitation cannot be sustained. She puts the
matter simply and with concrete examples from around the world:
Shock wears off. The story returns, memory, continuity, coherence
and meaning return. The soul returns. The victim of torture
can come to her senses once more. Submission can be cast aside,
the will to resist, the will to live, reasserts itself. Lives,
homes, cultures and economies shattered by crisis and repression
-- wiped out by shock- can be restored. “Information,”
she tells us, “is shock resistance. Arm yourself.”
