Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine looks at the history of using war and disaster to push neoliberal economics
DETAILS
Knox United Church
Monday, October 1 - Monday, October 1
More in: Literary
Naomi Klein was living in Argentina when the United States invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003. The response from her Argentine friends was a surprise.
“They were saying, ‘they did this to us in the ’70s,’ and at the time, I didn’t really understand the depth of what they were saying to me,” she says.
The more she researched it, the more she saw the similarities between what happened after the coup in Argentina in 1976 and what was happening in Iraq: a new government exploited the shock of violence in order to impose radical free-market reforms, including the privatization of state companies and the cutting of social spending.
She began to see that this same pattern had been repeated in several countries from the ’70s to the present day, always with the same shock and destruction. This idea forms the basis of her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Knopf Canada, 672 pp.). Its thesis is simple: every time neoliberal economics have been imposed on a country, it has required a shock such as a war, revolution or natural disaster to make it happen.
When she started working on her book, she was already a seasoned writer and activist: she protested the WTO in Seattle in 1999, and wrote No Logo, one of the most widely read attacks on corporate branding and Third World exploitation.
After she’d seen the parallel between the coup in Argentina and the war in Iraq, she began to look at the free market transformation in China. Her research on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing produced a view different from the more ubiquitous story of Communist government hardliners crushing western-looking students.
“The massacre at Tiananmen Square was needed to impose the economic shock therapy that followed,” says Klein, who found that the massacre was less about communism versus democracy as it was about capitalism against humanitarian concerns. “The massacre sent this message of terror to the entire Chinese workforce. I’d never heard of this massacre interpreted that way, as a violence that was required to create what’s being called ‘China’s economic miracle.’”
A year after the invasion of Iraq, Klein went to the shock doctrine’s most recent testing ground, intending to write a story about the reconstruction efforts in the country. While private security contracts had already been doled out and the American regime was selling off the country’s oil resources, very little had been done to help ordinary people rebuild their lives.
“I was there a year after the invasion for five weeks, and I hadn’t seen a single crane in Baghdad,” she says. “On almost the last day I was there, I saw this big yellow crane, and I was so excited I was finally going to see the reconstruction. But I got there and it was actually hoisting a giant billboard advertising imported products from Saudi Arabia.”
Mosques and religious leaders, including terrorist Muqtada al-Sadr, stepped in and organized reconstruction, including the provision of electricity and garbage collection. By not taking part in the reconstruction, Klein says, the U.S. contributed to the uprising in Iraq that continues to worsen today.
From Iraq, Klein was drawn to the sites of natural disasters in tsunami-battered Sri Lanka and in New Orleans, just days after it was hit by Hurricane Katrina. Once again, she found companies eager to exploit the disasters for corporate profits.
In the wake of the disaster, Sri Lanka privatized water and electricity services while companies bought up beachfront property formerly used by locals. In New Orleans, the government privatized much of the public school system and has dragged its feet in rebuilding all but the wealthiest parts of the city. What’s more, poor residents were dispersed to other parts of the country.
“The military was called in, and armed soldiers just back from Iraq were ordering people onto buses and planes and they were taken all across the country. Their families were torn apart and they weren’t given a return ticket. Talking to people in New Orleans, (they) were saying that it reminded them of slavery. It reminded them of people being grabbed in Africa, being hooded and thrown on boats. That’s inhuman,” she says.
In Sri Lanka, people tried to rebuild on their own as best they could, but companies continued their push to take pieces of the coastline from the people who lived there. “In Sri Lanka, I interviewed a politician who was a Buddhist monk and I remember him saying, ‘in order to fight, people need a place to stand.’ When you’re in a refugee camp, and you don’t have anything, that makes you who you are. It is a tremendously weakened state,” she says.
Talking to Klein in downtown Toronto in late summer, I feel far removed from the locales of her book. The wars, disasters and revolutions feel a world apart from the quiet international backwater that is Canada. However, Klein sees an immediate connection.
The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), a summit between Canada, the United States and Mexico, has just wrapped up outside of Ottawa, and Klein sees it as a blatant attempt to exploit the aftershocks of 9/11 in order to ram through greater integration of Canadian and American security services.
“In the aftermath of September 11, we’re told that security trumps trade. Entirely behind the scenes, this agenda of deep integration was quietly pushed through,” she says. “The incredible level of integration between Canadian security forces and American ones was part of that, and Maher Arar’s case was only the best example. The extraordinary level of energy integration is part of it, and the directive to rapidly increase tar sands production. The oil that was supposed to come from Iraq is coming from Alberta instead.”
Somewhat chilling about the SPP summit, she says, was that its participants said that there likely wouldn’t be an opportunity to fully implement its agenda until another crisis provides the pretext.
While disaster capitalism continues to swallow new markets, Klein sees reason for hope in the events of the last few years. The anti-globalization movement, of which she was once the most well-known Canadian face, has achieved the original goals that motivated it in the streets of Seattle: the World Trade Organization is deadlocked, the International Monetary Fund is hemorrhaging money and the World Bank is losing influence internationally.
What’s more, several Latin American leaders are presenting a viable alternative to the neo-liberal economic model. In Bolivia, Evo Morales has ridden a wave of movements against privatization to take office, and Klein believes his supporters will keep pushing to make the government work for them rather than for American corporations. In Venezuela, the government has actively supported worker-run co-operatives to deliver work and goods to the people who need them. “I have cautious hope,” she says. “The real question is how much these developments will change people’s lives.”
Although neoliberalism might be in retreat in some places, Klein feels it is far from over. “If we don’t get off this course, we’re going to end up with a disaster apartheid future, where the people who have divided the world into haves and have-nots will save themselves from the crisis-prone world that they have created,” she says.
In Baghdad, Beirut and New Orleans, she caught a glimpse of a dystopic world where those who had the money could rebuild their homes and businesses, replacing the destroyed cities with modern streets, movie theatres and bars in a small core in the centre of the city. The majority, however, were left outside in the rotting neighbourhoods destroyed by the disaster. “I think they’re fast-forwards to the future and to what we’re building,” she says. “Whether through global warming, or the public sphere that’s falling apart, I feel like this is the endgame. People need to be realistic about it, name it and fight it.”
Naomi Klein reads at the Knox United Church (506 4 St. S.W.) on Monday, October 1 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available through WordFest or at Pages on Kensington.
