Video: The Shock Doctrine by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein
“Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible — and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston.” –George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
The rest of the series can be found here .
Naomi Klein’s book is reviewed today (excerpt below) in The New York Times. Her YouTube video, “The Shock Doctrine by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein,” is a terrifying look at what it really means to human beings like you and me. My mother was given at least thirty heavy shock treatments in the 1950′s — many of them in the psychiatrist’s office, a few blocks away on the Grand Concourse in The Bronx. I still remember her shakily walking home on wobbly ankles in the darkening light of Walton Avenue, supported by my father.
As it turned out, she had been misdiagnosed, and the treatments not only damaged her mind forever, but were also useless. Sometimes we see the whole world in a single moment that is preserved forever in memory, but we don’t really know what it means until it is too late to do anything about it, if anything at all can be done, in fact. I urge you to watch the video, if only to get a hint of what I am trying to say here, and what my life and work have been about.
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ
“The Shock Doctrine” is Klein’s ambitious look at the economic history of the last 50 years and the rise of free-market fundamentalism around the world. “Disaster capitalism,” as she calls it, is a violent system that sometimes requires terror to do its job. Like Pol Pot proclaiming that Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was in Year Zero, extreme capitalism loves a blank slate, often finding its opening after crises or “shocks.”
For example, Klein argues, the Asian crisis of 1997 paved the way for the International Monetary Fund to establish programs in the region and for a sell-off of many state-owned enterprises to Western banks and multinationals. The 2004 tsunami enabled the government of Sri Lanka to force the fishermen off beachfront property so it could be sold to hotel developers. The destruction of 9/11 allowed George W. Bush to launch a war aimed at producing a free-market Iraq.
In an early chapter, Klein compares radical capitalist economic policy to shock therapy administered by psychiatrists. She interviews Gail Kastner [See more], a victim of covert C.I.A. experiments in interrogation techniques that were carried out by the scientist Ewen Cameron in the 1950s. His idea was to use electroshock therapy to break down patients. Once “complete depatterning” had been achieved, the patients could be reprogrammed.
But after breaking down his “patients,” Cameron was never able to build them back up again. The connection with a rogue C.I.A. scientist is overdramatic and unconvincing, but for Klein the larger lessons are clear: “Countries are shocked — by wars, terror attacks, coups d’état and natural disasters.” Then “they are shocked again – by corporations and politicians who exploit the fear and disorientation of this first shock to push through economic shock therapy.” People who “dare to resist” are shocked for a third time, “by police, soldiers and prison interrogators.”
Go to original, The New York Times
