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Thatcher’s ‘self-serving cynicism’ during the miners’ strike was inspired by the economics of Milton Friedman |
Misplaced faith in the gods of disaster politics
Naomi Klein offers a brilliant account of capitalism’s global insanities, writes Christopher Price
The Shock Doctrine – the Rise of Disaster
Capitalism.
By Naomi Klein. Penguin £8.99 order this book
THE Shock Doctrine is an explosive book with an unrelenting thesis – that the 20th century was one in which disaster and sometimes annihilation has been visited upon individuals, nations, communities and governments by, in Klein’s phrase, “disaster capitalism”.
She hints that the seeds of this thesis – that you must first utterly destroy before you can create – go all the way back to Genesis where, in chapter 6, God told Noah to pack a few survivors into an ark while he (God) got on with the job of obliterating all other members of a hopelessly corrupted human race.
Two 20th-century gods of this doctrine, Klein tells us, are Professor Ewan Cameron, a fanatical, Scots/ Canadian psychiatrist who believed he could erase memory in human beings and rebuild new psyches in the resultant empty spaces in their heads; and Professor Milton Friedman, who believed he could set in motion much the same process with economics, by destroying whole nations and resurrecting them on the basis of his own newly discovered economic nostrums.
In what was not a coincidence, the CIA turned to both Cameron and Friedman for help.
In the early 1970s the CIA, interested in the brainwashing by the communists of prisoners of war in Korea and Vietnam, had been toying with extending Cameron’s ideas and Friedman’s thesis to the process of sabotaging whole nations; in their most celebrated experiment they assassinated Salvador Allende, the president of Chile and trained his successor, General Pinochet, in new forms of torture and murder, to cleanse his own citizens of socialism and open Chile up for privatisation.
Their faith in the thesis was bolstered by quasi-scientific social science statistics which began to claim the same reliability and certainties as those the physical sciences had long ago achieved. Psychometricians developed (actually unreliable) intelligence quotients while Friedman did much the same with computer crunched statistics on economic theory and outcomes. All these dubious processes produced self-fulfilling prophesies.
The “shock and awe” of the Iraq invasion was celebrated by neo-conservatives as a “success” because US companies were making so much money out of it; and neo-conservative doctrine thereby expanded into a generalised political myth that all nations needed a dose of Friedman brutality because the pain always justified the gain. This self-serving cynicism process then spread beyond America. Thatcher employed it during the miners’ strike in Britain.
As a historian of these global insanities, Naomi Klein is brilliant. She collects story after story to paint a picture of the growth of the US imperium and the cancerous effect of privatisation.
But she sometimes displays an inability to distinguish between conspiracies and incompetence.
Smart members of the human race have always exploited the less fortunate. Imperial brutality is nothing new. But after the Second World War, the US was a benign force for good, investing millions of dollars in the Marshall Plan, a beneficent act which used local labour and skills to help Europe rebuild and retool itself.
US “disaster capitalism” continues to put together plans to place countries under the control of US corporations to the point where governments which once were able to govern themselves crumble in the face of neo-conservatism using technological advances to accelerate the pace of privatisation and alien control.
If she has fault, Klein sometimes draws too stark a contrast between the goodies and the baddies. Not all powerful corporations are bad and brutal; and not all governments are good and considerate. The picture she paints sometimes almost evokes a religious aura and a plea for the violent Old Testament God of Genesis to give way to the justice of a New Testament one, to whose care all human beings are committed and in whose love all are equal.
Life, unhappily, is not quite like that. The unpleasant behaviour of the rich and powerful will persist.
The enormous strength of the book, however, lies in her ability to publicise those unreported activities and events which media organisations do not like to talk about.
Newspapers aiming for “balance” like to argue equal and opposite points of view and thereby allow the iniquities of the world to flourish. A continuous flow of books like hers is essential in a world which is gradually becoming more affluent and less oppressive, even for ordinary people, if future populations are not to be drugged into a lethargic indifference by the media or sucked into violent forms of mass murder by preachers peddling violence.
Happily today the sanctity of Friedmanite economic certainties is daily being challenged by the reality of a global recession and the patent failure of economics and economists to cope with it.
Klein is right to content herself with pointing what is patently wrong rather that mapping out a path towards any sort of new Jerusalem.
In an age in which politics has descended into empty cults of celebrity, her talent for identifying today’s false political corporate gods is all she needs to do.
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