Shock

What does the CIA, Milton Friedman, Augusto Pinochet, Boris Yeltsin, and the George W Bush Administration all have in common? They are all major players in Naomi Klein’s terrifying new book, “Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”

In her new book Klein begins with the experiments conducted by Ewan Cameron and the CIA in the late 1950’s through early 1960’s. During that time scores of individuals were subjected to Electroconvulsive therapy with the expectations that it would wipe their brains clean. Instead these experiments destroyed lives and caused untold suffering to the victims.

Klein then follows the trail of destruction from Cameron’s torture chambers to Chile, Russia, Poland, China, Iraq, and finally to New Orleans. Throughout the book Klein documents how the “Chicago boys” adopt Cameron’s theories to their own ends. Friedman and his ilk are shown to be opportunistic predators who have no need to create chaos but instead wait for events to happen (such as military coups, revolutions, wars, economic downturns, and environmental disasters) and then move in to take advantage of the shocked and frightened population to tear down the existing social institutions.

The goal of the Chicago Boys is to replace democratically run social institutions, especially Keynesian economic systems, with “Corporatism.” She explains that modern corporatism has evolved from Mussolini’s police state model based around government, business, and trade unions to a system based on, “a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war on the third power sector – the workers – thereby drastically increasing the alliance’s share of the national wealth.”

They say that knowledge is power. We should be grateful to Naomi Klein for providing us with this knowledge and therefore giving us another tool by which to fight back with.