Naomi Klein 5

'Disaster capitalism: Israel as warning Raymond Deane, The Electronic Intifada.

I think we can safely deduce that Jewish extremist Kach members aren't too fond of Naomi Klein. On their informative online S.H.I.T. (Self-Hating and/or Israel-Threatening) List, we read that she "is an ISM supporter and Rachel Corrie lover. If Hitler were alive today, she'd love him as well!" This considered evaluation will probably need to be rephrased in less glowing terms if any patient Kahanists get around to reading The Shock Doctrine - the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Many are now familiar with the outlines of Klein's argument: in the wake of natural and unnatural disasters, neo-liberal economic reform is foisted on stricken societies while their citizens are in a condition of collective disorientation. While the ruling class is quick to avail of these "opportunities," it doesn't actually set out to create them, because it doesn't need to: "An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial." After great destruction comes privatized reconstruction to the benefit of multinational corporations and the detriment of ordinary people.In itself, the thesis that capitalism thrives on disaster isn't exactly novel. What Klein has done, however, is to draw analytical conclusions from the consistency with which the metaphor of "shock" is employed in this context. She recounts how in the 1950s the CIA funded electric shock experiments by the US-American psychiatrist Ewen Cameron that entailed "attacking the brain with everything known to interfere with its normal functioning -- all at once" in order to reduce it to a tabula rasa upon which, it was mistakenly believed, anything could be written. These experiments inspired the CIA's MKUltra program designed "to break prisoners suspected of being Communists and double agents." As a bonus, Cameron's and the CIA's procedures laid the groundwork for torture practices from Santiago de Chile to Abu Ghraib.
Next, Klein explores the doctrines of Milton Friedman and his Chicago School disciples, those influential advocates of economic "shock therapy" who also drew up their theories in the heady 1950s. Friedman, according to Klein, was "the other Doctor Shock ... Friedman's mission, like Cameron's, rested on a dream of reaching back to a state of 'natural' health, ... before human interferences created distorting patterns. Where Cameron dreamed of returning the human mind to that pristine state, Friedman dreamed of depatterning societies, of returning them to a state of pure capitalism ... the only way to reach that prelapsarian state was to deliberately inflict painful shocks ... Cameron used electricity to inflict his shocks. Friedman's tool of choice was ... the shock treatment approach he urged on bold politicians for countries in distress."The first society to be remodeled on the basis of Friedman's theories was Pinochet's Chile. Here the overlap between Friedman and Cameron ceases to be merely metaphorical: the ruthless implementation of the former's shock therapy required the employment of the latter's, in the form of torture.'

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