Book Review: The Shock Doctrine

If I was going to found a radical people's university -- one to train progressive activists -- one book that would be required reading is The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein. As I have shared with you via snippets in over 20 posts, Klein makes a superb case that the shock doctrine is a key component for much of the human suffering of the last 40 years in the modern world.

Here's what Klein's website devoted to this marvelous book states as a summary.

In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world-- through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.

At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts.... New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters -- to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.

The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas through our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998...

At its most basic, the shock doctrine is about unmitigated greed and selfishness. The economists at the Chicago School developed a blueprint to rain down untold misery on the poor and middle class in order to feed the narcissistic aspirations of the wealthy elite. Wherever it has been employed -- and it has been employed all over the world -- the divide between rich and poor has grown by staggering leaps and bounds.

If you are interested in understanding what is going on in the world today -- particularly in the United States -- you need to read this book. The agenda of deficit hawks, the Tea Party and supporters of endless war/severe austerity are utilizing the shock doctrine as their playbook. If there is ANY hope of countering them, we must understand what is driving them and Klein's book provides this information in engaging detail.