Another kind of 'shock doctrine'

Larissa MacFarquhar's profile of Naomi Klein is worth the read. Klein's observations merit attention, of course, but should not get a free pass (and there are worse places to start than critiques by Mark Engler in Dissent and Stephen Holmes in the LRB).

The most virulent kind of 'shock doctrine' in the world today may actually be that of the government of Zimbabwe, which is not exactly Friedmanite (see, e.g., ICG, Amnesty).

[But in Zimbabwe, Mahmood Mamdani argues, Mugabe

has ruled not only by coercion but by consent, and his land reform measures, however harsh, have won him considerable popularity, not just in Zimbabwe but throughout southern Africa. In any case, the preoccupation with his character does little to illuminate the socio-historical issues involved.]

Shocked

...The analogy between Chile and Iraq cuts both ways. After arguing that Chile was a laboratory for Friedman’s free-market ideals, Klein has to acknowledge the inconvenient fact that Pinochet refused to reverse Allende’s nationalisation of the copper mines. This suggests that Chile’s military rulers were not the lackeys of foreign companies, did not view nationalisation as a step on the road to Communism and were nationalists before they were neoliberals. At one point, Klein herself admits that Pinochet’s Chile was not a laboratory for Chicago School ideals. But this concession is soon forgotten and she continues to hold up the Chilean analogy as evidence that torture in Abu Ghraib, too, had a primarily economic rationale and, indeed, was part of the same ‘crusade to liberate world markets’.

Klein argues that the invading forces deliberately allowed the National Museum in Baghdad to be looted and the National Library burned. These apparent acts of criminal negligence were in fact a form of cultural lobotomy, a collective shock treatment meant to ‘depattern’ the minds of the Iraqis and reduce their capacity to resist free-market reforms. She never explains why ancient manuscripts stored in a library would have fortified Iraqi resistance to a radical economic agenda. Indeed, this example shows how far Klein is willing to go to deny the decisive role of imbecility and obliviousness in the making of the Iraqi disaster.

The supposed primacy of neoliberal ideology and business interests in the Iraq war is also thrown into doubt by another consideration. Nothing we know about Dick Cheney suggests that he wanted to ‘redeem’ Iraq or make it into a model society of any kind. If he followed any example in his dim plans for post-invasion Iraq, it was not Milton Friedman’s but Ariel Sharon’s. No one would suggest that Sharon aimed to ‘redeem’ the Palestinians or create a model market society in the West Bank and Gaza. What he aimed for, and achieved, was managed anarchy: a weak, internally divided and festering society unable to project power outwards but susceptible to periodic violent intrusions. Free-market orthodoxy was not on Sharon’s mind, or on Cheney’s either...

-- from a review by Stephen Holmes of The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.

Klein may sometimes project and distort, but for outrageous manipulation nothing beats the 'mainstream', as Nick Turse shows.

[P.S. another interesting review of The Shock Doctrine here]

It makes ze vorld go round

The average life expectancy in the poorest countries at the end of the twentieth century was fifteen years longer than the average life expectancy in the richest country in the world — Britain — at the start of that century.

-- claims Peter Saunders in Why Capitalism is Good for the Soul. He argues that "while capitalism may not be a sufficient condition of human freedom, it is almost certainly a necessary one", and "recognising that consumption does not always bring contentment does not mean we have to give up on capitalism."

Some things to mull over here, but the essay has important gaps, and one might want a copy of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, Stiglitz on globalization, Mike Davis on slums and much else to hand as well.

P.S. A quick search seems to raise some questions with regard to Saunders's claims about life expectancy. According to one source, UK life expectancy in 1900 (both sexes) was 49.2 (table 12A here). A BBC report from Sierra Leone in 2000 put the figure there at 25.9 years. The CIA factbook for 2007 gives, for example, 49.21 for Burkina Faso 53.29 for Congo and 42.98 for Malawi.

The ulimate renewable resource

...is fear. According to Naomi Klein,

the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn't threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the "global war on terror".

Naomi not brilliant

Ewa Jasiewicz has circulated Naomi Klein's article Racism is the terrorist's greatest recruitment tool, describing it as "brilliant". I don't agree, and responded:

"Thanks, Eva

Racism, ignorance and discrimination - of which there are far too much in the UK - don't help anybody, but there are other factors to consider too.

As William Shawcross noted in his letter responding to Naomi Klein (see The force behind fanatics), self-described Islamists also target progressive internationalists like Sergio Vieira de Mello. Bin Laden made a special point of saying how glad he was that the man who helped East Timor achieve independence was blown to bits.

Caspar"

More thoughtful than Naomi Klein is Sameer Rahim in the 18 August edition of the London Review of Books:

"Ian McEwan wrote soon after 9/11 that the hijackers did not have the imaginative capacity to empathise with others’ pain. I saw almost the opposite in their frightening ability to carry out an act of suicidal revenge on behalf of people with whom they had no ties other than religion. One of the failed London bombers of 21 July, Hussein Osman, told Italian police that the group motivated themselves by watching footage of grief-stricken Iraqi widows and children. For most of us the distress fades when the news bulletin ends; for Osman they fuelled 'a conviction that it was necessary to give a signal – to do something'. That something was, allegedly, trying to explode a bomb at Shepherd’s Bush Tube station.

'There is truth to the blowback argument' said [Sameer Rahim’s friend Ali, a lawyer who gave up his job in London to study Islam in Qom], 'but there is something missing. You could call it moral responsibility'. The bombers may have been bound together by a conviction they were working 'in the name of God', but they did not heed the second half of the prayer which Muslims are supposed to say as they begin any significant action: 'in the name of the most benevolent, the most merciful'. 'The repetition of God's names is a way of helping us develop his qualities; if he is merciful, then we must strive to be merciful too'. When Richard Reid – who later attempted to blow up a plane over the Atlantic – converted to Islam, he changed his name to Abdul Rahim, Servant of Mercy. 'In Arabic, Rahim means the most intense form of mercy', Ali said, looking at me. 'We must all start to examine ourselves more closely.' "

Also, Faisal Devji in The Financial Times on A war fought for impersonal passions:

"The passion of the holy warrior emerges from the same source as that of the anti-war protester - not from a personal experience of oppression but from observing the oppression of others. These impersonal and even vicarious passions draw upon pity for their strength. And pity is perhaps the most violent passion of all because it is selfless enough to tolerate monstrous sacrifices".