Growing up during the cold war in Europe, I, like most of the people I knew, felt stuck between a rock and a hard place. To the east was, well, the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union. Even the leftiest among us thought they had betrayed the potentially positive aspects of real socialism. We knew they were a threat to their own people, but we didn’t believe they would invade Western Europe.
To the west were the USA, with their primitive, knee-jerk anti-communism (most Americans we heard or met had no real idea what communism was. They just knew that commies didn’t believe in god, and that was reason enough to nuke them to high-heaven).
So we hated the USSR for their despotic ways, and we hated the USA with its CIA promoting their cynical, corporate-driven politics, overthrowing democratically elected officials (Allende in Chile), or supporting fascist juntas as long as they were anti-communist and good for business (United Fruit Company).
Maybe because the Russians are European, few of us believed the USSR would nuke their Western European neighbors. We weren’t so sure about the USA. Plenty of ex-nazi weapons experts working on the A & H bomb programs there, and crazy people like Edward Teller (the model for Doctor Strangelove).
Now sometimes, (bear with me, this is going somewhere), in my (bleeding) heart of hearts, I thought to myself that we were maybe too naive and too lenient towards the USSR. Maybe they did want to swallow us up.
Similarly, I remember thinking (secretly to myself) that the anti-capitalist, anti-corporation, anti-American rhetoric that was so prevalent was maybe a tad too paranoid. Sure, corporations were amoral, sometimes verging on the cynical, but maybe not out of some kind of intrinsic evil-ness. Maybe they just had their eyes on the bottom-line and lost sight of the consequences of their actions.
Years later (well, yesterday to be precise), I stumbled upon a bunch of articles about Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. You can watch a video trailer for the book (boy, I hate that idea) or read an excerpt published in the Guardian, which I urge you to do!
Her premise is truly bone-chilling. It reveals a cynicism on the part of the West far beyond anything I or anyone dared envision back in the 70’s and 80’s. Here’s the pitch:
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.
Here are a couple of short excepts from the excerpt, about the aftermath of Katrina and the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia & Sri Lanka :
The news racing around the shelter that day was that the Republican Congressman Richard Baker had told a group of lobbyists, « We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did. » Joseph Canizaro, one of New Orleans’ wealthiest developers, had just expressed a similar sentiment: « I think we have a clean sheet to start again. And with that clean sheet we have some very big opportunities. » All that week Baton Rouge had been crawling with corporate lobbyists helping to lock in those big opportunities: lower taxes, fewer regulations, cheaper workers and a « smaller, safer city » – which in practice meant plans to level the public housing projects. Hearing all the talk of « fresh starts » and « clean sheets », you could almost forget the toxic stew of rubble, chemical outflows and human remains just a few miles down the highway.
[…] after the devastating 2004 tsunami, [I] witnessed another version of the same manoeuvre: foreign investors and international lenders had teamed up to use the atmosphere of panic to hand the entire beautiful coastline over to entrepreneurs who quickly built large resorts, blocking hundreds of thousands of fishing people from rebuilding their villages. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering. Most people who survive a disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed. « When I rebuild the city I feel like I’m rebuilding myself, » said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans’ heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after the storm. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what once was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called « reconstruction » began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere.
The man behind this fundamentalist capitalist vision is none other than Milton Friedman, often presented as the pope of laissez-faire capitalism.
His followers, mostly in the US and the UK, are more than ever in power, and their cynical-beyond-belief exploitation of recent disasters is truly nauseating.
Naomi Klein’s book doesn’t reveal anything new, but it paints events in a different, truly frightening, light.
It also reveals that my occasional qualms about anti-corporate, anti-american sentiment in my youth were truly misplaced, and that Western Europe as a whole was probably as naive.
I hope the book makes a splash, and shakes things up a little, although I’m not holding my breath.
Besides, there is just too much money to be made from the catastrophes that climate change is sure to bring. You can be sure you-know-who will never cave in to those naive idiots who actually want to try to reverse or slow down global warming before its really too late.
It’s a good thing that radioactivity fucks up the resale value of real-estate, or these insane people would probably have pushed for a preemptive nuclear strike, and raked in the dough building hotels and resorts over the rubble.