The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein

a Review written by Darren Stoltz

When I was handed The Shock Doctrine by a fellow colleague, I wasn't expecting

to read it right away. I had just seen Amazing Grace and was in the process of

learning more about modern day slavery, being very curious as to why slavery still

exists in the world. But when I got home with my stack of slavery books, this red

and white cover with its “shocking” title was staring me in the face. I couldn't

resist. Maybe it was the fact I'm Canadian and couldn't resist something that's red

and white. And maybe it was the words themselves calling to me. To be honest,

some were screaming.

Naomi Klein's thesis is simple - “This book challenges the central and most

cherished claim in the official story – that the triumph of deregulated capitalism

has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with

democracy. Instead I will show that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has

consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the

collective body politic as well as countless individual bodies. The history of the

contemporary free market – better understood as the rise of corporatism – was

written in shocks.” (p.22)

Klein's first task is to show us the essence of shock, and where the modern form

originated. In the 1950's, a Canadian psychiatrist named Ewen Cameron began

some experiments at McGill University in Montreal. He received funding from the

CIA, as they were very interested in his results. Cameron's hypothesis was in order

to cure his patients of their problems, he would “unmake” them, reverting them

back to a childlike state, and then begin to remake them in the order that he saw

fit.1

Cameron's theory was that in order to unmake a person's brain, a series of shocks

needed to be inflicted upon the brain. Shocks included disorientation as to time

and place (eg. inconsistent meal times, inconsistent lighting and darkness), drugs,

and electro therapy. Indeed, his shocks did reduce his patients to a childlike state.

The interesting fact is that none of them ever became better afterwards than

before. Cameron's experiments were a bonafide failure. When his experiments

and links with the CIA finally broke in a scandal, it was clear that “the CIA and

Ewen Cameron had recklessly shattered lives with their experiments for no good

reason – the research appeared useless.” (p.42). But the CIA was more interested

in what purposes they could use Cameron's research for.

Klein's next step is to introduce us to Milton Friedman, a man lauded by President

George Bush as “a hero of freedom” (May 9, 2002 – Eisenhower Executive Office Building).

Friedman's main tenet of economics was a completely free market, completely

outside of government control, a market that included massive privatization,

deregulation of prices (lack of governmental control), and large cuts to

1What crossed my mind here is that this process was completely subjective. Who

is to say what a remaking should look like? In his remaking Cameron played the

same tapes over and over again. But on what grounds did he choose what the

tapes said?
government services. Privatized government companies would be bought up by

the “free market”. The free market would determine its own prices, and the

shrinking of government services would be taken up, again, by the free market.

The only problem, and it's a rather large one, is that the free market is almost

completely controlled by massive multinational corporations.

Throughout his extensive career, Friedman and/or his ideas helped to push the

economies of several countries as close to that precipice as possible. As Klein

shows, he was a utopic visionary in regards to his theories, but where they led

and who used them was a different story. Klein quotes Eduardo Galeano on this

point:

“The Theories of Milton Friedman gave him the Nobel Prize. They gave Chile

Pinochet.”

Days and Nights of Love and War, 1983.

On September 11, 1973, Pinochet launched a coup against President Salvador

Allende and the freely elected socialist government of Chile. He then proceeded to

arrest around 13 500 civilians. Thousands ended up in two main football stadiums,

which became places of death (p.89). Hundreds were executed, and their bodies

would show up on the sides of highways or in canals.

The Chicago Boys2, which Bush mentioned in his speech about Friedman, worked
2 The Chicago Boys were a group of about 25 young Chilean economists who trained at the University of Chicago under
feverishly right after the coup to get a long economic document to the military

leaders. Known as “The Brick”, it “bore a striking resemblance to ...Milton

Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom: privatization, deregulation, and cuts to social

spending” (p.90), the hallmarks of Friedman's economic philosophy. The

philosophy may not be evil in and of itself, but it seems that wherever in the world

these hallmarks are desired to be implemented, it takes shocks such as a coup, or

shocks such as torture, to make them happen, because as Klein shows, the

people, normal everyday human people, will not put up with them.

The pattern was repeated in several other South American Countries during this

time – Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina. White American men were known to show up in

torture rooms, helping the torturers with specific techniques. Chicago trained

economists (More Chicago Boys, Friedmanites) were in the back rooms of each

new government, helping to push forward Friedman's tenets. And in each country,

the poor grew poorer, unemployment was rampant, and money lined the pockets

of the rich and those in power. (p.102-110) One curious symbol of change was in

Argentina, where the Ford Falcon was used by the new government to pick people

up off the streets, or to drop off the dead bodies. (p.105)

The philosophy is simple: open the markets up, and within time, “the 'natural'

laws of economics would rediscover their equilibrium.” (p.92). This didn't happen.

In 1974, inflation in Chile reached 375 percent, twice what it had been under

Allende. Local businesses closed, unemployment hit an all time high, and hunger

became rampant. The experiment was a disaster. The remaking, again, didn't
Milton Friedman.
work. But not according to present day President Bush, or Friedman.

Klein, throughout the rest of the book, shows how the shock doctrine has been

used again and again the world over during the last 40 years3.

In South Africa, Nelson Mandela and the ANC won the political war, but lost the

economic one as laws were penned in the background that “pinned down the

limbs of the new government” (p.244). They had the state, but no power.(p.243)

Some privatized companies were even bought with South Africa's own money.

In Poland, Solidarity won the election, but quickly succumbed to Chicago School

economic policies as well. “Now in the grip of Chicago School economists, the IMF

and the U.S. treasury saw Poland's problems through the prism of the shock

doctrine. An economic meltdown and a heavy debt load, compounded by the

disorientation of a rapid regime change, meant that Poland was in the perfect

weakened position to accept a radical shock therapy program.” (p. 211)

In Russia, Yeltsin privatized almost the whole country, lining the pockets of the few

elite.()

In the coasts of the tsunami of 2004, people were moved off of their homelands

for many bogus reasons, only to find that huge resorts had been built up where

they used to live. As well, they now had to move their fishing boats a mile or more

3 Klein does not mention other ones that go back even farther. For example, Honduras in 1910, and Guatemala in 1950,
have succumbed to similar techniques in order to secure their resources for the corporations and governments that
economically took them over.
to go fishing. ()

And in Iraq, the Shock of all modern Shocks, everything was contracted out to

private companies, a Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axiom. Iraqi companies were not

allowed to rebuild. Unemployment shot through the roof. (ref...)

The Shock Doctrine has sickened me. I had heard rumours of this stuff before, but

now it is finally there in black and white. I have read about corporations before,

and have been struck with their greed. But it has become more than greed. Greed

has turned into blood; the issues have turned from green to red. When

governments, and in this book mainly the US government, speak one thing

(democracy, freedom, free markets, forces of good), and then behind the scenes

they take freely elected governments down and allow corporations to come in and

swallow up the people's and country's resources, allow new governments to

torture and kill people, and it is ALL done (let's not kid ourselves that any other

motives exist) in the name of Mammon and Power, greed has turned into blood. In

the words of Davison Budhoo's letter of resignation, after 12 years as a senior

economist with the IMF, “To me resignation is a priceless liberation, for with it I

have taken the first big step to that place where I may hope to wash my hands of

what in my mind's eye is the blood of millions of starving peoples.... The blood is

so much, you know, it runs in rivers. It dries up, too; it cakes all over me;

sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the whole world to cleanse me

from the things I did do...” (p.313)

What The Shock Doctrine has shown me is that there is blood is dripping all over

our continent, our buildings, our organizations, our markets, our democracy, our

fingers. The resources and money of country after country has been robbed and

brought back to North America. And I have to ask myself if we as a people

innocent of it. Who votes for these automatons? Whose cultures did these bloody

Alexander the Greats come from? Who buys their stuff? Who allows themselves to

be entertained in the Coliseums of movie theatres, living rooms, and sports

stadiums, and who buys the gossip magazines, plays the video games, tans their

skins, intoxicates themselves on disposable cash? We have. We have allowed this

to happen. Klein does offer a great deal of hope at the end, showing how people

in South America, If the issues of this book, and the people the world over that

they effect, do not make tears of sorrow and outrage well up in our eyes, then I

feel we are beyond hope. The issues are clear. They're right there in red and

white.