Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism - Softcover

Klein, Naomi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312427999 ISBN 13: 9780312427993

Verlag: Picador Paper, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

International Bestseller
Winner of the Warwick Prize for Writing
18th in The Guardian's top 100 Greatest Books since 2000

"Impassioned, hugely informative, wonderfully controversial, and scary as hell." -John le Carré

The bestselling author of No Logo shows how the global "free market" has exploited crises and shock for three decades, from Chile to Iraq

In her groundbreaking reporting, Naomi Klein introduced the term "disaster capitalism." Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment," losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers.

The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq.

At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Naomi Klein is the award-winning author of the acclaimed international bestsellers The Shock Doctrine, No Logo, This Changes Everything, and No Is Not Enough. She is a contributing editor for Harper's, a reporter for Rolling Stone, and writes a regular, internationally syndicated column. She has won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. In September 2018, she was named the inaugural Gloria Steinem Chair for Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University.

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The Shock Doctrine

The Rise of Disaster CapitalismBy Naomi Klein

Picador

Copyright © 2008 Naomi Klein
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312427993

 

PART 1

TWO DOCTOR SHOCKS

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

 

We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

 

The Industrial Revolution was merely the beginning of a revolution as extreme and radical as ever inflamed the minds of sectarians, but the problems could be resolved given an unlimited amount of material commodities.

—Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation

CHAPTER 1

THE TORTURE LAB

EWEN CAMERON, THE CIA AND THE
MANIACAL QUEST TO ERASE AND
REMAKE THE HUMAN MIND

 

Their minds seem like clean slates upon which we can write.

—Dr. Cyril J. C. Kennedy and Dr. David Anchel on the benefits
of electroshock therapy, 19481

 

I went to the slaughterhouse to observe this so-called “electric slaughtering,” and I saw that the hogs were clamped at the temples with big metallic tongs which were hooked up to an electric current (125 volts). As soon as the hogs were clamped by the tongs, they fell unconscious, stiffened, then after a few seconds they were shaken by convulsions in the same way as our experimental dogs. During this period of unconsciousness (epileptic coma), the butcher stabbed and bled the animals without difficulty.

—Ugo Cerletti, a psychiatrist, describing how he “invented”
electroshock therapy, 19542

 

 

 

 

“I don’t talk to journalists anymore,” says the strained voice at the other end of the phone. And then a tiny window: “What do you want?”

I figure I have about twenty seconds to make my case, and it won’t be easy. How do I explain what I want from Gail Kastner, the journey that brought me to her?

The truth seems so bizarre: “I am writing a book about shock. About how countries are shocked—by wars, terror attacks, coups d’état and natural disasters. And then how they are shocked again—by corporations and politicians who exploit the fear and disorientation of this first shock to push through economic shock therapy. And then how people who dare to resist these shock politics are, if necessary, shocked for a third time—by police, soldiers and prison interrogators. I want to talk to you because you are by my estimation among the most shocked people alive, being one of the few living survivors of the CIA’s covert experiments in electroshock and other ‘special interrogation techniques.’ And by the way, I have reason to believe that the research that was done on you in the 1950s at McGill University is now being applied to prisoners in Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.”

No, I definitely can’t say that. So I say this instead: “I recently traveled to Iraq, and I am trying to understand the role torture is playing there. We are told it’s about getting information, but I think it’s more than that—I think it may also have had to do with trying to build a model country, about erasing people and then trying to remake them from scratch.”

There is a long pause, and then a different tone of voice to the reply, still strained but … is it relief? “You have just spelled out exactly what the CIA and Ewen Cameron did to me. They tried to erase and remake me. But it didn’t work.”

In less than twenty-four hours, I am knocking on the door of Gail Kastner’s apartment in a grim Montreal old-age home. “It’s open,” comes a barely audible voice. Gail had told me she would leave the door unlocked because standing up is difficult for her. It’s the tiny fractures down her spine that grow more painful as arthritis sets in. Her back pain is just one reminder of the sixty-three times that 150 to 200 volts of electricity penetrated the frontal lobes of her brain, while her body convulsed violently on the table, causing fractures, sprains, bloody lips, broken teeth.

Gail greets me from a plush blue recliner. It has twenty positions, I later learn, and she adjusts them continuously, like a photographer trying to find focus. It is in this chair that she spends her days and nights, searching for comfort, trying to avoid sleep and what she calls “my electric dreams.” That’s when she sees “him”: Dr. Ewen Cameron, the long-dead psychiatrist who administered those shocks, as well as other torments, so many years ago. “I had two visits from the Eminent Monster last night,” she announces as soon as I walk in. “I don’t want to make you feel bad, but it’s because of your call coming out of the blue like that, asking all those questions.”

I become aware that my presence here is very possibly unfair. This feeling deepens when I scan the apartment and realize that there is no place for me. Every single surface is crowded with towers of papers and books, precariously stacked but clearly in some kind of order, the books all marked with yellowing flags. Gail motions me to the one clear surface in the room, a wooden chair that I had overlooked, but she goes into minor panic when I ask for a four-inch space for the recorder. The end table beside her chair is out of the question: it is home to about twenty empty boxes of cigarettes, Matinee Regular, stacked in a perfect pyramid. (Gail had warned me on the phone about the chain-smoking: “Sorry, but I smoke. And I’m a poor eater. I’m fat and I smoke. I hope that’s okay.”) It looks as if Gail has colored the insides of the boxes black, but looking closer, I realize it is actually extremely dense, minuscule handwriting: names, numbers, thousands of words.

Over the course of the day we spend talking, Gail often leans over to write something on a scrap of paper or a cigarette box—“a note to myself,” she explains, “or I will never remember.” The thickets of paper and cigarette boxes are, for Gail, something more than an unconventional filing system. They are her memory.

For her entire adult life, Gail’s mind has failed her; facts evaporate instantly, memories, if they are there (and many aren’t), are like snapshots scattered on the ground. Sometimes she will remember an incident perfectly—what she calls “a memory shard”—but when asked for a date, she will be as much as two decades off. “In 1968,” she will say. “No, 1983.” And so she makes lists and keeps everything, proof that her life actually happened. At first she apologizes for the clutter. But later she says, “He did this to me! This apartment is part of the torture!”

For many years, Gail was quite mystified by her lack of memory, as well as other idiosyncrasies. She did not know, for instance, why a small electrical shock from a garage door opener set off an uncontrollable panic attack. Or why her hands shook when she plugged in her hair dryer. Most of all, she could not understand why she could remember most events from her adult life but almost nothing from before she turned twenty. When she ran into...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Picador Paper
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312427999
• ISBN 13: 9780312427993
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 719
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland