The Shock Delusion

The ability of the human mind to delude and deceive itself in an effort to deny historical realities that contradict deeply held beliefs appears to be infinite.
Case in point The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism an interesting and readable work of propaganda by Canadian leftist Naomi Klein. Klein’s thesis is that the great historical changes we’ve seen over the last four decades: the failure of planned economies of all sorts, the collapse of Communism and socialism, the catastrophic poverty in many Third World nations, the Iraq War are the work of an evil conspiracy rather than history.
Klein blames an unholy alliance of the CIA, big business, the International Monetary Fund and the University of Chicago for most of the major catastrophes of the last forty years. According to Ms. Klein, all manner of disasters including the Pinochet coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War, the massacre at Tiananmen Square, the turmoil and poverty in post Communist Russia, the debacle in post war Iraq and the post Katrina disaster in New Orleans were all caused by the ideas of the late, great economist Milton Friedman. Or rather by a fanatical cadre of international bankers, economists, politicians, military men and covert operatives dedicated to forcing those ideas on the world.
The fantasy Klein spins is an intoxicating one for leftists and socialists, all the crackpot political and economic schemes of the last century: socialism, the welfare state, third world economic independence, state directed development, Keynsian economics, workers cooperatives, worked. The people almost achieved their great victory over capital. That is they worked until the benefactors of the people were stabbed in the back by the bankers, the CIA, the United States, free market economists and other evil agents of Jewish capitalism.
The idea that government directed economies whether they be the Soviet Union, third world Marxist paradises or the neocon viceroyalty in Iraq fail because of the stupidity, incompetence, arrogance and shortsightedness of the bureaucrats and politicians who run them doesn’t occur to Klein. No her thesis is that government works and private enterprise doesn’t, so if government fails it must have failed because some evil conspiracy thwarted its efforts.
The idea that government and the nation state are failing entities being destroyed by the march of history doesn’t occur to Klein. Instead she believes that her God can’t fail.
Klein’s adulation of government rises to a ridiculous level, she praises the economic policies of Richard Nixon, the dreary idealism of Mikhail Gorbachev and the socialist fantasies of Salvatore Allende. She doesn’t say it but Klein insinuates that the adventure in Iraq and the rebuilding of New Orleans would have succeeded if they had been carried out by noble civil servants instead of money grubbing contractors.
Like most modern anti-Semities and self hating Jews, Klein doesn’t come out and say it but she blames the Jews for the world’s problems. The lynchpin of her conspiracy is the blatantly Jewish Milton Friedman and the Jewish economists of the Chicago School. Israel is held out for particular scorn as the center of the world military industrial complex and an example of the war economy.
In the manner of most utopians and conspiracy theorists, Klein provides no real alternative to the free market. She simply outlines some fuzzy notions about “people’s reconstruction” and insinuates that cooperation among working people will solve the world’s problems. How that will work, she doesn’t say, it just will, we simply have to have faith in the people. Nor does she say what will happen to the Jews, believers in the free market, capitalists and other enemies of the people in her utopia. Like Lenin, she forgets to mention the gulag until the revolution is over.
If The Shock Doctrine was the work of some internet crackpot it might be ignored but it isn’t. This is a hardback book put out by a major New York publishing house that sells at $28 a copy (like many modern leftist elitists Klein believes in socialism for the masses while lining her own pockets). The cover includes words of praise by prominent leftists including Howard Zinn, John Le Carre, Seymour M. Hersh and Studds Terkel. The ubiquitous blurb from Noam Chomsky is missing, I guess he wasn’t in when Ms. Klein’s publicist called or he feared her work might cut into the sales of his own work. So one has to wonder does Ms. Klein really believe in what she writes about or the money she hopes to make by selling her overpriced tome to gullible leftists who need a scapegoat for the failure of their pet philosophies?
One final thought here, somewhere out there some neoconservative writer is penning a book blaming all the failures of the Bush and Tony Blair regimes on an evil conspiracy of left wing journalists, media moguls and academics led by Noam Chomsky and George Soros. Hopefully, this hypothetical neocon writer will include Naomi Klein on his list of evil leftists stabbing George W. Bush and our troops in the back. If there is such a thing as Karma, that’s exactly what a conspiracy theorist like Naomi Klein deserves.

The Death Penalty

In the latest blow to the death penalty, the Nebraska Supreme Court has decided that the electric chair is cruel and unusual punishment and should not be used. Naturally death penalty opponents are celebrating while a lot of conservatives are defending old sparky.
Where do I stand? I have to agree with the courts and death penalty opponents here, the electric chair is barbaric. It’s cruel, unusual, painful and just plain uncivilized. No civilized country should use the filthy thing period.
Now as for the death penalty, well I think society has an obligation to execute the worst transgressors of its laws but those executions should be carried out in a sane and civilized manner. Executions should be swift and dignified and treat the people being executed as human beings for that’s what they are. None of the supposedly humane methods we use in this country today like lethal injection do that. The American Medical Association rightly opposes lethal injection because it perverts the medical profession.
Therefore in my mind there should only be one method of execution in the United States of America: the firing squad. The cowardly criminal having tortured, murdered and raped the innocent should be forced to stand before six of his fellow citizens like a man and take his medicine like a man. A rifle bullet is cheap, relatively painless and simple to administer. No fancy gizmos are needed here, just six Springfields from the state armory.
It also leaves the executed with some dignity. The firing squad would also eliminate a lot of the sympathy those on death row endear since most of those executed are cowards the spectacle of the big bold serial killer being dragged out to face the rifles should destroy whatever legend they have.
No special class of executioner is created by the firing squad any six individuals can serve on it. There is no melodramatic walk to the death house and no longer vigil, somebody pulls the trigger and that’s it.
If we were truly civilized we’d execute people by the firing squad but we don’t. Instead we use cowardly methods that the worst gangsters would never resort to: needles and gas chambers. Like the rest of our prison system, it’s cruel, sadistic and wasteful.
I would make an exception to the firing squad, every convict on death row would be given a bottle of cyanide pills, a rope, a couple of razor blades and a pistol with one bullet. That way if the criminal wanted to do society a favor and end his pathetic life before facing the firing squad he could . That would save society money and allow the wretch to put himself out of his own misery. It would also keep the deranged from making heroes out of those on death row, a coward who blows his brains out attracts no followers.
That’s all I have to say on the matter, if we Americans don’t want to give criminals a civilized death we aren’t much of a people. If we can’t perform executions in a dignified manner then we shouldn’t have them at all.

Gomorrah

If there is an antidote for silly Europe worshipping among American intellectuals it is a brilliant little book called Gomorrah.
Gomorrah is a description of life as it is really is in the ancient Italian city of Naples by a native son Roberto Saviano. Gomorrah simply exposes modern Naples for what it really is a cesspool of crime and corruption dominated by a clique of vicious gangsters. The gangsters are the Camorra, a traditional Italian crime syndicate that has dominated every aspect of life in Naples for generations.
Gomorrah has been a sensation in Italy selling a half million copies, winning literary awards and landing Saviano in police protection, Camorra thugs don’t like their secrets being exposed. The book itself is a tremendous work a memoir written in a style of hard written prose worthy of Dashell Hammett or John D. McDonald.
Saviano exposes the sorry underbelly of his native country. He reveals that most of the haute products of Italian fashion are made at sweatshops in dismal Naples suburbs controlled by the Camorra. The glamorous creations of Milan’s fashion mavens are marketed by gangsters who make most of their profits by selling cheap knockoffs on the side.
Fashion is the tip of the iceberg, the Camorra are major drug dealers who provide heroin, cocaine and other drugs to the people of Europe. Saviano writes of drug supermarkets in the heart of Naples, and gangsters ruthless enough to use poor addicts as guinea pigs for new drugs. Then there are the other rackets the importation of counterfeit high tech items from China and garbage disposal. Saviano explains how Southern Italy has become one giant garbage dump. The Camorra bosses make huge fortunes by dumping hazardous waste and poisoning their homeland.
When he’s not describing the rackets of the Camorra or system of organized crime that runs Naples, Saviano takes us on a tour of Naples. The oddities of Naples’ underworld are as entertaining as they are frightening. A female mob boss whose lady body guards dressed in yellow like Uma Thurma’s character in Tarantino’s seminal “Kill Bill.” Teenaged Italian gangsters who bear an eerie similarity to American drug gangs, swaggering youths with pistols and arrogant attitude. Then he describes their heroes the Camorra bosses who live in villas rivaling those of Roman emperors, one modeled after the home of Robert DeNiro’s character in the 1981 version of“Scarface.”
Gomorrah is more than a tour of Naples it is also the first real description of post modern gangsterism by a true intellectual. Thugs whose actions are inspired by soccer video games and Quentin Tarantino movies. Street punks whose lives are shaped by American movies and of the new ethics and logic of 21st Century Gangsters.
Saviano describes not poor men who turn to crime out of desperation but middle and working class sorts motivated by an ugly combination of greed, boredom and tradition. The desperation he writes of is not survival but a desire for success and excitement that the European socialist welfare state can never fulfill. The prize is unlimited amounts of cash and the ability to do whatever you want if you’re tough, smart, ruthless and good with a gun and not afraid to use it.
The gangsters Saviano writes of are something new, they’re not the traditional creatures of the Godfather. Nor are they the victims of injustice, instead they’re simply greedy and amoral citizens of a modern state to whom crime is simply a lucrative job option.
The regions they inhabit, Naples and Southern Italy a cesspool of crime and corruption rivaling anything in the Third World. Yet an area vital to the success of modern Europe, the place where all the items judged politically incorrect by the European Union come ashore. A place of intense violence where guns are as common as they are in the United States and every gangster owns an AK-47. In Southern Italy European gun control like the European welfare state is a shallow and sick fantasy.
Saviano himself is an author to watch, for he’s a brilliant wordsmith who tells the truth. Like George Orwell he’s an intellectual native who lived as an ordinary man in his homeland. What he found there didn’t confirm to the fairy tale of Europe as welfare state utopia and he isn’t afraid to say it. His anger at the sorry state of affairs in Italy is refreshing and just a little frightening.
Gomorrah isn’t a journalistic expose it’s a brilliantly written memoir of post modern life and an entertaining philosophical musing on the state of the modern world. Saviano has written an intellectual book that is both entertaining and thought provoking. Unfortunately it’s a book that will be ignored because it exposes the ugly reality under the tourist friendly welfare state veneer of modern Europe.

Saviano Roberto Gomorrah, New York, 2007, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, translated by Virginia Jewiss. Originally published in Italian in 2006 by Arnoldo, Mondadori Editore, S.p.A., Milan.