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.