Munich American
Peace Committee (MAPC)
Radio Lora, 14. Juli 2008
Alternative Radio
Naomi Klein
Die Schock-Strategie
Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, 5.9.2007
Die kanadische Journalistin,
Schriftstellerin und Filmemacherin Naomi Klein ist Trägerin
zahlreicher Auszeichnungen und Ehrungen. Ihre Artikel erscheinen in
allen großen und wichtigen Zeitungen der Welt. In dem
Dokumentarfilm „The Take“ schildert sie die
Wirtschaftskrise in Argentinien. Ihr Buch „No Logo“ ist
weltweit ein Bestseller. Heute stellt Naomi Klein ihr neues
Buch„Die Schock Strategie“ vor.
Die Begriffe „Schock-Strategie und
„Katastrophen-Kapitalismus“ sind für mich Synonyme
für den Neoliberalismus mit seiner Ideologie der Privatisierung
und der Deregulierung zu Gunsten der Konzerne. In meinem Buch
„The Shock Doctrine“ beschreibe ich, wie schamlos man sich
der von Terrorattacken, Naturkatastrophen und Währungskrisen
ausgelösten Schocks bedient, um den weltweit unpopulären
Neoliberalismus durchzusetzen und sich dazu die lähmende Ohnmacht,
die solchen Katastrophen folgt, zunutze macht.
Terrorattacken, Naturkatastrophen und Kriege hinterlassen schmerzhafte
auch wirtschaftliche Traumen, die schnell zu einem Einfallstor für
skrupellose Wirtschaftsreformen werden können, genauso wie
Menschen unter Folter erzwungene Geständnisse ablegen oder ihre
Überzeugungen verraten. Dieser Zusammenhang wurde mir während
meines Aufenthaltes in Bagdad klar, als sich die Bush Regierung ihrer
so genannten „Shock and Awe“ Strategie - einer Kombination
aus militärischer und psychologischer Kriegsführung -
brüstete. Dabei ging es nicht um den militärischen Sieg
über Saddam Hussein, sondern um die Traumatisierung und
Desorientierung der irakischen Zivilbevölkerung. Während
Bagdad noch in Flammen stand, ließ der US Bevollmächtigte
Paul Bremer nach jahrelangen, brutalen Sanktionen alle Handelsschranken
niederreißen, ohne Rücksicht auf die Gesundheit und die
Sicherheit der Bevölkerung. Es sollte ein beispielloser
Wirtschaftsboom ausgelöst werden, der es dem Irak ermöglichen
würde, seinen Wiederaufbau selbst zu finanzieren.
Jedoch, wer ein Land besetzen und wieder aufbauen will, darf nicht an Wunder glauben.
Weder die „Shock and Awe“ Strategie noch der Sturz Saddam
Husseins brachten die Iraker dazu, sich manipulieren zu lassen, im
Gegenteil, Widerstand flammte auf gegen die Besatzer und deren dreistes
Wirtschaftsexperiment. Anfangs handelte es sich dabei fast nie um
bewaffneten Widerstand, sondern um Protestaktionen. Hätten die
Iraker die ihnen versprochene Demokratie bekommen, sie hätten sich
allein mit demokratischen Mitteln gegen dieses ihnen aufoktroyierte
Wirtschaftsprogramm gewährt.
Im Oktober 2004, nach einem heißen Sommer mit noch mehr Paul
Bremer Gesetzen entstanden die berühmt berüchtigten Fotos von
Abu Ghraib. Damals war der Krieg in die Gefängnisse verlagert
worden. Donald Rumsfeld - der getreue Schüler des neoliberalen
Wirtschaftsweisen Milton Friedman – führte den Irak Krieg
wie einen Wal Mart. Er kürzte das Personal bis an die
Schmerzgrenze. Als dann die Aufstände losbrachen, gab es nicht
genügend Soldaten, um sie niederzuschlagen – stattdessen
warf man die Widerständler einfach zu Tausenden ins Gefängnis
und begann mit den systematischen Folterungen.
- 2 -
Während der Weihnachtsfeiertage 2004 waren besonders viele arme
Fischer Opfer des Tsunami geworden, und in Sri Lanka geschah das, was
man schon im Irak beobachten konnte. Das Wasser hatte sich noch nicht
ganz zurückgezogen, die Toten waren noch nicht geborgen, als die
Weltbank, der Internationale Währungs-Fond, das
US-Außenministerium und die Regierung von Sri Lanka sich
anschickten, die Wasserwirtschaft zu privatisieren und Tausende der
gerade dem Tode entronnenen, traumatisierten Fischer angeblich aus
Sicherheitsgründen ins Landesinnere zu verfrachten - fernab von
jeglicher Einkommensquelle. Die Küstengebiete dagegen wurden nicht
zuletzt dank der Tsunami-Spendengelder an Großfischereiflotten
und Investoren für Ferienanlagen verhökert. Die in Lager
eingesperrten, streng bewachten Fischer gingen leer aus. So wurden die
Opfer einer gewaltigen Naturkatastrophe auch noch die Opfer staatlicher
Willkür und Gewalt.
2005, als in New Orleans die von den Neoliberalen vernachlässigten
Dämme brachen, spielte sich das gleiche Drama ab. Es war nicht der
Hurrikan Katrina, der die Katastrophe auslöste, es war die
fehlende Infrastruktur, die eine geregelte, menschenwürdige
Evakuierung ermöglicht hätte. Statt um Strände ging es
hier um Bauland. Für die Bau-Lobby entpuppte sich die
Tragödie zu einem Glücksfall. Man war die angeblich
kriminellen Bewohner der Armenviertel los und konnte endlich chice
Wohnblocks mit ein paar wenigen Alibi-Sozialwohnungen hochziehen. Das
Krankenhaus, in dem man früher kostenlos behandelt wurde, hat bis
heute seinen Betrieb nicht wieder aufgenommen. Öffentliche Schulen
wurden samt und sonders in Privatschulen umgewandelt.
Der Katastrophen-Kapitalismus ist durchaus nichts Neues. In Chile,
Argentinien und Uruguay hat man damit schon in den 70er Jahren
Bekanntschaft machen müssen. Damals bedienten sich die Vertreter
der Chicago-Schule militärischer Umstürze, um ihre Theorien
in die Praxis umsetzen zu können. Tatsächlich hatten Milton
Friedman und Friedrich von Hayek bereits in den 1950 Jahren damit
begonnen, im Auftrag des US Außenministeriums die politische
Landschaft in Lateinamerika zu verändern. Mit
großzügigen Stipendien wurden anfangs chilenische,
später auch andere lateinamerikanische Studenten nach Chicago
eingeladen, wo man sie mit den Ideologien des freien Marktes vertraut
machte und ihnen erklärte, dass nur eine Krise wirkliche
Veränderungen ermögliche und dass zur Bewältigung dieser
Krise den von Milton Friedman entwickelten Regeln zu folgen sei.
Eine nicht weniger menschenverachtende Idee geht auf die kanadische
Universität McGill zurück. Hier entwickelte der amerikanische
Psychiater Ewen Cameron mit Hilfe von Drogen, Elektroschocks und
Isolationsfolter die berüchtigten so genannten „kreativen
Vernehmungsmethoden“. Es dauerte nicht lange, bis sich die CIA
für seine Experimente zu interessieren begann. Etwa zur gleichen
Zeit fand Camerons Kollege, der Psychologe Donald Hebb, heraus, dass
Studenten, deren Gehör-, Gesichts- und Tastsinn unter
Isolationsbedingungen blockiert wurde, plötzlich zu halluzinieren
begannen und Ansichten vertraten, die ihren vorhergehenden
Einstellungen diametral widersprachen.
Seelen unter Schock und traumatisierte Länder, das waren die
Curricula der von der CIA organisierten und subventionierten
lateinamerikanischen Militär- und Polizeischulen.
- 3 -
Am 11. September 1973 konnten alle diese Theorien in Chile erfolgreich
umgesetzt werden. Noch bevor die Leiche von Salvador Allende
identifiziert war, wurden im brennenden Präsidentenpalast
fieberhaft Papiere vervielfältigt, die die Privatisierung des
Sozial- und Bildungssystems verkündeten und eine Einheitssteuer
von nur 15 % versprachen. Zur Durchsetzung dieses neoliberalen
Wunschprogramms spielten sich - vor den Augen der
Weltöffentlichkeit - in den Sportstadien Massenfolterungen ab und
wurde die gesamte chilenische Bevölkerung in Todesangst und
Schrecken versetzt.
Nur allzu gerne verschweigen die Anhänger des Reaganismus und des Thatcherismus der 80er Jahre diese blutigen Wurzeln.
1982 stand die Thatcher-Regierung mit ihren Privatisierungsplänen
und dem Versuch, die Macht der Gewerkschaften zu brechen, kurz vor dem
Scheitern und als Friedrich von Hayek von der chilenischen neoliberalen
Revolution schwärmte, wehrte die Eiserne Lady ab, weil sie
derartige Maßnahmen in einer Demokratie für
undurchführbar hielt.
Nach dem Falklandkrieg und nach 910 Toten auf beiden Seiten stieg ihre
Popularitätskurve wieder steil nach oben. Sie gewann die Wahlen
und privatisierte alles, was nicht niet und nagelfest war: British
Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, die British Airport Authority,
British Steel und British Petroleum.
Ist das nicht der beste Beweis dafür, dass auch demokratische
Regierungen unpopuläre Maßnahmen mit Hilfe von Krisen
durchzusetzen?
Neoliberale Wirtschaftler behaupten nur allzu gerne, dass die
Schocktherapie in Bolivien 1985 ausschließlich mit friedlichen
und demokratischen Mitteln angewendet worden sei.
Dabei wird unterschlagen, dass sich Präsident Victor Paz
Estenssoro nach seiner umstrittenen Wiederwahl fast über Nacht von
einem entschiedenen Anhänger der Staatswirtschaft plötzlich
zu einem devoten Schüler der Milton Friedman Schule entwickelt
hatte. Als nach der Entlassung von 22 000 Bergarbeitern die Menschen
auf die Straße gingen, verhängte er den Ausnahmezustand und
ließ 200 Gewerkschaftsführer in ein Internierungslager
verschleppen und erst nach Beendigung der wochenlangen Streiks wieder
zurückbringen. All das verschweigen die Neoliberalen wenn sie den
Sieg über die Armut und Hyperinflation bejubeln.
Der Hurrikan Mitch von 1998 ist ein weiteres Beispiel für den so
genannten Katastrophen-Kapitalismus. Anstatt den traumatisierten Opfern
in Nikaragua und Guatemala zu helfen, benützte man diese
Naturkatastrophe zu einer Nacht- und Nebelaktion in Sachen
Privatisierung, ganz so, als würde man bei einem Autounfall
anstatt Hilfe zu leisten, dem wehrlosen Opfer die Brieftasche klauen.
Das „Wall Street Journal“ bezeichnete diesen Coup damals
als „Total-Ausverkauf nach dem Sturm“
Das waren die Anfänge einer gefährlichen
Wirtschaftsideologie, für die Milton Friedman sogar mit dem
Nobelpreis ausgezeichnet wurde. Heute können wir im Irak und in
Afghanistan beobachten, wie mit Hilfe militärischer Gewalt und
brutaler Folter eine Bresche für den Freien Markt geschlagen wird,
genauso wie mit Jelzins Angriff auf das Parlament und dem Massaker auf
dem Platz des Himmlischen Friedens.
Nach dem Untergang der Sowjetunion rechnete man weltweit mit den
Gräueln des Kommunismus ab. Dieser Reinigungsprozess steht
für die Verbrechen im Namen des Kapitalismus noch aus. Deshalb ist
es an uns, die Wahrheit aufzudecken, denn nur dann sind wir gegen die
Schock-Strategien gefeit.
NAOMI KLEIN
The Shock Doctrine
Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec 5 September 2007
Naomi Klein of Canada is an award-winning journalist, author and
filmmaker. Her articles appear in major newspapers and magazines all
over the world. Her documentary film on the economic crisis in
Argentina is "The Take." "No Logo," her book on globalization and
marketing was an international bestseller. Her latest book is "The
Shock Doctrine."
I'm going to be talking about disaster capitalism and something I'm
calling the shock doctrine. I first want to start by defining these
terms. What I mean by the shock doctrine and disaster capitalism, which
are really two phrases for the same phenomenon, is the idea that in
order to introduce a radical version of free market economics-and I
think we know what we mean. In Latin America they call it neoliberalism
or el modello, the Washington
consensus. Those are all the names that have been used. It's a bit of a
shape shifter, this ideology. But the triumvirate is privatization of
pretty much everything in sight, deregulation in the interests of
corporations, and cuts to essential government services, so cutting
back those aspects of government that help people directly and
intervening in the interests of corporations, protecting property
rights, and so on. It's the building of a corporate world.
What I argue in the book is that these policies are so unpopular around
the world that the ideologues of this movement have needed to harness
great shocks-terrorist attacks, natural disasters, currency crises-in
order to advance this ideology, taking advantage of the window of
opportunity that opens up when there has been a kind of a body blow to
a nation, when we lose our footing, when we lose our story, when we
lose our sense of where we fit in history. Those moments of
vulnerability can be opened up through a huge range of disasters. And
it is in that moment when this radical version of capitalism advances.
That's what I mean by the shock doctrine, that's what I mean by
disaster capitalism.
The three forms of shock that I look at, and I look at the
interrelationship among these three forms of shock, are the shocks to
countries, the ones I've just described-the terrorist attacks, natural
disasters, wars, these body blows; the second shock is the one that
follows in the aftermath, economic shock therapy, as the economists
call it, the extreme country makeovers that we see in the immediate
aftermath of the first shock; the third shock I look at is the
corporeal shock, the body shock of torture, and the way in which
torture serves as an enforcement tool for economic shock therapy and
also how torture is a kind of a metaphor for disaster capitalism.
Because, after all, what disaster capitalism does, what disaster
capitalists do to countries reeling from shock is they take advantage
of that window of opportunity when whole societies are not able to
protect their interests. And what is it that prison interrogators do?
They do that very same thing. They try to put a prisoner into a state
of psychological shock and trauma. And in that window of opportunity
that opens up when people are unmade, it is in that moment when they
are least able to protect their interests and supposedly give the
interrogator what they are looking for, whether it be a confession or
information, a renunciation of their beliefs.
I became interested in this intersection of these three forms of shock
when I was in Baghdad reporting on the occupation for Harpers magazine.
I was there a year into the occupation, and I was studying and
researching the campaign that the Bush administration proudly called
Shock and Awe, which was a military strategy that was proudly as much
about psychology as it was about militarism. If you read the manual for
shock-and-awe warfare, the shock-and-awe manual talks about how this is
a campaign of war that pits itself against the strategy that was used
during the First Gulf War, where they say that the U.S. military
targeted Saddam's military infrastructure. But now the shock-and-awe
strategy targets the Iraqi population and tries to put the whole
population into a state of shock. So I was looking at how this military
strategy, which was designed as a psychological strategy of mass
trauma, mass psychological disorientation, was harnessed by the
economic shock therapists, with Paul Bremer at the helm.
Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. envoy, who rode into Iraq while the city
was still burning, by his own accounts, and the first thing he does is
declare it open for business and takes Iraq from the most closed
economy in the world, because of the brutal sanctions regime of the
1990s, to suddenly becoming the widest open market anywhere in the
world, where the borders are so open to trade that there aren't even
any health and safety regulations for any products whatsoever. The idea
was that this jolt of capitalism, of unregulated free markets, would
create an economic boom the likes of which the world had never seen,
and Iraq would essentially rebuild itself. That's what happens when you
have countries occupied and reconstructed by people who don't believe
in government. They believe in magic, actually.
I quote in the book the theory behind all of this shock. I quote
Richard Armitage, former Undersecretary of State, who said, The working
theory was that Iraqis would be so disoriented by the shock-and-awe
campaign and by the collapse of Saddam "that they would be easily
marshaled from point A to point B." There is a lot you can say
about the Iraqi people, but they are not easy to marshal from point A
to point B. This strategy really backfired, and Iraqis resisted. They
resisted the occupation, they resisted this bald experiment in social
and economic engineering, and the resistance began.
The resistance at first was not an armed resistance, except from very
small parts of the country. It was protests. It was protests outside
the Green Zone. And it became clear that if Iraqis had the democracy
that was being promised to them, that they would use that democracy to
oppose this economic program, because Iraqis are a nationalist people
and they were not going to hand their country over that easily.
It was in this context, after that very first hot summer of country
remaking under Paul Bremer, after all that wave of protests, that you
started to see the third shock emerge in Iraq. It was October 2004,
after Paul Bremer's summer of law making, that the images that have
become so famous out of Abu Ghraib were taken. That's when the war
really moved into the jails. Because as we know, Donald Rumsfeld, who
is a disciple of Milton Friedman, decided to run the invasion a little
bit like a Wal-Mart executive, and he cut and he cut and he cut, and
there were very few soldiers on the ground. When the plan didn't go as
anticipated and people resisted, they didn't have the ability to fight
the war in the streets, so they moved the war into the jails, and they
just scooped up thousands of people. That's when torture became
systematic in Iraq.
So in Iraq we saw that triple-shock formula. I was in Argentina at the
time. We were making the film The Take. It felt somehow that there was
a connection between what was happening there and in Argentina, where
neoliberalism was being rejected. This was 2003, after five governments
had been overthrown, where there was a popular rejection of
neoliberalism on the streets. I wrote at the time, maybe free trade
lite, that had been enforced through arm twisting at trade summits and
as conditions of the International Monetary Fund, was being upgraded to
free trade heavy, where new markets are simply being seized on the
battlefields of preemptive war. But at the time I thought this formula
of disaster capitalism was perhaps unique to Iraq.
Then the tsunami happened, the Asian tsunami, just the day after
Christmas in 2004. A few months later, I got an e-mail from a list
serve I'm on from a man named Herman Kumara, who heads the association
of small boat fishing people in Sri Lanka. Who were the casualties of
that horrible natural disaster? They were overwhelmingly the people who
live on the coast, the people who live precarious lives. Because, of
course, it's always the people who lead the most precarious lives who
are hit hardest by all forms of disaster. So the majority of the
victims, around 90%, were small boat fishing people who had huts on the
beach and who made their living off the sea.
What Herman Kumara, who represented the small boat fishing people in
Sri Lanka, said in this e-mail-and this is three months after the
tsunami-was, "We're being hit with a second tsunami." He said,
"It's a second tsunami of corporate globalization and militarism." He
described what was happening, and it sounded so much like Iraq. He said
that the shock of the tsunami had been harnessed expertly by the World
Bank, by the International Monetary Fund, by the U.S. State Department,
in collaboration with the government that had been elected eight months
before the tsunami on an anti-privatization, anti-neoliberalism
platform. Four days after the tsunami hit, a bill opening the door for
water privatization was put forward by that government while the bodies
still hadn't been buried, taking advantage of that moment of trauma.
Then he also described how the fishing people had been moved to inland
camps, hundreds of thousands of people moved to inland camps, and this
was in the name of safety and security. They said, "If another tsunami
comes, you don't want to be hurt." But then the coasts were handed over
to large resort developers and to the industrial fishing fleets. So it
was shock therapy under the guise of reconstruction and aid, and it was
victimizing the people in whose name billions of dollars of aid had
been raised. And at the same time, those camps were starting to feel
more like jails. He said they were patrolled by soldiers. So you had
that third shock, which was the threat of state terror.
Then came New Orleans. Then came the levies breaking two years ago in
New Orleans. And we saw that triple shock formula again. The first
shock, of course, was the shock of the disaster itself, which was
caused by neoliberalism, which was caused by the steady neglect of the
public sphere. I just got back from New Orleans. Again and again you
hear people say, "Please remember the disaster was not a Category 5
hurricane. We were never hit with a Category 5 hurricane. The disaster
was the neglect of the levies and the neglect of the people, the fact
that there wasn't the infrastructure to organize an evacuation. It was
state failure. You can't blame nature for what happened in New Orleans."
I was there in the city just 10 days after the levies broke, and I was
so struck because I had just come back from this research in Sri Lanka,
where I had seen the coast being grabbed by hotel developers. I had
just gotten back. Then Katrina hit, and we went to New Orleans. And we
saw the same all over again. Only now it wasn't about the coastal land,
it was about the housing projects in New Orleans. We were talking to
lobbyists in Baton Rouge, who were saying things like, "Yes, it's a
tragedy, but it's also an opportunity, because, you know, those housing
projects were crime-ridden. And now we're going to convert them into
mixed-use housing," which means condominiums and a few token apartments
for the poor. What was left of the public sphere, the charity hospital,
the public hospital in New Orleans that treats the people without
insurance, still has not reopened; and the public school system in New
Orleans was immediately converted into this living laboratory for a
privatized charter school system. So that was the second shock,
economic shock therapy after the first shock.
We see how deeply antidemocratic this disaster capitalism impulse is.
Here you have New Orleans. And what's the opportunity? The opportunity
is that the people aren't there. The poor people have been boarded on
to buses and planes and spread all over the United States, separated
from their families and loved ones, and not given a ticket home. So the
opportunity that is opened up in these moments of crisis is the
opportunity to make politics without people. What a wonderful thing
that appears to be.
When I started this research, I thought that I was researching a new
phenomenon, that this exploitation of disaster, this deliberate
exploitation of disaster, as I said earlier, represented a ramping up
of the neoliberal crusade. But I remember being in Argentina when the
war in Iraq began and hearing from my friends in Buenos Aires, "This
happened to us, this happened to us." I didn't understand the parallels
that they saw, because, of course, this was a foreign invasion, this
was Shock and Awe. I didn't at the time understand the depths of the
observation that was being made about the parallels between the 1976
coup d'etat in Argentina.
But I think I have slowly begun to scratch the surface of understanding
how there is this continuity between what happened in Latin America in
the 1970s, particularly in the southern cone, when the southern
cone-Chile, Argentina, Uruguay-was a laboratory for the Chicago boys,
and how the shocks of those coups were used to lay the groundwork for
the first experiment in Chicago School economics in the real world,
when these ideas leapt from the textbook into the real world.
In the book I look at two laboratories for different kinds of shock.
The first is the one I just mentioned, the University of Chicago in the
1950s, under the spell of a charismatic professor named Milton
Friedman. Friedrich von Hayek was a visiting professor for a little
while at the University of Chicago. And I look at something that
Greg Grandin documents so well and so thoroughly in Empire's Workshop,
which is the way in which the University of Chicago in the 1950s and
1960s was not just a place where Latin Americans happened to study.
This was a deliberate program of the U.S. State Department, which was
part of a campaign to change the ideological landscape of Latin
America. Of course, now we have all kinds of declassified documents and
interviews with key players where we understand that there was a great
deal of concern at the State Department about the so-called pink
economists of Latin America. So while the University of Chicago in this
period, in the 1950s and 1960s was very marginal in the United States,
and Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek were seen basically as sort
of out-there wingnuts within the context of a period when Keynesianism
ruled in the United States and the welfare state was still strong, it
was understood that this little, sort of cultish environment at the
University of Chicago would provide a very good learning environment to
engage in an exercise in what some have called ideological transfer.
So a group of 100 privileged Chilean students-and it started with
Chileans but it expanded from there-were brought to the University of
Chicago on full scholarship, their tuition paid for by the State
Department and also by the Ford Foundation, so that they could study
with these free-market ideologues, who were marginal even in the United
States and who Nixon didn't even listen to when he got into power. He
said, "We're all Keynesians, now," didn't he? So this became the
laboratory. I want to read you a quote from Milton Friedman. He said
this, and this, to me, is the best articulation of what I mean by the
shock doctrine. He said, "Only a crisis-actual or perceived-produces
real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend
on the ideas that are lying around." Then he said, "That, I
believe, is our basic function." That was the function of the
University of Chicago, to get those ideas ready for the next crisis.
So I also looked at-and I'm telling you this because of where we are,
because we're in Montreal and we are near McGill University, one of the
preeminent post-secondary institutions in this country and certainly
the preeminent post-secondary education in this city-another crucial
laboratory for these shock treatments that have shaped our modern
history, McGill University. This was a different kind of shock, not
economic shock but the shocks to bodies. In the same period that the
State Department started funding this so-called Chile project at the
University of Chicago, the CIA became interested in what they called
creative interrogation techniques. They still call it creative
interrogation techniques, as a matter of fact. This was the heyday of
the infamous MKUltra experiments, MKUltra being the experiments into
all kinds of drug use, sensory deprivation. Ground zero of these
experiments was at McGill University. This is because there was a
psychiatrist at McGill-he was an American citizen but he came to Canada
and was head of psychiatry at McGill University-named Ewen Cameron.
Ewen Cameron's work caught the attention of the CIA. The reason why
Ewen Cameron's work caught the attention of the CIA is because Ewen
Cameron believed that if he used a method of just bombarding the minds
of his psychiatric patients with everything he could think of, massive
doses of electroshock, higher doses than anyone had ever attempted
before-some patients were subjected to 600 jolts of
electricity-experimental drugs, weird mixes of uppers and downers that
would put patients to sleep for weeks, what he could do is depattern
their personalities. He called it depatterning, but it was really about
this quest for the blank slate. He believed that mental illness came
later in life, that people learned patterns of mental illness, so he
thought that what he could do was he could regress his patients back to
the point when they were a fresh, newborn baby. And he deliberately
erased their memories, he deliberately reduced them to a state-he
thought the optimal state was when they lost some language, when they
didn't know whether they were married or not, when they became
incontinent, when they started to suck their thumbs and started to
think that their doctors were their parents. That was his goal. And
then he started repatterning them, remaking them by playing
tape-recorded messages over and over and over again. So the CIA started
funding Ewen Cameron because they saw in his research a way of unmaking
people.
There was another scholar at McGill, the head of the psychology
department, Donald Hebb, who was doing research into sensory
deprivation. He took McGill students and put them into extreme
sensory-deprivation situations where he blocked their ears, their eyes,
their sense of touch. And he found that after a couple of days they
started hallucinating and they became very receptive to ideas that they
had rejected earlier.
So in 1963-and we didn't know this at the time because it was
classified, but it's since been declassified-the CIA published a manual
called the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation.
It is an interrogation handbook for so-called resistant sources. The
handbook makes specific reference to the McGill experiments.
Essentially what the Kubark manual is-and Alfred McCoy, the wonderful historian at the University of Wisconsin, in his book A Question of Torture
has really laid all of this out-is a new method of breaking people's
personalities, bending people to your will. It's the use of extreme
sensory deprivation followed by sensory overload. This method was
field-tested, was taught in the field, through police training
programs, and it was also taught at the School of the Americas, and it
was also taught through the CIA. A generation of Latin America police
and soldiers were trained in these methods of deliberately inducing a
state of shock in prisoners and using this window of opportunity in
order to bend people to their will.
So you have these two twin shock labs, one at the University of
Chicago, which is focused on shocking economies, and one at McGill
University, which is focused on shocking minds. I was struck by the
similarities between the thinking in both of these laboratories, that
in both there was this quest for the blank slate, this fantasy that you
could wipe out minds and rebuild people. At the University of Chicago
they were dreaming of blank-slate countries where they could build an
idealized, fantasy version of capitalism. So you had these two shock
labs and you had these trained economists and you had these trained
soldiers and police. They really were lying in wait. They were waiting
for their moment.
And their moment came. Their moment came on September 11, 1973. This is
a room filled with Latin American scholars, and I know you know this
history well. But I think we haven't paid enough attention to this
intersection of the three forms of shock. There was the shock of the
coup, but remembering that on the night of the coup the Chicago boys
were busy mimeographing a document which was essentially a Spanish
version of Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom.
It was known in Chile as "the brick," because it was so thick. All
night, as La Moneda, the presidential palace in Santiago, burned, their
mimeograph machines churned away. And they produced this document,
which reads in an odd way like George W. Bush's 2000 election platform.
What does it talk about? Privatizing Social Security, charter schools,
a 15% flat tax. It's the wish list, which to this day has not been
imposed fully in the United States but was imposed in Chile in the
aftermath of that shock. Of course, that would have been absolutely
impossible without the third shock, the shock of torture, the shock of
terror and the display of terror, the theater of terror in the
stadiums, the warning of terror to the whole society.
We rarely hear about modern capitalism within the context of that ugly
chapter of our collective history. Instead, when we hear about the
free-market crusade-and we heard this a lot when Milton Friedman died
in 2006-it's usually fright-dated, isn't it? It's sort of like the
1970s become a lost decade, and they start in around 1982 with Thatcher
and Reagan. That's supposedly when these free-market policies,
Reaganism and Thatcherism, began their global crusade. The bloody roots
of the neoliberal project have largely been erased from the official
story.
One of the things that I think it is important to look at again is even
those places where the claim is that these policies were imposed
peacefully, because I think if we look more closely at them, we see
that the harnessing of shock, the harnessing of various states of shock
and states of exception, was crucial even in those circumstances when
we've all largely accepted the idea that it was a peaceful process. A
good example of this is Thatcher's Britain. Thatcher's Britain is often
held up as the example of, Look, these policies are compatible with an
advanced Western democracy.
Let's take another look at that. In 1982, Thatcher had been in power
for a few years, and her regime was in trouble. She had tried to break
the coalminers' union and had failed. She had wanted to privatize the
state companies, but there had been too much opposition. Her
government-this is after three years in office, in 1982-was at 18% in
the polls. That makes George W. Bush look good. Her own approval
ratings were at 25%, which were the lowest ratings in the history of
British polling. Thatcherism was about to come to a rather inglorious
end.
It was at that point, interestingly, that Friedrich von Hayek wrote
Margaret Thatcher a letter. He had just come back from Chile. He had
made a lot of trips to Chile. Hayek comes back from Chile, and he's
kind of like a kid who has just come back from Disneyland. He thinks it
is the greatest thing he's ever seen. He's like one of these kids who
wants to wear the Mickey Mouse ears to school the next day. So he
writes to Thatcher and he says-I'm paraphrasing here-You've got to do
this. You've got to check this out. They've really done it in Chile. He
was really Thatcher's intellectual guru, and he was advising her very
explicitly to adopt the Chile model in Britain.
And Thatcher rather snippily writes back, and I'll read you from the
letter-this is 1982- "I was aware of the remarkable success of the
Chilean economy. The progression from Allende's socialism to the free
enterprise capitalist economy of the 1980s is a striking example of
economic reform from which we can all learn many lessons. However, I am
sure you will agree," says the woman who is at 25% in the polls, "that,
in Britain, with our democratic institutions and the need for a high
degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite
unacceptable." So there you have it from the Iron Lady herself. The
neoliberal revolution just can't be pulled off in a democracy, not
under normal circumstances.
But it's once again Latin America that comes in to save the day.
Because Margaret Thatcher needed a crisis, and that crisis came when
the junta in Argentina decided to claim the Malvinas, known in Britain
as the Falklands. Thatcher had really neglected the Falklands, and
there was good reason, actually, to believe that she was no longer
interested in it. She cut spending on the navy and had sent, actually,
all kinds of signals that made it clear that she was not that
interested and maybe Jorge Luis Borges was right, this was just a
couple of bald men fighting over a comb. But I think Thatcher
recognized that she had just been handed the crisis that she needed,
and she went into full Churchillian battle mode for the Falkland
Islands. It was a last blast for British Empire.
Suddenly, she went from 25% in the polls to 59%, after she brought that
victory home. Nine hundred ten people were killed in the Falklands.
That's the combined death toll on both sides. Thatcher rode the
momentum from that military victory to launch the very procorporate
revolution that she had told Hayek was quite unacceptable a year
earlier. What she did is she very expertly translated the war that she
had just waged against Argentina into a war at home against the unions.
She said that "we had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands and
now we have to fight the enemy within, which is much more difficult but
just as dangerous to liberty." She was referring to coalminers. And she
did fight that so-called enemy within, and she fought it with force. It
was a tremendous operation of MI5, the secret police in Britain.
Extraordinary levels of surveillance of the union leadership and
extraordinary levels of overt repression on the front lines of that
struggle. There were thousands of injuries. She then went on to win the
next election. And she privatized pretty much everything she could at
the time: British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, the British
Airport Authority, British Steel, sold off shares in British Petroleum.
This was the first mass privatization in a Western democracy.
I think that the real lesson of Thatcherism is not that neoliberalism
was chosen democratically, transcending the need for shock that was so
clear in the 1970s in Latin America. The real lesson that Thatcher
discovered is that any crisis can create the opportunity to push
through unpopular policies that wouldn't be accepted under normal
circumstances. That was the lesson.
When neoliberal economists debate people like me, they often hold up
Bolivia as an example disproving the claim that this ideology requires
force, requires shock. You often hear, Look at Bolivia in 1985. This
was a country in hyperinflation. There was a very ambitious shock
therapy program that was imposed, but it was imposed in the context of
a democracy and it was imposed peacefully. I think this does require
another look at how we are defining peacefully and how we are defining
democracy.
It was a sort of kinder, gentler form of shock therapy, and it was not
imposed by the gruff Milton Friedman. It was imposed by Jeffrey Sachs
at age 30, or prescribed, at least, by Jeffrey Sachs, who was much more
likable. I think he was really the only person in some ways who could
have helped the transition from the dictatorship era to the democratic
era for this economic ideology. I hasten to add that I do believe that
Jeffrey Sachs really is a different breed from the Chicago boys, than
Milton Friedman. I see him in a completely different category in the
sense that I actually do believe that he believes that he is helping.
But I think the record is quite devastating in Bolivia, Poland, Russia,
and so on. I'll leave it there.
There was a democracy in Bolivia in 1985. There had just been
elections, historic elections. They were very contested elections. It
wasn't entirely clear who had one. But Victor Paz Estenssoro was
appointed president. Victor Paz Estenssoro had run on an explicitly
nationalist platform. And, of course, Bolivians thought that they knew
what they were getting because he had been their president before and
he was really the godfather of economic nationalism in that country,
who had nationalized the mines and so on. So even though the campaign
had been a little bit vague, it was certainly seen as a victory of
sorts for economic nationalism in 1985.
Even though this did take place in the immediate aftermath of
elections, I think that if we look at what actually happened, it was
anything but democratic. Four days after being named president,
Estenssoro did something quite extraordinary: he struck an emergency
economic team. He didn't even tell his own cabinet that he had done
this, that the team even existed. The team, which had 10 members, met
for 17 straight days in the home of Gonzales Sanchez de Lozada, Goni's
house. The descriptions of these meetings by people who were part of
them say that they were clandestine, that people didn't even know where
they were going, they didn't know what was happening. They came up with
an extraordinary document that bears a lot of resemblance to the
document that the Chicago boys in Chile photocopied that night. It was
a decree which had 220 laws within it. Once again, this strategy of all
at once, economic shock therapy, extreme country makeover. It was the
Bolivian version of "the brick."
There are a few things that are interesting about this document. One is
that the Bolivians who proposed the plan, this radical shock therapy
plan, were aware of how shocking it would be to the country. I want to
quote Bolivia's planning minister, who was part of this clandestine
group that came up with this decree. Actually, I don't think this quote
has ever been translated into English before. He says, "We have to be
like the pilot of Hiroshima. When he dropped the atomic bomb, he didn't
know what he was doing. But when he saw the smoke, he said 'Oops,
sorry.' And that's exactly what we have to do: launch the measures and
then say, 'Oops, sorry.'" That's economic shock therapy for you.
This really was like a bomb. The state mining corporation alone, the
same one Paz Estenssoro had nationalized in the 1950s, was downsized
from 28,000 employees to 6,000 employees.
When you launch an economic shock therapy program like this, obviously,
if it is a democracy, people will react. And they did react. They
reacted by staging massive strikes in the streets. Tens of thousands
took to the streets. And, of course, most of the opposition came from
the unions. What the government did in response to this mobilization
was declare not one but two states of siege, two consecutive states of
siege, and not once but twice, in order to suppress mobilizations in
the street. The union leadership, 200 union leaders, were rounded up,
boarded onto planes and taken to internment camps, and held in the
Amazon for weeks, until their membership agreed to call off the strikes.
So it's quite extraordinary. I read Jeffrey Sachs's account of what
happened in Bolivia in this period. He has a whole chapter on the
success of Bolivia in his book The End of Poverty. I bring this up
because this is where the official history is being told, in forums
like this. He has a whole chapter on how they slayed hyperinflation in
Bolivia, which they did do for a time. And he holds it up as an example
of the first time these radical economic policies were imposed in the
context of a democracy. What I found just extraordinary is in this
account, an entire chapter in the book about this transition, he didn't
mention the states of siege, not once. It is not mentioned that the
government had to declare a state of siege, with curfews, where people
had to get special permission to travel in the country, where radio
stations were raided. It's just not part of the history. And the
internment and the rounding up of the union leadership, it's not part
of the history. It's not even mentioned once. So the official story
becomes, Bolivia proves that it's possible to impose these policies
democratically.
Because we're running behind schedule, I want to jump ahead to the
conclusion. The roots of what we're seeing now and the types of
disaster capitalism that I was describing earlier, with the harnessing
of natural disasters to introduce rapid-fire privatization, that
happened in 1998 after Hurricane Mitch. I think we need to think about
what's going on right now in Central America with Hurricane Felix and
realizing that this tragedy, yet another tragedy, will very likely, if
we aren't ready, be harnessed in the same way by international lenders
to push through privatization policies when people are least able to
resist. To me, this is the moral equivalent of stopping by a car
accident scene and, instead of helping, picking someone's pocket, to
take advantage of a moment of trauma like this. That is exactly what
happened after Hurricane Mitch. In the two months post-Mitch, Guatemala
announced plans to sell off its phone system, Nicaragua did the same,
the electricity company was also privatized, the petroleum sector. The
Wall Street Journal ran an article called "The Speed Sell-Off after the
Storm." That was a pretty prime example of disaster capitalism.
Why does this matter? It matters because it's still happening. And this
ability to cleanse the violence, to cleanse the shock, to cleanse the
repression that has been required to impose this model is
extraordinarily dangerous. The Chicago boys' first experiment in Chile
should have served as a warning for humanity that theirs is a dangerous
idea that can only be imposed under extraordinarily violent
circumstances. Instead, Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize. By failing
to hold the ideology accountable for the crimes committed in its first
laboratory, this subculture of unrepentant ideologues was given
immunity, freed to scour the globe for the next conquest.
This matters because we are once again, living in an era of corporatist
massacres, with countries like Iraq and Afghanistan suffering
tremendous military violence alongside attempts to remake them into
model free-market economies. Disappearances and torture are back with a
vengeance. And yet the goals of building these idealized
free-market-model states and the need for such brutality is still
treated as if there is no connection between these two projects.
After Milton Friedman died, there was a torrent of words written in
eulogy, but the role of shocks and crisis to advance his world view
barely received a mention. Instead, his death provided an occasion for
a retelling of the official story of how his brand of radical
capitalism became government orthodoxy in almost every corner of the
globe. It's a fairy-tale version of history, scrubbed clean of all the
violence, whether it was Yeltzen's attack on parliament in 1993 or Deng
Xiaoping's attacks on the students and labor demonstrators in Tiananmen
Square, which paved the way for the transition of China into the
export-processing zone for the world. This fairy-tale version of
history has been scrubbed clean of the violence and the coercion that
has been so intimately entwined with the crusade. It is far past time
for this to change.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a powerful
collective reckoning with the great crimes committed in the name of
communism. This has been a healthy process for the left. It's crucial
that we understand that ideologies that require violence are dangerous.
We must confront this history, however painful. But what of the
contemporary crusade to liberate world markets? The coups, wars, and
slaughters to install and maintain procorporate regimes have never been
treated as capitalist crimes. If the most committed opponents of this
economic model are systematically eliminated, whether in Argentina in
the 1970s or Iraq today, that suppression is explained away as part of
a dirty fight against communism then or terrorism now, almost never as
a fight for the advancement of pure capitalism.
My talk today has only scratched the surface of the part that Latin
America has played in this untold history of the so-called free market.
But I want to urge all of you-and I know so many of you are doing this
already-to keep filling those gaps, to keep fighting against the
sanitization of history. And I think that you also know that knowing
history, having a narrative to hold on to to keep us sane and oriented,
is the very best form of shock resistance. Thank you.
Q&A
The question had to do with resistance.
I mentioned I was in New Orleans recently. The reason why I went there,
there was an extraordinary exchange going on between survivors of the
Asian tsunami in India, people from Tamil Nadu, which was hit very
hard, who traveled to New Orleans to meet with Katrina survivors. They
were trading stories and they were trading strategies for dealing with
disaster capitalism. There was an organizer based in New Orleans at
this meeting named Saket Soni. He is one of the people working at the
Workers' Center for Racial Justice in New Orleans, which is trying to
organize the mostly Latin American workers who have come to New Orleans
to find work. And there is a lot of tension between African American
residents of New Orleans and the migrant workers, who they see as
taking their jobs, and so on.
Saket Soni said, "They have disaster capitalism. We need disaster
collectivism," which I thought was a great phrase. And I do feel that I
have seen some examples of disaster collectivism in action. The film
The Take is about the occupied factory movement in Argentina. Of
course, it spread beyond Argentina. You have just an explosion of the
cooperative economy in Venezuela, explosion because, unlike in
Argentina, where there is really no state support or, at times, state
repression of these attempts to take what has been discarded and left
behind by capital in that country, the slow-motion disaster that is
neoliberalism. In the rubble of neoliberalism, in the abandoned
factories that have been boarded up, people moving in and trying to put
those factories back to work often meet with state repression. That's
where this issue of resistance comes in, because that is a form of
peaceful resistance that often becomes violent because of the violence
of the state against these alternatives. Venezuela is a different
situation because you have a state government that has decided to
support the cooperative economy as an alternative to neoliberalism. So
it's been able to expand exponentially, and actually be a significant
part of the economy, unlike in Argentina, where we're talking about 200
workplaces.
I think that we are seeing glimpses. The last chapter of the book, the
conclusion of the book, I call "Starting from Scrap," because I see
this ethos really as the antithesis of the ethos of the blank-slaters,
who want to wipe everything clean and they want everything shiny and
new. Whether it's the MST, Landless People's Movement, taking fallow
land that has been left abandoned and putting that land back to work
through cooperative farming or the co-ops in the occupied factories,
you have this same ethos of just taking what has been left behind, the
rusty tools, whatever hasn't been looted and stolen and taken, and
whoever is left behind starting not from scratch but from scrap.
I always think of something that William Gibson, the science fiction
writer, said once. He said, "There are two kinds of science fiction
writers: there are the people who think that the world is going to be
shiny and new, and there is the rest of us, who know that it's going to
be rusty, that it's going to be what's been left behind by capital." We
know what it looks like when capital abandons industrial sectors: the
ghost towns around the world, the rusty leftovers of capitalism. What
we're starting to see now are the moldy leftovers of capitalism in
places that have been hit by this collision between the war on the
state, the neoliberal war on the bones of the state, the attack on big
government. The bones of our states are getting really brittle-the
bridges, the levies, the roads. And when those brittle bones of the
state are met with heavy weather, and increasingly heavy weather, then
you start to see situations like we saw in New Orleans.
So I think that, yes, these are glimpses of the future, disaster
collectivism. I just think these are hints of a way of building another
society in the rubble that is left behind. I say this because I think
that the left can be guilty of longing for crisis precisely for the
same reason the right does-this idea of just blasting people out of the
way and some idea that you can finally get your way. And when we look
at the living experiments, where people are building the experiments
that we so admire, people are at the very center, as opposed to just
blasting people out of the way. It's the right to a life of dignity, a
right to land, a right to work that is at the very center of these
movements that we're talking about. This, to me, points the way
forward.
There is also some hope in the fact that shock is a temporary state by
its very nature. I think Latin America is starting to point the way
towards alternatives, in some ways because this is where the experiment
began. In the book I quote the Argentine investigative journalist,
Rodolfo Walsh, where he predicted that it would take 20 to 30 years
before the terror that was imposed under the dictatorship would wear
off and people would regain their confidence once again. You mentioned
the awe. I think there is awe, but I think there is also a kind of a
terror hangover in countries that have experienced the state terror in
recent memory. It doesn't just lift overnight, just because there have
been elections. It takes time. But shock does eventually wear off.
One of the moments that I always remember about the importance of
understanding that history is what happened in Argentina in 2001, on
December 19, 2001, when there was a crisis, a severe economic shock.
People were locked out of their bank accounts, there was looting in the
suburbs. The president, Fernando de la Rúa, goes on television
on December 19, 2001, declares a state of siege, and says, The country
is in danger, bad people are taking over. Stay in your homes. He
imposes a curfew. And while he's talking, people start hearing pots and
pans in the streets, and people are pouring out of their houses and
rejecting the state of siege, rejecting this attempt to exploit the
crisis.
At that time there were plans for the IMF to use that crisis to impose
even more drastic austerity measures. People rejected it. If you ask
them why, they say, "Because it reminded us of something. It reminded
us of the way in which we were complicit with the loss of our rights in
1976." So there were those historical echoes. This was a country,
imperfect as the process was, that had gone through that hard work of
looking at its own history, enough to be able to identify the patterns.
That's why I think it's so important.
Debt is an important point. We understand debt
as a discipline for entire countries, as a disciplining force. We know
how the IMF uses debt to enforce policies and to enforce obedience.
But, of course, it's also true on an individual level that debt is a
tremendous enforcer of these policies.
Other AR Naomi Klein programs -
Naomi Klein - Economic Warfare: From Argentina to Iraq
Naomi Klein - No Logo
Naomi Klein - Debacle in Iraq
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