The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Author: Naomi Klein
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 over the past few years, 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.
Author Biography
Naomi Klein is the award-winning author of the acclaimed international bestseller No Logo and the essay collection Fences and Windows. An internationally syndicated columnist, she co-created with Avi Lewis, The Take, a documentary film.
The New York Times - Joseph E. Stiglitz
One of the world's most famous antiglobalization activists and the author of the best seller No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Klein provides a rich description of the political machinations required to force unsavory economic policies on resisting countries, and of the human toll. She paints a disturbing portrait of hubris, not only on the part of Friedman but also of those who adopted his doctrines, sometimes to pursue more corporatist objectives.
The Washington Post - Shashi Tharoor
The Shock Doctrine is a valuable addition to the corpus of popular books that have attempted to rethink the big ideas of our post-Cold War age. Francis Fukuyama's notion of the "end of history"—the idea that all societies would be governed by liberal democracy and free markets—started the process of reflection; Samuel Huntington's concept of the "clash of civilizations" underpinned much of the anxiety that followed the realization that reports of history's demise were exaggerated. Thomas Friedman's celebration of the flatness of the globalized world is now countered by Klein's argument that when disasters flatten societies, capitalists see opportunities to profit and spread their influence. Each thesis has its flaws, but each contributes to the contest of ideas about the shape and direction of our current Age of Uncertainty. For this reason, and for the vigor and accessibility with which she marshals her argument, Naomi Klein is well worth reading.
Mark Engler - Dissent
This is an ambitious book, an accomplished book, and an important one, too. It makes contributions in several key ways.
Publishers Weekly
The neo-liberal economic policies-privatization, free trade, slashed social spending-that the "Chicago School" and the economist Milton Friedman have foisted on the world are catastrophic in two senses, argues this vigorous polemic. Because their results are disastrous-depressions, mass poverty, private corporations looting public wealth, by the author's accounting-their means must be cataclysmic, dependent on political upheavals and natural disasters as coercive pretexts for free-market "reforms" the public would normally reject. Journalist Klein (No Logo) chronicles decades of such disasters, including the Chicago School makeovers launched by South American coups; the corrupt sale of Russia's state economy to oligarchs following the collapse of the Soviet Union; the privatization of New Orleans's public schools after Katrina; and the seizure of wrecked fishing villages by resort developers after the Asian tsunami. Klein's economic and political analyses are not always meticulous. Likening free-market "shock therapies" to electroshock torture, she conflates every misdeed of right-wing dictatorships with their economic programs and paints a too simplistic picture of the Iraq conflict as a struggle over American-imposed neo-liberalism. Still, much of her critique hits home, as she demonstrates how free-market ideologues welcome, and provoke, the collapse of other people's economies. The result is a powerful populist indictment of economic orthodoxy. (Sept.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationKirkus Reviews
Klein (Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, 2002, etc.) tracks the forced imposition of economic privatization, rife with multinational corporate parasites, on areas and nations weakened by war, civil strife or natural disasters. The author follows John Perkins (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, 2004) and others in pointing an alarmed finger at a global "corporatocracy" that combines the worst features of big business and small government. The difference is that Klein's book incorporates an amount of due diligence, logical structure and statistical evidence that others lack. As a result, she is persuasive when she links past and present events, including the war in Iraq and trashing of its economy, to the systematic march of laissez-faire capitalism and the downsizing of the public sector as both a worldview and a political methodology. Klein fully establishes the influence of U.S. economist Milton Friedman, who died in November 2006, as champion of the free-market transformations that occurred initially in South America, where Friedmanite minions trained at the University of Chicago in the 1960s worked their wiles on behalf of some of the 20th century's most repressive regimes. On to China's Tiananmen Square, then to the collapsed Soviet Union, where oligarchs soared and the underclass was left to starve in the 1990s. More recent developments include forcing private development on the tsunami-ravaged beachfronts of South Asia and junking the public-school system in favor of private charter schools in post-Katrina New Orleans. Just as provocative is Klein's analysis of the Bush administration's rampant outsourcing of U.S. governmentresponsibilities, including the entire "homeland security industry," to no-bid corporate contractors and their expense-laden chains of subcontractors. Her account of that methodology's consequences in Iraq, as mass unemployment coincided with the disbanding of a standing army whose soldiers took their guns home, leaves little doubt as to why there is an enduring insurgency. Required reading for anyone trying to pierce the complexities of globalization.
New interesting book: Developing the Public Relations Campaign or Television Field Production and Reporting
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
Author: Adam Hochschild
In the 1880's, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and largely unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed the population by ten million--all while shrewdly cultivating his international reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose this secret crime finally led to the first great international human rights movement of the 20th century in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated.
King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting portrait of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply involving story of those who fought Leopold and of the explorers, missionaries, and rubber workers who witnessed the horror. With a cast of characters richer than any novelist could invent, this book will permanently inscribe these too long forgotten events on the conscience of the West.
Literary Review Magazine - Robin Blackburn
This book provides a wonderfully vivid account of an episode in the modern history of Africa that was tragic and terrible.... King Leopold's Ghost is an exemplary piece of history-writing: urgent, vivid and compelling.
The Economist
To an already long list of tyrants which includes Hi-tler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Idi Amin, a late addition is required. 'Late' only because King Leopold II of Belgium (1835-1909) should always have been there. As 'owner' of the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908 he was responsible for what Joseph Conrad once called 'the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the his-tory of human conscience.' It is indeed a ghastly story of greed, lies and murder. And Adam Hochschild retells it well. 'King Leopold's Ghost' last week beat several excellent books to win the Lionel Gelber prize. . . . now the world's most important award for non-fiction. . . . Around the turn of this century in the depths of the Congo the bonds of humanity were unbound and the trappings of civilisation cast aside, releasing something diabolical which exists within us all. Mr. Hochschild conveys this particular-ly well.
Christian Science Monitor
This true story of the Congo is 'full of fascinating characters, intense drama, high adventure, courageous truth-telling, and splendid moral fervor. . . A work of history that reads like a novel....An enthralling story
The New York Times Book Review - Jeremy Harding
A superb synoptic history of European misdemeanor in central Africa.
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
A vivid, novelistic narrative that makes the reader acutely aware of the magnitude of the horror perpetrated by King Leopold and his minions.
Publishers Weekly
Hochschild's superb, engrossing chronicle focuses on one of the great, horrifying and nearly forgotten crimes of the century: greedy Belgian King Leopold II's rape of the Congo, the vast colony he seized as his private fiefdom in 1885. Until 1909, he used his mercenary army to force slaves into mines and rubber plantations, burn villages, mete out sadistic punishments, including dismemberment, and committ mass murder.
The hero of Hochschild's highly personal, even gossipy narrative is Liverpool shipping agent Edmund Morel, who, having stumbled on evidence of Leopold's atrocities, became an investigative journalist and launched an international Congo reform movement with support from Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington and Arthur Conan Doyle. Other pivotal figures include Joseph Conrad, whose disgust with Leopold's "civilizing mission" led to Heart of Darkness; and black American journalist George Washington Williams, who wrote the first systematic indictment of Leopold's colonial regime in 1890.
Hochschild (The Unquiet Ghost) documents the machinations of Leopold, who won over President Chester A. Arthur and bribed a U.S. senator to derail Congo protest resolutions. He also draws provocative parallels between Leopold's predatory one-man rule and the strongarm tactics of Mobuto Sese Seko, who ruled the successor state of Zaire. But most of all it is a story of the bestiality of one challenged by the heroism of many in an increasingly democratic world.
"King Leopold
Library Journal
The author of The Unquiet Ghost: Russia Remembers Stalin, one of Library Journal's best books of 1994, takes on another megalomaniac.
Library Journal
The author of The Unquiet Ghost: Russia Remembers Stalin, one of Library Journal's best books of 1994, takes on another megalomaniac.
The Boston Globe - Robert Taylor
Adam Hochschild's spellbinding account of imperial machinations and how these led to the first major human-rights movement of this century present a dynamic story.
The New York Times Book Review - Jeremy Harding
A superb synoptic history of European misdemeanor in central Africa.
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
A vivid, novelistic narrative that makes the reader acutely aware of the magnitude of the horror perpetrated by King Leopold and his minions.
WQ: The Wilson Quarterly - Rebecca A. Clay
...[D]raws on memoris, missionary accounts, government rcords, and the testimony of Africans themselves to unearth the long-forgotten facts behind Conrad's fiction....the kind remains a shadowy villain...[but] Hochschild vividly brings to life the activists whose battle agains Leopold dominates the book's second half.
SalonSept. 9, 1998 - Zachary Karabell
In King Leopold's Ghost, journalist Adam Hochschild chronicles the depredations of Belgian rule of the Congo (today's Zaire) between the 1880s and 1909, when Leopold, the king of Belgium, died. During this period, 5 million to 10 million people were killed, or died of starvation, disease and being worked to death. All of this for rubber, harvested from the thick vines that contained that precious gelatinous sap. Hochschild understandably wanted to know why so few of us have ever heard about the atrocities of Leopold's rule.
Even today, travel in the Congo basin is excruciatingly difficult -- 100 years ago, it was usually fatal for those who attempted the journey. In 1874, Henry Stanley became the first Westerner to get to the interior of the Congo basin and survive to tell the tale. At the time, the competition for colonies was intense; in the late 19th century, such colonies were to a European state's power what market share is for corporations today. Sitting in his immense palaces in tiny Belgium, King Leopold finagled his way into gaining control of the Congo basin. Within a decade of Stanley's journey, Leopold ruled a territory bigger than England, France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined.
By all accounts, Leopold was a narcissistic, sleazy, greedy man. He was also a master manipulator who used the vainglorious Stanley to convince the rest of Europe that his motives for wanting the Congo stemmed solely from a desire to put an end to "Arab slavery." Having rescued the Congolese from that non-existent threat, Leopold proceeded to enslave them himself.
In time, a few European and American visitors to the Congo began to publicize the whippings, murders, rapes and other humiliations visited upon the Congolese by Leopold's administrators. Some of these visitors were American blacks, whose reports were discounted. Not until a group of Englishmen made exposing the injustices of Leopold's rule their own private crusade did the general public become aware of what was happening.
Hochschild, co-founder of Mother Jones magazine, presents the story as a parable of human rights abuses stemmed by activism. While it would be reassuring to believe that Leopold's violence stopped as a result of intrepid crusaders, Hochschild doesn't make a convincing case. Yes, the reformers spoke at hundreds of meetings, letters were written, commissions heard testimony and governments disapproved. But the violence started to ebb only when the population declined to the point that labor got expensive and killing people by intent or neglect meant less profit.
Hochschild prefers to see the Congo as a sorry tale that is in the end redemptive. Unfortunately, redemption in this case can only be found by distorting history. Viewed through a less idealistic lens, the Congo's history tells us that evil isn't only banal; it can also be profitable, and it often goes unpunished. Not an uplifting moral, but the harsh light of history often exposes aspects of humanity that most of us prefer not to see. Hochschild has written about a terrible period that we have tried to forget. It's a shame that he tries to shield himself and the reader from recognizing the full dimension of the horror. Hitler committed suicide; the Japanese were routed after Nanking; but Leopold died in his bed, vastly enriched by the suffering of millions.
Kirkus Reviews
Journalist-memoirist Hochschild (Finding the Trapdoor) recounts the crimes against humanity of Belgium's King Leopold II, whose brutal imperialist regime sparked the creation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the first major human-rights protest movement of this century.
Hell-bent on building grandiose state monuments and palaces and on swelling royal coffers, Leopold sought to carve out of central Africa a fiefdom 76 times the size of Belgium. Cagily inveighing against local slave traders and inviting Christian missionaries to spread the Gospel, he transformed a philanthropic organization temporarily under his aegis into the Congo, his own personal colony. He plundered the Congo's bounty of rubber, instituted forced labor, and reduced the population by half (an estimated 10 million deaths from 1880 to 1920). To achieve compliance with rubber-gathering quotas, soldiers in the Force Publique, Leopold's colonial army, committed mass murder, cut off hands, severed heads, took hostages, and burnt villages. His misrule remained undetected for more than a decade because he won U.S. recognition of his claim to the Congo, used explorer Henry Morton Stanley to swindle chiefs out of land, and concealed the colony's budget.
If Hochschild depicts Leopold not as a Hitleresque madman but as a liberal bogeyman ready to sacrifice all for the bottom line, he profiles the monarch's opponents in all their complicated humanity. These include George Washington William, an African-American journalist prone to exaggerating his own credentials but not Leopold's atrocities; Roger Casement, a British consul knighted for a damning Congo report, then later executed for participating in Ireland's 1916 rebellion, and exposed as a homosexual; and E.D. Morel, a journalist who, though committed to imperialism, led a decade-long campaign that succeeded in forcing Leopold to turn the Congo over to the citizens of Belgium. A searing history of evil and the heroes who exposed it.
What People Are Saying
Paul Theroux
King Leopold's Ghost is a remarkable achievement, hugely satisfying on many levels. It overwhelmed me in the way Heart of Darkness did when I first read it.
Nadine Gordimer
Hochschild's outstanding study, unmatched by any other work on the Congo, reveals how all Europe -- and the USA -- contributed to the making of King Leopold's holocaust of the Congolese people.
No comments:
Post a Comment