http://counterpunch.org/cockburn09222007.html
Weekend Edition September 22 / 23, 2007
CounterPunch On Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine"
Where Klein would presumably claim originality is in identifying the taxonomy of this "shock doctrine", the latest in capitalism's phases of "creative destruction", as Schumpeter described the soul of the system. So she describes the shock of a sudden attack, whether the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 or the bombing of Baghdad in 2003; the shock of torturers using sensory deprivation techniques and crude electrodes to instill fear and acquiescence; Friedman's economic "shock treatment." Methodically combined and elaborated, these onslaughts now amount, on Klein's account, to a new and frightful chapter in the history of capitalist predation.
Klein begins with a chapter on the CIA-sponsored psychic "de-patterning" experiments of that monster, Dr Ewen Cameron of McGill University's Allan Memorial Institute, and states explicitly that torture, aside from being a tool, is "a metaphor of the shock doctrine's underlying logic". To use shock literary tactics to focus attention on the deliberate and sadistic engineering of collective social trauma is certainly no crime. But, as often happens after a shock, one eventually retrieves a sense of proportion, one that is not entirely flattering to the larger pretensions.
Capitalism, after all, as always been a shock doctrine of selfish predation, as one can discover from Hobbes and Locke, Marx and Weber, none of them saluted by Klein. Read the vivid accounts of the Hammonds about the English enclosures of the eighteenth century, when villagers would find nailed to the door of the parish church an announcement their common lands had been privatized. Protesters may not have "depatterned", but were briskly hanged or relocated to Botany Bay. Klein could have used Karl Polanyi to better effect than as an epigraph. The wrenching conversion of peasant societies to cash economics, private property, the job regime, has always been brutal.
The Chicago Boys laid waste the southern cone of Latin America in the name of unfettered private enterprise, but 125 years earlier a million Irish peasants starved to death while Irish grain was exported onto ships flying the flag of economic liberalism. Klein writes about "the bloody birth of counter-revolution" in the 1960s and 1970s, but any page from the histories of Presidents Jackson, Polk or Roosevelt discloses a bleak and blood-stained continuity with the past. Depatterning? Indian children were taken from their families and punished for every word spoken in their own language, even as African slaves were given Christian names and forbidden to use their own, or to drum. Amid the shock of the Civil War the Republicans deferred by several years the freeing of slaves, while hastening to use crisis to arrange a banking and monetary system to their liking.
-- Stephen Philion http://stephenphilion.efoliomn2.com/