The Shock Doctrine
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.
Milton Friedman, godfather of the modern market.
In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the
myth that the global free market triumphed
democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money
trail and the puppet strings behind the
world-changing crises and wars of the last four
decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story
of how Americas free market policies have come
to dominate the world-- through the exploitation
of disaster-shocked people and countries.
At the most chaotic juncture in Iraqs civil war,
a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and
BP to claim the countrys vast oil reserves .
Immediately following September 11, the Bush
Administration quietly out-sources the running of
the War on Terror to Halliburton and
Blackwater . After a tsunami wipes out the coasts
of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are
auctioned off to tourist resorts.... New
Orleanss residents, scattered from Hurricane
Katrina, discover that their public housing,
hospitals and schools will never be reopened .
These events are examples of the shock
doctrine: using the publics disorientation
following massive collective shocks wars,
terrorist attacks, or natural disasters -- to
achieve control by imposing economic shock
therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks
dont succeed in wiping out resistance, a third
shock is employed: the electrode in the prison
cell or the Taser gun on the streets.
Based on breakthrough historical research and
four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster
zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how
disaster capitalism the rapid-fire corporate
reengineering of societies still reeling from
shock did not begin with September 11, 2001.
The book traces its origins back fifty years, to
the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman,
which produced many of the leading
neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose
influence is still profound in Washington today.
New, surprising connections are drawn between
economic policy, shock and awe warfare and
covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and
sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that
helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.
The Shock Doctrine follows the application of
these ideas though our contemporary history,
showing in riveting detail how well-known events
of the recent past have been deliberate, active
theatres for the shock doctrine, among them:
Pinochets coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands
War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in
1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,
the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998.
Product Description
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.
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
Hardcover: 576 pages
Publisher: Metropolitan Books (September 18, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0805079831
ISBN-13: 978-0805079838
Democracy now Program Interview to listen too
interview with Noami Klein the author
Wednesday, August 15th, 2007
Naomi Klein: From Think Tanks to Battle Tanks,
"The Quest to Impose a Single World Market Has Casualties Now in the Millions"
Listen to Segment || Download Show mp3
Watch 128k stream Watch 256k stream Read Transcript
'Is Another World Possible?' That was the theme
of this year's annual meeting of the American
Sociological Association that was held in New
York City this past weekend. "We did not lose the
battles of ideas. We were not outsmarted and we
were not out-argued, journalist and author Naomi
Klein said. We lost because we were crushed.
Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and
sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by
think tanks I mean the people who are paid to
think by the makers of tanks." Klein is author of
the forthcoming book, "The Shock Doctrine: The
Rise of Disaster Capitalism." [includes rush transcript]
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: The State Department is coming under
criticism this week for refusing to allow a
prominent South African social scientist to enter
the country. Adam Habib was scheduled to speak at
the annual meeting of the American Sociological
Association in New York this past weekend, but
the government refused to give him a visa.
Ironically, the theme of this year's sociology
conference was "Is Another World Possible?" At
the conference, the ASA planned a series of
sessions to assess the potential for progressive
social change both in the US and in the world and
to invite a serious discussion of "economic
globalization" and its consequences.
One of the most highly anticipated sessions was
to feature Jeffrey Sachs, an internationally
known economist and a former special advisor to
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, versus Naomi
Klein, the Canadian journalist and author. But
shortly before the ASA conference opened, Sachs
pulled out. Unclear if it was related to the fact
that Naomi Klein takes him on in her forthcoming
book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism. The theme of her talk was "Lost Worlds." This is Naomi Klein.
NAOMI KLEIN: As we think about reaching this
other possible world, I want to be very clear
that I don't believe the problem is a lack of
ideas. I think were swimming in ideas: universal
healthcare; living wages; cooperatives;
participatory democracy; public services that are
accountable to the people who use them; food,
medicine and shelter as a human right. These
aren't new ideas. Theyre enshrined in the UN
Charter. And I think most of us still believe in them.
I don't think our problem is money, lack of
resources to act on these basic ideas. Now, at
the risk of being accused of economic populism, I
would just point out that in this city, the
employees of Goldman Sachs received more than $16
billion in Christmas bonuses last year, and
ExxonMobil earned $40 billion in annual profits,
a world record. It seems to me that theres
clearly enough money sloshing around to pay for
our modest dreams. We can tax the polluters and
the casino capitalists to pay for alternative
energy development and a global social safety
net. We don't lack ideas. Neither are we short on cash.
And unlike Jeffrey Sachs, I actually don't
believe that what is lacking is political will at
the highest levels, cooperation between world
leaders. I don't think that if we could just
present our elites with the right graphs and
PowerPoint presentations -- no offense -- that we
would finally convince them to make poverty
history. I don't believe that. I don't believe we
could do it, even if that PowerPoint presentation
was being delivered Angelina Jolie wearing a
(Product) Red TM Gap tank top and carrying a
(Product) Red cell phone. Even if she had a
(Product) Red iPhone, I still don't think they
would listen. Thats because elites don't make
justice because we ask them to nicely and
appealingly. They do it when the alternative to
justice is worse. And that is what happened all
those years ago when the income gap began to
close. That was the motivation behind the New
Deal and the Marshall Plan. Communism spreading
around the world, that was the fear. Capitalism
needed to embellish itself. It needed to soften
its edges. It was in a competition. So ideas
aren't the problem, and money is not the problem,
and I don't think political will is ever the problem.
The real problem, I want to argue today, is
confidence, our confidence, the confidence of
people who gather at events like this under the
banner of building another world, a kinder more
sustainable world. I think we lack the strength
of our convictions, the guts to back up our ideas
with enough muscle to scare our elites. We are
missing movement power. Thats what were
missing. The best lacked all convictions, Yeats
wrote, while the worst are full of passionate
intensity. Think about it. Do you want to tackle
climate change as much as Dick Cheney wants
Kazakhstans oil? Do you? Do you want universal
healthcare as much as Paris Hilton wants to be
the next new face of Estee Lauder? If not, why
not? What is wrong with us? Where is our passionate intensity?
What is at the root of our crisis of confidence?
What drains us of our conviction at crucial
moments when we are tested? At the root, I think
its the notion that we have accepted, which is
that our ideas have already been tried and found
wanting. Part of what keeps us from building the
alternatives that we deserve and long for and
that the world needs so desperately, like a
healthcare system that doesn't sicken us when we
see it portrayed on film, like the ability to
rebuild New Orleans without treating a massive
human tragedy like an opportunity for rapid
profit-making for politically connected
contractors, the right to have bridges that don't
collapse and subways that don't flood when it
rains. I think that what lies at the root of that
lack of confidence is that were told over and
over again that progressive ideas have already
been tried and failed. We hear it so much that we
accepted it. So our alternatives are posed
tentatively, almost apologetically. Is another world possible? we ask.
This idea of our intellectual and ideological
failure is the dominant narrative of our time.
Its embedded in all the catchphrases that weve
been referring to. There is no alternative,
said Thatcher. History has ended, said
Fukuyama. The Washington Consensus: the thinking
has already been done, the consensus is there.
Now, the premise of all these proclamations was
that capitalism, extreme capitalism, was
conquering every corner of the globe because all
other ideas had proven themselves disastrous. The
only thing worse than capitalism, we were told, was the alternative.
Now, its worth remembering when these
pronouncements were being made that what was
failing was not Scandinavian social democracy,
which was thriving, or a Canadian-style welfare
state, which has produced the highest standard of
living by UN measures in the world, or at least
it did before my government started embracing
some of these ideas. It wasn't the so-called
Asian miracle that had been discredited, which in
the 80s and 90s built the Asian tiger
economies in South Korea and Malaysia using a
combination of trade protections to nurture and
develop national industry, even when that meant
keeping American products out and preventing
foreign ownership, as well as maintaining
government control over key assets, like water
and electricity. These policies did not create
explosive growth concentrated at the very top, as
we see today. But record levels of profit and a
rapidly expanding middle class, that is what has
been attacked in these past thirty years.
What was failing and collapsing when history was
declared over was something very specific in
1989, when Francis Fukyama made that famous
declaration, and when the Washington Consensus
was declared, also in 1989. What was collapsing
was centralized state communism, authoritarian,
anti-democratic, repressive. Something very
specific was collapsing, and it was a moment of tremendous flux.
And it was in that moment of flux and
disorientation that several very savvy people,
many of them in this country, seized on that
moment to declare victory not only against
communism, but against all ideas but their own.
Now, this was the Fukuyama chutzpah, when he
actually said -- and it seems so strange to read
it now -- in his famous 1989 speech, that the
significance of that moment was not that we were
reaching an end of ideology, as some were
suggesting, or a convergence between capitalism
and socialism, as Gorbachev was suggesting, it
was not that ideology had ended, but that history
as such had ended. He argued that deregulated
markets in the economic sphere combined with
liberal democracy in the political sphere
represented the endpoint of mankind's ideological
evolution and the final form of human government.
Now, what was interesting and never quite stated
in this formulation was that you basically had
two streams: you had democracy, which you can use
to vote for your leaders, and then you had a
single economic model. Now, the catch was that
you couldn't use your vote, you couldn't use your
democracy to reshape your economy, because all of
the economic decisions had already been decided.
There was only -- it was the final endpoint of
ideological evolution. So you could have
democracy, but you couldn't use it to change the
basics of life, you couldnt use it to change the
economy. This moment was held up as a celebration
of victory for democracy, but that idea, that
democracy cannot affect the economy, is and
remains the single most anti-democratic idea of our time.
Now, I was drawn to the slogan that was chosen
for this year's ASA gathering, because I think,
as many of you know and have read in the program,
it comes from the World Social Forum. And I was
at the first World Social Forum six-and-a-half
years ago -- more than six-and-a-half years ago
in January 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. I was
one of only a handful of North Americans who
attended. And we gathered under that same slogan,
but I think its significant and interesting that
it wasn't posed as a question back then. There
was a proud exclamation mark at the end of the
sentence: Another world is possible!
I wrote a feature article for The Nation when I
came back from Brazil, trying to explain to
readers in the US -- the event wasn't covered at
all in this country, although it was covered very
heavily in the international press -- what it
felt like to be there with 10,000 other people.
And a lot of people were saying that they felt
like we were making history. And what I wrote was
that what it really felt like was the end of the
end of history. That's what it felt like to be in
that room. It was this powerful gust of wind that
you could suddenly breathe more deeply. You were
free to imagine. Our minds were unleashed.
And it wasnt just Porto Alegre, because Porto
Alegre was the culmination of these types of
spontaneous -- often spontaneous uprisings that
were happening around the world whenever world
leaders were gathering to advance the so-called
Washington Consensus, whether it was in Seattle
at the WTO meeting in 1999, whether it was the
IMF/World Bank meetings a few years later in
Washington, then in Genoa during the G8. And, of
course, the Zapatistas and the MST in Brazil were at the forefront.
And the theme in Porto Alegre was democracy. That
was the -- it was about redefining democracy to
include the economy: deep democracy,
participatory democracy. And it was a challenge
to this idea that these two streams could not
intersect. The right to land as a form of
democracy, the right to biodiversity, to
independent media. But what was most
extraordinary about Porto Alegre was that -- you
know, certainly there were some politicians
there, there were some big NGOs there, but the
people who were at the podiums, who were shaping
the discussion, were the people who were the
casualties of this economic model, who were
themselves discarded, made landless, forced to
occupy pieces of land, chop down fences and plant
food and make decisions democratically.
So, you know, Jeffery Sachs talks about these
model villages that hes building in Africa. And
many of them, you know, are making tremendous
progress. But I can't help thinking back to these
field trips that we made in Porto Alegre to MST
villages, where it was the people themselves, the
landless people themselves, who were showing us
their own model villages and were asking for our
solidarity. And I think as sociologists, you
understand this key distinction, that it was the
actors who were the protagonists of their
history, and that was what was historic. It was
breaking the charity model in a very real way.
Now, I look at where we are now, six-and-a-half
years later, and it does feel that we have moved
backwards in many areas. Talk of fixing the world
has become an astonishingly elite affair. Davos
-- now, Porto Alegre was in rebellion against the
Davos Summit every year in January. This was the
anti-Davos. Davos has been re-legitimized, and
now solving the world's problems appears to be a
matter between CEOs and super-celebrities. And
the idea that we don't need to challenge these
mass disparities, what we need is sort of
noblesse oblige on a mass scale, that is very
different than what we were talking about in Porto Alegre those years ago.
Now, we know what closed that window of
possibility, that freedom that opened up in 2001,
and it was September 11th in this country. And
the window didn't close everywhere, but it did
close, at least temporarily, in North America,
that sense of possibility, that putting these
issues and the people affected by these policies
at the center of the political debate. Now, the
shock of those attacks, I think we can see with
some hindsight, was harnessed by leaders in this
country and their allies around the world to
abruptly end the discussion of global justice
that was exploding around the world. There was a
door that had opened, and it was suddenly slammed
shut. We heard that phrase again and again: 9/11
changes everything. And one of the first things
we were told that it had changed was that trade,
privatization, labor rates, all the things we
were fighting for just so recently no longer
mattered. It was Year Zero. Wipe the slate clean.
And it was another one of these rebooting history
moments. History was apparently starting all over
again from scratch, and nothing we knew before
mattered. It was all relegated to pre-9/11 thinking.
Now, the Bush administration justified this by
saying that all that mattered was security and
the war on terror. And in Canada, we were told
that -- by the US ambassador -- that security
trumps trade. That became the new slogan, that
before 9/11 it was economic priorities that drove
the US administration, but post-9/11 the only
thing that mattered was security. So talk of
economic justice, corporate greed, the loss of
the public sphere, the talk of Porto Alegre, was suddenly retro, so 2001.
Now, the irony that we can now see is that, while
denying the importance of this economic project,
the Bush administration used the dislocation of
9/11 to pursue the very same pre-9/11 radical
capitalist project, now with a furious vengeance,
under the cover of war and natural disasters. So
forget negotiating trade deals at the World Trade
Organization. When the US invaded Iraq, Bush sent
in Paul Bremer to seize new markets on the
battlefields of his preemptive war. He didnt
have to negotiate with anyone. He just rewrote
the country's entire economic architecture in one
swoop. But, of course, if you said that the war
had anything to do with economics, you were
dismissed as naïve. It was, of course, about
security, about liberating Iraqis from Saddam.
AMY GOODMAN: Journalist Naomi Klein. Well be
back with her speech in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We return to journalist Naomi Klein.
NAOMI KLEIN: Meanwhile, at home the
administration quickly moved to exploit the shock
that gripped the nation to push through a radical
vision of hollow government, in which everything
from waging wars to reconstructing from those
wars to disaster response became an entirely
for-profit venture. This was a bold evolution of
market logic. Rather than the 90s approach of
selling off existing public companies, like water
and electricity, the Bush team was creating a
whole new framework for its actions. That
framework was and is the war on terror, which was
built to be private, privately managed from the
start. The Bush administration played the role of
a kind of a venture capitalist for the startup
security companies, and they created an economic
boom on par with the dotcom boom of the 1990s.
But we didnt talk about it, because we were too busy talking about security.
Now, this feat required a kind of two-stage
process, which was using 9/11, of course, to
radically increase the surveillance and security
powers of the state, concentrated in the
executive branch, but at the same time to take
those powers and outsource them to a web of
private companies, whether Blackwater, Boeing,
AT&T, Halliburton, Bechtel, the Carlyle Group.
Now, in the 80s, the goal of privatization --
and in the 90s -- was devouring the appendages
of the state. But what was happening now is it
was the core that was being devoured, because
what is more central to the very definition of a
state of a government than security and disaster
response? Now, this is one of the great ironies
of the war on terror, is that it proved such an
effective weapon to furthering the corporate
agenda precisely because it denied that it has,
and continues to deny that it has, a corporate agenda at all.
Now, it had another benefit, too, which was the
ability to pay anyone who opposed this system as
aligned with potential terrorists and so on. So
our movement, which was already facing extreme
repression before 9/11, was put on notice as
traitorous. Looking back, its clear that the
shock, the disorientation caused by the attacks,
was used to reassert this economic agenda, to
reassert that consensus that never really was.
The window that was opened at the end of the 90s
in the movement known as the anti-globalization
movement, but which was always a pro-democracy
movement, was slammed shut, at least in North
America. And it was terror that slammed it shut.
The alternatives started to disappear.
Now, I want to use the rest of my time just to
say that this was not the first time, that this
-- if we look back at the past thirty-five years,
we see this slamming of the door on alternatives
just as they are emerging repeating again and
again. Many of you were here for the opening
address from Ricardo Lagos, the former president
of Chile, who talked about another September
11th, which was another one of those moments, a
far more significant one, when a very important
democratic alternative, the real third way, not
Tony Blair's third way, but the real third way
between totalitarian communism and extreme
capitalism was being forged in Chile. And that was the great threat.
And we know that now through all of the
declassified documents. Theres a really
revealing one: a correspondence between Henry
Kissinger and Nixon, in which Kissinger says very
bluntly that the problem with Allendes election
is not what they were saying publicly, which was
that he was aligned with the Soviets, that he was
only pretending to be democratic, but that he was
really going to impose a totalitarian system in
Chile. That was the spin at the time. What he
actually wrote was, The example of a successful
elected Marxist government in Chile would surely
have an impact on -- and even precedent value for
-- other parts of the world The imitative spread
of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn
significantly affect the world balance and our
own position in it. So that alternative, that
other world, had to be blasted out of the way,
and extreme violence was used in order to accomplish that.
Now, this kind of preemptive attack on our
democratic alternatives, the persistent dream of
a third way, of a real third way, has come up
again and again. And this is what I discuss at
length in the book, but I want to mention a
couple of examples -- unless Im totally out of
time? OK -- examples of moments where there was a
similar sense of effervescent possibility of
being able to breathe more and dream more fully.
One of them was in Poland in 1989. June 4th was
the day of the historic elections in Poland that
elected Solidarity as the new government. They
hadn't had elections there in decades. And this
was the event that really set off the domino --
whats now referred to as the domino effect in
Eastern Bloc countries -- and ultimately
resulting in the breaking apart of the Soviet
Union. But its worth remembering what it
actually looked like in June of 1989. In Poland,
people didnt think that history was over,
because they had just elected Solidarity as their
government. They thought that history was just
beginning and that they were finally going to be
able to implement what the movement, which was a
labor movement, had always seen as the third way,
the third way not taken. Now, Solidarity's vision
was not a rejection of socialism. They said that
they were calling for real socialism, as
socialists often do, and it was a rejection of
the Communist party. They were everything that
the party was not: dispersed where it was
centralized, democratic where it was
authoritarian, participatory where it was
bureaucratic. And Solidarity had ten million
members, which gave them the power to completely shut down the state.
So when people went to the polls and elected a
Solidarity government, what were they voting for?
What did they think they were voting for? Did
they think that they were voting to become a free
market economy on the model that Francis Fukuyama
was talking about? No, they didn't. They thought
they were voting for the labor party that they had helped to build.
And I just want to read you a short passage from
Solidaritys economic program, which was passed
democratically in 1981. They said, The
socialized enterprise should be the basic
organizational unit in the economy. It should be
controlled by the workers council representing
the collective and should be operated --
cooperatively run by a director appointed through
competition, recalled by the council, workers
cooperatives. So the idea was to get the party
out of control of the economy, to decentralize it
and have the people who were doing the work
actually control their workplaces. And they
believed that they could make them more sustainable.
Now, did they get the chance to try that, to act
on that vision of a worker cooperative economy as
the centerpiece of the economy, to have
democratic elections but still have socialism?
Did they get that chance when they voted for
Solidarity? No, they didn't. What they got was an
inherited debt, and they were told that the only
way that they would get any relief from that debt
and any aid is if they followed a very radical
shock therapy program. Now, I would be remiss if
I didn't point out that the person who prescribed
that shock therapy program was Jeffery Sachs. And
I -- no, I say that because I really had hoped
that we could debate these different worlds,
because there are differences, there are real
differences that we must not smooth over.
Now, in 2006, 40% of young workers in Poland were
unemployed, 40%, last year. Thats twice the EU
average. And Poland is often held up as a great
success story of transition. In 1989, 15% of the
Polands population was living below the poverty
line. In 2003, 59% of Poles had fallen below the
line. Thats that opening of that gap. Thats
what these economic policies do. And then, we can
say were very, very worried about the people at
the bottom, let's bring them up, but lets be
clear about what were talking about. These
jarring levels of inequality and economic
exclusion are now feeding a resurgence of
chauvinism, racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny,
rampant homophobia in Poland. And I think we can
see, actually, that its inevitable that this
would be the case, because they tried communism,
they tried capitalism, they tried democratic
socialism, but they got shock therapy instead.
After youve tried all that, there really isn't a
whole lot left but fascism. Its dangerous to
suppress democratic alternatives when people
invest their dreams in them. Its risky business.
Another one of these powerful dreams was
Tiananmen Square, and its a sort of a very sad
fluke of history that on the same day that
Solidarity won those historic elections and that
dream was betrayed, what they voted for was
betrayed, tanks rolled in Tiananmen Square, and
that was the day of the massacre: June 4, 1989.
It was another bloody end to a moment of effervescent possibility.
Now, the way those protests were always reported
on in the West was that students in Beijing just
wanted to live like in the United States. And
they, you know, put a goddess to democracy that
looked a lot like the Statue of Liberty. So it
was reported on CNN as just kind of pro-Americanstyle democracy protests.
But in recent years, an alternative analysis of
those events has emerged. And what were starting
to hear from whats being called China's New
Left, and people like Wang Hui, whos a wonderful
academic, is that this was a vast
oversimplification of what was driving the
pro-democracy movement in 1989 in China. What was
driving it was that the government of Deng
Xiaoping was radically restructuring the economy
along with the lines that had been prescribed by
Milton Friedman -- economic shock therapy -- and
people were seeing their quality of life
devalued. Workers were losing their rights. And
they were taking to the streets and demanding
democratic control over the economic transition.
So democracy wasn't an abstract idea. It wasn't
just We want to vote. It was, We want to
control this transition. We want to have a say in
it. It was a direct challenge to the Fukuyama
formulation, which, by the way, was made that
same year: the idea that you would have these two
streams and that they wouldn't intersect.
I just want to read one other thing, which is
another one of these paths not taken, because we
know how that one ended in Tiananmen Square: that
dream was crushed. Another historic moment of
possibility, when we look back on our recent
history, was 1994, when the ANC government won
landslide elections in South Africa. That was a
victory for people power. That was one of the
most hopeful days that I can remember.
I think we should remember what South Africans
thought they were voting for in those historic
elections. You know, it was just portrayed as
something very simple: it was an end to
apartheid. But what did an end to apartheid mean
to South Africans? And we can get an answer from
that actually from Nelson Mandela, who wrote a
little note two weeks before he was released from
prison. And he wrote this note because there was
a growing concern that he had been in prison so
long that he had forgotten the promise of
liberation, which was not just to have elections,
but to change the economy of the country and
redistribute the wealth. And Mandela was under so
much pressure that he had to release this very
short statement just to clarify this point. And
what he said was, "The nationalization of the
mines, banks and monopoly industry is the policy
of the ANC and a change or modification of our
views in this regard is inconceivable in our
situation. State control of certain sectors of
the economy is unavoidable. And this was a
reiteration of South Africas Freedom Charter,
which is the platform of the ANC, which calls for
the national wealth of South Africa, the heritage
of the country, to be restored for the people, the mineral wealth and so on.
Now, I say this because this was one of those
worlds that wasn't chosen, one of those paths
that wasn't chosen. And I spent the past four
years pulling these stolen and betrayed
alternatives out of the dustbin of our recent
history, because I think it matters. I think it
matters that we had ideas all along, that there
were always alternatives to the free market. And
we need to retell our own history and understand
that history, and we have to have all the shocks
and all the losses, the loss of lives, in that
story, because history didn't end. There were
alternatives. They were chosen, and then they
were stolen. They were stolen by military coups.
They were stolen by massacres. They stolen by
trickery, by deception. They were stolen by terror.
We who say we believe in this other world need to
know that we are not losers. We did not lose the
battle of ideas. We were not outsmarted, and we
were not out-argued. We lost because we were
crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks,
and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And
by think tanks, I mean the people who are paid to
think by the makers of tanks. Now, most effective
we have seen is when the army tanks and the think
tanks team up. The quest to impose a single world
market has casualties now in the millions, from
Chile then to Iraq today. These blueprints for
another world were crushed and disappeared
because they are popular and because, when tried,
they work. They're popular because they have the
power to give millions of people lives with
dignity, with the basics guaranteed. They are
dangerous because they put real limits on the
rich, who respond accordingly. Understanding this
history, understanding that we never lost the
battle of ideas, that we only lost a series of
dirty wars, is key to building the confidence
that we lack, to igniting the passionate intensity that we need.
AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, author of the
forthcoming book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
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[permaculture] The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Hardcover) by Naomi Klein plus interview on Democracy Now,
Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network, 08/16/2007