One Smart Cookie

I guess it’s still tough being a woman with an opinion

THE author and activist Naomi Klein sees recent history collectively: “At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly outsources the running of the ‘War on Terror’ to Halliburton and Blackwater. After a powerful tsunami devastates the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts. New Orleans’s residents, still scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened.”
In the seven years since Klein wrote the anti-globalisation bible No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, she has found a much more sinister enemy to expose: disaster capitalists. John le Carre calls Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, “scary as hell”.
I went to the New York Society for Ethical Culture to hear Klein talk about how governments use disasters to spread the American version of “free market” capitalism. She’s not accusing them of creating the disasters, but rather of pushing through agendas that the public would never usually allow were they not reeling from post-disaster shock. Shock, she says, reduces us to a childlike state.
The idea for a book came after Klein spent time in Iraq in 2000, researching how the invasion was supposed to have laid the psychological groundwork for (Bush’s Iraq envoy) Paul Bremer’s extreme country makeover.
“By shock therapy I’m referring to the economic policies that were really seen by many Iraqis as a continuation of the war, like the huge layoffs in the public sector, the dismantling of the army, the opening up of the country to unrestricted free trade,” she said. “It was an extraordinarily unfair way for Iraqis to enter the free market.”
Klein told Time magazine that she first used the phrase “disaster capitalism” when she saw something very similar to Iraq happening in Sri Lanka. “Just days after the tsunami hit, the government started pushing a very unpopular agenda of water and electricity privatisation.”
What I found most fascinating was Klein’s recounting of her hostile reception from the international press (Klein hails from Canada). A German journalist kicked off the interviews thus: “I explained your thesis to my wife and she said: ‘Has Naomi Klein lost her mind?’” The publicity tour, Klein said, turned into “one big therapy session”. Another journalist ventured: “Your book made me depressed. The forces you describe are so strong and we are so weak.”
To which Klein gave this excellent answer: “If your job is to report on how to change the grim and horrific things that exist in the world and you simultaneously believe that this is undoable, and you use your power and platform to spread futility and powerlessness, then, yeah, when confronted by the need for immense change, I would get depressed too.”

Worth checking out online is the short film about The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which Klein made with Children of Men director Alfonso Cuaron. Google it.

By Nadine Rubin. A version of this appeared as my Made in Manhattan column in the South African Sunday Times