Night of the Living Frankensteins

Book Review

By John Taylor; 2008 March 06, 05 Ala, 164 BE

Naomi Klein, "The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism," Knopf Canada, 2007

I'm reading Naomi Klein's latest, "Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism." I did not want to touch this book. I already have one of her older books on my "to read" bookshelf, "No Logo," and every time I pick it up it depresses my spirits and I have to drop it. But when I came across Disaster Capitalism in the "New Arrivals" section it slipped into my hand and I had no choice but check it out of the library. I had heard some of the many interviews with Klein available on the Web, but resisted reading it.

Now that I have got 159 pages into this 600 page book -- in spite of being mentally impaired most of the day by the fast -- I realize that this is a very important book indeed. As she says in one interview, her history covers the same ground that the triumphalist documentary "Commanding Heights" did (I reviewed that on this blog a few years ago), except that she tells the whole story, and starts at different dates. It is depressing, but it must be understood. For me it clarifies events and atrocities, the news of which came in dribs and drabs over the whole of my lifetime.

How it all started was that Stalin balked when the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights used the word "political" when talking about discrimination and persecution. He refused to let them define as genocide anything to do with mass murder for political reasons. Not surprising, really, in view of the fact that Stalin himself would have been the first to be put on trial for genocide, had he let this pass. In terms of numbers, few in history killed more of his political enemies, real or imagined, than he did.

It took a while, but the far right cottoned on to this gaping loophole in international law dug out by a leftist mass murderer. They exploited it for a new, more sophisticated rightist brand of mass murder, not to say genocide. Interestingly, they worked out their torture techniques in Montreal medical clinics; the idea was to use drugs, electroshock and other "shock and awe" techniques to retrogress an individual to before they needed diapers. They combined torture with conventional coups d'etats in a plan they called "shock and awe."

There followed, first in Chile, then Brazil and Argentina, the systematic murder and torture of an entire class, branded "leftists," that is, trade unionists, social welfare workers, anyone with an education or social conscience. Essentially the crime was, in Klein's words, not murder but armed robbery. Massive wealth and resources had been nationalized (or was about to be nationalized) by democrats and "developmentalists" was appropriated and handed out to corporate elites in the familiar process of "privatization." They practiced this technique first in the "Southern Cone" of South America, then throughout the Third World, and finally, their techniques perfected, they took it big-time, to the centers of Western materialism.

Klein does not mention this, but the shock and awe capitalists were doing the same thing that Stalin did when he exterminated the mythical "Kulak class," and Hitler did when he invaded Poland and systematically wiped out its teachers and other educated people. Stalin did it in the name of equality, Hitler in the name of Breathing Space, and Milton Friedman and his "Chicago boys" did it in the name of corporatist armed robbery, specifically what she calls a "fundamentalist" interpretation of capitalism. Like all fundamentalists, they chose the outside of the dish and called it the inside. Whatever name these murders were done in, that name is not mentioned in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and so it was not genocide.

I find it significant that it is a woman who wrote this very significant book. Like Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, she can see better than any man the devil that is unleashed when men appropriate the means of reproduction of humanity, in this case our economic and libertarian values. In the first pages of the book, she points out exactly who her Frankenstein is. It is none other than the merging of the nationalist state with the modern corporation.

"A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor, and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society. But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture." (The Shock Doctrine, p. 19)

Nor should the coincidence be surprising that Naomi Kline writes about how electroshock made a political regression into a dominant force in our world, and the fact that Mary Shelley was inspired by the electrical shock experiments of Galvani. Both Frankenstein monsters are vivified by lightning from the body parts of corpses cadged together into one being.

If you are interested in hearing more about this book, the best source of interviews I found is here:

<http://www.webmunism.com/vids/of/klein>

This includes the first five minutes of her film, "The Take," as well as an interview by what is left of David Frost, and another in-depth interview. The most interesting of all is a "debate" with Milton Friedman, edited as a tribute at his death. Although it has a clear bias for Friedman and he gets 90 percent of the airtime, even here Klein beats him decisively when she says, in response to his convoluted argument that the common good is best served by the free market's mediation of selfishness and hate for our fellow man, "Surely it is more economical just to say that good is good and bad is bad."

This review will probably be continued here, if the book continues to force itself upon me. Let me close for now with these words of the Master, which although they are addressed to Sunday school teachers, point to the only way to get over the "Night of the Corporatist Frankensteins."

"...humanity must be inculcated into every fiber of his being and the universal principles be explained to him in as easy a manner as can be devised. Then the power of great faith will take possession of his heart. But if these supreme precautions are not taken in the earliest stages of the child's growth, it will be most difficult to curb later on his growing manifest appetites. For then he will live according to the requirements of the world of nature and uncontrolled self. Once the lower and sensual habits of nature take hold of him it will be very hard to reform him by any human agencies. Hence children must be brought under the control of the love of God and under spiritual influence from their earliest youth. The lower appetites of nature are like kings over man; one must defeat their forces; otherwise he will be defeated by them." (Star of the West, Vol. 7, No. 15)