This Film is an Idiot's Version of Naomi Klein's Masterpiece

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine is one of the most important political books of the past decade. She takes the central myth of the right -- that since the fall of Soviet tyranny, free elections and free markets have marched hand-in-hand together towards the shimmering sunset of history -- and shown that it is, simply, a lie. It is a major revisionist history of the world that Milton Friedman and the market fundamentalists have built.

In the new Depression, with their vision lying in smoking rubble, it is a thesis whose time has come -- yet its film, alas, has not. The new "adaptation" of the book for Channel 4 by Michael Winterbottom is garbled and mumbled to the point of meaninglessness.

Klein argues that human beings consistently and everywhere vote for mixed economies -- a mix of markets and counter-balancing welfare states. The right has been unable to accept this reality, and unable to defeat it in democratic elections. So in order to achieve their vision of "pure capitalism, cleansed of all interruptions," they have waited for massive crises -- when the population is left reeling and unable to object -- to impose their vision.

Klein's story begins with the market fundamentalists' show-room: Chile. Milton Friedman, the apostle of pure unfettered capitalism, sent many of his finest students to Chile for years to spread the message that markets must be allowed to work their pristine logic unhindered by governments. They persuaded virtually nobody. Their parties were thumpingly defeated, and the democratic socialist Salvador Allende was elected instead. So the CIA backed an anti-democratic coup by the fascist general Augusto Pinochet -- and Friedman swiftly stepped in to design "the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere," as Klein puts it.

All subsidies for the poor were scrubbed away, prices were sent soaring, and unemployment reached unprecedented levels. Friedman told Pinochet to go further and cut harder. The wishes of the people could be safely ignored, because "the shock of the torture chamber terrorized anyone thinking of standing in the way of the economic shocks," she notes. "Attacks on union leaders were often carried out in close coordination with the owners of the workplaces." Even Margaret Thatcher tacitly admitted this vision could never be tried in a democracy. She wrote to Friedrich Hayek that much as she longed to create a similar economic outcome in Britain, "I am sure you will agree that, in Britain with our democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable."

So the right-wing vision of total markets -- slice away all social protections and let the corporations rule -- was born with the iron fist of state violence as its conjoined twin. In most of the places it has been tried, they have been there, inextricably stuck together. Klein tracks them across continents: in post-Soviet Russia, for example, Boris Yeltsin could only impose this extreme vision by blowing up the Parliament (with most of the elected representatives trapped inside), shredding the country's young democracy, and starting a vast distraction-war in Chechnya that killed 100,000 people. In post-Tiananmen China, the Communist party could only turn their country into a vast export credit zone with massacres and mass imprisonment that made ordinary Chinese workers too terrified to ask for even the most meager rights. Indeed, across the planet, "some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era... were in fact committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public to prepare the ground for the introduction of free-market reforms."

Where this uber-corporate vision has not been imposed by force, it has been imposed by blackmail at a time of crisis. One of the ugliest examples Klein exposes is the use of the tsunami -- a quasi-Biblical wave that washed away 250,000 people -- as a pretext to impose a Friedmanite vision. In Sri Lanka, mega-corporations had long been desperate to clear the old beach-dwelling communities of fishermen away and open up the coastline to much-more-profitable foreign tourism. But the people liked their homes, and their careers, and did not want to hand their beaches over. So these proposals prompted a wave of militant strikes and mass protests. They were then put to the Sri Lankan people in an election -- and defeated by a landslide.

But then a wave washed it all away, and "underneath the rubble and carnage was what the tourism industry had been angling for all along -- a pristine beach, scrubbed clean of all the messy signs of people working, a vacation Eden." The Sri Lankan government was told that it would only receive the vast reconstruction loans they needed from the World Bank and IMF if they agreed to a "restructuring" programe -- which consisted of everything the Sri Lankan people had just rejected at the polls. Reeling from the shock, the Sri Lankan government agreed. They banned people from returning to their beachfront homes, declaring a "buffer zone" for indigenous people -- but not for the hotel trade, who were free to do as they please. So money donated nominally to help tsunami victims was actually used to inflict a "second tsunami" on them, handing over their land to foreign corporations and ending their historic lifestyles forever.

Similar programs of extortion have been inflicted on other peoples reeling in shock. As the people of South Africa were fighting the last battles against Apartheid, the successor ANC was forced to haggle with the IMF and World Bank for their loans. The conditions? Ditch all the social protections included in your Freedom Charter, and leave the economic structures of Apartheid in place. As the people of Poland emerged blinking from the horror of Soviet Communism, the Solidarity government was forced to gut their social democratic vision and impose a bitter dose of 'shock therapy' that cut the country even further to the bone. In both countries, the will of the people was explicitly ignored.

Klein's account of this "disaster capitalism" is written with a perfectly distilled anger, channeled through hard fact. So what on earth happened to the film?

Winterbottom has taken her simple thesis and mangled it beyond recognition. He serves up only a cold porridge of archive footage and disconnected soundbites that have some vague connection to the book, without the connecting spine of her explanations. It is though an idiot has explained the book to another idiot, who then made a film. Incredibly, the film doesn't mention the words 'debt', 'IMF', or 'World Bank' a single time. It's a bit like adapting Jaws and taking out any mention of sharks.

This film should have been another Inconvenient Truth. Instead, it's just deeply inconvenient -- and a shocking squandering of a masterpiece.

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

To read Johann's latest article for Slate, click here.

Comments

[frankstallone]

Naomi Klien is a liar:

"In fact, Friedman never worked as an adviser to, and never accepted a penny from, the Chilean regime. He even turned down two honorary degrees from Chilean universities that received government funding, because he did not want to be seen as endorsing a dictatorship he considered "terrible" and "despicabl­e." He did spend six days in Chile in March 1975 to give public lectures, at the invitation of a private foundation. When he was there he met with Pinochet for about 45 minutes and wrote him a letter afterward, arguing for a plan to end hyperinflation and liberalize the economy. He gave the same kind of advice to communist dictatorships as well, including the Soviet Union, China, and Yugoslavia.

Klein twists this relationship beyond recognition, claiming Pinochet's 1973 coup was executed to allow free market economists ("the Chicago Boys," as the economists from Friedman's University of Chicago were called) to enact their reforms. This false link is crucial for giving the impression that the Friedmanites have blood on their hands, since the most violent period of the regime came right after the coup. But Friedman's visit, which Klein claims started the real transformation, came two years later. Klein insists on having it both ways. "

the rest here if you're intrested: http://www.reason.com/news/show/128903.html

[HelloFunnyWorld]

Hello Johann,

Read the book in our book club, it was shocking and hard to keep reading, especially in some parts....
Naomi Klein is some thing special. Good thing she's so together and beautiful too.

Too bad about this movie. Though given the topic, hardly surprising, yea...

:)

[eileenflemingWAWA]

Klein wrote:

"After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel's economy was devastated, but then came 9/11, and "suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners…Many of the country's most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel's status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of twenty-fou­r-hour-a-d­ay showroom--a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war…Israel now sends $1.2 billion in "defense" products to the United States—up dramatically from $270 million in 1999.

That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world…Much of this growth has been in the so-called "homeland security" sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion--an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are …precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the "global war on terror."

Excerpted: THAT DAY, This 9/11 and Bob Dylan
http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1420&Itemid=224

[iamjoneskeepupwithme]

apropos of nothing, i think naomi is smokin' hot! brains are sexxxxy!

[FirstBiteBooks]

Excellent article. Thank you.

Any info whether and when they are going to show it in the U.S.?

[ghtrains]

Milton Friedman is beloved by right wing governments all over the world because his economic theories could be used to justify their behavior. His ideas are everywhere in the economic policies of Republican administrations starting with Reagan: supply side monetary policies, tax cuts, education vouchers, all volunteer army, privatization of government services. As a libertarian, Friedman had no use for government of any kind believing government to be the source of most economic and social problems. For example, his answer to unemployment was getting rid of the government mandated minimum wage. When his policies did not seem to work, he merely distanced himself from the consequences, as he did in Great Britain.

[K.J. Dwyer - Huffpost Blogger]

Great piece, Jonathan.

If I may, I'd like to add a little something to the mix regarding Chile. One of the main reasons Allende was overthrown was that he had the temerity to nationalize the copper industry, which had been bilked by American interests for years. As you rightly point out, the Chicago boys came in and virtually destroyed their economy and social structures. What was the only thing that saved Chile from utter and complete economic collapse? The nationalized copper industry, which remains nationalized to this day. A very bitter pill for the Friedmanites to swallow.

In fact, they've never swallowed it. They just keep spitting it out, engineering crisis after crisis, reaping unfathomable profits and answering to no one.

[K.J. Dwyer - Huffpost Blogger]

Sorry, Johann; a moment of hysterical dyslexia.

[Taxi]

Thank you.

I appreciated your stream of information very much indeed.

[Over40]

What a shame!!! Hopefully, some far more competent and passionate filmmaker will make another film. People are shockingly ignorant of what Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine contains. The power that corporate interests have have gained over the last several decades is simply horrific - everthing from what you describe, ot the pharmaseutical and insurance interests that control our healthcare (or lack of it!) to the corporate farming interests that knowingly poison and polute our food chain and keep livestock in unthikable conditions, to the military industrial interests that Eisenhower warned about, to the financial corporations that have just robbed us blind and on and on.

These interests have an obvious desire to keep the public in the dark and have been quite effective using their right-wing politicos to divert public attention and education by using wedge issues to keep people distracted and willfully ignorant..

Anyway, thank you for this post.. We need a thousand more like it.

[anniecanuck]

Great post!
I think Naomi Klein's message about capitalism not only rings true but is also fascinating just to study. Here in Canada, she has been vilified by the righ (yes-we have a right wing)t; one letter to the editor of our so-called national newspaper recently eferred to her as "the worst kind of prostitute" because she sold her soul as a Jewish woman and came out against the state of Israel. These views are not necessarily uncommon, but they are usually left to the truly right wing papers. Too full of blindness and hate for the rest of them!
(btw: I wrote the paper in her defense!!! Couldn't resist!)

[Bateman]

"In post-Tiananmen China, the Communist party could only turn their country into a vast export credit zone with massacres and mass imprisonment that made ordinary Chinese workers too terrified to ask for even the most meagre rights."

Then what of the massacres and mass imprisonment in pre-capitalist China? Or precapitalist Vietnam, Russia... If the people of these countries are repressed and brutalized both before and after global capitalism, perhaps global capitalism is not to blame. What about misery, repression, and brutality in Cuba and North Korea, which have yet to undergo IMFization? So much for this global "shock" theory. If the capitalist evangelist theory that economic deregulation inevitably brings prosperity and liberty is flawed, then Klein's thinking is also inadequate.

I notice that you nowhere mention the Iraq War, one of Klein's most important examples. Is that because you supported the war at first?

[anniecanuck]

Billions have been brought out of poverty in China since Deng's policy shift toward capitalism.
Socialist ideas have co-existed in most liberal democracies quite nicely. It's when you start seeing the world as one or the other that things get so intolerably irrelevant and ideological.
The sad thing is, human rights seem to come once a middle class is established as part of the establishment and begin demanding rights. It only works well industrialized economies.
China is both industrialized and agricultural. Like it or not, capitalism tends to create human and civil rights. But surely rampant capitalism where bankers and stock brokers (and realtors) are above the law and the public good is not a reasonable option! I think even China knows this now.

[davidly]

The idea in this post has nothing to do with the atrocities you have introduced, not that their nature is necessarily mutually exclusive.

To use a metaphor in the post: Your argument sounds akin to responding to a report about shark attacks by asking, "What about all the people who drown?" It doesn't mean that there aren't any shark attacks (or that someone who is attacked by a shark might not die of drowning).

[LMPE]

I vow never to watch it.

PS: you forgot to mention Hurricane Katrina