I recently had the opportunity to view a lecture by Michael Parenti whom I consider a foremost expert on imperialism. Parenti began his lecture with the use of the word “stochasticism” which essentially means random, non-deterministic, based on conjecture or guess. A simpler way of summarizing it is, “stuff happens.” It is, in fact, the polar opposite of “conspiratorial.” In the lecture Parenti went on to criticize those who refuse to admit that the United States is imperialistic and who explain its imperial adventures around the world as something that “just happened.” Generally, those in academia who rationalize U.S. imperialism are astute, incisive thinkers on other issues, so one is perplexed by the obtuseness they demonstrate around the topic of imperialism.
In the same way, I have been bewildered by a singular stochastic perspective of Naomi Klein in her brilliant, exhaustive, superbly-documented book The Shock Doctrine. In it Klein builds an intricate and convincing case for the use of various techniques of trauma applied to societies and individuals during the twentieth century and continuing into the current moment for the purpose of perpetrating what has become one of her hallmark phrases, “disaster capitalism” Yet two pages in the book left me aghast. The first is Pages 11-12 which refer to September 11, 2001 and state:
The Bush team seized the moment of collective vertigo with chilling speed-not, as some have claimed, because the administration deviously plotted the crisis but because the key figures of the administration, veterans of earlier disaster capitalism experiments in Latin America and Eastern Europe, were part of a movement that prays for crisis the way drought-struck farmers pray for rain, and the way Christian-Zionist end-timers pray for the Rapture.
After hearing endless interviews of Klein and reading numerous articles about the book when it first hit the stores in September, and being very familiar with the disaster capitalism thesis, the above quote from the book’s first pages were astonishing in their inconsistency with nearly every other page of the book.
If you’re wondering about that second quote that left me aghast, please bear with me. I will address it, but first things first.
Disaster Capitalism-Microcosm and Macrocosm
Disaster capitalism is according to Klein “…orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities.” (6) It has its origins in the “Chicago School” of economics made famous and perpetuated for decades by University of Chicago economics professor, Milton Friedman, who actually coined the phrase “shock treatment” to describe the psychological pummeling of societies and individuals who might stand in the way of or could be made more useful to the advancement of corporate goals. One recent example was the dramatic use of shock and awe, including using those very words to describe it, against the nation of Iraq during the invasion by the U.S. in 2003. A more recent example to which Klein devotes a great deal of attention is the devastation of New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina.
The endgame of disaster capitalism is the total privatization of what have throughout American history been state services. Not surprisingly, the ultimate outcome of unbridled disaster capitalism will be the supplanting of government by corporations.
While these are examples of societal decimation, the book’s first chapter focuses on the origins of the current forms of torture used by the U.S. in the incipient, CIA-funded experiments of Ewen Cameron, a Canadian psychiatrist who “believed that by inflicting an array of
shocks to the human brain, he could unmake and erase faulty minds, then rebuild new personalities” on what he believed would be a “clean slate.” (29) I was quite familiar with Cameron as a result of a History Channel documentary called “Mind Control: America’s Secret War” which I frequently show in my classes, but for the most part, progressives have been loath to discuss many of the CIA’s early torture escapades and have minimized them as perhaps “borderline conspiratorial”-until Klein published Shock Doctrine. As a result, her research is now currently quite fashionable in progressive circles, but ten years ago, it was a bit “fringy” for the left-liberal establishment as many of us were exposing the MK Ultra mind control agenda of the CIA, only to be labeled “whacky.”
http://americanargameddon.wordpress.com/2008/06/03/a-review-of-naomi-kleins-the-shock-doctrine/
I have to agree. One thing I found disappointing. Is Klein's assumption that 911 wasn't part of the conspiracy. I'm hoping she will come around..
I cannot recommend Shock Doctrine highly enough for a multi-layered understanding of the origin, evolution, and likely outcome of disaster capitalism. It offers an extraordinary economic and geopolitical map of historical and current events. Yet the book’s treatment of 9/11 is disappointingly characteristic of the progressive response to the tragedy which belies once again its intellectual armoring against venturing into the territory of conspiracy. Yet nowhere in Shock Doctrine is the most absurd, incongruous, intellectually insulting conspiracy of all, the “official” story of 9/11, challenged.
While I have been on record for years arguing that the attacks were orchestrated by the U.S. government, and while I have repeatedly supported the 9/11 truth movement, I no longer feel a sense of urgency in pursuit of 9/11 truth. The larger picture of the collapse of empire and civilization, of which 9/11 was only one piece, compel me to expand my horizon. Nevertheless, when otherwise perspicacious minds tenaciously embrace the official story, no doubt in fear of being labeled a conspiracy theorist, I feel equally compelled to challenge the contradiction.
Shock Doctrine offers us priceless documentation of the lengths to which empire has gone and will go to achieve and maintain primacy; however, its one shocking and pivotal incongruity must be illuminated. Unless we are willing to cross the line into the forbidden domain of pre-meditated mass murder that was 9/11, we are adrift in a stochastic world of “stuff happens” while surrounded by a sea of intentional, well-orchestrated holocausts.
So What Does It Matter If Progressives Can’t Go There?
With respect to a book like Shock Doctrine which plumbs the depths of malignancy that the United States has inflicted upon the world and on its own citizens, the inability of its author to allow herself to know the whole truth about 9/11 and speak it, is astounding. Not only does it reveal the intellectual constraints which the progressive movement has foisted upon itself, but it facilitates a tenacious clinging to endless layers of denial. Even worse, in so doing the liberal left perpetuates not only everyone else’s denial but the false hopes and pseudo-solutions of the American political chimera, the corruption of which is consummate and which serves no other purposes than choreographing a caricature of democracy and ensuring massive social control.
Carolyn Baker is a frequent contributor to Global Research
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