Men like Jonas Salk, Lenny Bruce and J. Edgar Hoover, these men thrive upon the continuance of segregation, violence, and disease. The purity they dost protest a need for, they dost feed upon. Thank You, Masked Man
Lenny Bruce
A divinely inspired work, Naomi Klein has tapped into the zeitgeist of modern day destruction capitalism. In 400-plus pages and extensive footnotes, she melts the myths surrounding the so-called global free market. Apparently, it is neither global, nor free and anything but a market. The Shock Doctrine, based on her historical research, and four years of boots-on-the-ground investigation by Klein, reveals the shocking truth that connects Pinochet’s Chile, the Falklands War, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Asian financial crisis and Hurricane Mitch all in terms of rapid fire corporate restructuring of these societies and their economies. Along the way, we go through Poland following communism, South Africa after apartheid, Sri Lanka recovering from the tsunami, Iraq after mission accomplished and New Orleans’ privatization post Katrina.
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The Shock Doctrine reads like an economic disaster film, Die Hard With a Calculator, if you will. Its antagonist is the late economist Milton Friedman and his gang of Chicago Boys, economic free marketeers trained by the University of Chicago to spread their gospel to an unreceptive and reluctant world.
Friedman argued that “only a crisis – actual or perceived –produces real change.”
The shocking truth is that most of the world’s economists now believe this. (He was given a Nobel Prize to make sure of the fact.)
At first you won’t believe this parallel history laid out by Klein and then later, near the end of the book, you will be unable to see the world in any other way than through the prism of Shock. It is the political equivalent of reading Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky for the first time. Whole swaths of recent history have been reinterpreted for the reader, who if you are like me, will be stunned that the connections hold up so solidly.
Klein flawlessly fuses the political torture of shock therapy with the economic torture of the shock doctrine. One of her themes is that these two techniques which originally operated on separate tracks, have now merged into one super runaway train.
Somehow global free market capitalism has become the new economic eugenics movement. How the hell did we get here?
In the 1950s an American psychiatrist by the name of Ewen Cameron performed barbaric experiments on thousands of unsuspecting patients at McGill University in Montreal. His theory was that massive amounts of shock therapy, LSD, paralyzing drugs and sensory deprivation combined for long periods of time, could strip the human mind of all its knowledge, memory and emotion leaving it as a clean slate on which he could implant new information. Aka: brainwashing. He placed his patients into drug-induced comas for months on end shocking them with 30-40 times the normal power of electroconvulsive charges.
Cameron had gotten the idea for these ghastly experiments following his involvement in the so-called Doctor’s Trials – the Nuremberg war crime tribunals for the Nazi doctors held following WWII.
Ironically, he was sent by the U.S. Army to sit in judgment of the medical crimes performed by the German doctors. Ironic, because as a secret operative for the OSS, Cameron himself was involved in scientific work during the war. We learned later that Dr. Cameron, along with British intelligence, was involved in the extensive interrogation of Nazi Rudolph Hess, who many felt was mentally incapacitated by his interrogators.
Cameron, fascinated by these techniques, decided to continue them upon his return to North America. Working at Albany State Medical School, Cameron carried out his heinous experiments just north of the border in Montreal to avoid U.S. law. For the record, this was not some rogue medical quack. This was not a college student like Josef Mengele had been at Frankfurt University. Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron was one of the most famous doctors in the world. He was President of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association and the President of the World Psychiatric Association.
We now know that Cameron’s experiments, from 1957 – 1964, were paid for by the CIA and later became part of Project MKULTRA, the CIA-directed mind control program. (In 2004, 77 of these victims received cash settlements from the government of Canada.) This led to the publication of the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual used throughout South and Central America in the 1970s and 80s to help repressive regimes implement the economic policies of the Chicago Boys. With the help of right wing ideologues like Bush advisor Elliot Abrams, (alleged torture tape destroyer) Jose Rodriguez Jr., the former head of the CIA’s clandestine service, and the British-born son of a Greek shipping tycoon named John Negroponte, listed on paper at the time as the U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, the Central American regimes implemented the KUBARK program with ruthless efficiency.
In fact, many members of these regimes learned how to torture while enrolled at the School of the Americas located at Ft. Benning, Georgia.
Today, we find the pages of this program dog-eared in the torture facilities of Guantanamo Bay and other CIA black sites around the world.
The blunt reality is that the American government tortures...
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/01/19/cl-book-of-the-month-the-shock-doctrine-the-rise-of-disaster-capitalism/
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