De-Kleining Shock Doctrines?

I am sure Naomi Klein shocked the corporate elite. I read parts of this book and found it very courageous and driven by a concern of control expanded through shocks. In truth, no-one can be controlled for long, if they get wind of it, then you will see an angry public. We are witnessing public anger around the world today and determined attempts to bring down corrupt governments. I do think we are in times where truth is emerging and that for people, is the real shock. Wikileaks comes to mind.

When I travelled the world I saw globalisation as a juggernaut. However, I also see public awareness as a snowball, I can see it gathering momentum. Information is accessible today and people can make up their own minds. For the first time in history, there is an ability for people to organise worldwide. It is very exciting. I would always advocate nonviolence and problem solving rather than violence and revenge. To be the change, we live by example and model the society we wish to create. If it is one without corruption then we must be ethical in every aspect of our lives. For the microcosm is the macrocosm, as we change the world changes.

Here is a brief overview.

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world– through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.

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 out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts…. New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.

The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas through our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998.