The secret of Naomi's success
National Post
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Page: A21
Section: Issues & Ideas
Byline: Jonathan Kay
Column: Jonathan Kay
Source: National Post

Was it really only eight years ago that anti-globalization rioters trashed Seattle? It seems more like ancient history. At last month's NAFTA-member summit in Montebello, Que., just a few hundred protestors bothered showing up. And even some of those, it turns out, were police officers in globaphobic drag.

But not all the movement's champions have faded into obscurity. Naomi Klein -- the feisty writer who gave the Seattle movement its Bible in the form of No Logo -- has remained an intellectual rock star. Her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is a transatlantic publishing sensation. At my local independent book store in the left-wing Toronto neighbourhood of Riverdale, it sold out in two days. "Everyone is talking about her!" a giddy cashier told me.

Read the book, and you can see why. Naomi Klein has managed her post-9/11 transformation in a clever and original way. Since the World Trade Center attacks, lots of leftists have disgraced themselves by making common cause with anti-American Islamists -- under the theory that the enemy of an enemy must be a friend. Klein sensibly rejects this approach. Instead, she more ambitiously casts the whole war on terror as a smokescreen for corporate avarice.

The root of the Shock Doctrine theory -- the Original Sin that Klein comes back to again and again--is the overthrow of Chile's Salvador Allende in 1973, and his replacement by Augusto Pinochet, an American-backed general who proceeded to privatize sections of the Chilean economy.

By historical standards, Pinochet's coup and the brutality that followed it were small beans: Stalin and Mao (quite literally) killed more people in an average week than Pinochet did in his whole career. Yet what happened in 1973 has nevertheless attained mythic status among grad-school leftists. It is somehow imagined that the whole course of Third World history might have been changed -- that socialism might be alive and well today, and not just the domain of demented bullies like Kim Jong-Il -- if only Allende hadn't been turfed.

Klein embraces this left-wing narrative wholeheartedly, and ex-tends it to Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil. But that's just for starters. As she sees it, what happened in South America set the prototype for the laissez-faire octopi now spreading their tentacles in Russia, East Asia, the Middle East and even post-Katrina New Orleans: Whenever vulnerable societies suffer shock -- a war, coup, tsunami, hurricane, financial meltdown -- large Western corporations exploit the ensuing misery to force free-market policies down their throats.

Klein is at her strongest when she's writing about South America. In many cases, she bends the historical record to suit her anti-American thesis. But she is at least correct in her contention that Washington has meddled aggressively in Latin America for the protection of its own interests, corporate and otherwise.

It's when Klein tries to bring her thesis into the 21st century that the wheels fall off. At its worst, her book reads like an extended conspiracy theory.

With regards to Britain, for instance, Klein tries to present the Falklands War as a stage-managed "shock" that Margaret Thatcher cynically seized on to smash unions and ram through laissez-faire policies at home. In Iraq, Klein suggests that the United States permitted the looting of public buildings and the de-Baathification of the government in part because U.S. Republicans are disdainful of "the public sector." It gets worse in China, where she reinvents the history of Tiananmen Square to cast student protestors as champions of state economic planning who were angry at China's government for forcing capitalism on the nation.

Perhaps most preposterously, Klein argues that influential parties within Israel are intentionally exacerbating the "shock" of the Middle East conflict in order to sell military hardware. In breathless, gotcha tones, she declares that the value of Israel's annual exports of counterterrorism-related products has risen to $1.2-billion. What she never tells the reader is that tourism -- which dries up whenever that same Middle East conflict flares -- is worth $3-billion. In fact, Israel's exports as a whole stand at more that $40-billion. The idea that the nation's security industry, a drop in the bucket of Israel's $200-billion economy, would cause the country to expose itself to a genocidal military threat from Iran, not to mention daily suicide attacks, is nothing short of lunatic.

And yet, for all my fulminating, one fact is uncontested: I am writing about Naomi Klein. She isn't writing about me. The author must be doing something right. What is it? Three things.

First, Naomi Klein works hard. While I don't buy her thesis, I admire the fact that she travelled to Iraq, Sri Lanka, South America, China and a dozen other places to research it. This is no armchair screed. Her research lends the book heft (more than 600 pages worth) and, for those inclined toward her thinking, credibility. Given the success of No Logo, a lot of writers in Klein's place would have been tempted to produce a quick-and-dirty follow up to get themselves back on the front pages. Klein had more discipline than that.

Second, Klein has a gift for sticky symbolism. No one who reads this book is going to remember her detailed reports about Indonesian currency fluctuations and pay scales in Chinese sweatshops. What they are going to remember is her larger metaphor: shock, pain, misery and exploitation. That's why she brilliantly provides a lengthy passage at the beginning of her book detailing the CIA's 1950s-era electroshock experiments. The material has absolutely nothing to do with her thesis. But as a matter of symbolism, it's gold.

Third, Klein names names. Like every good Marxist, she knows that the workers and student protestors need someone to hate -- a bin-Ladenesque evildoer upon which their rage can focus. The enemy can't be just some abstract principle like, say, IMF-imposed structural-adjustment loans. In No Logo, the enemy was Nike and Disney. For this new book, she needed a new villain. But who? The answer:Milton Friedman.

In life, Friedman was a diminutive American economist who helped convince the world that free markets and free trade were the path to prosperity. He was so impassioned about the subject that he spread the gospel to anyone who would listen -- even to Pinochet. What he said was influential. But by modern standards, it wasn't particularly radical. Indeed, most of his teachings are now part of the economic mainstream.

Yet in death, Klein has turned Friedman into a sort of economic Sauron -- a larger-than-life ideological demigod from which the world must be delivered. And who shall deliver us? Why, Ms. Klein, of course. To quote one informed source, "Everyone is talking about her!"

jkay@nationalpost.com

Idnumber: 200709130082
Edition: National
Story Type: Column
Length: 1110 words
Keywords: BOOKS; WRITERS

PRODUCTION FIELDS
NDATE: 20070913
NUPDATE: 20070913
DOB: 20070913
POSITION: 1