COLORADO COLLEGE- If you catch Democracy Now on KRCC, you are already up to speed on Naomi Klein‘s SHOCK DOCTRINE: THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM. Otherwise you can hear the author of No Logo and Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate at 7:30pm tonight at Armstrong Hall; an uncharacteristically critical voice among CC’s usual lineup of neoliberal panderers.
Not My Tribe
The Myth of Middle Ground
Naomi Klein’s book has become a big hit with the liberal crowd but without a lot of reason for it. Her central thesis is a rather obvious one, which is that Big Business government in the US is simply taking advantage of catastrophes world wide to move its policies into place big time, but this hardly seems a grand revelation?
At the event on Colorado College, Naomi revealed herself and the limitations of her ‘insight’ rather thoroughly, as she plugged away rather obviously for the Obama campaign, and also the financial policies of British Prime Minster, Gordon Brown, who she credits with saving the world economy!
I found her idea that the European Bloc had come up with something fundamentally different than the Paulson giveaway plan for the super rich rather unconvincing. In fact, there is nothing much different here at all in what the European capitalist governments are doing, as they are pumping three times the amount of the US government give away to their own Big Business elites. What’s to cheer about here, Naomi? However, Klein found this all just super grand.
Naomi is a heroine to the liberal crowd that simply want what they see as a more responsible capitalism running in place. There is hardly anything very radical about this at all. In fact, it is the classical Social Democratic Party program that imperialist capitalist regimes in Europe have used for decades to maintain their power and control over the masses of Third World countries their business communities exploit. Naomi Klein wishes that the US government act less openly brutal and be more subtle about their control over the rest of the world. Then her feelings about capitalism might be less anguished?
Naomi Klein has this little film of hers put together, where she compares the US Big Business community’s methods to the convulsions of a person given electric shock therapy. We get to see an individual back in the ’50s given this treatment twitch a lot. Very visual. However, none of that really adds to the limitations of her own world view, where she is certainly an advocate for change in tiny increments, even as she reveals to others that the ruling class is not that way when it comes to implementing its own reactionary programs. The question is for Klein, why should we advocate for bit by bit change when our opponents do not? I don’t think she has a good answer to that at all.
You can read more about Dr. Ewen Cameron’s CIA-funded experiments and all the MKULTRA subprojects in the MKULTRA Briefing Book, which was prepared by the CIA in 1976. The CIA Inspector General wrote in 1958 of MKULTRA: “Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles.”