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A review by huerca_armada
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.0
From the interior, all of the prism's flaws can be swept away with simple, airy platitudes. Those flaws exist because there is no possible way to remove them. The prism has achieved perfection, you see. Anything done in the course of creating the prism is justified; any deficiency is something integral not just to its structure, but all prisms that could ever be made. And from the inside of it, it is hard not be inculcated in the ideology that upholds that narrative.
Naomi Klein's seminal book is the strongest possible denunciation of mellifluous, abhorrent economic design that has gripped the world. It goes by many names; Freidmanism. Neoliberalism. Neoconservatism. Globalization. The hallmarks are all the same between these names, however. Mass layoffs, the unfettering of capital and the removal of the obstacles placed before its rapacious desire to conquer new markets. In a modern age where there is no longer an economic or political counterweight to it, neoliberalism metastasizes like a cancer across the globe. It flies from nation to nation, carving up their industries, opening up their markets to the world, and vampirically siphoning away the wealth of generations for the benefit of an elite few.
The Shock Doctrine is an immensely upsetting book for a myriad of reasons. It isn't just the helicopter caravans of the Pinochet regime that murdered dissidents across Chile in the wake of his successful coup. It isn't the myriad of textual examples of hopelessness and despair faced by ordinary people from Myanmar and the Philippines, to Russia and Poland, to Bolivia and Trinidad, and countless others that are seen as collateral damage in the face of massive market and debt restructuring. It isn't even the gruesome realization about the privatization penetrating even the American military so that everything from nation-building, to torture, to staffing the bases' McDonalds is taken care of such monolithic groups like Halliburton. What gets me is the abhorrent smugness that many of these neoliberal pundits have, and continue to have as they drift through the halls of power decade after decade.
This book is many things. It is a denunciation of the hidden empire that pretends that it is anything but. It is a catalogue of the abuses of the international and transnational monetary empires that dictate the lives of the world from their looming, glass towers. For those who are still in the thought prism of the "peaceful" rise of global capitalism in the post-history world that we've been in since 1989, it is perhaps the most radicalizing book that you will read. It deserves to be read by as many people as possible, and I cannot recommend it enough.
Naomi Klein's seminal book is the strongest possible denunciation of mellifluous, abhorrent economic design that has gripped the world. It goes by many names; Freidmanism. Neoliberalism. Neoconservatism. Globalization. The hallmarks are all the same between these names, however. Mass layoffs, the unfettering of capital and the removal of the obstacles placed before its rapacious desire to conquer new markets. In a modern age where there is no longer an economic or political counterweight to it, neoliberalism metastasizes like a cancer across the globe. It flies from nation to nation, carving up their industries, opening up their markets to the world, and vampirically siphoning away the wealth of generations for the benefit of an elite few.
The Shock Doctrine is an immensely upsetting book for a myriad of reasons. It isn't just the helicopter caravans of the Pinochet regime that murdered dissidents across Chile in the wake of his successful coup. It isn't the myriad of textual examples of hopelessness and despair faced by ordinary people from Myanmar and the Philippines, to Russia and Poland, to Bolivia and Trinidad, and countless others that are seen as collateral damage in the face of massive market and debt restructuring. It isn't even the gruesome realization about the privatization penetrating even the American military so that everything from nation-building, to torture, to staffing the bases' McDonalds is taken care of such monolithic groups like Halliburton. What gets me is the abhorrent smugness that many of these neoliberal pundits have, and continue to have as they drift through the halls of power decade after decade.
This book is many things. It is a denunciation of the hidden empire that pretends that it is anything but. It is a catalogue of the abuses of the international and transnational monetary empires that dictate the lives of the world from their looming, glass towers. For those who are still in the thought prism of the "peaceful" rise of global capitalism in the post-history world that we've been in since 1989, it is perhaps the most radicalizing book that you will read. It deserves to be read by as many people as possible, and I cannot recommend it enough.