No me acuerdo a través de quién descubrí a Naomi Klein, pero desde luego su libro No Logo me encantó, y me dejó con ganas de leer más cosas de la autora. Acabo de comprarme The Shock Doctrine, libro que espero disfrutar -si se puede decir así- tanto como el anterior. Aquí tenéis un corto que hizo con Alfonso Cuarón sobre los temas tratados en el libro.
De la solapa
«Only a crisis -actual or percieved- produces real change, when that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.» – Milton Friedman, Godfather of the modern market.
At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civel war, a new law is unveiled that will allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reservers. Immediately following September 11, the Bush administration quietly outsources the running of the «War on Terror» to Halliburton and Blackwater. Aftar a powerful tsunami devastates the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts. New Orleans’s residents, still scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover taht their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopenened.
These events are examples of what Naomi Klein calls «the shock doctrine»: the use of public disorientation following massive collective shocks -wars, terrorist attacts, natural disasters- to push through highly unpopular economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out all resitance, a third is employed: that of the electrode in the prison cell or de Taser gun.
Based on breakthrough hisotrical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Disaster capitalism -the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies that are reeling from shock- did not begin with Septermber 11, 2001. In this courageous new book, Klein traces the intellectual origins of disaster capitalism back to the University of Chicago’s economics departement under Milton Friedman, whose influence is still felt around the world. The Shock Doctrine draws new and surprising connections among economic policy, «shock and awe» warfare and the covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation that shaped the torture manuals used today in Guantánamo Bay.
As Klein shows how the deliberate use of the shock doctrineproduced wordl-changing events, from Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973 to the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviert Union in 1991, she tells a story radically different from the one we usually hear. Once again Nami Klein has written a book that will reframe the debate.
