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 re engineering 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.
Available
at TimbooktooTel: 4494345
