Redstate

By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Economy — Comments (3) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Once again, let me mention just how grateful I am for people whose book reviews save me time and allow me to devote myself to more interesting literary works:

A spectre is haunting global capitalism, the spectre of Naomi Klein. Wherever globalists wander, they find her standing in their way, sternly shaking her finger like a schoolteacher handing out bad marks. If supporters of free trade celebrate a success, like China, Klein calls it "corporatism" and reminds us that many millions of Chinese remain impoverished. When globalism fails, in Argentina or Indonesia, Klein quickly identifies the enemies of humanity, the "Chicago Boys," University of Chicago economists who destroy social democracy everywhere.

Economists will love her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Has any profession ever been so lavishly flattered? Economists believe they should run the world and now comes this super-industrious Toronto journalist with the news that they are already doing so.

The way she frames her views is at least as interesting as the views themselves. "Shock doctrine," for example, sticks in the mind even if no one understands it. It means everything and nothing. "Shock" refers, among many other things, to CIA-funded brainwashing experiments at McGill in the 1950s, the U.S. invasion of Iraq and any demand from the International Monetary Fund for payment of a loan.

Klein writes with little sense of style and no pity for the poor reader. The Shock Doctrine requires that we hack through a thicket of self-contradictions and wild overstatements. For her, hyperbole is not a literary device, it's a way of life.

But she seems to believe (and who can call her wrong?) that if she moves fast enough, few will notice the flaws in her thinking. Within one sentence, she blissfully mashes together movements and political figures with little in common except her dislike of them.

She says democratic socialism was never defeated in political debate or elections. Instead, it was "shocked out of the way at key political junctures" -- and, when resistance was fierce, defeated violently, "rolled over by Pinochet's, Yeltsin's and Deng Xiaoping's tanks." Huh? Have those names ever appeared in the same sentence before? In 1973, Augusto Pinochet brought small-scale neo-fascism to Chile. In 1989, Deng Xiaoping defended the gigantic monolithic power of the Communist Party. In the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin led the break-up of the U.S.S.R.

But Klein implies that the people brutally defeated in Chile, China and Russia were social democrats, all probably holding NDP-type opinions. Perhaps they were. Or perhaps the students in Tiananmen Square hoisted that home-made variant of the Statue of Liberty as a plea for emergency assistance from the U.S. Marines and Micro-soft. Even now, as Klein said recently in a Maclean's interview, "I don't think we've even begun to come to terms with what's going on in China." Yet she knows what they were thinking 18 years ago.

If you can manage to read Klein, you need read no more. Learn her way of thinking and you'll not be required to think again. She delivers a packaged one-size-fits-all theory of history that shares just one attribute with Marxism: When you have absorbed Klein you will in future always know the answer before you know the question.

Capitalism is a wonderful system. It is certainly good enough to deserve good friends. But if it cannot have as many good friends as it deserves, why can't it at least have less confused foes?