The Shock Doctrine

This is a movie you should check out. Aristotle said that "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." Well, going back to the start of the review, even if you think that what Naomi Klein is talking about is pure nonsense, "The Shock Doctrine" is a movie to watch, precisely even more if you don't agree with the ideas it presents.

Basically the movie talks about how capitalism aliments itself on conflict and shocks, meaning that it is very good at distracting the attention from the important to some event that is terrible, but not the most terrible. For example, it talks about how the United Kingdom got into the Falklands War, and how that distracted public attention from the strikes and the civil unrest that was ongoing in the country. Does it all sound a little bit conspiratorial? It does, but it is also true that when something like a war happens, people's attention will be centered on that event, and it will become a situation of "us" vs. "others". Even if you don't believe that happens on purpose, it is true that systems, being it capitalism or other, may take advantage of those situations.

But that's for a politics or international relations class. Going back to the documentary, "The Shock Doctrine" presents its ideas in a very clear and easy to understand way, and it gives enough examples to see why they say what they say. In that respects it does a very nice job. It also does a good job in making the viewer think and analyze situations. And it is very interesting to try to see things in a different light from the "official" view of things.

As Aristotle said, you don't have to accept it. Or agree with it. But it doesn't hurt to think.

The numerous examples provided in this documentary very effectively support the conclusions that Klein is making. This is NOT a conspiracy film by any stretch. This is just a history lesson that has you draw your own conclusions. It makes a major point that should be no surprise to any of us - that "shocks" have been opportunistic to the powers that are determined to promote their success above the general welfare. I appreciate this documentary because it focuses on important truths that too many of us refuse to accept even though the evidences are overwhelming. The documentary might be a little overwhelming for someone who is not familiar with the facts presented since they are presented in such volume so quickly. The documentary could have easily been twice as long, but I suppose that is what the book is for.

Obviously, the opinions about this powerful documentary will be sharply divided. Liberals, and proudly I am one of them, will approve and cheer, and conservatives will call it communist propaganda and other such drivel. I lived in both communist and capitalist society. With the incredible youthful passion I fought communism and it's limits on free speech and artistic expression. And over 22 years ago I immigrated to the USA. And, it was a sobering experience. There is a freedom of speech, nobody limits the artistic expression( mostly because nobody gives a damn about art-the dying form). And there is the most troubling of all for me. The mighty dollar, the only pertinent thing. It really is all about money. Everything else takes the back seat. The extremes of socialism didn't work, because repression doesn't last forever, but, on the other hand, the extremes of ruthless, greedy capitalism, do not work either. The culture of ME,ME,ME is ultimately barren and lonely, and the impoverished will eventually rise up in arms, and who wants that. Nobody reads the dusty volumes of history books. If they were, we might be living in a different world.

The adaptation of Naomi Klein's book 'The Shock Doctrine' seems to have been quite convoluted. First Alfonso Cuarón and his brother teamed up with Klein to make a 6 minute short film almost as a way of advertising the book.

This is just a taster for the larger issue at hand. Whitecross and Winterbottom's feature-length documentary is a journey into the meat of the matter. Each of the snippets from Cuarón's film are expanded and the story is told over a grand, even epic, scale. This is the story of an economist called Milton Friedman and his idea. Perhaps not just an idea, given the remarkable effect of Friedman's 'idea' it just doesn't seem like a big enough word, but it will have to do. The idea is one that sounds attractive, it is beguiling in its simplicity and more than that, it offers the chance of a kind of utopia - it is the notion of the 'Free Market'. Klein's book, and this film, describe how Friedman's ideas on Free Market economics went from being a marginalised backwater of economic theory to being the reasoning behind so many international events in recent years. It is the story of how deregulated trading isn't a Utopian saviour but a dangerous and unpredictable beast powerful enough to bring a country to its knees.

The argument is drawn clearly and with enough evidence to be compelling; from the military coups in Chile and Argentina through the right wing governments of Thatcher and Reagan, a stop off with Boris Yeltsin and the collapse of the Soviet Union and ending with our current embroilment in Iraq – Naomi Klein has drawn a path connecting all these events to the economic ideas of Milton Friedman. At points the power of the message is a little overwhelming, it made me angry to see the atrocities committed in the service of enacting national changes. To see the rich get rich and the poor, well the poor get eaten up by the system. It is horrible and brilliant. Sickening and yet so very clever, so smart as to be almost admirable – but that doesn't make it right.

They are preaching to the converted with me, but I urge you to seek out this film. Find it and watch it and understand some of the underlying ideas that run our lives on a day to day and nation to nation basis. A word of warning though, you might get angry.

We're all familiar with economic shock therapy, the idea that sometimes a massive destabilisation of the economy is the first step towards recovery. What Naomi Klein argues in her book, 'The Shock Doctrine', is that chaos is not just an occasionally necessary precursor of reform, but it rather exploited or at worst engineered by reform's proponents, because the consequences of the changes proposed would not be accepted by the people if offered to them a la carte in a less pressured environment. Michael Winterbottom's film develops Klein's arguments, and presents a fairly conventional alternative history of the world. But there are still some interesting details: I didn't know that it was Eisenhower, of all people, who first warned about the military-industrial complex; and it's welcome to see a different interpretation of what happened in Chile in the 1970s to the outrageous story told by Niall Fergusson in his recent BBC series, 'A History of Money'. Yet I still felt slightly disappointed by this film, because while it exposes the lies of the new right to be friends of freedom and democracy (by showing how they need to suppress freedom to get their ideas through), it doesn't address the other part of the argument, namely, whether their economic ideas are basically sound. Perhaps it does indeed take unpopular policies to rescue broken economies; one can dispute that this belief justifies coercion, but should a rational people accept shock as a price worth paying? There are lots of good arguments that say no, but the film doesn't make them; the case that equality is an aid to the efficiency of a country, as well as a moral good in itself, is here taken for granted, although this is arguably the key point of difference between left and right. I fear that this film will not convert anyone while the right's most insidious claim, that a competitive jungle is, however distasteful, the best of all possible worlds, goes unchallenged.