The Shock Doctrine

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.

This documentary that looks at the concept of 'disaster capitalism' which is capitalism which feeds off and depends on natural disasters, war and terror in order to prosper. Famous early proponents of it were Augusto Pinochet's fascist regime in Chile and the neo-liberal conservative administrations of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA. Its name, 'the shock doctrine' coming from the way patients used to act after shock therapy, where immediately after this treatment they became far more pliant, easier to manipulate. If true, I guess some similar shock therapy will be in the pipeline off the back of the current pandemic. Interesting stuff on the whole.

As the economic incentive for peace is lost or defeated, and is increasingly replaced by investment in an endless and un-winnable 'War on Terror', and the capitalistic exploitation of disasters, both natural and man-made, there is a danger that one part of human society will begin to look increasingly like Israel, with its walled-off areas, and massive 'homeland security' apparatus…. and the other like Gaza…… This film by Michael Winterbottom, based on Naomi Klein's terrifying book 'The Shock Doctrine :the Rise of Disaster Capitalism', attempts to show how we arrived at this critical point in history. The film is faithful to the themes of the book and makes good use of contemporary newsreels and pertinent interviews, some conducted by Ms Klein herself. An important documentary, thoroughly recommended.

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.

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.