10.16.07
Israel and disaster capitalism
From Rad-Green
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9044.shtml
Electronic Intifada October 15, 2007
Disaster capitalism: Israel as warning
Raymond Deane
I think we can safely deduce that Jewish extremist Kach members aren’t
too fond of Naomi Klein. On their informative online S.H.I.T.
(Self-Hating and/or Israel-Threatening) List, we read that she “is an
ISM supporter and Rachel Corrie lover. If Hitler were alive today,
she’d love him as well!” This considered evaluation will probably need
to be rephrased in less glowing terms if any patient Kahanists get
around to reading The Shock Doctrine - the Rise of Disaster
Capitalism.
Many are now familiar with the outlines of Klein’s argument: in the
wake of natural and unnatural disasters, neo-liberal economic reform
is foisted on stricken societies while their citizens are in a
condition of collective disorientation. While the ruling class is
quick to avail of these “opportunities,” it doesn’t actually set out
to create them, because it doesn’t need to: “An economic system that
requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at
environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all
on its own, whether military, ecological or financial.” After great
destruction comes privatized reconstruction to the benefit of
multinational corporations and the detriment of ordinary people.
In itself, the thesis that capitalism thrives on disaster isn’t
exactly novel. What Klein has done, however, is to draw analytical
conclusions from the consistency with which the metaphor of “shock” is
employed in this context.
She recounts how in the 1950s the CIA funded electric shock
experiments by the US-American psychiatrist Ewen Cameron that entailed
“attacking the brain with everything known to interfere with its
normal functioning — all at once” in order to reduce it to a tabula
rasa upon which, it was mistakenly believed, anything could be
written. These experiments inspired the CIA’s MKUltra program designed
“to break prisoners suspected of being Communists and double agents.”
As a bonus, Cameron’s and the CIA’s procedures laid the groundwork for
torture practices from Santiago de Chile to Abu Ghraib.
Next, Klein explores the doctrines of Milton Friedman and his Chicago
School disciples, those influential advocates of economic “shock
therapy” who also drew up their theories in the heady 1950s. Friedman,
according to Klein, was “the other Doctor Shock … Friedman’s
mission, like Cameron’s, rested on a dream of reaching back to a state
of ‘natural’ health, … before human interferences created distorting
patterns. Where Cameron dreamed of returning the human mind to that
pristine state, Friedman dreamed of depatterning societies, of
returning them to a state of pure capitalism … the only way to reach
that prelapsarian state was to deliberately inflict painful shocks …
Cameron used electricity to inflict his shocks. Friedman’s tool of
choice was … the shock treatment approach he urged on bold
politicians for countries in distress.”
The first society to be remodeled on the basis of Friedman’s theories
was Pinochet’s Chile. Here the overlap between Friedman and Cameron
ceases to be merely metaphorical: the ruthless implementation of the
former’s shock therapy required the employment of the latter’s, in the
form of torture.
The opportunity afforded by war to effect a neo-liberal restructuring
of shocked and disorientated societies provided neo-conservatives with
a blueprint for taking advantage of natural catastrophes. The December
2004 tsunami that killed 250,000 people and left 2.5 million homeless
provided a golden opportunity for the governments of Sri Lanka,
Thailand and Indonesia to achieve a free-market “second tsunami,”
often employing funds donated for victim relief to “cleanse” fishing
people and other surplus natives from coastal regions destined for the
exclusive use of wealthy tourists. Hurricane Katrina, the following
year, afforded 93-year-old Milton Friedman the opportunity to make his
final public intervention when he proposed that the “tragedy” of the
destruction of New Orleans’s schools was “an opportunity to radically
reform the educational system” by privatizing it. This amiable advice
was hastily acted upon, “in sharp contrast to the glacial pace with
which the levees were! repaired and the electricity grid was brought
back online …”
Somewhere between natural catastrophes and wars come events like
Jeffrey Sachs’s disastrous interventions in Bolivia and Poland, the
Tiananmen Square massacre, and Boris Yeltsin’s Ubuesque rise to power
in Russia. In each case, however, the military — and mercenaries
nowadays — play a belligerent role in keeping the rabble in line. In
a word, we are dealing with a particularly lethal and one-sided class
war (although Klein avoids the phrase).
Exhibit A: Israel
Before the advent of Friedman and his successors, conventional wisdom
had it that “relative peace and stability were required for sustained
economic growth.” More recently this state of affairs gave way to “the
Davos Dilemma”: “Put bluntly, the world was going to hell, there was
no stability in sight and the global economy was roaring its
approval.” In a context where “instability is the new stability,”
“Israel is often held up as a kind of Exhibit A.” Despite — or
because of — its parlous political situation, “Israel has crafted an
economy that expands markedly in direct response to escalating
violence.”
The explanation is that Israel’s technology firms grasped the
potential of the global “homeland security” boom long before the
horrible phrase was even coined, and they now dominate that rapidly
expanding sector. Klein stresses the negative aspects of this
development: “Israel should serve as … a stark warning. The fact
that Israel continues to enjoy booming prosperity, even as it wages
war against its neighbors and escalates the brutality in the occupied
territories, demonstrates just how perilous it is to build an economy
based on the premise of continual war and deepening disasters.”
With considerable perspicacity Klein traces two factors contributing
to Israel’s retreat into unilateralism in the post-Oslo period, both
linked to the Chicago School free market crusade. “One was the influx
of Soviet Jews, which was a direct result of Russia’s shock therapy
experiment.” The Rabin/Arafat “handshake on the White House lawn was
on September 13, 1993; exactly three weeks later, Yeltsin sent in the
tanks to set fire to the [Russian] parliament building …”
Subsequently there began a wave of immigration to Israel from the
former USSR, thus “markedly increasing the ratio of Jews to Arabs,
while simultaneously providing a new pool of cheap labor” and swelling
the population of illegal settlements. It suddenly became possible for
Israel to dispense with Palestinian workers and introduce a policy of
closure, “sealing off the border between Israel and the occupied
territories … preventing Palestinians from getting to their jobs and
selling their goods.” The result ! was that the territories “were
transformed from run-down dormitories housing the underclass of the
Israeli state into suffocating prisons.”
The other factor “was the flipping of Israel’s export economy from one
based on traditional goods and high technology to one
disproportionately dependent on selling expertise and devices relating
to counterterrorism,” a process mightily exacerbated by the dot.com
crash of 2000 and by 9/11. By 2004 Israel had set itself up “as a kind
of shopping mall for homeland security technologies.” Klein lists ten
samples of the reach of Israel’s security industry, ranging from
Buckingham Palace to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to the wealthy
New Orleans neighborhood of Audubon Place, where policing is in the
hands of an Israeli firm charmingly named “Instinctive Shooting
International.”
In a world turning itself into a patchwork of fortresses separating
the rich from the poor, Israel is making itself indispensable. This
“has coincided precisely with [Israel’s] abandonment of peace
negotiations, as well as a clear strategy to reframe its conflict with
the Palestinians not as a battle against a nationalist movement …
but rather as part of the global War on Terror …” Generalizing from
those “glimpses of a kind of gated future build and run by the
disaster capitalism complex” afforded by Baghdad, New Orleans and
Sandy Springs (a wealthy Republican suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, that
has turned itself into a “contract city” in order to prevent its taxes
being used to subsidize poor neighborhoods), she concludes that “This
is what a society looks like when it has lost its economic incentive
for peace and is heavily invested in fighting and profiting from an
endless and unwinnable War on Terror. One part looks like Israel; the
other part looks like Gaza … In So! uth Africa, Russia and New
Orleans the rich build walls around themselves. Israel has taken this
disposal process a step further: it has built walls around the
dangerous poor.”
Light at the end of the tunnel
Naomi Klein’s blockbuster is a worthy successor — in scope, ambition
and achievement — to Noam Chomsky’s Deterring Democracy. Her
contextualization of Israeli politics is utterly convincing, and can
only confound those who still believe that Israel has the slightest
interest in reaching an equitable accommodation with its neighbors.
At the end of this tunnel of pessimism, Latin America provides a
glimmer of light: “Today Latin Americans are picking up the project
[of independent “developmentalism”] that was so brutally interrupted
… Many of the policies cropping up are familiar: nationalization of
key sectors of the economy, land reform, major new investments in
education, literacy and health care. … Latin America’s mass
movements … are learning how to build shock absorbers into their
organizing models.” She refers to Venezuela’s and Bolivia’s
grass-roots progressive networks, Brazil’s Landless Peoples Movement
and its cooperatives, Argentina’s movement of “recovered companies,”
and the entire region’s increasing emancipation (Colombia sadly
excepted) from Washington’s military and financial tutelage.
She fails to mention that such moves towards independence have only
become possible because Washington’s increasingly fanatical focus on
the Middle East has diverted its attention (temporarily?) from its
“back yard.” The solidarity between Middle Eastern peoples that is
surely a precondition of Palestine’s liberation is frustrated at every
turn by the repressiveness of Arab regimes (the Palestinian Authority
now tragically included) backed to the hilt by the financial and
military resources of the US and EU.
Nonetheless, it is within this oppressive climate that the Lebanese
people, Sunni and Shiite, trade unionists and Hizballah, have come
together to oppose the attempts by the West and its client prime
minister Siniora to remake Lebanon, in the wake of Israel’s
catastrophic 2006 assault, in the image of New Orleans in the wake of
Katrina. Klein is one of the few Western intellectuals to have
appreciated the importance of this story, and this is just one of the
many virtues of this extraordinary book. Whether or not she is correct
in her belief that “the shock is wearing off,” there is an indelible
truth in her assertion that “[t]he only prospect that threatens the
booming disaster economy on which so much wealth depends … is the
possibility of achieving some measure of climatic stability and
geopolitical peace.”
Raymond Deane is a composer and a founding member of the Ireland
Palestine Solidarity Campaign.