One of the great pleasures about travelling away from the general hurly-burly is to take a few good books with me to read - the kind that I find (after an 11 hour day) too exhausting to get into. I have spent some of my holiday reading (and completing) a book called The Shock Doctrine by a Canadian Journalist called Naomi Klein. It was a fascinating and harrowing read, and takes you through the entire experience of economic policy as determined by Milton Friedman and the Chicago boys, and how it has been used as the blueprint by the First World to impose neoconservative views on the rest of the world.
The Dramatis Personae of the book includes many of my own hate figures, and the exhaustive detail and clear prose ties all these people in a web of power, greed, corruption and death.
In no particular order:
- General Pinochet of Chile
- Vice-President Dick Cheney
- President Suharto of Indonesia
- Margaret Thatcher
- George H W Bush
- Deng Xiao-Ping
- Paul Bremer
- Thabo Mbeki
- Boris Yeltsin
- The Union Solidarnosc (in Poland)
- Bill Clinton
- George W Bush
- Richard Perle
- Igor Gaidar
- Donald Rumsfeld
The list of the murderous, venal, selfish, greedy, arrogant and/or despicable people goes on; there is little sparing of prose in this work. Members of my profession include a psychiatrist from McGill University, Canada, who experimented on patients in a Josef Mengele style using Electric Shock, Sensory Deprivation, Drugs and Hallucinogens.
I see the hand of Monetarism (as propounded by Friedman and his acolytes in the University of Chicago) in much that goes on in the world, and much of this has taken place in the USA and the UK.
The economic orthodoxy is to go down the monetarist route of privatisation, deregulation, low-taxes and removal of tariffs. This poisonous combination has resulted in hundreds and thousands of deaths in the countries that have been 'helped' by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (the List is a long one, but Chile, Uruguay, Mexico, Poland, Russia, China, Argentina, Brazil etc. etc).
So are there any heroes in this sorry saga? Ms Klein (of course) and her supporters. John Pilger. The Guardian. Rodolfo Walsh. John Maynard Keynes. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Evo Morales of Bolivia.
Profoundly upsetting. Do try to read it.
