I found this reading to be incredibly poignant and interesting. Having never heard of the Shock Doctrine or Disaster Capitalism, it was very cool to learn about this and the ideas of Mira Klein.
The part I found most interesting in the first part of Shock Doctrine was her comparison of the economy to torture and the ideas of Ewen Cameron. It was very interesting how Klein asserts that Cameron's essentially lay the groundwork for what the CIA did to prisoners of war and war criminals. I completely agree with Klein's conclusion of torture: the economy is like the victim--left completely confused and blank. The victim, or economy, is ready for new information. And the free market is imposed on the tortured economy as a way of fixing it. This kind of blew my mind. In that way disaster capitalism is almost an exact parallel of Cameron's torture tactics.
Overall this was an incredibly stimulating read and I am interested in reading the entire book.
I agree this was a very interesting read. The part about Cameron's experiments was especially engaging, though I felt very disgusted with the whole idea of shock therapy and the way he would completely wipe someone's personality blank in order to remake the person.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the book was shocking and thought provoking. I also did see the parallels between torture and governments and corporations taking advantage of people. The free market does not have to be inherently bad, but using it to make the rich richer and poor get poorer.
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