[R-G] Shock resistant: Naomi Klein, an audacious voice in a discouraged era

[Anthony Fenton]

Copyright 2007 The Globe and Mail, a division of CTVglobemedia  
Publishing Inc.
All Rights Reserved
The Globe and Mail (Canada)

September 1, 2007 Saturday

SECTION: FOCUS; PROFILE: WOMAN OF THE WORLD; Pg. F8

LENGTH: 2793 words

HEADLINE: Shocked and appalled;
Shock resistant: Naomi Klein, an audacious voice in a discouraged era

BYLINE: John Allemang

BODY:


Naomi Klein isn't talking shopping now. The author-activist behind  
the 2000 hit No Logo has returned with a scathing attack on  
government and corporate exploitation of disaster, conflict and  
terror, from 9/11 to New Orleans, and Russia to Guantanamo Bay and  
Iraq. While critics scoff, she holds out hope that she can inspire  
the political left the movement she was born, raised and married  
into, to reclaim its courage and confidence. Before it's too late.

If there's anyone who knows the ins and outs of a successful  
marketing campaign, it's Naomi Klein.

So why is the author of the bestselling No Logo, the 2000 book that  
tore apart the pretensions of "Just Do It" brand-building while  
inspiring the social-justice spirit in young consumers, walking away  
from a screening of the video for her long-awaited new book, The  
Shock Doctrine

"It's too disturbing," she says, as she closes the door to the small  
room that started off as our meeting place but now feels more like an  
isolation chamber.

Of course, if you're a truly discerning consumer of the commodity  
that is intellectual culture, you're focusing less on Ms. Klein's  
sudden disappearance from her own promotional gathering and more on  
the fact that her massive new tome (to be published on Tuesday in  
seven languages) comes with its own trailer - if trailer is a word  
that can begin to describe this dense and darting six-minute  
documentary created by Ms. Klein and Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron  
(Children of Men, Y Tu Mama Tambien), which will shortly make a more  
public appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Book videos "are the hot new thing in publishing," according to the  
37-year-old Canadian author, whose particularly successful brand of  
activism-for-our-times has always had a soft spot for the hot new  
thing. And why not? Why should left-wing politics be preachy and  
above-it-all, which is certain death for any movement that is  
sincerely committed to reaching the masses, whoever they now may be?

Those are particularly relevant questions when the subject is as  
difficult and unsettling as the one Ms. Klein has chosen for her No  
Logo follow-up - no less a theme than the human devastation caused by  
the unrelenting propagandists for the free-market economy over the  
last 35 years, from the torture chambers of Augusto Pinochet's Chile  
and the murderous disappearances in Argentina's military rule to the  
morass of Hurricane Katrina and the shock-and-awe destruction of Iraq.

No wonder Ms. Klein flees her own video. Reduced to a film-festival  
format, The Shock Doctrine scours the vulnerable brain, as the  
jarring noises of crying babies and wailing cats surround images of  
pain and torture that are meant to represent the shock-therapy  
metaphors peddled by unsparing market economists - in the most  
visceral and literal way.

This, to Ms. Klein's sensitive eye, is the ugly face of capitalism,  
and it's a sight she can't stand to see.

We're a long way from No Logo, a book that exposed the cruel ruses of  
global branding, true, but didn't implicate us quite so much in the  
writhing bodies and twisted souls of the market's innocent victims.  
Smart 17-year-old girls latched on to it and found in its breezy  
pages the substance to go with their style. Hundreds of them wrote  
personal letters to Ms. Klein, thanking her for opening them up to  
the world of politics, a place from which they thought they were barred.

No Logo was upbeat, empowering, effortlessly superior to the  
globalized economy it described (to the point where some critics  
accused it of being just an elevated version of consumer snobbery).  
The 662-page Shock Doctrine, as you might guess from its subtitle,  
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is much more prickly and much less  
eager to please.

As such, it is a risky venture for a woman who found a devoted  
worldwide audience with her previous book, including praise from  
British and American rock stars and a paparazzi following in Italy,  
where unlicensed No Logo boutiques honour her fame. She deliberately  
resisted writing an obvious sequel - to the point of investing over  
$200,000 of her advance payments in research operations, building a  
virtual academic institute in order to get the goods on such unsexy  
free-market gurus as the late University of Chicago economist Milton  
Friedman. Her acknowledgments alone run to eight pages.

"I did feel some pressure to write another No Logo," she says,  
returning to the meeting room after the video's cacophony has given  
way to a more bookish calm. "Politics ... but fun!" she says, in a  
parody of the marketing voice that can reduce every bright idea to  
its most lucrative and inane. " 'Easier than Chomsky,' someone said.  
Well, this isn't that."

No utopia

The Shock Doctrine, in her analysis, is "the secret history of the  
free market." The concepts that economists such as Prof. Friedman and  
institutions such as the World Bank so zealously promoted -  
deregulation, privatization, free trade, debt reduction, huge cuts in  
the public sector, targeting trade-union movements - have become so  
mainstream that they seem inevitable for any political office-seeker  
in a Western democracy, even if they lead to lower wages and less  
protection for the working classes.

But Ms. Klein is determined to show that this free-market utopia,  
designed to benefit big corporations and their allies in government,  
is neither inevitable nor democratic nor a good thing. And by doing  
so, in her detailed histories of those political and economic crises  
where the free marketeers overplayed their hand (Prof. Friedman is  
disturbingly tight with the repressive Pinochet, for example), she  
also wants to shake us out of our deference to crisis-capitalism's  
shock therapy and lead us back to the more humane values of  
democratic socialism.

Does that make sense? In Ms. Klein's world, these are givens. Free- 
market ideals are undemocratic by nature and can be imposed only  
against the will of the people at "a moment of collective vertigo"  
when the ordinary rules of political behaviour are suspended - one  
classic example being Sept. 11, 2001, when right-wing think tanks  
rolled in with readymade agendas to take advantage of what she calls  
"a period of disorientation, when you trust authority figures and  
think Rudy Giuliani is your long-lost daddy."

Her project is a secret history because so much free-market rhetoric,  
in her view, is at odds with the way these economic "reforms" have  
been carried out. Since people won't choose a more precarious  
economic life willingly, they have to be fooled or shocked or  
tortured into being compliant - which sounds accurate in describing  
Pinochet's Chile and post-9/11 Iraq, both of which submitted under  
duress to the delusions of free-market ideologues, but doesn't quite  
correspond with the usual view of the divisive but freely chosen  
Margaret Thatcher and Mike Harris.

Ms. Klein will point out that Mrs. Thatcher's government arranged for  
striking mine workers to be beaten and spied on, and that Ontario's  
Mr. Harris had an education minister who was actually videotaped  
talking about the need to prepare the way for cuts by "creating a  
useful crisis." But she's not about to entertain the idea that Mrs.  
Thatcher or Mr. Harris came to power because a mass of people  
actually preferred their ideology to the alternative - we must have  
been bullied or duped or metaphorically tortured.

As a secret history of capitalism, The Shock Doctrine, for all its  
hefty research and convincing connect-the-dot revelations about the  
money men's back-room machinations, doesn't purport to be even- 
handed. Being balanced and boring just isn't Ms. Klein's style, in  
activism as in the rest of her life.

This leaves her wide open to challenges from free-market defenders  
such as National Post columnist Andrew Coyne, who comments: "It is  
true that radical changes in economic policy are usually only  
possible in conditions of crisis: Chile under Pinochet, Thatcher  
after the Winter of Discontent, New Zealand after the currency  
crisis. Israel and Ireland are more recent examples. But that is true  
not only of free-market reforms: Communism was only imposed in  
Russia, Cuba etc. after the 'crisis,' albeit self-inflicted, of  
revolution.

"And whereas communism has everywhere been renounced at the first  
democratic opportunity, I note that none of the free-market  
experiments I mentioned have been reversed, though different parties  
have come to power."

But such polite observations from the other side are not about to  
waylay Ms. Klein.

"The Shock Doctrine is an alternative history," she says with amiable  
defiance. "This is the part of the story that's been left out.  
Hundreds of books talk about the other version of history, about the  
ineffectiveness of big government and the corruption of big labour  
and the problems of stagflation. This is not that kind of book."

Red-diaper baby

Ms. Klein's left-wing certainties, her refusal to lie down and accept  
the fact that the business mentality has triumphed, are rooted in her  
family history: "I don't question being a leftist any more than I  
would question being a Jew - it's the culture I got taught as a kid."

Her upbringing, she believes, is responsible for The Shock Doctrine's  
theme of resistance against the privatized world. Her American  
parents, who came to Montreal during the Vietnam War, both thrived in  
publicly funded occupations - her mother as a feminist National Film  
Board director, her doctor father as the founder of a natural- 
childbirth clinic who also taught at McGill University and worked at  
a large public hospital. But when Ms. Klein was a baby, the family  
moved to Rochester, N.Y., and suddenly her mother was working out of  
a trailer for a local public-access station, while her father treated  
uninsured patients at a tiny clinic on the edge of town.

"They faced the choice of whether they'd be totally marginal in the  
United States or part of the mainstream in public institutions in  
Canada," says Ms. Klein.

After five years in the United States, the choice seemed more clear- 
cut, and so Ms. Klein came of age as a serious-minded Montrealer -  
auspiciously, she wrote a Grade 9 essay on the CIA's responsibility  
for Pinochet's 1973 military coup. Clearly, talk in the Klein  
household was dominated by big issues. Her grandparents on her  
father's side were ardent old-school lefties, both of whom supported  
Stalin out of unassailable faith in the communist cause. Her  
grandfather, who worked on Fantasia, led a strike at the Disney  
studios, and Ms. Klein grew up hearing tales of her father, age 13,  
joining in the protests.

"These are my childhood stories, what we heard on car trips," she  
says, "about my grandfather getting blacklisted, about my father  
screaming 'scab' on the picket line at Disney." Her grandparents  
joined a rural left-wing community in New Jersey called Nature's  
Friends, where Woody Guthrie would show up to sing to the converted.  
This is where she spent her childhood vacations, giving the lie to  
the much-repeated description of her in her teens as just another  
"mall rat" - a recurring image that makes her wince.

"It's pure propaganda. Yes, I really was a teenager in high school,  
but the truth is I was a pretty serious kid. It was played up as an  
interesting angle when No Logo was published" - the phrase "mall-rat  
memoir" even found its way to the dust-jacket - "and I didn't do  
enough to hide it. It will haunt me forever. I do think it's silly,  
though. Do men who write fairly serious books get this kind of  
treatment?"

Having grown up in a Jewish socialist family where politics was table  
talk, she married into another where the bar may have been set even  
higher. Her husband, the hyper-articulate CBC television host Avi  
Lewis, is the son of former Ontario NDP leader and UN AIDS envoy  
Stephen Lewis and of legendary feminist columnist Michele Landsberg.  
He is also the grandson of the late federal NDP leader David Lewis -  
the last of the supremely confident Canadian socialists, who coined  
the phrase "corporate welfare bums."

Ms. Landsberg first came across Ms. Klein, then the editor of The  
Varsity at the University of Toronto, when the young writer called  
for reassurance after drawing fire for criticizing Israel in the  
student newspaper. "It was very brave of her to take on the Jewish  
establishment," Ms. Landsberg says. "She said what she believed  
without softening the blow, and I was very impressed by her courage."

As a regular at family colloquies, Ms. Klein most often ends up  
trading ideas with Stephen Lewis. "Both of them are at a loss for  
small talk," says Ms. Landsberg. "They're both thinking about stuff,  
and there's this great engagement around issues."

Still, Ms. Landsberg feels that Ms. Klein's greatest similarity is to  
David Lewis. "We have these old snapshots of David at the Socialist  
International meetings before the war, as a very young man, and  
there's the same intellectualism of the left, and the same passion.  
That's the tradition Naomi is a part of, and I see hope in that."

Moving with the time

The left in Canada has been suffering from a crisis of confidence for  
many years. Ms. Klein encountered it head-on in her early 20s when  
she led a pack of her university-journalism friends in the effort to  
remake a long-standing but faltering left-wing Toronto publication  
called This Magazine - only to be met with complaints that she was  
dumbing it down and selling out by directing some of the magazine's  
attention (however critical) to popular culture.

"There are always people on the left who are resistant to change,"  
she says, "who are terribly nostalgic for a mythic moment when  
everything was figured out. ... But while I feel a part of the  
tradition, I'm also trying to evolve it. This Magazine was in  
trouble, and that's why it was handed to a gang of 22-year-olds. It  
had not changed with the culture."

But this is a left-wing thinker who can change with the culture - and  
even manages to change the culture herself. With No Logo, she helped  
foster a more critical and nuanced understanding of global business  
practices at a time that she calls "the high-water mark of corporate  
triumphalism."

With The Shock Doctrine, both her goals and her challenges are much  
greater, despite the fact that the triumphs now seem much less  
secure, after Enron and the conspicuous failures of the Iraq master  
planners - one of whom, Paul Wolfowitz, went on to run the World Bank.

"We're living in a moment of unbelievable defeatism and passivity,"  
she says, with more animation than that blanket statement should allow.

But instead of rounding on the overly passive masses - somebody must  
be electing all these duplicitous leaders, or yielding quietly to the  
corporate cuts or nodding off when so-called terrorists are held for  
years without trial - Ms. Klein spreads what she calls her  
"mobilizing stories" in order to rewrite the history of the free  
market's triumph, so that left-wingers can realize how they were  
outmanoeuvred and learn from their mistakes.

The brief sense of victory that No Logo seemed to promise to  
thoughtful shoppers now seems a long way off, after the post-9/11  
arrogance of the disaster capitalists in Iraq, who paid no attention  
to Ms. Klein's arguments that the policies of globalization would  
come crashing down.

"They made the transition from Free Trade Lite, opposing the anti- 
globalization movement through arm-twisting and bullying, to 'Who  
needs the International Monetary Fund? We'll treat this bombed-out  
country like a blank slate, with no government and no negotiating.' "

In response, Ms. Klein offers up encouraging examples of people who  
have refused to play along, like the Germans who didn't buy into the  
economists' miracle cures at the difficult time of reunification:  
"They know from their history how dangerous it is to shock society.  
The forces unleashed are volatile, and they're not forces you can  
control."

This is not the bravado of a David Lewis, not even close. But for the  
endlessly marginalized left, it's a start.

"Almost no one I know has the confidence David had," Ms. Klein says.  
"We've internalized the narrative that our ideas have been tried and  
have failed - which is why we have strong critiques, but when it  
comes to producing alternatives, we go weak."

Even a bright, audacious, bestselling leftist Naomi Klein can admit  
to carrying around the idea that "when we're in power, we're a  
disaster." And despite the hopes of her Lewis in-laws, she doesn't,  
so far, have any interest in running for elected office - a  
generational difference Michele Landsberg finds hard to accept, even  
as she acknowledges the shock-resistant activist's lesson that there  
are many different ways to change the world.

John Allemang is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.

GRAPHIC: Illustration

LOAD-DATE: September 1, 2007