NEWSREEL: The 1940s have been a decade of breakthroughs and developments in medicine and psychiatry. It premiered last week at film festivals in Venice and Toronto. I want to begin by playing excerpts from a short documentary co-written by Naomi Klein and Children of Men director Alfonso Cuarón.

Naomi Klein writes in the introduction to Shock Doctrine the quote, “The history of the contemporary free market was written in shocks.” She argues, “Some of the most infamous human rights violations of the past thirty-five years, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market reforms.” When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” Naomi Klein examines some of what she considers the most dangerous ideas - Friedmanite economics - and exposes how catastrophic events are both extremely profitable to corporations and have also allowed governments to push through what she calls “disaster capitalism.” It’s called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.Įconomist Milton Friedman once said, “Only a crisis produces real change. Award-winning investigative journalist Naomi Klein brings together all these world-changing events in her new book. In this utterly lucid study, Klein’s triune thesis is bold enough : economical war (the neoliberal controlled demolition of the state), state terrorism (the systematic destruction of culture with bombs, abductions, torture, assassinations…) and “democratic” free market are three facets of the enforcement of the same ideology.AMY GOODMAN: Pinochet’s coup in Chile, the massacre in Tiananmen Square, the collapse of the Soviet Union, September 11th, the war on Iraq, the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. La montée d’un capitalisme du désastre, traduit par Lori Saint-Martin et Paul Gagné, Arles, Actes Sud, 2008). Seven years after her famous No Logo : No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (2000), Naomi Klein has published The Shock Doctrine : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York, Metropolitan Books and London, Allen Lane, 2007), now available as a paperback (Penguin, 2008) and recently translated into French (La stratégie du choc. Annuaire de la philosophie en procès - Yearbook of Philosophy in Process', Louvain-la-Neuve, Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2008, pp. Ce compte rendu a été publié originellement in Michel Weber et Pierfrancesco Basile (dir.), 'Chromatikon IV. La Stratégie du choc, la montée d’un capitalisme du désastre (The Shock Doctrine : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism) est un essai de Naomi Klein paru en 2007 chez Acte Sud.

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein