Alarm tomes: literary bricks written specifically to crash through the windows of your comfort zone
Though this post will not be published for a few days, I am writing it on the sixth of August, the day they buried Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in the Donskoy Cemetary in Russia. Solzhenitsyn will of course be remembered as one of the greatest dissident writers of any age, receiving the 1970 Nobel Prize for First Circle and filling the pages of Cancer Ward and Gulag Archipelago with dissent against the corrupt tyranny rife in the totalitarian Stalinist police state. However, the burial of this body is, thankfully, just that - there is no space here for metaphors on the burial of written dissent. That, thanks to the labours of writers up to the current day, lives on.
Noam Chomsky has enjoyed world-wide recognition for his cutting analysis and criticism of US policy across decades. He is also the author of many books on the subject which, while perhaps not penned with the same edge of disdain and anger we revel in on this blog, command respect and warrant mention.
noted titles
Profit Over People: Neoliberalism & Global Order
Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance
Chronicles of Dissent: Interviews With David Barsamian
The Shock Doctrine [Naomi Klein]
The name Naomi Klein will be known to many thanks to her arresting work No Logo on the ugly secrets of the global sweatshop industry, a world of exploited workers in developing countries sewing and manufacturing for pennies items that, with the magic touch of a brand logo, retail for many times the wage paid for them. Almost certainly her latest book of revelations, The Shock Doctrine, will broaden her exposure and expand her acclaim. It will also sicken any reader with a conscience as it charts the history of an evolving dogma of systematic piracy, terrorism and plunder. This Shock Doctrine honed at the Chicago School of Economics seeks to hijack the recovery process of those countries and communities unfortunate enough to suffer calamities deemed 'opportune' by its proponents. Their pursuit of a world whose people obey the 'signals' of unfettered markets facilitating pure capitalism has lead them to see the period of disorientation after some massive social shock [a coup, a flood, the collapse of an ideology, or the aftermath of a denounced invasion] as the best, even only, conduit to reengineering a national economy along such lines. Apparently, in a stable, operative democracy where people are aware of what is happening around them, and their ability to affect it, nobody ever agrees to switching the roles of people and market between 'master' and 'slave'.
Klein aptly marries the economic shock policies in each case, from the Southern Cone Juntas to ex-Soviet economies, to post-invasion Iraq, with the political shock programs, and electric shock torture administered to their opponents in cells designed along CIA manual guidelines. The economic piracy could never occur without the attendant intrigue and social terrorism that accompany it. The parallels drawn between the economic doctrine itself, and the electro shock therapy developed by Dr Ewen Cameron from which the torture techniques applied to dissidents in its victim territories were extrapolated, are stark and deserved - neither achieves the aims it is claimed to strive for. Electro shock 'patients' were not healed, but destroyed. Shocked economies suffer scars, and free markets everywhere, in direct correlation to the determination with which the policies are implemented, precipitate imprisoned peoples. Enduring Freedom is a grotesquely fitting name for Washington's Iraq adventurism, if this be freedom, Iraq can only hope to endure it.
But this is no simple Iraq Invasion-bashing jolly. The Shock Doctrine stays on the hunt to the end and elaborates on the accompanying development of the military-industrial complex into something more elegant and odious, the disaster-capitalism complex. Now the same companies [and politicians] who profit from the fighting of wars and bombing of homes, schools and hospitals, can reap the riches of government contracts for re-building them too, 'better' than they were before, accessible to a narrower, richer clientele than before. That wall casting its shadow on the land, and inclination toward a peaceful settlement for all, in Gaza, the West Bank and so forth; consider it a prototype for the high-tech fence to go up against Mexico and be guided by Israeli expertise. Those cameras that we don't even notice anymore because they're as abundant as TV sets in the home - a multi-million pound industry. Software for sharing information gleaned from the content of your emails and phone conversations, cross-checked against whether you buy baklava - already generating arrests in the War on Terror. Who's doing the terrorising?
Globalization and its Discontents [Joseph Stiglitz]
Joseph Stiglitz was chief economist at the World Bank from 1997 to 2000 and won the Nobel Prize for Economics a year later. In Globalisation and its Discontents, Stiglitz defends the basic concept of globalisation, [a process which is defended to the hilt by international financial institutions and trumpeted as the path to a gleaming global economic future, but which has drawn fire from streets in all corners of the globe] and seeks to identify where the problems have come in implementing it. Stiglitz concentrates on the actions of the World Bank and the IMF in projects for development in the economies of Africa, Asia and to a lesser extent Latin America, and the transition from command to market economies in former communist states. From the first chapter, he cites the points the finger to the IMF, to its departure from purely interesting itself with financial stability [the cause for which John Maynard Keynes pushed its creation in 1944] and its imposition of conditions on the liquidity it was set up to provide, originally to avert crises but recently, to assist in development and transition projects. Stiglitz accuses the IMF of overstepping its competencies and infringing national sovereignty in providing or suspending aid, and imposing a miss-judged and flawed 'one-size-fits-all' approach to economic development in countries all over the world with ideological rigidity. While the relatively mild tone of this dissection of the failings of globalisation sounds almost defensive against the vitriol that drips from the pages of The Shock Doctrine, and the language in general is unlikely to win him another Nobel Prize, the book is nonetheless a valuable admission of the discord between two of the chief institutions responsible for what of the world has been so angry about over the past decade. The main concerns of this book are the economic and political-bureaucratic betrayals and failures of globalisation, which are acknowledged to be responsible for impoverishing so many millions and incubating instability when the people they touch find their teeth, the only individual's story explored in depth being Stiglitz's own, it is not an accusation of outright criminality in any sense. However it nonetheless provides enlightening reading and insight into the discontent at the top of this food chain among economists and advisors. That offers hope to the rest of us outside those closed doors behind which notoriously devastating decisions have been made and demonstrably misguided plans have been drawn up [such as the shock therapy administered on Russia and other post-communist states]. There is a potentially receptive audience for street demonstrations behind those uber-reflective cold glassy exteriors on Washington DC's 19th street and elsewhere in the world. next time you're nearby maybe take along a hard-back edition, it stands a better chance of getting through that glass and doing some creative destruction.
The Strange Death of David Kelly [Norman Baker]
Any ordinary citizen of the UK dies an everyday death, there is an investigation, and inquest, an analysis of exactly how they died. The body of the country's top weapons inspector and expert in the field of science upon which the UK government bases its justification for war against Iraq is found slumped against a tree near his home in an extraordinary and macabre end to his life. The coroner's inquest is mishandled and never completed. The government is accused of complicity in the death or obfuscation of the facts surrounding it, it appoints a judge to preside over hearings purporting to uncover those facts. This book will unsettle any level headed member of the country governed by the usually PR-savvy Labour party whose image was forever indellibly tarnished by these events and the war they preceeded. Norman Baker apparently delves into more detail than Lord Hutton required of his witnesses when compiling that seemingly farsical report from august 2003 to january 2004 for an inquiry conducted outside the parameters of normal UK legal procedure. The holes in the procedures followed and the malice with which this respected scientist was regarded by that government are almost as unnerving as the details of the possible ways in which this man died as explored with the help of experts in the field of suicides and 'suicides'. So much of the official account of this saga does not add up, it decidedly appears to amount to an affront to democracy and the social contract between government and its people as much an insult to the memory of a dead man.
Also of interestWar on Terror, Inc. Corporate Profiteering From the Politics of Fear [Solomon Huges]
No Logo [Naomi Klein]
No comments:
Post a Comment