The New Fascist Corporate Right And The "Naomi Klein Phenomenon"

Corcoran spends several column inches missing the point about the recovery disaster of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, as well as uttering at least one falsehood. Chile was NOT a country “under state control” when the U.S. manipulated the overthrow of its freely-elected government, and then supported torture and genocide of all possible opposition figures – as the IMF and related organizations gave full support. That misinformation by Corcoran is important. Weigh all he writes in the column in the light of it. Brute capitalism, he argues, replaced various kinds of Left dictatorship that had ruined countries “at the cost of millions of lives and untold poverty”. Just for the record Corcoran would have us believe the Soviet Russia that Gorbachev wanted to turn into an ideal social democracy (with something like Swedish social existence) was far, far better off to have a U.S.-inspired and orchestrated hand-over to a disastrous criminal class “at the cost of millions of lives and untold poverty”. So intense is Corcoran’s misinterpretation of history, of Klein’s position, and of simple facts like the condition of Chile when militarily overthrown by criminal U.S. design that the reader pauses. What is going on? First, the New Fascist Corporate Right in the West attacks every manifestation of reform as “leftism” or some other in-house formulation of hate words. Secondly, it works as a solid front, endlessly working to indoctrinate populations against the expectation of a decent life. And, thirdly, of course, Terence Corcoran is a major ‘gorilla club’ columnist for the National Post that was founded by a Raving Rightest, now a (U.S.) convicted felon willing to exchange his Canadian citizenship for a British title (“Call me Lord Black”). It is all quite (drearily) consistent. Corcoran makes one correct statement in the column. In a piece close to 40 column inches in length the odds are pretty good that even he might do that. He rejects (correctly, I believe) the claim by Naomi Klein “that [Milton] Friedman and his ideas animated decades of policy malfeasance orchestrated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).” As proof, Corcoran quotes Friedman saying: “Abolish the IMF”. What Corcoran doesn’t point out is that Friedman made the statement because he feared the IMF and the World Bank might go soft and put in place policies sympathetic to populations rather than ones intended to enforce the right of private corporations to oppress and loot. Friedman definitely didn’t want to destroy the IMF for the reasons Naomi Klein might want to see it erased. Corcoran is correct in his suggestion that Klein is ingenuous in her argument. She accepts the false position that out of the Bretton Woods meetings and formulations of the early 1940s the IMF, the World Bank and later “international” organizations were full of good will but somehow got hi-jacked. As a result Klein is forced to settle on big, bad Milton Friedman as a key to disaster capitalism. She makes a common error: to blame a leading spokesperson for policies already actively at work before he speaks. Sad it is that major Bretton Woods architect John Maynard Keynes grew sick at a critical point and then died in 1946. But the cause was lost before he died. The U.S.A. didn’t have the slightest intention of permitting the creation of a world trade and banking system which provided equality in oversight, democratic voting, punishment for market-flooding, real elbow-room for developing economies, and built-in fairness policies for unions. The U.S.A. was the triumphant super-power coming out of the Second World War. It did not intend to give room to reform social democracies in Europe or to the bloodied but-as-yet-unbowed Soviet Union. Klein misses the brutality of U.S. intention. And so she is soft on “the free market” and distinctly soft on the concerted, unrelieved U.S. policy of oppression and expansion. That is evident over and over as she piles up evidence of policy design by U.S. government and collaboration by U.S. corporations in destroying democratic freedoms abroad. She never pulls that evidence together, and she often leaves the possibility open for error or oversight or absent-mindedness in U.S. actions where no such possibility exists. Surprisingly, she doesn’t push backwards in history even to the Second World War when Ford, German corporations, and IBM were deeply implicated in collaboration and/or the worst torture horrors of that period and regime. The erasure of political and “racial” kinds under Nazism was “shock doctrine” in action and a parallel of like, later genocides in Argentina and Chile. Klein doesn’t make the connection. Indeed, she refuses to see Milton Friedman in the perspective of U.S. history. Friedman was an ugly human being. But he did not ‘shape’ U.S. policy. He was a handle to take hold of, a wonderfully useful propagandist, a legitimizer of already clearly formed U.S. policy. The “shock doctrine” and “disaster capitalism” are as old as the U.S. itself. U.S. spokespeople bridled at the existence of “Canada” long before the U.S. War for Independence, repeatedly urging invasion. In his Declaration of Independence, (1776) Thomas Jefferson removed any reference to slavery – to please the slave owners (of which he was one). After 1776 for several decades slavery increased dramatically: torture, deprivation, and oppression to enhance profit-making. Under the administration of Andrew Jackson in 1832 Chief Justice Marshall decided for just treatment of native Indians the State of Georgia was displacing. Marshall ruled that the Cherokee of Georgia were a distinct community “in which the laws of Georgia have no force”. The U.S. administration worked against the decision. In fact President Jackson is quoted, perhaps apocryphally, saying: “The Chief Justice has made his ruling. I wonder if he has the military forces to back it up.” Justice Marshall didn’t have. And so “the shock doctrine” continued: a good Indian was a dead Indian. U.S. government permitted and aided the genocide of U.S. Indians in order to gain possession of Indian lands. Torture, deprivation, and oppression to enhance profit-making. The cornerstones of the U.S. empire are not the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. constitution, but Black slavery and the genocide of the Indian peoples. Equally relevant – in 1786-87 yeoman formers (who were veterans of the ‘liberating’ U.S. War for Independence) protested against and resisted unjust seizure of their property and incarceration for debt by Boston capitalists at a time of great shortage of gold and silver for debt payment. (The events were called Shay’s Rebellion). Instead of acting to mediate in the dispute, U.S. government stood aside and soon formed – for the first time – a U.S. standing army to put down such “rebels” and to support the unjust exactions of the debt holding capitalists. The first move to create a standing army in the U.S. was undertaken on behalf of capitalists oppressing “ordinary” U.S. people. Klein doesn’t connect those dots. In addition she doesn’t clearly characterize the power, the viciousness, nor the persistence of U.S imperialism – and so she lulls her readers to inattention on that crucial matter. To this reader’s surprise, moreover, she writes – shockingly – of the present break-up of that power – what she describes as “its violent decline”(p. 561), not as U.S imperialism but as “the corporatist crusade”. In either case, however named, violence there undoubtedly is, but not the violent decline of those forces. Such a statement calls to mind the article by John Ralston Saul in the Atlantic Monthly a few years ago announcing the death of globalization. Statements like those ones place their authors dangerously close to the camps with which they are apparently in conflict. The one camp says economic rape and human oppression are normal, progressive. The other camp says, “Don’t worry; it’s all in the process of being changed”. Consistent with her large liberal vision, Klein trumpets the defeat of the new (private corporation-favouring) constitution for Europe by France and Holland. She says nothing about the fact that the European Commission is dealing with the defeat by instituting as many of the constitution’s terms as it can by other means than a constitution. There have been almost no victories for ordinary people in the European Community since the defeat of the proposed new constitution. By the same token, Klein touches Canada only tangentially in the book. But Canada is brilliantly relevant to her argument. She quotes Margaret Thatcher writing to “her intellectual guru” (p. 155) that British “reform” (?) “may seem painfully slow”. That is what Stephen Harper told eager supporters after winning minority government. Thatcher then seized on the war with Argentina for the distant, useless Falkland Islands in order to gain approval and to push through her destructive policies. Harper seized upon Afghanistan, hoping to turn it into a Canadian Falkland war, beating poisonous nationalist drums. But Canadians have not taken the bait. So Harper is quietly presiding at the sell-off of Canadian wealth and assets. He is refusing to shape a national water policy so that B.C.’s premier Gordon Campbell can sell off (in fact) all B.C. rivers. He is refusing a national environmental policy so the U.S. can loot and pollute using the Canadian tar sands. He is slashing support for women, undermining the CBC and other national cultural institutions. Waiting for the shock he needs to ram through programs of disaster capitalism, Stephen Harper is whittling away, nonetheless, at Canadian democracy and Canadian-owned wealth – something to which Naomi Klein could well have devoted six or eight pages, as directly relevant to her thesis. That failure describes the final problem with the Naomi Klein phenomenon. Canada doesn’t matter. The North American liberal view of the world and reality does matter. It lets Klein keep her U.S. citizenship, write for the liberal U.S. publication The Nation, and dampen criticism of U.S. fascism, weakening her book. As does the fact that the book is produced by a U.S. branch-plant in Canada and is “Printed and bound in the United States of America”. In a peculiar way, by citizenship, political definition, and public action, Klein is “embedded” with the forces she criticizes. That position may allow her to shrink away from fingering George Bush, U.S. imperialism, and the New Fascist Corporate Right for the War in Iraq. She permits herself to write: “Iraq’s current state of disaster cannot be reduced to the incompetence and cronyism of the Bush White House or to the sectarianism and tribalism of the Iraqis. It is a very capitalist disaster, a nightmare of unfettered greed unleashed in the wake of war.” (p. 422) That just isn’t good enough. As Corcoran’s ugly “mistake” about the rape of Chile condemns all of his argument, so Klein’s almost unbelievable “liberalizing” of historic, oppressive U.S. imperialism in Iraq calls into question much of what Klein writes in The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In fact, the real shortcomings of the book may, alas, point to the reason it has been given so much play in press and media. It is a “safe” critical book. A book that nailed U.S. imperialism to the mast, exposed its old, continuing historical roots, saw Milton Friedman in the context of long-term U.S. oppression, and analysed the role of Western press and media as an active part of the New Fascist Corporate Right would, I suspect, have significantly limited the attention she and her book have received. In passing, in backing her thesis about Friedmanism, Klein repeatedly quotes a totally sold out press and media. But she never points to it as part of the problem, part of the New Fascist Corporate Right, ably doing its work to create shock and disaster. Those “communications” institutions desperately need full-scale exposure and rejection by an angry and active public – and by a writer making the claims Naomi Klein makes. Klein’s latest book is stuffed with information that everyone should have available. We are lucky to have it. But it needs to be read with care – with as much attention to what is not there as to what is. [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on September 17, 2007]