“This term “intellectual” having being identified with “liberal” it scarcely is surprising that Lionel Trilling discovered no conservative intellectuals; one might as well have sought for carnivorous vegetarians. But actually the man of intellectual strength need not be alienated from his cultural patrimony and his society; he may be a member of what Coleridge called the clerisy….
“Because it flourishes upon rootlessness among the masses, the total state detests and endeavors to obliterate knowledge of the past. ” A sense of the past is far more basic to the maintenance of freedom than hope for the future… Hence the relentless effort by totalitarian governments to destroy memory…”
– Excerpted, with a long elision, from pages 485-487 of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind.
You’ll find essentially the same argument in The Language of Empire where I argue that commercial news media, advertising, and entertainment (from soap dramas and sports to court-room dramas and pornography) all combine in various ways to fragment and destroy memory making it easier to impose state propaganda onto public consciousness. The erasure and manipulation of memory was precisely what was at work in the Abu Ghraib torture - the effacing of cultural identity and sexual identity.
In Klein’s Shock Doctrine, this argument is appropriated and reversed, and torture becomes the logical outcome of capitalist profit-seeking, instead of statist power-seeking.
(I’ll be going through the book and compiling the many points of resemblance between her argument and mine, as well as hers and Peter Linebaugh’s and others whom she doesn’t cite).
Again (without making any allegations), I note the following resemblances:
(1) Kubark manual and its connection to Abu Ghraib
(2) Erasure of memory through terror (shock) in the population in order to create impose a new reality. She says the new reality is the capitalist market economy; I argue it’s the propaganda of the state; analysis of the term “rapid dominance”
(3) Connecting terrorist attacks on New York to terror bombing in Iraq to the shock of torture.
(4) Connecting apocalyptic terror in some forms of Christianity to emphasis on “terror” in the Promethean (neoconservative) ideology of the Bush administration. She changes my indictment of neo-conservatism to an indictment of capitalism.
(5) I blame neoconservative ideology and trace its roots to Leninism and to an ideology of power, to Machiavellianism. She blames capitalism and traces its roots to Milton Friedman and Hayek.
(6) In articles preceding my book, I charge that the Asian tsunami might be connected to nuclear testing and state weapons research and allege pre-knowledge and failure to assist on the part of the state. She connects the tsunami to corporate profiteering.
(7) In an article published before my book, I connect Katrina to the failure of the federal government and the state’s forced gentrification program through housing. She connects Katrina to capitalist profiteering.
(8) I mention Ewan Cameron at a central part of the book. She does too. I connect it to state behavioral modification research. She connects it to the Chicago School of Economics.
(9) I show the similarity of CIA torture techniques to Nazi and to Soviet techniques and to their mind-control programs. She does not mention the Soviets (who were actually ahead of the US on several counts). I need to double check this more carefully.
(10) I notice a repetitive symbolism of towers, which I use to draw attention to a non-monolithic, fragmented reality which the state wishes to erase but which resurfaces nonetheless as a “real” of history (drawing on my studies of the writing of Deleuze, a post-structuralist thinker whose work is compatible with individualist and anti-state thinking and with chaos theory and complexity).
I reference Deleuze sub-textually in my first book.
I use a similar technique in “Mobs” - of subtextual linking through imagery.
My book (being my first) had to be written within a word count given to me by my publisher, and it was written as a media text, since they and I did not have the resources/name that would allow me to undertake a larger project. The arguments, though complex and I think convincing, had to be fitted into a shorter length and into a more academic frame-work. Still, you’ll see all Klein’s main points made in my book, in relation to the state.
Considering that the manuscript and several closely related articles were published in December 2004 - 2005, and given that the book was sent to every major liberal-left opinion journal and outlet, and that Klein began writing her book only in 2004 and published it only in 2007, it’s hard for me to believe that she didn’t see any of it.
I was writing quite a bit for Dissident Voice and Counterpunch then, and she cites Counterpunch on other things.
Check out the dates of my pieces on this site, the number of hits they got, and the reprints. and you’ll see it’s hard to believe a serious researcher on the subject could’ve have missed them.
Another coincidence: the GetAbstract business award which “Mobs” won in 2008 was previously awarded to Benoit Mandelbrot, who was the father of modern complexity theory, as well as to Nicholas Taleb (2007), whose work also draws on complexity theory. Taleb and Mandelbrot are in fact collaborating on new work.
Now, Klein’s book was recently awarded a newly-created Warwick Prize under the theme “complexity”. The prize was awarded just this year, 2009. Could this be a way to counter the identification of complexity theory with market-based “spontaneous order”?
I have no way of knowing and I’m making no allegations. Merely noting the points of coincidence and wondering aloud….
To be fair, people can arrive at similar ideas and even imagery simultaneously without reading or being influenced directly by each others. Also, I have a lot of respect for Klein’s antiwar reporting in the Guardian. Hers was a much needed voice. And, again, to the extent that Shock Doctrine draws attention to the negative impact of globalization and points out how free trade is “managed” - that too is a very good thing and deserves the widest hearing. Also, at first glance, the Cato Institute critique which I referenced earlier, does not seem fair to the book in calling it poorly researched. It seems well-documented from the number of citations. Of course, I haven’t followed through and pinpointed whether they actually support her text, but there are certainly plenty of them and of good quality.
There’s also the possibility that the lumping together of various people might be from pure ignorance (though it’s hard to believe that). It’s quite possible she really doesn’t know the difference between the old right and the new right, between Friedman, the Austrians, Sachs and Rubin…or perhaps doesn’t think the differences are important enough to matter.
But that would be amazingly shoddy, given that she’s trying to critique capitalism. You’d think it would be a good thing to know what it was first.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar