One thing I noticed in Warsaw was the emptiness of store shelves. Through our interpreter, I asked one store keeper how I would go about ordering a toothbrush if I needed to replace mine. "We put you on our list," he told me, "and when they come in, we contact you." This is the result of central planning, a process that stifled production during the entire Soviet experiment. As I walked down street after street during our state-sponsored tour, I couldn't help but notice the empty store shelves in every shop and the scarcity of selection. I knew then that the Soviet example, as it applied to Warsaw, Poland, at least, was a total sham and couldn't survive much longer. There was no way that people would accept such a dramatic lack of goods even if their social needs were being taken care of, for the most part, by the state.
When the Polish government fell to the rising tide of civilian outrage, American Shock Doctrine worked quickly to take full advantage of the disaster felt by the Poles. Naomi highlights the events very well and explains sequentially the major steps that took Poland from a leading Eastern Bloc nation to an Eastern Bust nation.
Here, she should have contrasted with the other Eastern Bloc super power, East Germany, when they were eventually folded into modern Germany. Germany felt barely a strain when it brought in East Germany in the early 90s. Obviously, the net goals for the two events differed dramatically. Poland represented nothing more than another heaping of money into the coffers of the modern day robber barons, while East Germany was the culmination of a two-generation struggle to reunite a country. A contrasting viewpoint would have been good on Naomi's part.
Nevertheless, Naomi amply demonstrates that the country-saving Solidarity movement of Poland became an economic disaster in large part due to their allowance of Friedman's shock troops as administered by American foreign policy under President Reagan. Once that doctrine took hold of Poland's economy, the Solidarity movement was dead meat. Their overwhelming support for Lech Walesa and his group slowly ebbed during the 80s as Friedman's Shuck and Jibe drained the country of nearly all of its life-sustaining ability. Naomi's presentation is in-depth and well researched.
The Russian debacle is equally intoned. The Friedman connection is correctly focused here as well. I appreciate Naomi's demonstration of how the chronology of events superseded the hierarchy of rulers. It wasn't just that Gorbachev tried to switch from a Communist to a Capitalist system too fast, but that once the tentacles of the Shock Doctrine took hold, the real location of power could be found thousands of miles away in large skyscrapers among men who aren't even citizens of the USSR let alone speak the language. They dictate policy, full stop.
Here again, a contrast with the broken system that was the Soviet Union beforehand would have been a nice indicator of where that country was headed economically, which is precisely what gave the world financiers the foot in the door. Also, a contrast here with the economy of Cuba, a country that not only endured the collapse of its biggest trading partner, but had also endured 30 years of US economic embargo from an American system that spent more money watching the maritime activity of Cuba than it did fighting terrorism the whole time.
Mao Are you?
Of course, a study of the Shock Doctrine would be incomplete without mentioning its effects on the continent where about half of the world's population resides. Ms. Klein does a good job of exposing American hegemonic desires with her work on the late 20th Century history of the Mideast. She does a good job explaining the South Korean and Indonesian economies of the time and the false flag scare tactics used by Wall Street and the international community in order to create a crisis out of nothing with the intent of ravaging and pillaging the wealth of those Asian nations.
At this point, we can see the maturation process of the Shock Doctrine as Friedman's brainchild began developing techniques to artificially induce economic crisis where none existed in order to play the knight in shining white armor during the supposed rescue portion of the program.
Naomi could have covered Chinese economic history in the 20th Century a bit more. The economic transformation, welcomed first by Mao himself during the Ping-Pong Diplomacy years when Nixon was in power, took farmers and made them day laborers. That is where the little red book and Mao hats first started becoming the fashion. That was all they could produce then. Since Nixon, the economic power of the biggest country of the world has increased steadily and by double digits over the past 15 years. There were over 4 times the number of people in China than in the US, and when they decided that agriculture was nice, but city-life was spice (think Green Acres in reverse - Eva Gabor wins out), their economy skyrocketed.
The final decade of the last millennium was indeed quite tragic for the peoples of Asia as fabricated disaster after fabricated disaster was whipped up around their countries causing near total economic collapse and creating the classic conditions required for the wolves in sheep's' clothing known as the Chicago Boys. Their operating procedure, now as precise an instructional manual as any system out there, raped and pillaged countries across Asia. Where the Chicago Boys weren't found at the controls of a given nation's demise, the military industrial complex, that other pillar of American hegemonic export, could usually be found in their stead. This deadly duo would only increase their presence in the new millennium and even today, we can see their poisonous tentacles doling out misery and suffocation to the vast majority of the citizenry of any country they touch.
The third article will consist of a summary of this review of Naomi's Shock Doctrine rev. 2, the present form of the program, and expand out beyond her book, given the recent developments that have occurred since. I will go over her main points once again and present her conclusion, as well as my personal comments on it. We must, however, always keep in mind that her entire book reviews Shock Doctrine and its effects on other nations, the so-called third world, by way of the Military Industrial Complex. The Commodities Robber Barons played essential roles throughout these calamities like giant Hoovers sucking the nation's natural resources of every country they faced.
Up to the publishing of her book, that is where the majority of this doctrine had been applied. It would have been near impossible for Naomi to anticipate the events that have unfolded since its release, yet the same parameters and the same essential results should be, and are, expected. The main difference is, we are now seeing the Shock Doctrine being applied to the industrialized world as well, and this time, it's courtesy of the banksters.
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