NAOMI KLEIN: It's in those moments when fear and chaos are sucking up all the oxygen when we most have to ask: Whose interests are being served by the chaos? What is being slipped through while we're distracted? Who's getting richer, and who's getting even poorer?
WENDELL PIERCE: When the floodwaters were still rising in New Orleans, one of the first official acts that the governor did was to fire all the teachers. What's happening is a raid of the money set aside for public education to be given to private companies. It wasn't by happenstance. It was by design. You saw the political manipulations and taking advantage of the crisis.
NAOMI KLEIN: But if we learn from this history, we could actually make history, with step five: Advance a bold counterplan. At their best, all the previous steps can only slow down attempts to exploit crisis. If we actually want to defeat this tactic, opponents of the shock doctrine need to move quickly to put forward a credible alternate plan. It needs to get at the root of why these sorts of crises are hitting us with ever greater frequency. And that means we have to talk about militarism, climate change and deregulated markets. More than that, we need to advance and fight for different models, ones grounded in racial, economic and gender justice, ones that hold out the credible promise of a tangibly better and fairer life in the here and now and a safer planet for all of us in the long term. Defensive actions alone won't cut it. There has to be a different vision, and it needs to be bold. Saying no to the shock doctrine is vitally important. But when the [bleep] hits the fan, no is not enough.
AMY GOODMAN: That video, produced by The Intercept. Their senior correspondent, Naomi Klein, author of the new book, released this week, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. Yes, a shock. You're a specialist in analyzing what happens next, Naomi.
NAOMI KLEIN: Right. And, you know, the reason why I wrote this book very quickly, for me -- you know, it usually takes me five years to write a book; I did this in less than five months -- is because I really wanted it to come out before any kind of major crisis hits the United States. I mean, lots of people out there see Trump himself as a crisis, and, you know, I would tend to agree, but what really has me scared is what this configuration of characters in the Trump administration -- Pence, Bannon, Betsy DeVos, Steve Mnuchin, all these Goldman Sachs alum who are in the Cabinet -- how they would respond to a large-scale crisis that they themselves are not creating. I mean, the chaos is chaos they're generating themselves, either deliberately or out of incompetence and avarice, but what happens if there's a 2008-like financial crisis? What happens, you know, heaven forbid, if there is a Manchester-like attack in the United States?
The actions of this administration make these types of shocks more likely, not less, right? They're deregulating the banks, creating the conditions for another crash. They are antagonizing the world, particularly the Muslim world. You know, ISIS apparently called Trump's Muslim travel ban a "blessed ban," because it was so good for recruitment. They are -- you know, they are making climate disasters more likely with everything they're doing to deregulate industry, deregulate for polluters. You know, there's a lag time between that and when the climate shocks hit, but the truth is, we've already warmed the planet enough that no U.S. president can get through a year, let alone a term, without some sort of major climate-related disaster.
So, how does this group of -- this Cabinet of disaster capitalists, is what I call them, Amy, because there is such a track record of taking advantage of crisis, whether we're looking at the Goldman Sachs -- former Goldman Sachs executives and the way they profited from the subprime mortgage crisis to increase their own personal wealth, whether it's Mike Pence and the central role he played when New Orleans was still underwater to come up with a corporate wish list to push through. So, you know, as disastrous as Trump's policies have been so far, there's actually long, toxic to-do lists, things that people around Trump and Trump himself have been -- have very openly said they would like to do, but they have actually not been able either to get through without a crisis or they haven't even tried, right? Think about Trump's threats to bring back torture. Think about his threats to bring the feds into Chicago. Think about his threats not just to have a Muslim travel ban from specific countries, but not to let Muslims into the country, period.
So I think we do need to prepare for this. And what I tried to do with this video is create a little toolkit of, you know, what I have seen work in other countries, because I have been reporting on shocks and large-scale disasters and how societies respond now for a couple of decades, and I've seen some amazing acts of resistance, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about those. We saw some images of them here.
NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah. So, one of the things I think we could really count on Trump to do, particularly if there is any kind of terrorism-related shock -- and let's be clear: There have been terrorism events, white supremacist terrorism, in the United States during the Trump era, but of course he doesn't treat those as a crisis. So, an event that they decided was a large-scale crisis, we already know from the way Trump responded to the London Bridge attacks -- he immediately said, "This is why we need to bring back my travel ban." After the Manchester attacks, he immediately said, "This is about immigrants flooding across our borders." In fact, the person responsible for those attacks was born in the U.K. It doesn't matter. You know, we know this from 9/11, that the way -- these crises are used as opportunities to push through policies that actually have very little to do with getting at root causes, and, in many cases, exacerbate -- most notably, the invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11, but it was just that sheer opportunism.
So, you know, what I've seen is, I think, in all likelihood, they would declare a state of emergency, some sort of state of exception, where they're able to ban protests, like the protests we saw, the very inspiring protests in the face of the Muslim travel ban. They would say, "No, you can't block a road. You can't block an airport. This is -- you could be a target of terrorism yourself. Stay in your homes."
So, you know, I give a few examples, like Argentina in 2001, when, as the president was declaring a state of siege and telling people to stay in their homes, people described not being able to hear him because the sound from the streets was so loud, the roar of pots and pans, and neighbors flooding out of their homes and going to the Plaza de Mayo and refusing this state of siege, was -- that they drowned him out. They literally couldn't hear him. So other people left their houses. And, you know, in that moment, that's the moment to resist. You know, that is the moment to just not accept it. And it's really a question of strength in numbers, because if it is only the kind of hardcore activists that are out on the streets, it's really easy to crush small protests. It's harder to do it when it is hundreds of thousands of people. So I wanted to share some of these stories of societies that have just said, "We will not let you do it." Right?
I was in France, as were you, Amy, a week after the horrific terrorist attacks in 2015. We were there for the Paris climate summit. A week before, 200 people had been killed in Paris in coordinated attacks. The French government, under Franà §ois Hollande, a Socialist government -- Socialist in name only, but, you know, a left government -- declared a state of emergency and banned political gatherings of more than five people. You know, if that can happen in France under a Socialist government, in a country with a very deep history of disruptive strikes, what do we expect Trump and Bannon and Pence to do at the earliest opportunity? So, I think it's important to strategize.
It's important to know the history in the United States. You know, in all these countries, the examples I give -- Argentina, why did they flood out of their houses? You ask people. They said, "It reminded us of the beginning of the dictatorship in 1976. That's how it started. They told us that we weren't safe and that it was going to be a temporary state of emergency. And it ended up turning into a dictatorship." So they saw the early signs, and they said, "No, not again. Nunca ma's." Right? You know, we talked to Americans about this. They say, "Well, we don't have that history." Really? What about the Japanese internment, you know? What about, as you've written, Amy, what about what happened to Mexican -- Mexican Americans in the United States during the Great Depression and during that crisis and the mass deportations? There is this history in many communities, and those communities keep that history alive. You know, during Hurricane Katrina, so many African Americans talked about the history of how crises had been used to further oppress black people in this country. But these stories are offloaded into those communities, who hold them and keep that history alive. It isn't nationally metabolized, right? And so we have to share these stories. And I do think there is a memory now of what happened after September 11th and the rights that were lost and the ways in which people's grief was exploited by men in power who said, "Trust me." Don't make that mistake again.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the connection to war? I mean, you have what happened in Manchester, the horror there. You have the continued deaths in Yemen, the U.S.-backed Saudi bombing. Now the U.S. has expanded both in Somalia and in the Philippines with U.S. forces.
NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm, yeah.
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