Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Henry Holt and Metropolitan Books. 2007. 500 pages. Hardcover. US$18.11
In: The Pakistan development review: PDR, Band 49, Heft 3, S. 264-265
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, and his book The
Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is a bestseller. Klein
argues that free market philosophy professed by the Nobel laureate
Milton Friedman and may others and adopted by the international
financial institutions faced a hard time while being put to practice.
Accordingly, crises were engineered in some countries to provide an
environment in which unpopular reforms could be carried through. In some
countries natural disasters were used as an occasion to push through the
free market reform agenda. Klein's basic thesis is that unpopular market
reforms have typically been carried out at a time when the
shock-stricken people were too disoriented to take even a clear stand on
the reforms, much less to put up a stiff resistance to these. Policy
changes that followed the Falklands war of 1982, the Tiananmen square
event of 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian
Financial Crisis of 1997, and of course the more recent Global Financial
Crisis are all examples of pushing through the liberal reform agenda
after the man-made crises had disoriented the public at large or had
softened their stand on the free market.