Hosted by Justin Podur
A couple of posts ago I reported on a talk by Pervez Hoodbhoy (who I will now call “my friend Pervez Hoodbhoy”) that he gave at the University of Toronto on October 6. I sent my post to him to elicit reactions and corrections. He made a correction and posted a response in the comments section – but I want to make sure everyone sees it, so I am putting it here as well.
Below is Pervez Hoodbhoy’s response:
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Continue reading “Pervez Hoodbhoy’s Response to my report and commentary”
On October 6 I was lucky enough to finally meet Pervez Hoodbhoy, the Pakistani activist and physicist, who I have long admired and corresponded with a little. He was going to be in Ottawa and on short notice people at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre managed to organize a talk for him. The talk was called “Can the Taliban Win?” As usual with these blogs, I will summarize what he said, and follow with my reactions.
Continue reading “Can the Taliban Win? Pervez Hoodbhoy in Toronto (back on Oct 6)”
So, it looks like Musharraf got the message and resigned. The message, probably, having come from the US. Authoritarian regimes might be useful to imperial patrons, but individual dictators are usually dispensable. Because he is resigning, he will get off easy, not be tried for any crimes, and probably be allowed to leave the country. Tariq Ali argued in the Guardian that he can’t stay in Pakistan because of the risk of assassination.
ISLAMABAD – The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) is a women’s organization that runs underground schools and other projects, educates Afghan girls, runs a periodic journal, and agitates politically for women’s rights, human rights, secularism, and social justice in Afghanistan. From the 1979 Soviet invasion through to the 2006 closings of the camps, millions of Afghan refugees lived in Pakistan and many still do. While RAWA’s operations were always based primarily in Afghanistan, they have also had a strong presence in the Pakistan refugee community. I spoke to Mariam from RAWA in Islamabad when I was there in July 2008.
JUSTIN PODUR (JP): To begin, perhaps you could introduce readers to RAWA and its work in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
MARIAM (RAWA): RAWA was begun in 1977 in Kabul as an organization of Afghan women for human rights and women’s equality. After the Soviet invasion, some RAWA members were imprisoned in Kabul, and as a huge number of refugees fled to Pakistan, RAWA also shifted its focus somewhat, and began to work with refugee women and children in Peshawar (the capital city of the North West Frontier Province in Pakistan, close to the Afghan border). We began providing humanitarian services and some social assistance, through which we also tried to educate Afghan women of their rights. We continued our political activities, but because of the security situation in Afghanistan it was not easy. We continued to work underground in some Afghan cities. When the Soviet occupation was followed by the fundamentalists’ bloody rule and later the Taliban regime, we continued to work both in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We ran literacy programs, orphanages and schools in Afghanistan, but a lot of our public, political statements were made from Pakistan. We publish a political magazine called Payam-e-Zan (Women’s Message). Today under the NATO occupation and after the closing of the refugee camps, we do the political part mostly from Afghanistan as well, but much of our work is still semi-underground due to grave security risks.
JP: Can you say something about how RAWA is organized, how you ‘recruit’, where RAWA’s leaders are drawn from?
RAWA: Through our literacy programs, orphanages, and schools, RAWA has had contact with many girls over the past 15-20 years. There is a deep difference between the life of women in Afghan society who have lived through war, the Taliban, and the fundamentalists, in normal domestic life, and those girls that have been basically raised by or worked with RAWA. The latter have different vision, ideas, and mentality; they are aware of their rights and know that they must fight to achieve it. Some of them continue to work for RAWA after they are grown up. Some are adult women when they get involved and their whole families get involved. Some young girls and boys get involved. Others are involved who don’t yet read and write but become attached to RAWA, especially in rural areas, where RAWA members live and work and are part of the community with the people.
JP: And what is the situation of Afghan refugees in Pakistan today?
RAWA: In general, Pakistan has been better to Afghan refugees compared to Iran or other neighboring countries. There have been some limits. The life in refugee camps was very hard and with very basic resources. The majority of the camps were under the control of fundamentalist parties who imposed their restrictions on the refugees. Work for democratic-minded groups such as RAWA was very hard and risky. Many Afghan freedom-loving individuals were assassinated by Jehadi groups with the help of Pakistani ISI. Meena, RAWA’s founder, was one of them. But despite all the problems, RAWA had its presence in some of the camps and we were running a refugee camp in suburbs of Peshawar for over two decades until it was finally forcibly evacuated by the Pakistan government some months ago.
In 2001-2002, after the US invasion and occupation, large numbers of Afghans went back. The Peshawar refugee communities were basically emptied, but due to bad conditions, returning to Afghanistan is still an unattractive option for many refugees.
When the government decided to close some refugee camps in 2006, it had a huge effect. Most of the refugees were forced to leave, even though they had lost everything in Afghanistan: they had no jobs, no shelter, nothing to go back to. And in fact no one knows what happened to them. Those families who have returned to Afghanistan are very disappointed with the lack of any job and facilities in Afghanistan, and many came back to seek refuge to Pakistan for the second time.
Today according to the UNHCR, refugees are coming back to Pakistan and they are trying to find places in the cities. When there is any tension between the Afghanistan and Pakistan governments, the Afghan refugees who suffer the most. Pakistan puts pressure on refugees to return to Afghanistan. But the people in the border areas are the same people – they share language, culture, clothing, tradition. After thirty years, too, many refugees saw Pakistan as their second country. Afghans know Pakistan supports the Taliban and the fundamentalists in Afghanistan, but the political crisis won’t weaken the relations of the people across the border.
JP: Perhaps we could complete the introduction with a bit of your analysis of the political and military situation in Afghanistan.
RAWA: It is a complicated situation. We have NATO’s occupation and the interference of neighbors, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Russia etc. all of whom have supported different fundamentalist groups in recent years. The Taliban control some areas and in recent months even reached the borders of Kabul. They are being supported by some circles in Pakistan. Even the Iranian regime sends arms and ammunition to the Taliban. Afghan civilians are the prime victims of Taliban brutalities, again, including their suicide bombings. The brothers-in-creed of the Taliban, the Northern Alliance, are in power today and generously supported by the US government. Much of the northern part of Afghanistan is ruled by the local warlords of the northern alliance. The government of Hamid Karzai has no tangible control there. The Taliban and other Islamic movements are the enemy of the Afghan people. And their strength is supported by the US and the West. The support the fundamentalists get from outside makes it difficult for the Afghan people to resist them. On the other hand the US/NATO play a Tom and Jerry game with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, while ordinary Afghans severely suffer from the impact of their blind bombardments and we witness awful tragedies of civilian casualties on a daily basis.
JP: You have described all of these Islamic political movements as enemies of the people, whether they are supported by the West or fighting NATO. I have heard the argument here that Pakistan and Afghanistan are deeply religious countries, and any political movement has to contend with that fact. As a consequence, I have heard that groups like RAWA isolate themselves because of their uncompromising stand on secularism and religion. Do you find that your secularism makes you unpopular?
RAWA: That is the impression the Western media give of Afghan society. Maybe it is true from their eye. We Afghans have lived through it. How it expresses itself depends on many factors, including social, cultural, and economic factors. We have worked in some of what would be called the most ‘backward’ areas, very religious, without much recognition of women’s rights. But after some time, and sometimes it is quite quickly, over weeks or months, they come to like what we are doing and even get involved, even whole families. We have seen this in some areas. So I do not agree that the country as a whole couldn’t accept democratic rights or secular values. It needs time and work to build social and political awareness, and in recent years people have not had that opportunity.
The brand of Islam the fundamentalists present is different from that of common Afghan people. Their Islam is a political Islam and each party has their own brand, which contradict each other. The Islam of Mullah Omar is different from the Islam of Burhanuddin Rabbani or Rasul Sayyaf, and these groups have been at war for years although they all pretend to be true Muslims. The fundamentalist groups have committed unprecedented crimes under the name of Islam over the past two decades. Today Afghans are so fed up with them that majority of Afghans support any voice raised against the fundamentalists. When Malalai Joya spoke against them for only 2 minutes in the Loya Jirga, her voice was soon echoed and supported by millions of Afghan across the country and she was called a heroine and voice of the voiceless. The fundamentalists impose their domination with the help of their weapons, foreign masters and money. Without these, they have no footing in Afghan society.
JP: Is the NATO’ occupation helping or harming Afghanistan? Can it be used somehow to strengthen progressive forces? Is it holding back a Taliban victory which would be worse than the current situation?
RAWA: Seven years ago when the US invaded, the situation was different. Many Afghans appreciated their presence and were happy to get rid of the Taliban’s oppressive rule. They thought – the Taliban had been eliminated, the international community worked, they were promised a better life, democracy and freedom and an end to the fundamentalist groups. Within months, it was clear that the US government still continues its wrong policy of supporting the fundamentalists in Afghanistan. We saw that the US rely on the fundamentalists of the Northern Alliance to fight another fundamentalist band – the Taliban. It doesn’t matter if they fight the Taliban or “terrorism”, they are supporting the Northern Alliance, and for Afghans both are the same – both are terrorists and fundamentalists, supported by foreign governments, whether by the West, or Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia or any other country. They violate human rights, they abuse women, they commit corruption and fraud and smuggling, as we have documented.
From the beginning, RAWA announced that the US and the West have their own reasons for being here and it is not for the freedom of the Afghan people. We said that what the US/NATO is doing under the name of democracy is in fact a mockery of democracy. It is clear for us. Today NATO bombings are increasing, more civilians are being killed, and other violations are being done by the US and NATO. And now even they are trying to share power with the Taliban and terrorist party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. If this plot is realized, it will mean another tragedy for Afghanistan and its people, the unification of all enemies of Afghan people under one umbrella so they could jointly smash the Afghan people and freedom-loving individuals and forces.
Under the mafia system and the shadow of gun and warlordism, unfortunately there is no chance for progressive forces to come to the scene and work openly. Any serious and stanch anti-fundamentalist and anti-occupation force still needs to fight underground and they are not supported and encouraged. In fact the US is afraid to see emergence of a powerful progressive movement in Afghanistan. Those who openly criticize the government and warlords face threats, imprisonment and restrictions. We are facing the same problems and risks today which we were faced under the Taliban.
The privatization and the free market system imposed on Afghanistan since 2001 is opening the way for neoliberalism in Afghanistan, which is another nightmare for our people. We are feelings its disastrous impact on poor people of Afghanistan. The degree of destitution and poverty in Afghanistan is beyond imagination. The gap between rich and poor is getting wider day by day. Over 70% of Afghan people are living under the poverty line. According to official statistics, 42% are living with only US$10/month. Skyrocketing prices in recent months have made life a torture for the majority of Afghan people.
JP: What about the argument that if NATO left, Afghanistan would quickly fall to the Taliban, which would be worse?
RAWA: It is true that it might be worse under a Taliban regime. But at least we will not be occupied by a foreign power. Today we have two problems: our own local fundamentalists and a foreign occupier. If NATO left we would have one problem rather than two.
RAWA has announced a number of times that neither the US nor any other power wants to release Afghan people from the fetters of the fundamentalists. Afghanistan’s freedom can be achieved by Afghan people themselves. Relying on one enemy to defeat another is a wrong policy which has just tightened the grip of the Northern Alliance and their masters on the neck of our nation.
JP: If NATO left the Taliban would also have a more difficult time portraying themselves as a national liberation movement, an argument they can make and a source of prestige for them so long as the occupation continues.
RAWA: Actually both parties depend on each other. If the US were to eliminate the Taliban somehow, they would find themselves with no pretext for being here. But the Taliban and terrorism are only a pretext. They are not honest. They are here for the strategic ends: the central location from which to control Iran, Russia and China, affect Pakistan’s government and society, strengthen its grip on the Central Asian Republics and so on. That is why they keep increasing their military presence and building up bases. NATO will probably leave, but the US won’t – they wanted a pretext for being here, and the US will not set aside the golden opportunity.
JP: NATO’s “development effort” has involved a lot of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have been involved in providing social services. Is RAWA seen as one of these?
RAWA: RAWA never introduces itself as an NGO. It is a political organization for women’s rights and human rights. But it does try to meet direct needs and we do run social programs. Actually it is our political stance and activities that hurt our relations with the NGOs and agencies and why we don’t get funds from foreign governments. Embassies do not want to give RAWA funds because we are political. This is in contrast to the thousands of recently established NGOs in Afghanistan over the past 6-7 years. It is a good business. You will have some families, with some English and a computer, and they become an NGO with funds, documents, and proposals being produced in their homes. Most NGOs that are larger, or bigger aid agencies, are funded by governments and influenced by those governments. The smaller ones often get involved in fraud and corruption – they work not for the Afghan people but for their own purposes. Millions of dollars of funds go to NGOs and are wasted in overhead, salaries, office expenses, and so on. They collect huge salaries, they have no long-term projects, they spend huge amounts for security expenses and vehicles.
NGO-ism is a policy exercised by the West in Afghanistan; it is not the wish of the Afghan people. The NGO is a good tool to divert people and especially intellectuals from struggle against occupation. NGOs defuse political anger and turn people into dependent beggars. In Afghanistan people say, the US pushed us from Talibanism to NGO-ism!
JP: Your political stance means governments don’t want to give you money. Do you have any criteria for where you will accept donations?
RAWA: The question has not come up since we have not been offered funds from a government. But we will accept unconditional support from any source. We rely on individuals and sometimes, groups of feminists in other countries who support RAWA. We sell our own materials through income-generating projects, carpets, handicrafts, CDs, posters; we do fundraising whenever we go on speaking tours to other countries. That is how we continue. After 9/11 there was some interest in RAWA and we had good funding for 1-2 years. Today Afghanistan has the same problems but we have had to scale back our operations, reduce the numbers of children in our orphanages, and cancel some projects for lack of funding. RAWA is facing a grave financial problems today which affects the scales of our activities.
We see a total difference between the Western governments and their people. Most of these people are not in favor of the policies of their government towards Afghanistan. I have heard there is a free media in the US, but also that people do not know much about the outside world or the policies of their governments. RAWA is proud to receive donations from individuals, organizations, and groups not linked to governments, but not from government sources that would put pressure on RAWA. We would rather forego such money and attempts to control us. Even if we face problems, one hundred dollars from individuals gives us courage and lets us know we have support, in a way that thousands of dollars from a government agency would not.
JP: These projects RAWA runs, they must be underground as well?
RAWA: They are semi-underground but not the way we were under the Taliban. We are able to run education projects, and have meetings and gatherings in Afghanistan. But we are not registered with the government. Even if we were, we know they would try to stop us. We never use the title RAWA for our projects. People mostly know, but officially, we are not registered as RAWA – all run as private activities, initiatives, run by locals.
JP: The primary media source in Afghanistan is the radio. Is it possible for RAWA to get on the radio? What is RAWA’s media strategy?
RAWA: It is not possible at the moment, partly because of the financial (although some supporters from Italy have suggested they could raise funds for it, in fact), but mainly because of the security problem. But we can use some other techniques to run a radio station if we were provided with the needed funds and equipment. We can run it without any sign of RAWA in it, but still in the current situation, we can’t reflect our points of view as clearly and openly as we do through our web site and magazine, because if we do so, the next day the radio staff will be gunned down by the warlords.
JP: I read recently that Afghanistan and Pakistan has a growing number of opium addicts, including women, as a consequence of the war and displacement. Has RAWA come across this in its social service work?
RAWA: Out of the estimated 26 million population, over one million are addicted, which include even children and women, and the number are increasing.
Many people who are involved in poppy fields gradually become addicted: a mother working in the fields all day with health problems of her own, can’t get her child to sleep or stop crying, she might give some to her child. There are many women in prisons today, and large numbers get addicted in prisons.
JP: What is RAWA’s perspective on drugs?
RAWA: We think poppy cultivation in Afghanistan is part of the US regional strategy to control this third biggest global commodity (in cash terms). And it is not a new phenomenon, but has been a project of the CIA’s covert operations in the region since the start of the Soviet-Afghan war in 80’s. Today even the US/NATO encourage farmers to cultivate poppies. There are some reports that even the US troops have hand in the drug trafficking and the US government makes billions from the Afghan drug business. The UK military are negotiating deals with the Taliban on drugs, in Helmand.
Since 2001 the opium cultivation increased over 4,400%. Under the US/NATO, Afghanistan became world largest opium producer, which produces 93% of world opium. Those engage in the dirty business reach to the Afghan cabinet and even recently Mr. Karzai was accused by US officials of supporting the drug-dealers. His brother Wali Karzai leads the largest network of drugs in Kandahar. Gen. Daud, head of the counter-narcotics department of the interior ministry, himself is a famous drug-trafficker! Warlords in the Northern Afghanistan each control the route of drug-smuggling to the Central Asian Republics.
No one talks about this horrible aspect of the US occupation of Afghanistan. We are now living under a narco-state and drugs has already impacted Afghan people with horrible consequences.
JP: As a political organization, what is RAWA’s relationship with political parties in Afghanistan?
RAWA: We have good relations with some. But unfortunately most political groups, democratic groups, human rights, women’s rights, and intellectuals are not active. Thirty years ago there were lots of activities of such groups, and RAWA was just one. After the Soviet invasion and the Northern Alliance, the Taliban and Pakistan, many activists were arrested, assassinated, or made to flee the country. Our founder, Meena, and many others, were killed here in Pakistan, in the killing grounds of the Russian puppets and elsewhere. The past 30 years, the progressive forces of Afghanistan faced many losses and were always under pressure. And today still they are being marginalized or neutralized by the NGO-ism policy.
So the most powerful forces on the political scene are fundamentalists or linked to them, representing them, and using their political positions to protect them. Movements of left groups and intellectuals have been greatly weakened. But there are many progressive and freedom-loving individuals around and we have a long way to go and unite them under a unified force. There are some small groups too and we are in touch with them. We have to support each other.
There has been some rather small resistance against the US/NATO and warlords in some parts of the country. If the US/NATO occupation and atrocities continue for long, there will be stronger resistance from Afghan people.
To donate to RAWA, see the Afghan Women’s Mission: www.afghanwomensmission.org.
RAWA’s website is www.rawa.org.
Justin Podur is a writer and activist based in Toronto. He was in Pakistan in July 2008. His blog is www.killingtrain.com
Howard Zinn reviewed a book by elin o’Hara slavick called “bomb after bomb”. At the end of the review he mentions some of his thoughts on war. I think they are very good and bear repeating.
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My own reflections on my experiences as a bombardier, and my research on the wars of the United States have led me to certain conclusions about war and the dropping of bombs that accompany modern warfare.
One: The means of waging war (demolition bombs, cluster bombs, white phosphorus, nuclear weapons, napalm) have become so horrendous in their effects on human beings that no political end– however laudable, the existence of no enemy — however vicious, can justify war.
Two: The horrors of the means are certain, the achievement of the ends always uncertain.
Three: When you bomb a country ruled by a tyrant, you kill the victims of the tyrant.
Four: War poisons the soul of everyone who engages in it, so that the most ordinary of people become capable of terrible acts.
Five:Since the ratio of civilian deaths to military deaths in war has risen sharply with each subsequent war of the past century (10% civilian deaths in World War I,50% in World War II, 70% in Vietnam, 80-90% in Afghanistan and Iraq) and since a significant percentage of these civilians are children, then war is inevitably a war against children.
Six: We cannot claim that there is a moral distinction between a government which bombs and kills innocent people and a terrorist organization which does the same. The argument is made that deaths in the first case are accidental, while in the second case they are deliberate. However, it does not matter that the pilot dropping the bombs does not “intend” to kill innocent people — that he does so is inevitable, for it is the nature of bombing to be indiscriminate. Even if the bombing equipment is so sophisticated that the pilot can target a house, a vehicle, there is never certainty about who is in the house or who is in the vehicle.
Seven: War, and the bombing that accompanies war, are the ultimate terrorism, for governments can command means of destruction on a far greater scale than any terrorist group.
These considerations lead me to conclude that if we care about human life, about justice, about the equal right of all children to exist, we must, in defiance of whatever we are told by those in authority, pledge ourselves to oppose all wars.
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Despite not being a dispassionate reviewer, I wrote this review of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. In case you didn’t know, I’m not entirely without positive bias. And even with high expectations, the book really impressed. It seems to be doing quite well without my recommendation, but I would like to add my recommendation to the many that are out there. Hope you like the review.
http://www.zcommunications.org/through-the-lens-of-the-shock-doctrine-by-justin-podur
Review of:
Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Random House, Toronto, 2007.
I’ve been seeing the shock doctrine at work my whole political life without knowing it, it seems. Like Naomi Klein, I was born in the 1970s, which she dates as the doctrine’s beginnings. I had just finished high school when my province, the Canadian province of Ontario, elected a mini-shock doctrine government that engaged in what Naomi Klein calls the three planks of the economic aspect of shock, the Chicago School, Milton Friedman approach: privatization, deregulation, cuts to social programs and protections.
Later, I saw the shock doctrine – and people fighting it – in Chiapas, where, in 2000, the Zapatista communities were ringed with tens of thousands of soldiers, who would constantly, visibly drive around their communities in displays of force, on trucks and jeeps bristling with soldiers with weapons drawn. I saw it again in Colombia in 2001, in paramilitary-controlled Putumayo, where a series of spectacular massacres had brought peasants under the control of the government and paramilitaries and shocked them into forced acceptance of the poisoning of their lands by aerial fumigation.
Then, again, in Palestine in 2002, I witnessed the most carefully calibrated shock, to terrorize children and parents with tanks and bulldozers and bullets. A friend, a reporter, traveling into Gaza recently described entering through a long, pitch black tunnel. He was being watched, he knew, but he could see nothing, for dozens of meters as he walked along in sensory deprivation. Gaza itself has lived sensory deprivation on a massive scale, since Israeli warplanes destroyed its power plant last year. Two planes, this same reporter was told, flew one run, fired their missiles, circled back, fired again to make sure. Palestinian emergency crews rushing to the scene were intercepted by American-made Israeli helicopters and turned back. An Israeli torturer told a Palestinian child prisoner: “Your world looks big now, but I will put this hood over your head and then your world will become very small, and then we will talk again.” (See the book “Stolen Youth” for more information on Israel’s treatment of Palestinian children).
In Haiti in 2005, I saw the shock of another coup, designed to look just like a previous shock in 1991, with some of the same players, calibrated again to humiliate and degrade. A military and police force with close training ties to the US and Canada worked with a local elite to destroy a democratic government with a popular base. The coup took place on the bicentennial of the country’s independence, an extra humiliation inflicted on the whole society to add to the physical and political shocks. If in the Southern Cone dictatorships Naomi writes about, electroshock and disappearance were the symbols of torture, in Haiti the weapon was rape. From 1991-1994, the first coup, in addition to high profile massacres and assassinations that killed thousands, paramilitaries used rape repeatedly against political opponents. The same pattern occurred since 2004, with one study by Athena Kolbe and Royce Hutson estimating 35,000 rapes and 8,000 murders under the most recent coup regime.
Before reading the book, I’d understood these conflicts as being about racism and capitalism, the imposition of an economic and social model to benefit a few and all the violence required to force that model down people’s throats. For me, the book took the lens I’d developed and sharpened it immensely, revealing aspects of conflicts and social problems that are hard to make sense of otherwise. Organized chronologically, the book tells the story of the shock doctrine: the idea that violence, or shock, can be used to unmake people, or societies, and rewrite new rules, more favorable to the powerful, on a blank slate. Against that, Naomi advocates for a more real, impure, un-idealized, system: messy democracy, which leads, if people actually have a say, to progressively more economic equality.
To the believers in the shock doctrine, reality, full of real people with preferences of their own and ideas about the common good, is impure. And only violence can restore purity, on which a perfect capitalist solution can be placed. Of course, that capitalist vision is not the mathematical perfection of economics textbooks, but a world of corruption and impunity, in which a few people grow spectacularly wealthy and live above all rules and laws, while others are starved, bombed, tortured, and threatened.
The book made me see everything I’ve seen and done these past few years in a new light. The book does the same for the author’s own journeys. She describes how the book began when she spent about a year in Argentina (around 2003) and saw the echoes of the dictatorship of 1976-83, the lingering effects of the shock that the torture and disappearances of 30,000 people had inflicted on the society. In the years since, she traveled all over Latin America, to South Africa, to tsunami-afflicted Southeast Asia, to occupied Iraq, and to post-Katrina New Orleans.
Where others might have written a travelogue, Naomi’s genius was in seeing, in each of these situations, a different stage in the process of shock and recovery. Argentina was coming out of shock inflicted decades before. South Africans were reeling from economic shock inflicted while they were trying to recover from the many shocks of apartheid, not as far along in the process of recovery. Iraq was the place for experiments in whole new levels of shock, and New Orleans was where the lessons of those experiments were applied. This ability to build a narrative out of what might otherwise be viewed as random or disparate tragedies or horrors, is the true strength of the book. It also happens to be, as she points out, one of the best ways to defend oneself from shock, which depends on surprise.
The book has 7 parts. Part 1 describes the basics of the shock doctrine through the story of Ewen Cameron, a Montreal psychiatrist who carried out experiments on his unwilling patients for the CIA in the 1950s, destroying their personalities with electric shock, sleep and sensory deprivation, and drugs. Cameron is the doctor of physical shock. The economic shock doctor of the book is Milton Friedman and his ‘Chicago Boys’, whose attempts to impose ‘pure’ capitalism on socialist or mixed economies offer a precise analogy to Cameron’s attempts to erase personalities through torture. Cameron’s experiments ended up in torture manuals that guided the destruction of many people’s bodies in poor countries. Friedman’s doctrines ended up in economic policy documents that guided the destruction of these countries’ economies. The first laboratories of the shock doctrine were the dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America – Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay (and Indonesia). These laboratories are described in Part 2, along with, in Part 3, a description of how the shock doctrine was adopted in the West, starting with Thatcher’s UK and Reagan’s US.
In Part 4, Naomi illuminates aspects of history that have not had nearly enough attention. China’s Tiananmen square revolt and massacre was as much about the violent imposition of capitalism as it was about the violent suppression of democracy, she shows, citing author Wang Hui’s book China’s New Order. Poland’s working people, like Russia’s, dreamed not of capitalism but of socialist democracy and had those dreams crushed by violence and economic shock therapy. South Africans, after fighting apartheid for decades and setting out their economic vision in a document called the “Freedom Charter”, were out-negotiated by the elite who maintained the economic inequality of apartheid by presenting economic issues as “technical”, and by the US and international financial institutions who threatened them with economic collapse. The Southeast Asian “Tiger” economies were melted down and sold at fire sale prices to American corporations in the context of an entirely manufactured “crisis”.
Parts 5 and 6 establish the book as a solid and important document of a history that is now unfolding. As the victims of economic shock began to recover from the disorientation and organize across national lines in the “anti-globalization movement” that Naomi was a participant and chronicler of, a new and even more devastating series of shocks hit, and were exploited to take disaster capitalism to a new level. 9/11, the Iraq invasion and occupation, the Asian Tsunami, and Katrina are all analyzed here in terms of their use for disaster capitalists.
In Part 7, Naomi uses the same methods she’s used throughout the book – her knowledge and connections to movements in different parts of the world – to show how people are resisting, waking up from shock. This section is much more powerful than a call to arms – it is a report of what people are actually doing. The Brazilian landless peasants’ movement, the Argentine occupied factories, the Bolivarian movement in Venezuela, the shock-weary Lebanese who refused to be goaded into civil war in 2006, the dictatorship-weary Spanish who refused an authoritarian solution to the Madrid bombing in 2004.
In addition to illuminating hidden aspects of recent history and presenting a new way to view them, the “Shock Doctrine” provides a framework for analyzing other times and places. Afghanistan, for example, is a society that has been under continuous shock since 1979: first a 10-year occupation by the USSR, followed by a civil war, followed by the Taliban, followed by a 6-year US/NATO occupation. The result is a country with basically no infrastructure, some of the worst health and nutritional outcomes in the world, total poverty, millions of landmines, and as of this writing, hundreds of people being murdered in a US counterinsurgency war every week. Like they do on much of Africa, the wealthy countries debate not how to stop the shocks, but how to divide up the task of further torturing the country.
Using the shock doctrine to analyze the past, consider that the Nazi military doctrine of “blitzkrieg” was a kind of shock doctrine: air power and a rapid, concentrated, armored push for the enemy capital before a defence could be organized or mounted. This is not at all unlike what Naomi quotes of American “Shock and Awe” doctrine, which is to “seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events… rendering the adversary completely impotent”. Military historian Liddell Hart analyzed WWII in terms of the ratio of space and force. “Blitzkrieg” worked in France, but not in the USSR, where the Nazis were overstretched and ultimately defeated, at a tremendous cost to their victims.
How will the present “shock doctrine” fail? The shock doctrine ideal is of a “hollow state” which, rather than actually doing things, acts as a cash source for corporations which make super-profits but don’t actually deliver the goods in many cases. The hollow state’s “holes” are being filled in Latin America by organized workers and peasants and indigenous movements. These have, in some places, managed to get rid of “shock doctrine” governments and are trying to work out how to move forward. In the Middle East, the holes left by the hollow state – in providing health facilities, schools, security, emergency relief are being filled by religious-based movements like Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Mahdi Army in Baghdad. These movements arose in a context of shock, and won’t easily be shocked out of existence (the Israelis certainly tried in Lebanon in 2006, as did the Americans in Iraq with the ‘surge’). At home, Michael Moore’s “Sicko” reveals as eloquently as Naomi’s chapters on Katrina the hollowness at the core of the American social systems. If an organized movement could fill that hole, and the other holes of the socially collapsing US (as people in New Orleans are trying to do, Naomi reports), it might be possible for us to survive the next shocks that are on the horizon.
A central message of “The Shock Doctrine” is that the power of shock, torture and war is in overwhelming and disorienting their victims, preventing them from seeing the interests and agendas that lie beneath. When she spoke to torture survivors, Naomi found that the ones who understood these political and economic agendas, who could understand the meaning of seemingly senseless and total violence, were better able to cope. Starting with the shock, Naomi skillfully and patiently exposes these filthy agendas, naming names and showing evidence of massive crimes. By doing so, she might help our shocked world cope – and fight – better, as well.
Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer and activist. He can be reached at justin@killingtrain.com
So, today as promised a little discussion of James Ron’s book, “Frontiers and Ghettos”. The book is a comparison of state violence by Serbia in the 1990s and Israel in the 1980s. His argument is that the institutional context (whether the area is a ‘frontier’, where state authority is less intense or disputed, or a ‘ghetto’, where states have uncontested and intense control over people’s lives, what he calls ‘infrastructural control’) has an influence over the intensity of violence states wield. He compares the way Serbia behaved in Bosnia, its frontier, with Muslim-majority areas in Serbia proper, which were ghettos. He acknowledges that Muslims in Serbia proper did not experience wonderful conditions, but shows that the violence unleashed on Bosnia was far worse. Similarly, the things Israel did in Lebanon (frontier) in the 1980s were far more brutal than what Israel did in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza (ghettos), despite the brutality with which the first Palestinian intifada of 1987-9 was crushed.
Overall I found the analysis fascinating and the comparison of Serbia and Israel a very clever one. Given yesterday’s discussion of the blind spots of someone like Barbara Coloroso, who I don’t think would be able to make such a comparison, it’s refreshing to see someone like Ron, who’s a former Human Rights Watch investigator and a McGill academic, make these kinds of connections. He also takes the analysis closer to the present with Israel/Palestine, arguing that the second Intifada has seen the Occupied Territories become a kind of semi-frontier, where Israel unleashes horrific violence while also having extensive control. I believed, and wrote at the time of the Gaza ‘disengagement’, that the idea behind it was to do just that, to turn Gaza into a “frontier” (I didn’t have Ron’s language at the time but if you read what I wrote you’ll see that’s more or less what I was saying) so that Israel could unleash horrific, frontier-level violence on its people. That is, of course, what is happening now. Which brings us back to Coloroso, but let me say one last thing about Ron’s book before we go there. Towards the end Ron also asks if Palestinians in the WB/Gaza could take advantage of their ghetto status to wage a civil rights struggle, a struggle against apartheid and for democracy, rather than a two-state struggle which would simply turn the territories into a frontier targeted for destruction. He then dismisses this possibility because neither Palestinians nor Israelis want it (did white South Africans want apartheid to end?) and ends his book by saying perhaps Israel will one day just decide on ethnic cleansing. Two comments here. First, I don’t think the anti-apartheid struggle can be so quickly dismissed any more. Saying Israel won’t go for it is a capitulation to Israel’s racism, and of course our own racism and contempt for Palestinians, which, if we or Israelis can’t overcome, we’re all doomed anyway. Certainly no decent two-state settlement can occur if we all continue to sink into the ever lower levels of depravity and racism into which we are sinking. And second, it’s worth remembering that history won’t end with a second round of ethnic cleansing, any more than history ended in 1948 with the first round of ethnic cleansing. That doesn’t mean everything shouldn’t be done by people of conscience to try to avert that outcome. It might help avoid that outcome, however, if the racist planners recognized that ethnic cleansing is not a panacea even for their own plans and dreams of solving the “demographic problem”. Instead, it will just add one more atrocity, one more massive refugee population, one more set of implacable enemies and devastated human beings with less and less to lose.
And now back to Barbara. Barbara differentiates between wars and genocides, and uses analogies for both. Wars are like sibling rivalries. In sibling rivalry, negotiation and learning to live together, conflict resolution are the way to solve conflicts. And sibling rivalry on a mass level is war. Solutions to sibling rivalry are like solutions to war. But bullying is different. It has perpetrators and victims and bystanders. It is characterized by contempt and hatred and a massive power imbalance. Bullying on a mass level is genocide.
This made me realize that the metaphors people have about conflicts are part of why they can’t think clearly about them. How many people think of the Israel/Palestine conflict as sibling rivalry, rather than bullying? Probably most. And that impedes understanding, has them looking for negotiated solutions rather than ways to stop the bully and stop being bystanders to the bullying. Same with the Iraq war. Or the Vietnam war. Notice they’re all called wars? When they’re really not wars at all.
Next up, either Alfie and a tour through questions of motivation and rewards, or Alice and a tour of trauma and its effects.
Since I haven’t really followed her work over the past few years, I was a bit annoyed when I heard she had “quit”. Who is she to “quit”, and to do so so publicly, I wondered? War, empire, are filthy, despicable, genocidal affairs. Opposing them is not like a job that one can “quit”, is it? Opposing them, in my view, doesn’t even mean one is deserving of special praise. But then I read her exit note, and found it some of the best and most refreshing reading I have seen in some time.
“American Fascists” by Chris Hedges. A couple of little things annoyed me – like his tossing Hamas in with other fascist groups. But overall a very good and very scary book, whose title is descriptive. A good sequel to “what’s the matter with kansas” by Thomas Frank, and things have advanced since then. The main thing that I like is that he doesn’t advocate dialogue and recognizes that these people have to be fought. They have contempt for us, and there’s nothing to be gained by tolerating them.
“The Failure of Political Islam” by Olivier Roy. This is no anti-imperialist as far as I could tell, but some interesting stuff. Good title, anyway. Roy has an interesting argument: that as a political movement Islamism is based on reforming the individual, and because it’s based on reforming the individual it doesn’t develop comprehensive programs for transforming society, which limits it. It has gotten somewhere because of the failure of previous ideologies, nationalism, secularism, and socialism, but it too has failed, leaving the third world in an unresolved crisis. Fits with Vijay Prashad’s book’s idea about how the fall of the third world idea left the poor countries without a way out of their crisis. Vijay Prashad’s sequel, “Poorer Nations: A People’s History of the Global South”, promises to be a bit bleaker than his latest book…