The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein

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05/25/08

Trevor rated it:

There is a part of me that would like to make this review a bit funny. This is a deeply disturbing book. I’ve a preference for humour as a means of confronting the deeply disturbing. But I can’t bring myself to say anything remotely funny about this book.

Klein compares some psychological experiments (torture by any reasonable definition of the word) carried out in the 1950s in Canada (funded by the CIA off US soil so they could plausibly deny they were researching torture) in ...more

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10/08/07

Evan rated it:

Read in November, 2007

recommends it for: any intelligent person who has read Thomas Friedman

This is an ambitious book. It tries to tie the economic politics of Chile, Argentina, Bolivia (in the 1970s), Russia, Poland, China, South Africa (in the 1980s and early nineties), the war in Iraq, the tsunami, and hurricane Katrina into a unified theory. Obviously, certain investigative and interpretive biases are required to make this work. Third world nationalism and developmentalism, in general, get off pretty easy in Klein's analysis. As a specialist in Indonesia, I found her portrayal ...more This is an ambitious book. It tries to tie the economic politics of Chile, Argentina, Bolivia (in the 1970s), Russia, Poland, China, South Africa (in the 1980s and early nineties), the war in Iraq, the tsunami, and hurricane Katrina into a unified theory. Obviously, certain investigative and interpretive biases are required to make this work. Third world nationalism and developmentalism, in general, get off pretty easy in Klein's analysis. As a specialist in Indonesia, I found her portrayal of the Suharto regime as a betrayal of the somehow more viable Sukarno regime a bit evasive (let us not foget that Sukarno was also an ideologue who ran the nation's economy into the ground in the name of fighting neo-colonialism). Making me wonder just how she'd cooked the books in analyzing numerous other countries whose histories I don't know so well.

That said, it offers a very provocative perspective tying together some of the most significant events of the past quarter century.

The thesis, simply put, is that the economic theory championed by Milton Friedman and his Chicago School, first play-tested in the third world in the 1970s, has increasingly come home to roost in the West and Bush's America. The gist of the theory, according to Klein, is a total rejection of Keynesian economics (i.e. the New Deal approach to combatting recession through government spending). In contrast, the three guiding principles of the Chicago School are: deregulation, privatization and cutbacks. (Sound familiar yet?) Transferriing as much of the public sector as possible to the private sector, eliminating government regulations of business, cutting back on services, protections and other economic benefits to the workforce.

The problem, as Friedman and his disciples realized early on, is that voting citizens don't actually want any of this, and will not vote for neoliberal policies through any normal, free democratic process. The solution? Make democracy abnormal. Through shock and awe. Wait for (or instigate) a state of crisis and emergency (i.e. war, natural disaster, mass torture, revolution) and then implement neoliberal policies outside (or, in many cases, in direct contradiction to) democratic will. However, as we have discovered most recently in Iraq, such tactics don't tend to "settle down" into widespread prosperity for ordinary people. Rather, neoliberal governments find that if they let democracy operate normally again, they lose power. Which is why the United States ended up supporting so many dictators. In the name of spreading free market democracy.

There are some sharp notions in this book. I'm particularly taken with Klein's generalization of "Red Zone/Green Zone" to talk about zones of normalcy and nightmare created by neoliberal policies from Iraq to post-tsunami Sri Lanka to New Orleans. She also offers a persuasive refutation of the claim that we (the US) did the Marshall Plan in Europe, but when we tried it in Iraq, Arab Muslims just couldn't handle it. Rather, while the Marshall Plan was rooted in Keynesian economics (we rebuilt Europe's governments and public infrastructure), reconstruction in Iraq has been an "anti-Marshall plan," dismantling the Iraqi state and contracting all its functions to US corporations.

The REAL problem of this book is how to present arguments like these to anyone who doesn't already concsider themselves anti-globalization liberals. I think that any intelligent person who has read Thomas Friedman and found his arguments somewhat persuasive, should read this book too, and decide what sounds most persuasive for themselves. Unfortunately, I think most people will look at the jacket cover endorsements from Howard Zinn, Studs Terkel et. al. and make a snap call for the usual ideological reasons.

THAT is not good for America.(less)

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03/01/08

James rated it:

Read in February, 2008

“The lucky get Kevlar, the rest get prayer beads.”

This is a chilling, writhing outrage of a book. A hideous, squealing beast of a book that cannot and should not be ignored.

Klein has dropped the curtain on an ugly, malevolent Wizard. When these kind of curtains drop, we never like what we see. Like so many of these kinds of leftist exposes on conservatives, the Bush Administration, the neocons and their rabble, this book needn’t have been written. Orwell wrote it alread...more

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03/18/08

Rhyd Wildermuth rated it:

bookshelves: capitalism-and-its-discontents

Read in March, 2008

I just finished The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein. It came out months ago, and I would’ve read it sooner had it not cost $45 dollars in Canada.

Much of the information meticulously detailed in the book was already available in Harper’s Magazine and DemocracyNow!, though never put together so throroughly. She begins her book with a discussion of a canadian woman who endured several years of experimental psychiatric work under the authority of Da...more

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03/30/08

Mark rated it:

Read in December, 2007

Dear Naomi Klein,
I recently finished reading your latest book, The Shock Doctrine. Your detailed account of the connections between neoliberal economic policy and the use of violent repression, the decline of welfare states, and the rise of corporatized war and disaster capitalism is compelling. You thread together the recent histories of military brutality in the Southern Cone of South America, union busting in Margaret Thatcher’s England, and the Tiananmen Square massacre in China. ...more Dear Naomi Klein,
I recently finished reading your latest book, The Shock Doctrine. Your detailed account of the connections between neoliberal economic policy and the use of violent repression, the decline of welfare states, and the rise of corporatized war and disaster capitalism is compelling. You thread together the recent histories of military brutality in the Southern Cone of South America, union busting in Margaret Thatcher’s England, and the Tiananmen Square massacre in China. Through these histories you make explicit that acts of violent political repression against leftist organizers were not chance occurrences during periods of economic transition. On the contrary, you show that they were deliberate acts of “shock therapy” used by governments to numb and eliminate those opposed to the implementation of neoliberal policies such as the privatization of public services, the elimination of spending on social programs, and the deregulation of industry wage, safety and environmental standards.

You demonstrate the “constricted freedom” of post cold-war governments in Poland, Russia, and South Africa, who, in spite of initial aspirations to build social democratic welfare states, ended up implementing neoliberal economic reforms with disastrous consequences for the majority of their people. You then bring your analysis of neoliberalism to the United States, describing the rise of the privatized war machine and the parallel emergence of the occupation of Iraq as a profitable market for investments in military technology, homeland security, and the rebuilding of basic infrastructure destroyed by the aforementioned military technology. Finally, you tie it all together by concluding that the neoliberal economic model, in its thirst for new markets, is now preying upon areas struck by natural disasters to accumulate the profits it desires. “Disaster capitalism,” as you aptly name it, was evident in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and in Sri Lanka after the tsunami when large numbers of poor people were prevented from returning to their weather damaged homes in order to create lucrative new investment opportunities on the land they previously inhabited. The most sinister part of neoliberalism’s trajectory, as you note at the end of your book, is that when war and disaster are profitable enterprises, there are increased incentives to start wars and allow natural phenomena to deteriorate into social catastrophes.

To begin, I want to say that I learned a lot from reading your book. I was continually impressed by your ability to organize complex historical events into easily understandable patterns. You have clearly demonstrated neoliberalism’s historical dependence on political, economic, and physical “shock.” I am writing you, however, because despite my deep appreciation for the work you have done, I also have a major concern. You do an excellent job of describing many of the problems that come with neoliberalism, but I am afraid your analysis does not give a good account as to why neoliberal ideas are being implemented in the first place. Without a clear understanding of why neoliberalism is the policy of choice for many governments and economists today, you fail to put forward a comprehensive vision for how neoliberalism can be transformed.

For these reasons, I am concerned that many people will read your book and become motivated to make change, but will not be equipped with the right tools to do so. I am concerned that without the right tools, these motivated people will continue to focus on pressuring governments and/or economists to make change but will have little success persuading them to do so. I am concerned that these motivated people, after not having much success, will start to believe those who say that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union prove that free market capitalism is the final stop on the train of economic history. Moreover, I am concerned that these motivated people, frustrated by their inability to make change, will reluctantly give into the idea that capitalism (and the neoliberal ideology that now accompanies it) is the only way to organize economies after all.

With these concerns in mind, I would like to suggest that you take a look at another book that maps the rise of neoliberalism in the latter half of the twentieth century. The book is The Dilemmas of Social Democracies by two Peace Studies Professors at Earlham College, Howard Richards and Joanna Swanger. Instead of focusing on the violence and repression associated with neoliberal economics, Richards and Swanger focus on rules. They would argue that your book takes a wrong turn on the second to last page of the introduction when you make the claim that there is no reason that market-based economies are incompatible with decent wages, free health care, and quality public education. They would say that there is a very good reason that markets and government led social welfare programs do not mix: the basic cultural rules that shape our current economy do not allow them to. They would explain that until the basic rules of our economy are changed, governments have few options for making economic policies that serve the needs of all of their people...

Read the entire "open letter to Naomi Klein" at: http://www.infactispax.org/volume3/Webb....
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10/14/08

Logan rated it:

bookshelves: current-affairs, damn-the-man, essential-books-for-a-library, history, politics

Read in February, 2009

recommends it for: Anyone curious as to why they are now unemployed

As someone who used to consume nonfiction with the voracious appetite of a trucker at an Old Country Buffet, I find it odd and not a little unsettling that, since joining Goodreads, a solid 95% of my reading material has come from the fiction side of the bookstore. While this has definitely helped fill some dramatic gaps in my knowledge, it was with much relief that I tucked myself into Klein's The Shock Doctrine earlier this week. I'd attempted reading this in the heady afterglow of the elect...more As someone who used to consume nonfiction with the voracious appetite of a trucker at an Old Country Buffet, I find it odd and not a little unsettling that, since joining Goodreads, a solid 95% of my reading material has come from the fiction side of the bookstore. While this has definitely helped fill some dramatic gaps in my knowledge, it was with much relief that I tucked myself into Klein's The Shock Doctrine earlier this week. I'd attempted reading this in the heady afterglow of the election this past November but I was not in the mood to be depressed so soon and replaced it on my shelf.

Two months into Obama's presidency, as the economy crumbles into so many pieces which are then greedily consumed by the jackals that make up the banking industry, Klein's definitive history of Friedman economics and their entwined history with brutality, terror and disparity seems especially apt. Granted, Friedman didn't do this all on his own. Rather, as Klein's thesis bears out, this occurs through a system of shocks to the nervous system of the target country, much as electro-convulsive therapy was developed as a means to wipe its subjects mind so that it could be reformatted into a socially acceptable form.

The first shock is generally political upheaval- a coup, terror attack, or governmental collapse, though Klein points out that natural disasters such as the 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Katrina work just as well, that so upsets the regular routine of life that citizens are willing to invest extraordinary powers in the government and silence any dissent for the duration of the emergency. Sound familiar?

Next comes the economic shock, during which the social safety nets so despised by free-market zealots are taken away and former nationally-owned industries (oil, mineral, postal services, arms contracts, education, healthcare, pretty much everything) are "privatized," or sold at cut-rate prices to foreign investors who, through some never-explained sleight of hand will then lead the country into its bright capitalist utopia. Of course, as profit-driven enterprises are wont to do, this generally leads to corruption at unprecedented levels, currency inflation and record-bursting unemployment levels. "Relax," the economic advisers say (these well-trained theorists from Friedman's Chicago School of Economics), "these are just the birth pangs of a new economic era. Everything is under control."

Which is very true. Everything is very much under control. For, as social unrest grows, the next shock is coming. These are the state-sanctioned terror squads that quell social unrest by creating an atmosphere of unwavering brutality and terror. These are the Disappeared leftists of South America, herded into football stadiums and machine-gunned, the distraught funeral gatherings broken up with water cannons and riot police. These are electrodes under the nails, omni-present surveillance, bodies dropped from helicopters into farmer's fields, couples black-bagged during their own wedding ceremony and carted into torture facilities, in front of hundreds of witnesses who are all so very afraid to be next that they refuse to even acknowledge that the event occurred.

Klein charts the evolution of the titular Shock Doctrine from it's intellectual beginnings at the University of Chicago in the 1950s in horrified reaction to the New Deal and the Keynesian philosophy that holds that a country's economy should work to best serve the working classes that are it's lifeblood. Milton Friedman, godfather of this Doctrine, develops his economic theory of free-market systems using oh-so-precise calculations (this is the man who cried and recited Donne's "Ode to a Grecian Urn" upon seeing a geometric proof) yet lacks a real world opportunity to test them in.

Enter Chile in 1974, an alleged 3rd world country who has just elected the radical Salvador Allende who is promising further nationalization of vital industries and expanded benefits to its citizens. Obviously the man is a dangerous Marxist and must be deposed post haste, says the US-based United Fruit Company who has much to lose if these nationalizations occur. No sooner said than done. With the useful assistance of the CIA, the military executes Allende and installs General Pinochet as dictator who, with assistance from his Chicago Boys (worshipers at the fount of Friedman) dismantles the complete economy and disappears hundreds of thousands of upstart leftists.

Okay, so that was a bit too bloody for the world's tastes, but you can't argue with the profits. A few people got extremely rich, clearly the market works. Let's try that again, but this time a bit more slyly. So Klein ushers us through nearly every political upheaval of the past 30 years, from the Thatcherite Falklands War to the end of Apartheid in South Africa and communism in both Poland and Russia, illustrating in very explicit detail the cooption of movements in the name of free-markets, the economic blackmail of the IMF's structural adjustment programs, and the destruction of true freedom in order to create free markets.

What is shown is not a series of isolated events but the creation of post-nationalist systems in which the state serves as the source of endless wealth for a very few and muscle for the extortion that takes place in the name of freedom. Most effective is how, after hundreds of pages of showing how this program (or pogrom) worked overseas, Klein brings it home to the US and shows how the terror attacks of 2001, the Iraq War, and the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina allowed the Friedmaniacs to enact their policies in the states. Complete lack of oversight, no bid contracts, unregulated markets and massive speculation all ran rampant during the seven years of Bush's reign and Klein does well to show exactly how this system led to the economic armageddon that engulfs us today.

It is my only hope that Obama and his advisers have read and believed even one chapter of this book and seen Friedman's system for the massive fuck up that it is and are now looking to pull Keynes from the wilderness and enshrine his values firmly in the passages of law, finicky governors be damned.(less)

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01/03/08

Naeem rated it:

Read in January, 2008

recommended to Naeem by: paul puhr
recommends it for: those who like Chomsky, Parenti, and Polanyi

The mid-book review (see below) holds up. I have finished the book and it is not a good book. It is a great book. Klein has really achieved something here. Politics, economics, international relations, culture, ideology, and the human capacity to resist domination -- all come together here.

Klein's global range and tremendous detail are really heartening to me.

Below is the mid-book review written a few days ago:

I am up to chapter 11 (out of 22). So th...more

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06/15/08

David M. rated it:

bookshelves: political-theory

Read in June, 2008

I only got about ¼ into this. I don't like the shifty way Klein argues her points. I felt like I was being propagandized rather than educated.

Much of her main “shock doctrine” argument seems to be just sort of a tightly-woven set of linguistic parallels that are meant to suggest causation. Something like: Hitler had the autobahn built. The autobahn allowed drivers to finally race where they wanted to go. Hitler crafted what he thought of as the final solution to a race proble...more

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11/26/07

Grant rated it:

(review of isbn 0676978002)

bookshelves: activism, issues, thinking

Read in December, 2007

recommends it for: every human on the planet

I would seriously like to see every human on this planet read this book. I can’t think of any other book I would more highly recommend today.

The whole text was rich in the exposing of history and deep analysis. I strongly encourage anyone reading it to stick through to the end. The bulk of the book covers quite terrible things in the world, but the last chapter actually made me very hopeful and inspired.

Utterly brilliant!

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01/27/08

Maura rated it:

bookshelves: all-time-favorites, economics, history, human-rights, made-a-huge-impression-on-me, non-fiction

Read in June, 2008

Wow. This and Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America, which Klein cited frequently, are the two best books I've read in years.

What's amazing is that none of the historical or current events she covered were really new to me--I read the papers, I'm up on my Latin American history, and I'd had a basic understanding of Chicago School ideology... but she pointed out connections between them all that I hadn't seen before. I felt her analogizes between economic shock therapy and to...more

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10/12/07

Lynn rated it:

Read in October, 2007

recommends it for: college students

The central thesis of this book is that Freidman neo-liberal economics (privatization, deregulation,cutbacks in social spending) has been implemented around the world by creating or taking advantage of national shocks. Created as in coups in Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, taking advantage as in the natural disasters in Sri Lanka and New Orleans and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in the U.S. Neo-liberals have been able to impose this shock therapy undemocratically by taking advantage of populations...more

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12/03/07

Sara Willis rated it:

recommends it for: anyone ignorant of the dangers of capitalism

You can't have capitalism without capitalists. The intentional pervasive spread of capitalism is proven as no evolutionary process that begets an economic system out of the blue only because it is a natural progression. What Naomi Klien illustrates is how intentional and manipulated ,and how dependent upon suppression and violence, this "progression" turned out to be. Through spreading their influence to countries such as Chile, Russia and now Iraq the Chicago School economists pur...more

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07/11/08

Christopher rated it:

Read in July, 2008

Conservatives will call this book conspiracy theory, and the inside jacket flap made me hesitate for about six months before I read it. But this is not the stuff of "George W. Bush planned, plotted, and carried out 9/11" conspiracy theory (as if Bush wouldn't have messed that up too). The shock doctrine essentially asserts that governments use the public shock following catastrophes (whether natural, as with Hurricane Katrina, or intentional, as with several of the 1970s coups in South...more

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05/04/08

angela rated it:

bookshelves: economics, politics

Read in July, 2008

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in a popularized account of disaster capitalism and "shock" economics.

Although, I'll be honest, it didn't quite grab me up front - I found that Klein began the book with a number of oversimplifications in describing both the issues with disaster capitalism and economics and political economy more generally. However, by the time I made it through the first third I became far more impressed with her analysis. Some of her arg...more I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in a popularized account of disaster capitalism and "shock" economics.

Although, I'll be honest, it didn't quite grab me up front - I found that Klein began the book with a number of oversimplifications in describing both the issues with disaster capitalism and economics and political economy more generally. However, by the time I made it through the first third I became far more impressed with her analysis. Some of her arguments, though, continued to sensationalize and simplify issues (I suppose, partially due to her writing style). Also, while I know this is going to be a terribly unpopular opinion, I found the repeated and numerous parallels she drew with torture and shock pyscho"therapy" to be excessive by the end of the book without adding much to her argument. The information she presented on the case of Latin America and Dr. Cameron was necessary and illustrative. And some of the information on torture in Iraq was also quite necessary but the amount of information she provided seemed to become more sensationalized with fewer direct ties being made to diaster capitalism. I didn't have a problem with the inclusion of all those examples of torture, in and of itself, I just think the book would have been stronger by continually tying all of these incidents together or more strategically picking examples of shock therapy that could more readily illustrate her points about disaster capitalism.

If you only read select pieces of this book, I highly recommend you read the sections on South America and Russia. They are illustrative and I think the Russian case is especially revealing when compared to the South American case.

* I must admit that I listened to the audio version of this book (when I went to two book stores in Toronto to find it and neither had it, I thought I'd give this format a try). However, the format may have shaped my view of the book as I found it harder to digest and had to listen to some sections twice, for instance). (less)

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01/05/08

Zeph rated it:

bookshelves: politics

Read in February, 2008

This book is enlightening and infuriating. My Mom sent it to me for Xmas, claiming that it "shocked" her, and she's no dummy. Though criminal greed masquerading as free trade ideology doesn't surprise me, Klein cuts through the abstract haze surrounding economics with enough hard evidence, individual narratives and damning quotes to explosively personalize global events.

A forty year history of international finance negotiations and dry economic theory take on riveting pract...more

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01/01/08

Cat rated it:

Read in January, 2008

In the aftermath of the San Diego fires this volume caught my eye. Mostly, it was the subheading "The rise of disaster capitalism." Published in 2007, the summary promised a thorough indictment of the Milton Friedman inspired economics of "disaster capitalism" i.e. the method by which governments and corporations use natural & man made disasters to push through radical neo-liberal reforms during a period when the population, which normally would vociferously object to ideas l...more In the aftermath of the San Diego fires this volume caught my eye. Mostly, it was the subheading "The rise of disaster capitalism." Published in 2007, the summary promised a thorough indictment of the Milton Friedman inspired economics of "disaster capitalism" i.e. the method by which governments and corporations use natural & man made disasters to push through radical neo-liberal reforms during a period when the population, which normally would vociferously object to ideas like privatising the water supply, are in a such a state of shock they are helpless to object.

This book begins and ends with Milton Friedman, and if you are reading this review without a clear idea of who he is & what he stands for in the history of the 20th and 21st century, either google the man or stop reading now, because to describe The Shock Doctrine as anything other then one journalist's attempt to hold Friedman responsible for nearly all the ills of the post-cold war world (and many of the ills which occurred during the cold war) is to do this book a great disservice.

Friedman is best known as an apostle of free markets, privatisation and globalization. As a professor at the University of Chicago, he articulated an anti-kenseyian economic program that was near and dear to the hearts of our favorite republican presidents- Ronald Reagan, George Bush (the younger) and their advisers- Donald Rumsfeld was a student. Friedman also trained the economists who "revised" the post coup economies of Chile under the Junta, of Argentina under Pinochet.

A large part of what Klein seeks to do is hold Friedman and his disciples responsible for the torture & repression unleashed by the politicians and dictators seeking to implement his vision. At the heart of her argument is the simple idea that the neo-liberal program is a corporatist give away that loots the state in favor of hand outs to large corporations, that this project is profoundly unpopular to politicians in democracies because there are more poor voters then rich voters & ipso facto the neo-liberal economists are forced to created conditions of "shock" where vulnerable populations are unable to resist. These shocks can either take the form of coups (think Pinochet), political turmoil (eastern europe post cold war), currency crises (Mexico in the 90s) or, in fact, a military invasion by the United States (Irag, the second time.)

All of these shocks result in the implementation of the same program: sale of state assets, opening of markets to foreign investments, elimination of price controls for stable supplies.

There is no pretense of objectivity in Klein's writing, she is quite clearly a left leaning journalist of the 60s variety. Save the last chapter, which speaks of the revival of resistance to the neo-liberal program in places like Venezuela (yeah Hugo Chavez!), to read this book is to read an unending litany of disaster, repression, and, let's face it, malevolent evil doing by Friedman, the World Bank, the IMF & the current President (and his cronies). In short, it's pretty much a book length write up of the discussion that dope smoking undergraduates have been having in the dorm rooms since the 60s. To her credit, Klein appears to have actually gone to many of the places she is writing about. She footnotes extensively.

However, almost nothing in this book was new to me, and on behalf of Milton Friedman, the Bush administration and the giant corporations of American and the West, I would enter a demurrer to Ms. Klein's accusations. A "demurrer" is when you file a response to a law suit that basically says, "Yeah, so what?"

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12/16/07

Hank Horse rated it:

bookshelves: leftylucy

recommends it for: those who think capital=god=evolution

Klein provides trenchant analysis of the human costs of fundamentalist free-market privatization policies. She gives case after outrageous case.

This book is a valuable tool for understanding the politics and history of the last 50 years.

One aspect of the book I think especially timely is her analysis of torture as a state policy designed to intimidate populations resistant to neoliberal economic schemes. It makes anyone who uses that old "But what if you had a terro...more

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11/21/07

fbuser732165180 rated it:

(review of isbn 0676978002)

Excellent and compellingly written book about how Milton Friedman's Chicago school of free market capitalism has been imposed on countries following shocks, whether caused by natural or contrived disasters, and how the initial shock and followup shocks in the form of repression and frequently torture have been used to impose these deeply unpopular measures. Takes in Chile, Columbia, Russia, Poland, Britain under Thatcher and the war on terror. Points out how disaster capitalism profits from crea...more

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10/08/07

Kerry rated it:

bookshelves: non-fiction-favourites

Read in November, 2007

recommends it for: Everyone

A very disturbing read even with the positive ending. As someone who has taught History and Politics since the 1970s this book made sense of a lot of the seeming absurdities of US foreign policy through that period. Sad that Friedman died before he could be indicted for war crimes but it was never going to happen anyway. The US only allows very low level people to be brought to justice for this sort of thing. The section on tsunami aid was simply sickening and really shows how morally bankrupt t...more

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12/31/07

Holly rated it:

Read in December, 2007

I started this book half-expecting socialist propaganda. While reading it, I felt compelled to actually look up and research its incredible claims. By the time I finished this book, I found myself changed not only by the history lesson, but by the in-your-face current events reporting and grim foreshadowing of the potential future of every nation--as well as the role of the United States in all of these.

For the first time I have a clearer understanding of the phrase, "If you're ...more

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