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 which patients were blasted back to virtually a blank slate by sensory depravation and electric shock treatment to US foreign policy in countries such as Chile in the 1970s and Iraq today.

If you had forgotten just how evil unconstrained capitalism is – it is time to read this book. If you are concerned that the world seems to believe democracy = free markets – it is time to read this book.

For two decades it has been abundantly clear that the greatest danger facing the world is the ideology that likes to call itself Economic Rationalism but is better described as Radical Free Market Economics. This is the view that any restraint placed on the free operation of the market – from fixing minimum wages to environmental standards to health and safety controls in the workplace – are by definition wrong and counterproductive. This view states that governments are, by definition, wasteful and unnecessary. This view is an attempt at justifying unmitigated greed as if it was a universal good. It is about destroying all vestiges of democracy (and God knows those vestiges are today meagre indeed) in our society and handing over all power to corporations. If you are not troubled by the shift in power in the world away from governments elected by the people, for the people to corporations created out of greed for greed – then you really need to turn off American Idol and start looking around yourself.

Klein takes a series of increasingly distressing ‘case studies’ in which ever purer forms of radical free market economics are applied in times of crisis across the world – invariably with devastatingly negative results, invariably the opposite of what is predicted by the neo-liberals. She points out that without a crisis such as 9/11 or Katrina or the War in Iraq – such policies would never be allowed to be implemented. But come a crisis people are so shocked by what has just happened to them that they are prepared to forgo their democratic rights so things can be ‘fixed’.

The problem is that these bastards don’t want anything fixed. They want to apply more shocks, because that is the only way they can get rid of democratic structures that stand in the way of them handing over the wealth of our nations to themselves. The Corporate raping of Iraq as depicted in this book is only slightly less shocking than the Corporate raping of New Orleans. Perhaps I found the stuff about New Orleans more shocking because it was Americans doing this sort of thing to their own people. I know, I’m naïve.

The descriptions of torture in the book are too much to take. I’ve never been able to distance myself enough from the victims of torture to be objective about it. I believe it is the core of the democratic spirit – the notion that the sufferers of torture are our brothers and sisters and the perpetrators of torture require justice to be enacted against them – that immediately has me siding with the tortured. We have a moral responsibility to stop our government from using our tax dollars to torture people. If morality means anything at all – this is the minimum it can mean.

Klein documents that the torture used throughout the world by US client states has a long history going back to experiments done in the 1950s in Canada and have clearly become part of US foreign policy. If we are to be on the side of democracy then we must force our governments to stop using torture against the citizens of other countries. Particularly when these citizens are asking for what should be granted to them immediately – the right to reclaim the benefit of their own natural resources from foreign owned corporations.

There are so many lessons in this book, but the major one is that if people stand up against these greedy lunatics then we can stop them. We can reclaim our dignity and redistribute some of what has plundered from us. The criminal waste of tax dollars by these corporations in both Iraq and New Orleans is almost beyond description. In the book Iraq is at one point referred to as the Free Fraud Zone.

The world we live in today is increasingly becoming divided between those who have and are kept secure behind walled suburbs and those who have not and are forced to live without the basic necessities of life. We need to understand that my security is enhanced by making the world safer for you. That life isn’t about who ends up with the most stuff they don’t need or the biggest bank account or the fastest car, but that we are social animals and so what is good for all is also what is good for us.

As I said, this is a deeply disturbing book – but also an incredibly important one.