The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

by Naomi Klein

That night I thought about Claudia Acuña, the extraordinary journalist I had met in Buenos Aires two years earlier who had given me a copy of Rodolfo Walsh’s “Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta.” She had warned me that extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves. In a way, it had happened already to the antiwar movement. Our explanations for why the war was waged rarely went beyond one-word answers: oil, Israel, Halliburton. Most of us chose to oppose the war as an act of folly by a president who mistook himself for a king, and his British sidekick who wanted to be on the winning side of history. There was little interest in the idea that war was a rational policy choice, that the architects of the invasion had unleashed ferocious violence because they could not crack open the closed economies of the Middle East by peaceful means, that the level of terror was proportional to what was at stake.