No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

by Naomi Klein

“The Middle East has always been associated with two natural resources, oil (because of its abundance) and water (because of its scarcity).” When it comes to oil, water, and war in the Middle East, certain patterns have become clear over time. First, Western fighter jets follow that abundance of oil in the region, setting off spirals of violence and destabilization. Next come the Western drones, closely tracking water scarcity as drought and conflict mix together. And just as bombs follow oil, and drones follow drought—so, now, boats follow both. Boats filled with refugees fleeing homes ravaged by war and drought in the driest parts of the planet. And the same capacity to discount the humanity of the “other,” which justifies civilian deaths and casualties from bombs and drones, is now being trained on the people in the boats (or arriving on buses or on foot)—casting their need for security as a threat, their desperate flight as some sort of invading army. The dramatic rise in right-wing nationalism, anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and straight-up white supremacy over the past decade cannot be pried apart from this maelstrom—from the jets and the drones, the boats and walls. The only way to justify such untenable levels of inequality is to double down on theories of racial hierarchy that tell a story about how the people being locked out of the global Green Zone deserve their fate, whether it’s Trump casting Mexicans as rapists and “bad hombres,” and Syrian refugees as clo...