About the Book

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is a 2007 book by Canadian author Naomi Klein. The book argues that the free market policies of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman have risen to prominence in some countries because they were pushed through while the citizens were reacting to disasters or upheavals. It is implied that some man-made crises, such as the Falklands war, may have been created with the intention of being able to push through these unpopular reforms in their wake. The book has an introduction, a main body and a conclusion, divided into seven parts with a total of 21 chapters. The introduction sketches the history of the last thirty years where economic shock doctrine has been applied throughout the world, from South America in the 1970s to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Klein introduces two of her main themes. Part 1 begins with a chapter on psychiatric shock therapy and the covert experiments conducted by the psychiatrist Ewen Cameron in collusion with the Central Intelligence Agency: how it was partially successful in distorting and regressing patients' original personality, but ineffectual in developing a better personality to replace it. Parallels with economic shock therapy are made, including a digression on how government agencies harnessed some of the lessons learned to create more effective torture techniques. Torture, according to Klein, has often been an essential tool for authorities who have implemented aggressive free market reforms this assertion is stressed throughout the book. She suggests that for historical reasons the human rights movement has often portrayed torture without explaining its context, which has made it frequently appear as pointless sadism. The second chapter introduces Milton ... More: http://booksllc.net/?id=13127508

Product Details

Media: Paperback Book, 28 pages

Language: English

Publisher: Books LLC

ISBN-10: 1156173671

ISBN-13: 9781156173671

Dimensions: 9.02 x 6.00 x 0.07 inches

Shipping Weight: 0.12 lbs

• Categories: Not Classifiable