49

DISASTER CAPITALISM
In his January 1961 Farewell Address President Eisenhower warned
of the danger, not only of the Military-Industrial Complex, but also
of the Scientific and Technological Elite. The second danger was
not much noted at the time, nor much considered and openly
discussed in later years. There are a few who wondered, and tried
to discover, what specifically the President was thinking of. Though
he might have been thinking of the new Cybernetics Projects or
research in Multi-Media Manipulation and the New Biology applied
to warfare, he did not mention them. He certainly did not give
special attention to the elites and technocrats of Economic Science
or of the other then-expanding Social and Behavioral Sciences. But
Naomi Klein does.
In her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,
she gives special attention to that form of economic science called
Neoliberalism or Neoliberal Economics, especially that doctrine
articulated by Milton Friedman and further applied by others of the
Chicago School and their gradually extended apparatus at home and
abroad.
She also presents the psychiatric and broader social-psychological
research done in Canada and the United States after World War II,
and how it was applied, especially in connection with psychotropic
and neurotropic drugs (like LSD and PSP) and Electro-Shock
Therapy. She is especially attentive to how the Intelligence
Community applied the McGill University Professor Ewen
Cameron's psychiatric studies in mind-control, as in C.I.A.'s MK
Ultra Project and its predecessors.
She then relates these two larger and sometimes covert
phenomena to contemporary military science, especially in their
relations to the Shock-and-Awe Doctrine, as articulated in the
1996 book, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, by H.K.
Ullman and J.P. Wade, and published by the National Defense
University (NDU) in Washington D.C. (NDU constitutes, as an
institution, the highest level of military education in America, and

50
the studies there deal with many Grand-Strategic Topics.)
Creative Destruction
Naomi Klein proposes to show how these operational forms of
military shock which deliberately attempt to induce in the target
country a certain docility and acquiescent regression are
further connected with a doctrine of creative destruction and
profitable reconstruction of the earlier-invaded country, or
engineered re-location of the victims of a natural disaster such as a
tsunami or a hurricane.
Hence she refers often to the Disaster-Capitalism Complex
which is, in effect, a Military-Security-High Finance-TechnocraticDestruction-and Re-Construction Complex. She likewise often
speaks of Erasing and Remaking the World, of various kinds of
demiurgic Transformation that are built upon the Rubble of an
actual or perceived Crisis, or even an induced and manipulated
Pseudo-Crisis.
In other words, Naomi Klein relates the activities of three kinds of
Shock Doctors:
1. Psychiatric/ Psychological
2. Economic/ Financial
3. Military/ Paramilitary/ Private Security Services
She shows, in a refreshingly vivid way though depicting very grim
topics of human suffering how the new Re-Construction Industry
of Disaster Capitalism profits from Chaos and Instability and
Planned Misery (117, 125)1. She gives much evidence to show that
even the Big Oil Companies who once seemed to want Stability
are now involved with the Re-Construction Apparatus and can
thus profit from the actual or induced disasters. This is part of
the deliberate process of erasing and replacing (420). Sometimes,
as we shall see, it is part of a racket (449) operating for the
1

All numbers in brackets refer to page numbers in Naomi Kleins book.

51
purposes of pillage (442) in a protected free fraud zone (196), as
in Iraq.
Reservations
Before going on with our analysis of Klein's book, I want to
emphasize that her book is filled with important facts and almost all
of the facts she puts forth are well-sourced. My main reservation
about what she has honestly and truthfully presented is what she
has left out. She is admittedly and openly a Democratic Socialist
who is obviously sympathetic with the Revolutionary Left (the other
side of the Revolutionary Dialectic?), not only Marxism and portions
of Reformed Gramscian Communism and Indigenism and Global
Civil Society (like Richard Falk). But she barely touches upon if at
all the various shock doctrines and shock therapies of the Left.
She is also a seeming Mocker of Religion, especially of the Christian
Religion (at least in its messianic Protestant forms), but not of the
Jewish religion nor its special varieties of messianic action and
elitism or chosenness.
However, Klein does convey that persons like Milton Friedman,
who are of Jewish heritage but more secularized in their Jewish
ethnicity, do, indeed, have and very dangerously hold an Elitist (or
Neo-Gnostic) sense of their own Messianic Mission. Naomi Klein
also speaks of the destructive role of the Neoconservatives. She
simply does not name their predominant ethnic background.
For example, in the Conclusion of her book, which is significantly
entitled Shock Wears Off: The Rise of People's Reconstruction,
she speaks of the death of Professor Milton Friedman in November
2006 and his dubious legacy which was then beginning to show signs
of cracking and failure. She speaks of the state of disarray in which the
quest for unfettered capitalism found itself that November (561),
perhaps the end of an era (56):
Friedman's intellectual heirs in the United States, the neocons who
launched the disaster capitalism [and creative destruction]
complex, were at the lowest point in their history (561 my
emphasis added).

52
Klein argues that their high point the movement's pinnacle (561)
was in 1994 and the decline began and further sank into the dark
valley of November 2006. She quotes Jim Webb, who is now the
Democratic U.S. Senator from Virginia, who said on 15 November
2006, in a Wall Street Journal article, entitled Class Struggle that the
country had drifted toward a class-based system, the likes of which we
have not seen since the 19th century (561) and In each case, the core
tenets of Chicago School economics privatization, deregulation and cuts
to government services had laid the foundation for the breakdowns
(561).
Grabbing public property for the Rich Few
One of the tributes to Naomi Klein at the beginning of the book,
the words of Chalmers Johnson, reinforces what the former
combatant Marine and Secretary of the Navy Jim Webb himself
just said:
Naomi Klein's expos of neoliberal economics .... rips away the free
trade and globalization ideologies that disguise a conspiracy to
privatize war and disaster and grab public property for the
rich few. Klein's [book] is a long-needed analysis of our headlong
flight back to feudalisms under the guise of social science
and freedom (my emphasis added).
Earlier in her book, Klein shows additionally convincing evidence of
the privatization of security, war, and reconstruction (174) and its
strategic preparation, or unique brand of intellectual disaster
preparedness (175) which was then organized and poised to
intervene at the right time or at least the apparently profitable
time and swiftly so at a time of shock when no effective resistance
to their initiatives could be counter-organized.
At the outset of her book, Naomi Klein defined what she means by
disaster capitalism:
I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of
catastrophic events [the Iraq War, the Katrina crisis in New
Orleans, or the Sri Lanka Tsunami, for example], combined with

53
the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, disaster
capitalism. (6)
This combination is a sort of binary weapon: i.e., only when
brought together are the elements then effective, even explosive.
But there are also silent biological weapons that are likewise
binary weapons and have both stress-activated and latent (and
gradually erosive) effects.
By the time of the Katrina crisis, moreover,
For more than three decades [1971-2005] Friedman and his powerful
followers have be perfecting this very strategy: waiting for a major
crisis [Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, South Africa, and the like], the
selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were
still reeling from the shock, then quickly making the reforms
permanent. In one of his most influential essays, Friedman articulated
contemporary capitalism's core tactical nostrum, what I have come to
understand as the shock doctrine. He observed that only a crisis
actual or perceived produces real change. When that crisis occurs,
the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.
That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing
policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically
impossible become politically inevitable (7).
The Neoconservative Counter-Terrorist Strategists and War
Strategists might also have assimilated the doctrine and were thus
prepared to act when 9/11 occurred and even to get the already
prepared Patriot Act swiftly installed. (When do you already start
working to bring about the crisis when you have already prepared
to react to it? When do you thereby induce a self-fulfilling
prophecy?)
As Naomi Klein also said:
And once a crisis has struck, the University of Chicago Professor
[Milton Friedman] was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly to
impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society
slipped back into the tyranny of the status quo (6,7).

54
Klein even calls Friedman's Doctrine A variation on Machiavelli's
advice that injuries should be inflicted all at once and this proved to be
one of Friedman's most lasting strategic legacies (7). (She does not also
say that it was likewise one of Lenin's lasting legacies.)
Shock and Awe
The strategic-military authors of Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid
Dominance said in their own Appendix A (p.110), as follows, and as
now quoted by Klein:
Shock and Awe are actions that create fears, dangers, and destruction
that are incomprehensible to the people at large, specific elements/
sectors of the threat [sic] society, or the leadership. Nature in the
form of tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, uncontrolled fires,
famine, and disease can [also] engender Shock and Awe (3).
This passage was published ten years before Friedman died and
seven years before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Klein does not seem to know that there are also weathermodification weapons and seismic weapons and other forms of
special technologies that can now be put to military purposes
instead of just bombing from several thousand feet and at night.
Klein argues that the C.I.A.'s Kubark Manual (a once-classified
manual of Interrogation) represents a new age of precise, refined
torture (39) and constitutes a how-to guide on dismantling
personalities (40) and later, by extension, it was to be applied to
societies and cultures.
By way of illustration, she says that the Kubark's authors were
especially captured by McGill University's Dr. Ewen Cameron's
own focus on regression the idea that by depriving people of their
sense of who they are and where they are in time and space [eg.,
sensory deprivation], adults can be converted into dependent children
whose minds are a blank slate [tabula rasa] of suggestibility (40). Then
Klein quotes the Kubark Manual itself (pages 39-40, 76-77, 41, 66)
and its recurrent theme:

55
All of the techniques employed to break through an interrogation
roadblock, the entire spectrum from simple isolation to hypnosis and
narcosis, are essentially ways of speeding up the process of
regression. As the interrogatee slips back from maturity toward a
more infantile state, his learned or structured personality traits fall
away (48-49 my emphasis added).
Erasure of Memory and Tradition
Later in her book Klein notes the logical and actual connections
between policy change, the economic shock therapists and the
military doctrine of surprise:
The idea that policy change should be like launching a surprise
military attack is a recurring theme for economic shock therapists. In
Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, the U.S. military
doctrine published in 1996 that eventually formed the basis of the
2003 invasion of Iraq, the authors state [on p. xv] that the invading
force should seize control of the environment and paralyze or so
overload an adversary's perceptions and understanding of events so
that the enemy would be incapable of resistance (184).
Elsewhere, she says that the purpose is to induce acquiescence
(46), as it was likewise part of the Science of Fear (46) and the
terrible legacy of the McGill [mind-control] experiments in
deliberately induced regression (113) and erasure of memory and
tradition.
When Klein speaks of coercive interrogation (19) a euphemism
for forms of torture she also quotes at length the July 1963
Handbook which the C.I.A. produced, entitled Kubark
Counterintelligence Interrogation (46) a 128-page secret manual on
the interrogation of resistant sources that is heavily based on the
research commissioned by MK Ultra [concerning drugs and
psychology] (47).
Klein even quotes the inhuman words of a Bolivian economist, the
main author of a plan to implement economic shock therapy in his
own impoverished country. His words purported to stiffen spines by

56
comparing the team [the economic shock team] to fighter pilots
attacking an enemy, and he then acutely added:
We have to be like the pilot of Hiroshima. When he dropped the
atomic bomb he didn't know what he was doing, but when he saw the
smoke he said: Oops, sorry! And that's exactly what we have to do,
launch the measures and then: Oops, sorry! (184)
Human trash!
And it gets worse with Klein's further reportage of trust
betrayed (57) and its intimate consequences.
Perfect Storm
She shows various manipulations of financial volatility, and of the
movement of money electronic money at great speed. Sudden
drops of manipulated prices send entire economies into depression,
which is then deepened by currency traders who, seeing a country's
financial downturn, respond by betting against its currency, causing
its value to plummet (200 my emphasis added).
For example, Klein shows how the Philippines and Uruguay were hit
with a perfect storm of financial shocks debt shocks, price shocks and
currency shocks created by the increasingly volatile, deregulated global
economy (200-201).
There are many other illuminating presentations of the principles,
applications, and variations of shock doctrine psychological,
economic, military, financial and the like and they should be
carefully considered by the reader, who will then likely want to
enhance his own resistance to these technocrats and practitioners
and their all-too-characteristic frigidity and flippancy and indifference
and injustice.
Worse is Better
We propose now to consider only two more portions of Naomi
Klein's important, though ideologically slanted book. For, it seems
that the rightist and counterrevolutionary shock therapists and

57
corporatist-fascists which she so effectively exposes remind us, alltoo-often, of the Neo-Trotskyites and of Trotsky's own famous
saying Worse is better. That is to say, when things get worse, it is
better for the Revolution! Better for the progress of the Revolution
and of the Revolutionary Dialectic (solve et coagula!) For, Klein's
goal seems to be some form of democratic socialism (569).
Moreover, Klein, though perhaps unknowingly, essentially criticizes
the newly updated versions (and applications) of what the traditional
Catholic Church herself has also criticized and has called it
Manchester Liberalism to include the earlier financial doctrines of
David Ricardo, as distinct from those of Milton Friedman. (Both of
the men have come from the Jewish world, rather than from the
Christian Faith and the moral culture of the Christian Universe.)
Klein, however, never discusses this matter nor the underlying,
cynical moral doctrine found in some Neoliberal economists, but
which also is rooted as noted by Adam Smith himself in the
ideas of Bernard Mandeville in The Fable of the Bees (1723) and
elsewhere in Dr. Mandeville's naturalistic essays (which were often
called epitomes of immorality). That is, the idea that somehow the
interaction of private vices produces public benefits, at least
eventually. (It would seem to constitute a sort of secular
Providence.) We may note that Mandeville does not say anything
about private virtues or public virtues, but only the public
benefits deriving from private vices. For example, Mandeville says
that to govern man effectively, one must especially and continually
- and manipulatively flatter his pride. For, coercion is not enough.
Deception is, therefore, indispensable!
Do No Evil
The strategist Edward Luttwak and I once had a discussion about
this applied Mandevillean Ethos, after he had written an article and
spoken about the economic situation in post-1991 Russia. Quite
cynically, he thought that we should be much more tolerant and
patient, especially as their criminal capitalism and their spreading
Mafias were gradually moving from their black (i.e., covert and
criminal) economies to brown economies. For Luttwak, that was

58
progress! And they then maybe might even move on to a higher
form of Capitalism, such as Mont Pelerin Society Capitalism (which
he implicitly called white capitalism). (The Mont Pelerin Society, it
should be noted, was founded by Milton Friedman and Friedrich von
Hayek in Switzerland in 1947, three years after von Hayek's
important book, which is very critical of Socialism and was published
under the title The Road to Serfdom (1944).) Contrary to the
Mandevillean ethos, however, is the Christian moral principle: Thou
shall not do evil that good may come from it. (It is, for sure, a great
moral challenge not to instrumentalize evil and use it unto a
purportedly greater good!)
Klein herself favors the economic theories and doctrines of John
Maynard Keynes and favors the further implementation of
Democratic Socialism (569). She detests all forms of Economic (and
Political) Neoliberalism (and its atomizing individualism) and even
says that the dirty secret of the Neoliberal era is that the ideas of
democratic socialism and forms of cooperative economy were
only shocked out of the way (569) and never defeated in the great
battle of ideas, nor were they voted down in elections (569).
Which, as we know from Eastern Europe's Communism, is not true.
Klein also calls this era of Neoliberalism the era of Machiavellian
economics (321) and Voodoo politics. But, she never speaks of
alternatives to this disorder, except socialism.
The Washington Consensus
Let us now consider the special case of John Williamson and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, as it is
presented by Naomi Klein; and then we shall conclude with her
forthright and cautionary analysis of Israel, as found in her Chapter
21, entitled Losing the Peace Incentive: Israel as Warning (535559).
With reference to what she calls the Neoliberal tribe (320) and
the crowd's real guru (322), Klein now speaks of the importance of
the year 1993 and John Williamson, the man who coined the phrase
the Washington Consensus (322):

59
The new rules of the game were on display in Washington, D.C., on
January 13, 1993. The occasion was a small but important
conference, by invitation only, on the tenth floor of the Carnegie
Conference Center on Dupont Circle, ... and a stone's throw from the
headquarters of the IMF and the World Bank. John Williamson, the
powerful economist known for shaping both the bank and the fund,
had convened the event as a historic gathering of the neoliberal tribe.
In attendance was as impressive array of the star technopols who
were at the forefront of the campaign to spread the Chicago doctrine
throughout the world (320).
What Klein then proceeds to describe and analyze reminds one of
some of the insights and revelations given by John Perkins in his
earlier book (not mentioned by Klein), entitled Confessions of an
Economic Hit Man (2004).
One recurrent issue at Williamson's Conference was strategizing
how to get reluctant politicians to embrace policies that are
unpopular with voters (320), although the Conference was
euphemistically called The Political Economy of Policy Reform
(321).
One of the speakers, Jeffrey Sachs who had applied Economic
Shock Therapy to Poland and then to Russia and was starting to
have second thoughts and especially to worry about Russia
entitled his talk Life in the Economic Emergency Room (321). The
response to Sachs' cautionary talk, however, was tepid, according
to Klein, because
This crowd was on a global crusade [sic] to dismantle the New Deal
[of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt], not to forge a new one
(321).
This crowd, she adds, did not accept Jeffrey Sachs' second thoughts
and challenge, and Sachs himself later said to her in a personal
interview that the people who make policy from Washington often
don't understand what economic chaos is. They don't understand the
disarray that comes ... the reality that there's also a dynamic that things
get farther and farther out of control (322).

60
By contrast, however, in his own lecture
[John] Williamson offered no warnings of the imperative to save any
country from crisis; in fact, he spoke rhapsodically of cataclysmic
events .... These worst of times give rise to the best of opportunities
for those who understand the need for fundamental economic reform
[or, rather, for economic warfare?], he declared. With his
unparalleled knack for verbalizing the subconscious of the
financial world, Williamson casually pointed out that this raised
some intriguing questions (322-323 my emphasis added).
Provoke a Crisis
Klein then quotes a very important and altogether revealing passage
from Williamson's Lecture; and he wasn't jesting or teasing:
One will have to ask whether it could conceivably make sense to
think of deliberately provoking a crisis so as to remove the
political logjam to reform. For example, it has sometimes been
suggested in Brazil [sic] that it would be worthwhile stoking up a
hyperinflation so as to scare everyone into accepting those
changes .... Presumably no one with historical foresight would have
advocated in the mid-1930s that Germany or Japan go to war in
order to get the benefits [Mandeville's public benefits] of the
supergrowth that followed their defeat. But could a lesser crisis have
served the same functions [sic]? Is it possible to conceive of a pseudocrisis that could serve the same positive function without the cost of a
real crisis? (323 my emphasis added)
He was, of course, speaking of a deliberately engineered and
manipulated pseudo-crisis a strategic deception to deceive the
perceptions of the uninitiated.
Klein now comments on those words from that casually cynical
Lecture, and evokes a phrase from the days of Mao Tse-Tung:
Williamson's remarks represented a major leap forward for the
shock doctrine. In a room filled with enough finance ministers and
central bank chiefs to hold a major trade summit, the idea of
actively creating a serious crisis so that shock therapy could

61
be pushed through was now being openly discussed (323 my
emphasis added).
She then proceeded to give some concrete examples of this global
strategy (324), namely that there was plenty of evidence that his
[Williamson's] ideas were already being acted on at the highest levels of
financial decision making in Washington and beyond (324) to include
the targeting of Canada and its fictionally stoked and deceitfully
manipulated Debt Crisis, which Klein (herself a Canadian) also
describes.
One reason for Naomi Klein's writing of her book on the Shock
Doctrines, she says, was to foster a resistance to them through a
deeper understanding of its principles, ruses, and dialectical
methods; and by her attempting to give to us a true memory of this
deliberatively equivocal and often dishonorable history (at least in
part), i.e., a memory faithful to the truth of the past.
She has much to teach us despite some of her own blind spots.
Neoliberalism is not the Summum Malum, but, like Mandeville's
doctrine, it certainly flatters human greed and human pride, and
engenders manifold corruption and the embitterment that derives
from any intimately broken trust.

The Warning Case of Israel

Before getting to the specific case of Israel and some additional
implications for the U.S. Naomi Klein first speaks of the Davos
Dilemma which puzzled the elites who had assembled at the 2007
World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (536). Amidst all the
troublesome politics, the global economy, as it seemed, found itself
in a golden period of broadly shared growth (536). Or:
Put bluntly, the world was going to hell, there was no stability in sight
and the global economy was roaring its approval .... It was a truism of
the contemporary market that you couldn't have booming economic
growth in the midst of violence and instability. But that truism is no
longer true. Since 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion, the index [the

62
guns-to caviar index] found ... that the world is becoming less
peaceful while accumulating significant more profit .... [as in] the
expansion of the narrow military-industrial complex into the
sprawling disaster capitalism complex. Today, global instability does
not just benefit a small group of arms dealers; it generates huge
profits for the high-tech security sector [as in Israel, as she will soon
show us], for heavy construction, for private health care companies
treating wounded soldiers, for the oil and gas sectors and of course
for defense contractors [eg., Private Military Companies like Triple
Canopy, Blackwater, or MPRI] .... The Davos Dilemma is being further
fueled by the intensely profitable model of privatized reconstruction
that was forged in Iraq (536-537 my emphasis added).
That is to say, as one in-country disillusioned American Official put
it, this intensely profitable model was forged in the free fraud
zone (196) of Iraq! And with so little accountability!
In a slight emendation to what Dr. Sniegoski2 believes i.e., that oil
companies essentially want stability, not fragmentation and instability
Naomi Klein persuasively argues that
The oil and gas industry is [now] so intimately entwined with the
economy of disaster both as root cause behind many disasters and
as a beneficiary from them that it deserves to be treated as an
honorary adjunct to the disaster capitalism complex (538).
Klein immediately says, however, that no conspiracies [are]
required to account for this phenomenon. Indeed,
The recent spate of disasters has translated into such spectacular
profits that many people around the world have come to the same
conclusion: the rich and powerful must be deliberately causing the
catastrophes so that they can exploit them (539).
On the contrary, the truth is at once less sinister and more dangerous,
she says, since
The appetite for easy short-term profit offered by purely speculative
2

Dr Stephen Sniegoski, author of The Transparent Cabal.

63
investment has turned the stock, currency, and real estate markets
into crisis-creation machines [whether military, ecological, or financial
(539)], as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis and the
dot-com collapse all demonstrate (539).
Terrorist Blowback
Moreover, natural disasters and wars waged for control of scarce
resources ... [and] lower-intensity conflicts such as those that rage in
Nigeria, Colombia, and Sudan (539) also in turn create terrorist
blowback (539 my emphasis added). Then, the more panicked our
societies become (541), the more biometric IDs and liquid-explosivedetection devices will be sold by the booming disaster economy (541).
This further fosters the creeping expansion of the disaster capitalism
complex into [the] media (540) as a new kind of corporate synergy
(540) and vertical integration (541). Moreover, the homeland security
sector is also becoming increasingly integrated with media corporations, a
development with Orwellian implications (540).
Here enters the factor of Israel, i.e., the further and intelligently
strategic intervention of the Israelis themselves, and their many,
new counter-terrorist and homeland-security exports: services
and devices (550), or technologies and expert-advisers.
Instability the new stability
In her very candid Subsection, entitled Israel and the Standing
Disaster Apartheid State, Naomi Klein introduces her own
somewhat Orwellian paradoxes and then shockingly says:
As analysts struggle to understand the Davos Dilemma, a new
consensus is emerging ... It is that a steady flow of disasters is now so
expected that the ever-adaptable market has changed to fit this new
status quo instability is the new stability (541).
War is Peace; Peace is War. The new Revolutionary Synthesis. In
such an amalgam, moreover, political categories like Right and Left
have little substantive or clarifying meaning. The main goal seems to
be to uproot and to reform, to confuse and to disorient. And an
elite proposes to exercise the control over it and still to make

64
profits. The chaos managers know that, if you are sufficiently
cunning (and ruthless), you make profits in times of chaos!
In Israel, for example, according to Naomi Klein, wars and terrorist
attacks have been increasing, but the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange has been
rising to record levels right alongside this violence, and:
Like the global economy in general, Israel's political situation is, most
agree, disastrous, but its economy has never been stronger, with 2007
growth rates rivaling those of China and India (541).
Furthermore, what makes Israel interesting (541), she says, is that
Israel has crafted an economy that expands markedly in direct response
to escalating violence (542), because, years before others, Israel
strategically grasped the potential of the global security boom (542)
and Israeli technology firms were busily pioneering the homeland
security industry, and they continue to dominate that sector today
(542 my emphasis added).
Klein says that this development has made Israel a model to be
emulated in the post-9/11 market at least from a corporate
perspective.
From a social and political perspective, however, Israel should serve as
... a stark warning and also for the United States, lest we, too, build
an asphyxiating Counter-Intelligence/ Surveillance Police State.
Very candidly, Naomi Klein herself acknowledges:
The fact that Israel continues to enjoy booming prosperity, even as it
wages war against its neighbours and escalates its brutality in the
occupied territories, demonstrates just how perilous [and
precarious] it is to build an economy on the premise of continual
war and deepening disasters (542 my emphasis added).
Hydropolitics
Another point of danger is water, the shortage of water in Israel,
and Israel has also continued to claim key water reserves in the West
Bank, feeding the [Israeli] settlements and diverting scarce water back to

65
Israel (546). This is part of the larger, political issue, sometimes
called Hydropolitics a very contentious matter, indeed, especially
in areas of border disputes and grave scarcity.
Now, especially since the Second Intifada began in September 2002,
the Israeli government .... also encouraged the tech industry to branch out
from information and communication technologies into security and
surveillance and the Israeli Defense Forces played a role similar to a
business incubator (550).
Then,
When the market for these services and devices exploded after
September 11 [2001], the Israeli state openly embraced a new
national economic vision: the growth provided by the dot-com bubble
replaced with a homeland security boom. It was a perfect marriage
[or a Binary Weapon!] of the Likud Party's hawkishness and its
radical embrace of Chicago School economics, as embodied by [Israel]
Sharon's finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israel's new
central bank chief, Stanley Fischer, chief architect of the IMF's shock
therapy adventures in Russia and Asia (550)
In this context, it may also be noted that the current Head of the
U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, is a son
of a Jewish Rabbi and a woman who was the first Hostess of the
Israeli Airline El Al after 1948, and perhaps also associated with
Israeli Intelligence. This could indicate Michael Chertoff's
understandably close sympathies for Israel and incline him to
promote an especially close and lucrative collaboration with Israeli
Security Companies.
Klein herself says that, after the earlier calamitous crash (551)
because of the collapse of the dot-com bubble, Israel was already
making a stunning recovery (550) in 2003, and by 2004 the country
had seemed to pull off a miracle (550-551):
Much of this growth was due to Israel's savvy positioning itself as a
kind of shopping mall for homeland security technologies. The timing
was perfect. Governments around the world were suddenly desperate

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for terrorist hunting tools, as well as for human intelligence know-how
in the Arab world. Under the leadership of the Likud Party, the Israeli
state billed itself as a showroom for the cutting-edge homeland
security state, drawing on its decades of experience and expertise
fighting Arab and Muslim threats. Israel's pitch to North America and
Europe was straightforward [sic]: the War on Terror you are just
embarking on is one we have been fighting since our birth. Let our
high-tech firms and privatized spy companies show you how it's done
(551 my emphasis added).
Naomi Klein further acknowledges, in the words of Forbes magazine,
that overnight, Israel became the go-to country for antiterrorism
technologies (551). (We can well imagine the presence of other
services, too, supplied by Israel's own Special Operations Forces
(SOF).) This longer quotation of Klein may remind us of the terrible
tortures that were conducted in Abu Ghraib prison and that
destroyed so much of America's reputation in the world. The
seeming involvement of Israeli Private Security Companies in these
tortures came to light soon thereafter. If it is so, such an intimate
collaboration will further raise the hatred of the Muslims against the
U.S., as Michael Scheuer's argumentation would additionally confirm.
Even the perception of this possible collusion would be embittering
and explosive in the Muslim world.
Given that Israel, as of 2006, has become the fourth largest arms
dealer in the world (552), we can further imagine its growth
industry in homeland security and its own Disaster Capitalism
Complex. The reader is invited to read, very closely, what Naomi
Klein reveals on her pages 551-559 of her penultimate chapter
(Chapter 21). It will tie together many themes of her book, but also
connect it, in the end, to Israel itself and unflinchingly so. It might
even make Michael Ledeen happy, as well as very proud of her,
when she candidly says:
It is not an exaggeration to say that the War on Terror industry
saved Israel's faltering economy [but not its faltering demography!],
much as the disaster capitalism complex helped rescue the global
stock markets (552 my emphasis added).

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Perhaps the latter success had also made George Soros happy,
inasmuch as his father taught him long ago in Hungary (as he
autobiographically reports it), that one makes money in times of
chaos on the premise that one is and remains a skillful Chaos
Manager.
Surplus Humanity
After quoting Dan Gillerman once the head of the Israeli
Federation of Chambers of Commerce who called for Israel to
become a Middle Eastern Singapore (557) and a man who is now
one of the most inflammatory Israel's pro-war hawks, pushing for an
even wider escalation (557) Naomi Klein presents a critique and a
trenchant analogy:
This recipe for endless worldwide war is the same one that the Bush
administration [and Neoconservative Apparatus!] offered as a
business prospectus to the nascent disaster capitalism complex
after September 11. It is not a war that can be won by any
country, but winning is not the point. The point is to create
security inside fortress states [and New Feudalities!] bolstered by
endless low-level conflict outside their walls. In a way, it is the same
goal that the private security companies have in Iraq: secure the
perimeter, protect the principal (558 my emphasis added).
These are also, she says, grim glimpses of a kind of gated future built
and run by the disaster capitalism complex (558). One can feel
reminded here of the similar spirit shown in the former Communist
States, especially the former East Germany, which built walls along
their borders to keep their citizens imprisoned and to keep their
external enemies out.
Naomi Klein herself continues, and with great honesty and moral
courage:
It is in Israel, however, that this process is most advanced: an entire
country has turned itself into a fortified gated community, surrounded
by locked-out people living in permanently excluded red zones (558).
Such is what happens to a society when it has lost its economic

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incentive for peace and proposes to fight and continue profiting from
an endless and unwinnable War on Terror (558)
The case of Israel may soon have imitators, inasmuch as the disaster
capitalism complex thrives in conditions of low-intensity grinding conflict
(558) and we may, by way of illustration, contemplate the disaster
zones in New Orleans and Iraq.
According to Klein,
In April 2007, U.S. soldiers began implementing a plan to turn several
volatile Baghdad neighborhoods into gated communities, surrounded
by checkpoints and concrete walls .... Plan B is to settle into another
Colombia or Nigeria never-ending war, fought in large measure
by private soldiers and paramilitaries, damped down just
enough to get the natural resources out of the ground, helped along
by mercenaries guarding the pipelines, platforms and water
resources (558 my emphasis added).
Klein also describes the inhumanity in Israel. Writing with a deep
and compassionate heart like Whittaker Chambers himself in
Witness (1953) and Cold Friday (1964) Naomi Klein says:
What Israel has contructed is a system [with their concrete walls,
electrified fences and checkpoints (559)] designed ... to keep workers
from working [in the militarized ghettos of Gaza and the West
Bank], a network of open holding pens for millions of people
who have been categorized as surplus humanity (559 my
emphasis added).
Her final paragraph of her book's penultimate chapter intensifies her
attentiveness to the excluded and the broken of the world, those
who are discarded by a frigid society, or by its squalid oligarchs:
Palestinians are not the only people in the world who have been so
categorized [as surplus humanity]: millions of Russians [after Jeffrey
Sachs' Shock Therapy under Yeltsin and the Plundering Oligarchs]
also became surplus in their own country [with comparably grave
demographic problems, like Israel], which is why so many
[privileged Jews or putative Jews] fled their homes in the hope of

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finding a job and a decent life in Israel .... In South Africa, the one in
four people who live in shacks in fast-expanding slums are also
surplus in the new neoliberal South Africa. The discarding of 25 to 60
percent of the population has been the hallmark of the Chicago
School crusade [sic] since the misery villages became mushrooming
throughout the [once-prosperous and predominantly Catholic]
Southern Cone in the seventies [1970s]. In South Africa, Russia and
New Orleans the rich [or the ruling Mafias and Drug Lords] build
walls around themselves. Israel has taken this disposal process a
step further: it has built walls around the dangerous poor
(559 my emphasis added).
In the United States and in Europe, too, this disposal process is
going even a step further. For, it includes the disposal of the Little
Children and especially the very vulnerable Pre-Born Children, as
well as the Elderly who are weak and considered sick and
burdensome and useless. (Naomi Klein, however, in no way
chooses to mention this huge fact in her book.)
In her book, which is opposed to the mercurial and deracinating
spirit of Neoliberalism and the Neoliberal Economics of Milton
Friedman and the Chicago School, Naomi Klein would have done
well to include a discussion of Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century
(2004), who himself began his book with the earlier-quoted words:
The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in
particular, is the Jewish Century.
Naomi Klein must be honored for her courage to call even Israel
and her own people to a higher and better standard, as did General
Harkabi; and to speak openly and aloud against their injustices. We
need to resist these injustices, as well, not only for our own sake,
but also for Israel's sake. They, too, should be delivered from
immoral bondage.
2008 Robert D. Hickson