5 May 2010 — MRZine
‘There is a shadow of something colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the land. Call it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you will; it is the nearest I dare approximate it. What its nature may be I refuse to imagine. But what I wanted to say was this: You are in a perilous position.’ – Jack London, The Iron Heel
‘Shock and Awe’ on Greece
One of the ways to understand what is happening in Greece is to use the notion recently developed by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine. Seen from that perspective, the meaning of the Greek situation is simply that it’s the first time this so-called ‘shock doctrine’, a constitutive element of any neoliberal purge, is put into practice in a Western European country, after having been tested, of course, many times in the past in other parts of the world, including the eastern part of the European continent, with results that are now very familiar to us. The idea of the shock doctrine is, to put it as briefly as possible, the following: it’s impossible to implement a neoliberal purge, or, rather this kind of qualitative leap in the speed and depth of the neoliberal purge, and furthermore to get it to be, if not accepted, at least tolerated by society, without creating and staging an ‘exceptional’ situation, a situation of emergency, in the wake of which, somehow, ‘normal’ life is disrupted and what seemed until quite recently unimaginable just happens.
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MichaelKenny 15:25 on August 28, 2010 Permalink
Quite a good analysis. The author avoids the systematic parroting of the US Empire/Israel Lobby party line that all this is the fault of the EU and the euro and has nothing to do with Wall St or any other component of the Lobby. He also avoids the corollary of the above: the simplistic Greek v The Rest mantra. It is symtomatic of the Lobby’s censorship lockdown on the (oh so wonderful, neutral and free!) internet that we are reading this more than three months after it was delivered, now that the Lobby’s attack on the euro has clearly failed! Since that day, the attack has been exposed as a set up and things are looking up in Greece, precisely because the European solidarity that the Greek left called for has worked and the EU “sheep” did not scatter in panic, as the Lobby hoped. Moral of the story: don’t beleive anything you read on the internet!