Global Beach - Interview with Naomi Klein

Global Project - We are with Naomi Klein, I guess we’ll start off this interview with the Iraqi situation. You were in Iraq a little ago. What do you think the situation is leading to?

Naomi Klein – It is quite difficult time to talk about Iraq, the situation in Italy is very frightening because of the kidnappings that have just happened. We are all waiting for good news to come. I was in Iraq the past March and April and I was there to research the economic side of war. Not the "Shock and Awe" but the "Shock Therapy." I wanted to do this for several reasons. One of the reasons was because I really felt that something had happened in the way we were talking about our movements where there was a total disconnect between the movements against globalism, neoliberalism, or capitalism, however you want to frame it, and the movement against war; it was as if they weren’t connected at all. It had to do with some choices that were made in both of our movements. I’d say that in the movements against capitalism, we had really failed to deal with militarism and to deal with war and the connection between war and these economic policies, the fact that historically they are always imposed through war, whether a dictatorship or a local dirty war or a foreign invasion. We’d be talking about these trade policies and we allowed them to be very bureaucratized, like "oh, its just the IMF that imposes these policies" instead of really understanding the violence in how they are imposed.

When the war in Iraq started I was actually in Argentina making this documentary that we just presented here in Italy. That made it very clear for me, being in that country, because for Argentinians they would say "this is what they did to us." The history of that country and they way that neoliberalism was imposed just as I said in Latin America, through blood, is really the same process of that happened in Iraq. So I learned a lot from Argentina and learning that history was really important. We were in Argentina because neoliberalism had collapsed there and there had been a national uprising against neoliberalism, which we felt was very significant having been part of this movement against globalization where we had seen these uprisings against "the summit" - against particular trade agreements, Genoa, Seattle, or in a particular region like Chiapas.

What happened in Argentina in December of 2001 was that a whole country rose up against what they call there "el modelo" - the model, which is neoliberalism and the neoliberalism laboratory that Argentina had become. And we know what the rules of that laboratory are: a total attack on the state, on unions, on job security. This is the country that had the largest middle class in Latin America. You see that neoliberalism is not about development but actually about the reverse, about pushing a country that was very developed backwards, and deindustrializing and pushing wages way down. They privatized absolutely everything: even the street signs in Buenos Aires are sponsored by Mastercard. I’ve never seen such a privatized country. It was the "model student" - that was the phrase. So it seemed very significant as part of this movement against neoliberalism to go to Argentina to understand where they were able to impose the whole model, without stop. It had created a total economic destaster which had disenfranchized everyone, 60 percent of the people that were living in poverty.

But also that they were responding in very interesting ways. I think in part because the fall had been more sudden. As you know, most of Latin America lives in poverty. When you talk about Argentina in Bolivia or even in Paraguay they say "Argentina is having a crisis, we say Welcome to Latin America." And to me that made it more interesting that in a way allows people in Italy or people in Canada to relate better because when you hear about something going on in Bolivia, I think it is very easy for us to say "that could never happen to us." But you look at Buenos Aires that is such a European city, where the genocide against indigenous people was almost complete, so basically Italy in Latin America. To see that the crisis reached deep into the middle class, deep into the profession middle class who lost access to their bank accounts. We have images in our film of upper middle class people, looking extremely upper middle class with jewelry and things, attacking a city bank because they can’t get their money. I say the difference between the social movements in North America and in Argentina is that when they smash windows in North America they put on mask but in Buenos Aires they put on make up...

It was a long answer but being in Buenos Aires when the war started was very instructive because I had really just really been learning the history that neoliberalism didn’t start under Menem in the ’90s, it didn’t start with the IMF, it started with the military coup, and it was imposed through tears and blood. It couldn’t have just been done politely, it had to included the disappearances of the 30,000 people, the systematic attack of the left, on labor organizers, on student organizers, on the whole infrastructure on the left, and that was what the dirty war was. There is a famous Argentinian writer, Rudolfo Walsh, and he wrote a letter in 1977 called A Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta. In it he said - he had to write it secretly because he was living underground in the middle of the wave of disappearances he would write these letters and he would post a lot of copies and they would just be sent around - this was before the internet. Anyway he wrote this letter to the military junta, and he said "your greatest crimes are not the disappearances or your human rights violations, its your economic crimes which have pushed millions into poverty, this is the greater violence that you have imposed on this country." He mailed the letter and he was shot in the street an hour later. And that letter is now quoted all of the time in Argentina. It has really become like a manifesto to connect the violence of the dictatorship. The thing I learned in Argentina is that the whole dialogue around human rights often really obscures what Rudolfo Walsh was trying to say: there is a reason why these people are getting killed, but blood is blinding. That when you are confronting un-beliveable violence and terror, it is really hard to see the agendas behind it, because of course you respond to the terror, you respond to the violence - of course you do because you have an immediate crisis on your hands. That is what happened in Chile and that’s what happened in Argentina. Orlando Leteleir in the last thing he wrote, he said the same thing before he was killed - he said why is it that the international community is so up in arms about Pinochet’s human rights abuses but no body will talk about what the Chicago boys are doing imposing the Shock Therapy. Because that is why the violence is happening. There is a reason why.