Hacker Cinema
The Shock Doctrine
2009 · Film · documentary · 82 min
Directed by Michael Winterbottom, Mat Whitecross
An investigation of "disaster capitalism", based on Naomi Klein's proposition that neo-liberal capitalism feeds on natural disasters, war and terror to establish its dominance.
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3 comments on Hacker News
Shock Doctrine is the only explanation of 9/11
the Documentary: https://youtu.be/B3B5qt6gsxY
And the book by Naomi Klein https://naomiklein.org/the-shock-doctrine/
First, "The Shock Doctrine" was a book before it was a political documentary. Recommending the movie but not the book seems a little silly to me.
Second, I can't recommend it as a serious work. I've read a lot of Klein's work (two of her books sit here on my bookshelf) and I walked away each time rather unimpressed. In this particular case, she takes something that can be universally condemned (deliberately creating or taking advantage of disaster to pursue corporate interests) and uses it as a weapon against those who advocate free markets. This is a blatant misrepresentation of that ideology, the chicago school, and Milton Friedman. In short, Klein builds a great case against corporatism, rent-seeking, and government sponsored elitism and then beats those lobbying for freedom and equality over the head with it.
Naomi Klein's 2009 film "The Shock Doctrine" (imdb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1355640/), available on netflix, looks at similar subject matter.
In short, the 'chicago school' economics lead by Milton Friedman posit that as-free-as-possible markets, de-regulation and privatisation are economically beneficial. In practice (see: Argentina, Chile, etc) they only seem to further the gap between rich and poor, and the 'shock doctrine' way of destabilising the existing economy and government to achieve this is pretty disgusting.