This Film is an Idiot's Version of Naomi Klein's Masterpiece

[marmar]

from HuffPost:



Johann Hari
Columnist, UK Independent

Posted: September 6, 2009
This Film is an Idiot's Version of Naomi Klein's Masterpiece


Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine' is one of the most important political books of the past decade. She takes the central myth of the right - that since the fall of Soviet tyranny, free elections and free markets have marched skipped hand in hand together towards the shimmering sunset of history - and shown that it is, simply, a lie. It is a major revisionist history of the world that Milton Friedman and the market fundamentalists have built.

In the new Depression, with their vision lying in smoking rubble, it is a thesis whose time has come - yet its film, alas, has not. The new "adaptation" of the book for Channel 4 by Michael Winterbottom is garbled and mumbled to the point of meaninglessness.

Klein argues that human beings consistently and everywhere vote for mixed economies - a mix of markets and counter-balancing welfare states. The right has been unable to accept this reality, and unable to defeat it in democratic elections. So in order to achieve their vision of "pure capitalism, cleansed of all interruptions," they have waited for massive crises - when the population is left reeling and unable to object - to impose their vision.

Klein's story begins with the market fundamentalists' show-room: Chile. Milton Friedman, the apostle of pure unfettered capitalism, sent many of his finest students to Chile for years to spread the message that markets must be allowed to work their pristine logic unhindered by governments. They persuaded virtually nobody. Their parties were thumpingly defeated, and the democratic socialist Salvador Allende was elected instead. So the CIA backed an anti-democratic coup by the fascist general Augusto Pinochet - and Friedman swiftly stepped in to design "the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere," as Klein puts it. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/this-film-is-an-idiots-ve_b_278524.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. Hm. The reviewer condemns the film with extraordinary passion.

He skewers it. He roasts it. He eats it for dinner. And his driving motive is that the book is so good--a masterpiece that brilliantly exposes (mostly) US "shock and awe" economics against poorer countries. (The same fuckwads are now trying it out on us.) It is a brilliant review--quite as brilliant as the book, in its unswerving focus.

Still, it makes me just a little uneasy. Is it really that bad? I guess I'll have to see it to decide for myself.

[jwirr]

2. What film?