I recently finished reading The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein. Naomi explores how shock and awe tactics have been used by governments to push a population into submission so that the government can force unpopular policies or changes on the people. She explores the history of shock therapy (on humans and also on markets) and how it has evolved over time. This was a really gripping book to read, and extremely insightful. I highly recommend reading it.

Here are my favourite quotes from The Shock Doctrine:

“A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor, and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security.” p18

“A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy – like a national oil company – held in state hands. It’s equally possible to require corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of workers to form unions, and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state are reduced. Markets need not be fundamentalist.” p24

“Once again,, the human impact was unmistakable: within a year, wages lost 40 percent of their value, factories closed, poverty spiraled. Before the junta took power, Argentina had fewer people living in poverty than France or the U.S. – Just 9 percent – and an unemployment rate of only 4.2 percent. Now the country began to display sign of the underdevelopment thought to have been left behind. Poor neighborhoods were without water, and preventable diseases ran rampant.” p104

“Since the fall of Communism, free markets and free people have been packaged as a single ideology that claims to be humanity’s best and only defence against repeating a history filled with mass graves, killing fields and torture chambers. Yet in the Southern Cone, the first place where the contemporary religion of unfettered free markets escaped from the basement workshops of the University of Chicago and was applied in the real world, it did not bring democracy; it was predicated on the overthrow of democracy in country after country. And it did not bring peace but required the systematic murder of tens of thousands and the torture of between 100,000 and 150,000 people.” p121

“Is neo-liberalism an inherently violent ideology, and is there something about its goals that demands this cycle of brutal political cleansing, followed by human rights cleanup operations?” p151

“It was in 1982 that Milton Friedman wrote the highly influential passage that best summarizes the shock doctrine: ‘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 becomes politically inevitable.’ It was to become a kind of mantra for his movement in the new democratic era. Allan Meltzer elaborated on the philosophy: ‘Ideas are alternatives waiting on a crisis to serve as the catalyst of change. Friedman’s model of influence was to legitimize ideas, to make them bearable, and worth trying when the opportunity comes.” p166

“’Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient.’ – Ernest Hemingway on his electroshock therapy, shortly before committing suicide, 1961” p185

“This is where Friedman’s crisis theory became self-reinforcing. The more the global economy followed his prescriptions, with floating interest rates, deregulated prices and export-oriented economies, the more crisis-prone the system became, producing more and more of precisely the type of meltdowns he had identified as the only circumstances under which governments would take more of his radical advice.” p190
“It was a staggering admission. At this point in history, the bank and the fund were publicly insisting that governments the world over had seen the light and realized that the Washington Consensus policies were the only recipe for stability, and therefore democracy. Yet here was an acknowledgement, made inside the Washington establishment, that developing countries were submitting to them only through a combination of false pretences and bald extortion: privatization and free trade – two central pieces of the structural adjustment package – had no direct link with creating stability. To argue otherwise, according to Rodrik, was ‘bad economics.’” p197

“What Argentina’s leaders pulled off in this period was a psychological more than an economic technique. As Cavallo, a junta veteran, well understood, in moments of crisis, people are willing to hand over a great deal of power to anyone who claims to have a magic cure – whether the crisis is a financial meltdown or, as the Bush administration would later show, a terrorist attack.” p200

“A long-time anti-apartheid activist, Rassool Snyman, described the trap to me in stark terms. ‘They never freed us. They only took the chain from around our neck and put it on our ankles.’” p244

“If she had to do the process over again, Sooka said, ‘I would do it completely differently. I would look at the systems of apartheid – I would look at the question of land, I would certianly look at the role of multinationals, I would look at the role of the mining industry very, very closely because I think that’s the real sickness of South Africa… I would look at the systematic effects of the policies of apartheid, and I would devote only one hearing to torture because I think when you focus on torture and you don’t look at what it was serving, that’s when you start to do a revision of the real history.’” p254

“In the end, South Africa has wound up with a twisted case of reparations in reverse, with the white businesses that reaped enormous profits from black labour during the apartheid years paying not a cent in reparations, but the victims of apartheid continuing to send large paycheques to their former victimizers.” p256

“Redistribute the land so millions can sustain themselves from it, demanded the framers of the Freedom Charter, and take back the mines so the bounty can be used to build houses and infrastructure and create jobs in the process. In other words, cut out the middle-man. Those ideas may sound like utopian populism to many earss, but after so many failed experiments in Chicago School orthodoxy, the real dreamers may be those who still believe that a scheme like the Freedom Charter theme park, which provided handouts to corporations while further dispossessing the neediest people, will solve the pressing health and economic problems for the 22 million South Africans still living in poverty.” p258

“Once you accept that profit and greed as practised on a mass scale create the greatest possible benefits for any society, pretty much any act of personal enrichment can be justified as a contribution to the great creative cauldron of capitalism, generating wealth and spurring economic growth – even if it’s only for yourself and your colleagues.”

“Thomas Friedman was forthright about what it meant for Iraq to be selected as the model. ‘We are not doing nation-building in Iraq. We are doing nation-creating,’ he wrote – as if shopping around for a large, oil-rich Arab nation to create from scratch was a natural, even ‘noble’ thing to do in the twenty-first century.” p397

“Terrorists don’t try to win through direct confrontation; they attempt to break public morale with spectacular, televisual displays that at once expose their enemy’s vulnerability and their own capacity for cruelty. That was the theory behind the 9/11 attacks, just as it was the theory behind the invasion of Iraq.” p 400

“Corruption during the occupation was not the result of poor management but f a policy decision: if Iraq was to be the next frontier for Wild West capitalism, it needed to be liberated from laws.” p430

“Iraq under Bremer was the logical conclusion of Chicago School theory: a public sector reduced to a minimal number of employees, mostly contract workers, living in a Halliburton city state, tasked with signing corporate-friendly laws drafted by KPMG and handing out duffle bags of cash to Western contractors protected by mercenary soldiers, themselves shielded by full legal immunity.” p432

“For the Bush administration, it was a natural evolution: after claiming it had a right to cause unlimited pre-emptive destruction, it then pioneered pre-emptive reconstruction – rebuilding places that have not yet been destroyed.” p460

“Just as the U.S. Occupation authority in Iraq turned out to be an empty shell, when Katrina hit, so did the U.S. Federal government at home. In fact, it was so thoroughly absent that FEMA coud not seem to locate the New Orleans superdome, where twenty-three thousand people were stranded without food or water, despite the fact that the world media had been there for days.” p492

“The actual state, meanwhile, has lost the ability to perform its core functions without the help of contractors. Its own equipment is out of date, and the best experts have fled to the private sector. When Katrina hit, FEMA had to hire a contractor to award contracts to contractors.” p502

“The truth is at once less sinister and more dangerous. An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial. The appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis and the dot-com collapse all demonstrate.” p513

“The discarding of 25 to 60 percent of the population has been the hallmark of the Chicago School crusade since the ‘misery villages’ began mushrooming throughout the Southern Cone in the seventies. In South Africa, Russian and New Orleans the rich build walls around themselves. Israel has taken this disposal process a step further: it has built walls around the dangerous poor.” p532

My knowledge of the Rwandan genocide going into this book was limited to the very opinionated and biased novel A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali by Gil Courtemanche. Courtemanche painted a very ugly picture of Romeo Dallaire making him out to be someone who didn’t care about the dying people and was doing nothing about it. After reading the first few chapters in this book I realized how wrong Courtemanche was. Dallaire did everything in his power to try and stop the genocide and protect the people of Rwanda only to have the UN and other world powers consistently put road blocks in his way.

Shake Hands with the Devil is written in first person narrative and documents the entire stay of Romeo Dallaire the UN Force Commander in Rwanda. This book is highly detailed and really gives you a full picture of what Dallaire was thinking and feeling throughout his entire time. It also gives you an excellent insight into the way the UN reacted (or failed to react) to the events that were going on despite the continuous efforts of Dallaire.

This book really made me see the failures of the world and the UN in doing nothing to stop the genocide. All the writings were on the wall that a genocide was about to happen yet nobody wanted to risk the lives of their troops to help prevent it. Dallaire presents his proposal he gave to the UN before the genocide started of what he would need to ensure the peace and the protection of Rwandans before the genocide started, many expects have gone over this proposal and said that it would have worked. All Dallaire asked for was a minimum of 5500 well armed troops. What did he get? He got his troops cut back from the 2000 or so he started with. This book was real eye opener into the world of the UN who I used to hold in high regard.

What happened in Rwanda was an atrocity and could have been stopped. As world powers go around tooting their horns about spreading democracy, giving people freedom, protection, and peace, just remember these are the same people who said that 800,000 Rwandans are not worth saving.

Shake Hands with the Devil is a must read, and I suggest everyone read it for a very thorough and detailed account of what happened in Rwanda. The book is shocking and a bit disturbing at times, but it really puts things into perspective about our global community and the need for us to take action when such events happen.

I dog eared pages in this book whenever I came across a good quote, now having finished the book I realize IU have probably 30-40 odd pages dog eared. The following is a list of quotes I found exceptionally telling on second reading:

“What I have come to realize as the root of it all, however, is the fundamental indifference of the world community to the plight of seven to eight million black Africans in a tiny country that had no strategic or resource value to any world power. An overpopulated little country that turned in on itself and destroyed its own people, as the world watched and yet could not manage to find the political will to intervene. Engraved still in my brain is the judgment of a small group of bureaucrats who came to “asses” the situation in the first weeks of the genocide: “We will recommend to our governments not to intervene as the risks are high and all that is here are humans.””

“You know, soldiers are very unusual people. On the outside, they are the hardest, most demanding people, but underneath that, they are the most human, the most feeling, the most emotionally attached people who exist.” – Dallaires father

“In Canada, ‘French’ and ‘English’ are our first names. Our surname is ‘Canadian’. We must be true to our heritage, but we must also be true to our first name as it is our individuality, our soul, and we must not have any inferiority or superiority complex.” – Jean Lesage

“Nights in Kigali and in central Africa are usually extremely dark. The city usually shuts down at last light. I found African nights a startling contrast between peace and quiet, darkness and danger.”

“I remember that I settled back in my seat with some satisfaction as our plane left Africa. AI felt that I had worked very hard and had come up with a mission plan that could work. I had taken into account all the major political feedback from all the major players of the Arusha process. Real peace and contentment washed over me. I truly not realize that the devil was already afoot.”

“The future of UNAMIR’s participation in implementing the Arusha Peace Agreement was being decided by fifteen men sitting in a backroom beside the Security Council hall in New York, one of whom was a hardline Rwandan extremist. He found himself allied with the Americans, Russians and Chinese, who all wanted the mission to end. On the morning of April 6, we received the Security Council’s Resolution 909, which extended our mandate for six weeks… The report sent the wrong message, and the consequences were truly devastating. It confirmed for all Rwandans-the moderates attempting to hang on to hope and the extremists plotting extermination-that the world didn’t give a damn about Rwanda.”

“It was the end of the first day of a hundred-day civil war and a genocide that would engulf all of us in unimaginable carnage.”

“I passed by an assembly point where French soldiers were loading expatriates into vehicles. Hundreds of Rwandans had gathered to watch all these white entrepreneurs, NGO staff and their families making their fearful exits, and as I wended my way through the crowd, I saw how aggressively the French were pushing black Rwandans seeking asylum out of the way. A sense of shame overcame me. The whites, who had made their money in Rwanda and who had hired so many Rwandans to be their servants and labourers, were now abandoning them. Self-interest and self-preservation ruled.”

“In Gisenyi, a tourist town on Lake Kivu, an Austrian MILOB reported a festive spirit on the part of the killers, who seemed oblivious to the sheer horror and pandemonium as they cut down men, women and children in the streets. In Kobungo, government soldiers were running a scorched earth policy against Tutsis and Hutu moderates. In parts of Kigali, bulldozers had been broght in to dig deeper trenches at the roadblocks to reduce the piles of bodies. Prisoners in their pink jail uniforms were picking up corpses and throwing them into dump trucks to be hauled away. Think of that for a moment:there were so many dead that they had to be laded into dump trucks.”

“I can’t tell you how disgusting daily life could be; the corpse-eating dogs that we shot on sight now had no qualms about attacking the living.”

“After I got home from Rwanda, and the years slowly revealed to me the extent of the cynical maneuvering by France, Belgium, the United States, and the RPF and the RGF, among others, I couldn’t help but feel that we were a sort of diversion, even sacrificial lambs, that permitted statesmen to say that the world was doing something to stop the killing. In fact we were nothing more than camouflage.”

“To my mind, their crimes had made them inhuman, turned them into machines made of flesh that imitated the motions of being human.”

“The Interahamwe made a habit of killing young Tutsi children, in front of their parents, by first cutting off one arm, then the other. They would then gash the neck with a machete to bleed the child slowly to death but, while they were still alive, they would cut off the private parts and throw them at the faces of the terrified parents, who would then be murdered with slightly greater dispatch.” –Shaharyar Khan taken from The Shallow Graves of Rwanda

And so for the last weeks of my command the Americans, with all their resources, sat inside the perimeter of the Kigali airport, and though they helped us bring our troops in and out, they did little else.”

“…during those last weeks we received a shocking call from an American staffer…He told me that his estimates indicated that it would take the deaths of 85,000 Rwandans to justify the risking of the life of one American soldier. It was a macabre, to say the least.”

“Let there be no doubt: the Rwandan genocide was the ultimate responsibility of those Rwandans who planned, ordered, supervised and eventually conducted it. Their extremism was the seemingly indestructible and ugly harvest of years of power struggles and insecurity that had been deftly played upon by their former colonial rules.”

“Still, at its heart the Rwandan story is the story of the failure of humanity to heed a call for help from an endangered people.
The international community, of which the UN is only a symbol, failed to move beyond self-interest for the sake of Rwanda. While most nations agreed that something should be done they all had an excuses why they should not be the ones to do it. As a result, the UN was denied the political will and material mean to prevent the tragedy.”

“How do we pick and choose where to get involved? Canada and other peacekeeping nations have become accustomed to acting if, and only if, international public opinion will support them – a dangerous path that leads to a moral relativism in which a country risks losing sight of the difference between good and evil, a concept that some players on the international stage view as outmoded.”

“What is the reason for this marche seul by the developed nations? IN the last decades of the twentieth century, self-interest, sovereignty and taking care of number one became the primary criteria for any serious provision of support or resources to the globe’s trouble spots. If the country in question is of any possible strategic value to the world powers, then it seems that everything from covert operations to the outright use of overwhelming force is fair game. If it is not, indifference is the order of the day.”

“But many signs point to the fact that the youth of the Third World will no longer tolerate living in circumstances that give them no hope for the future. From the young boys I met in the demobilization camps in Sierra Leone to the suicide bombers of Palestine and Chechnya, to the young terrorists who fly planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we can no longer afford to ignore them. We have to take concrete steps to remove the causes of their rage, or we have to be prepared to suffer the consequences.”