Robust, Gripping, and Evocative

Certain authors have the power within their words to evoke a wide spectrum of feelings from their reader. Done in colorful prose, some of it is challenging, but none of it impossible to the lay reader. It teaches you things, or makes you think differently—in some way, good writing forces you to make an observation. It pulls from archetypes to place you within the story; from this, it can touch a reader emotionally. The more readers it engages, the wider readership it can obtain. Harnessing emotion around an issue and into a cause, this power can become a force for paradigm change or even revolution.  Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” does just that on the subject of toxic chemicals in our environment by painting a fantastic vision of “a town in the heart of America” in all its sentimental glory and killing it before the close of the introduction.

Silent Spring begins in your neighborhood, idealized. It brings up images that a rural reader would be familiar with and appreciate. It observes with the reader, a presupposition of regular abundance in nature, where calamity and catastrophe are buried notions. .

THERE WAS ONCE a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings.

Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler’s eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns.

Very quickly, she destroys the notion that such an arrangement is sustainable. She does so in a way that seems very black and white. ‘Blight’, used to describe the effects of DDT, fits aptly as a metaphor, and describes for someone in the 1950’s, a familiar danger from history that could strike at any day, without warning. Technically, she does so using well timed alliteration and assonance, which helps the flow of her dialogue.

A strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours.(Silent Spring, p.10)

As propaganda, it works brilliantly. The titular Silent Spring “crept” in, without warning, possibly scaring the reader much like a nuclear attack. For the landowner/farmer, the potential threat of infertile land was akin to going bust. The colorful descriptions of the land and life prior could be lost, without action on the part of the reader. It portrays it’s topic in clear terms, as evil, and responsible for death; this is strong language, but a fair and agreeable position to its likely reader, and a public relations nightmare to the product maker, which was probably a tangential goal of the piece. Carson ‘draws the line’ in her narrative, as if the matter is a showdown, but takes the time and prose to fully articulate all that is at stake.

“Erasing and Remaking the World” 

 Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”

Exploring the intersecting world of “super-profits and mega-disasters,” Canadian journalist Naomi Klein chronicles decades of instances where the two overlap, demonstrating how free-market ideologues welcome, and provoke, the collapse of other people’s economies. Klein devotes much of the first half of the expansive book to Latin America, following a trend of the past few decades to implement “Chicago School” economic policies by undemocratic (by the state) to the benefit of multinational corporations and detriment of local peoples. She traces these phenomena, starting in the Southern Cone of Chile and Argentina and the Falklands; through to Uruguay, Brazil, and Bolivia. Ultimately, she studies other points of contestation and disaster around the globe, making comparisons to economic reform attempts in Poland, China, South Africa, Russia, Southeast Asia, Iraq, Sri Lanka, New Orleans and Israel which seem drawn from a template.  Klein catalogs case after case where these reforms have been implemented without the consent of the governed. Most times, they are by suspect means in situations where a crisis was artificially created as a means for ‘fixing’ it—which have in turn become a way of “cleaning away the poor.” Very early in the reading, Klein lets the reader know where she is going with the term ‘shock’ when she quotes Uraguayan writer Eduardo Galeano:

“How can this inequality be maintained if not through jolts of electric shock?”

Klein asserts that in country after country, the Chicago School followers have foisted their pet policies of privatization, deregulation, and cutbacks in social spending on an unsuspecting populace through non-democratic means. Initially, dictatorial military force and accompanying fear of arrest, torture, disappearance, or death helped to assist in the reforms. Over time, new organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank were employed instead, creating impossible debt burdens to force governments to accept privatization of state-owned industries and services, complete removal of trade barriers and tariffs, forced acceptance of private foreign investment. In more recent years, terrorism and its response as well as natural disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis have wiped clean enough of the slate to impose these Friedmanite policies on people too shocked and focused on recovering to realize what was happening until the changes were already firmly in place. Although a work of non-fiction, there is a clear villain in Klein’s book: neoliberal economic schemes and their author, Milton Friedman and his Chicago School followers.

Klein argues that from its humble beginnings as an economic philosophy, the neoliberal program has devolved into a form of corporatism, or crony capitalism. Seen strongest in America, the switch to using private sector contractors for nearly every conceivable task has created a bloat of companies which exist almost entirely to secure lucrative government contracts to perform work formerly done by government. They now operate in a world the author describes as “disaster capitalism,” waiting and salivating over the profits to be made in the next slate-wiping war or disaster, regardless of the human cost. She lets the Chicago School practitioners speak for themselves and their “shock therapy” views in their own callous words. Describing the underlying principle of the therapy comes from the late Professor Friedman:

“Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change…our basic function is to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

***

According to Klein’s thesis, these revolutionary economic programs were the “medicine” deemed necessary by a bloc of neoliberal economists who sought to bring underdeveloped countries into the global trading community. What the author makes inescapably clear is that the world economic order has been largely remade in Milton Friedman’s image in the last few decades. And that this change has occurred by adopting programs that would never have been democratically accepted by the common people. Military coups, violence and force, wars, induced hyperinflation, terrorism, preemptive war, climate disasters – these have been the disruptive vehicles that allowed such drastic economic packages to be imposed. Nearly always, they are developed in secrecy and implemented too rapidly for citizens to respond. The end results, as Klein again makes clear, are massive (and too often, continuing) unemployment, large price increases for essential goods, closing of factories, enormous increases in people living in poverty, explosive concentration of wealth among a small elite—and extraordinary opportunity for capitalism from American and European corporations.

Klein also tells about the International Monetary Fund (IMF) set up after World War II to help struggling countries and their economies recover. Many of its managers and policy-makers have been graduates of the Chicago School of Economics and have imposed the Friedman creed wherever possible. One interview provided with an IMF staffer, David Budhoo (who became a whistle-blower in 1988); likened leaving corruption of the institution to liberation in his resignation, when he stated that he was done “hawking (their) bag of tricks.” The shame of the situation still lingers, although he is now free from those business practices. “To me resignation is a priceless liberation, for with it I have taken the first big step to that place where I may hope to wash my hands of what in my mind’s eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples… Sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the whole world to cleanse me from the things that I did in your name.”

The book pulls out of the reader a wide range of emotional responses, when painfully covering the callousness of the Chicago schemes; the massive human suffering created for no reason besides economic imperialism, and the greed of politicians, former political operatives, and corporate executives preying on the powerless. Likening free-market shock therapies to torture by electroshock, Klein documents that when some of the populace come out of the shock, become lucid, and begin to challenge the implementation of the policies (such as the loss of democracy, hyperinflation), the next step of shock doctrine is to terrorize, torture, or to make the challengers disappear. Klein’s summation of the Chicago School experiment: “It has been one of mass corruption and corporatist collusion between security states and large corporations, from Chile’s piranhas, to Argentina’s crony privatizations—the point of shock therapy is to open up a window for enormous profits to be made very quickly—not despite the lawlessness but precisely because of it.

The book is lucidly written, and a mine of facts and figures, which at times can be hard to absorb. Later chapters on the Homeland Security complex and Iraq have, thus far, been a depressing read, as one could expect any overview of cronyism and nepotism to read. Very evident is the sheer amount of care, detail, research, and effort that went into writing it. Citations (hundreds) and a glossary add nearly 100 pages to the book. In that regard, it is fairly clear that she wrote this book for the reader to follow up upon the claims she has made, which is easy enough to do and recommended by this reader. As mentioned, the clear villain in this narrative provided by Klein is Milton Friedman and his followers, shills in many respects, parroting defense and praise for their economic model that is either an absolute failure or works perfectly as designed. Klein would have you believe the latter, whereas I would be more inclined to accept corruption and manipulation as excuses (albeit, weak) for the failings of the Chicago School.

In that respect, Klein’s seminal work shows its weaknesses. In more than a few occasions per chapter, she gives her villains the “Michael Moore” treatment. You will weep for poor people in dismal economic conditions, get angry and frustrated with their suffering and neglect at the hands of society, and then, once she’s got under your skin, will point you at the boogeymen she believes to be responsible. Though less bombastic than Moore, you gradually become aware of her coaxing the reader to form a mob over the matter (which is appropriate by me), painting her characters as non-human caricatures, when in fact corporations and individuals are much more dynamic. My overriding vision the entire read thus far was seeing the antagonists ‘storyboarded’ as political cartoons. Simple pictures of ‘not the whole story’, in many respects, propaganda of a different sort, though the type I am more inclined to favor. However, Klein did allow for the villains’ own words to do the damning.

The Shock Doctrine goes very deliberately for the heartstrings, and succeeds, perhaps, in some instances, at the cost of rational objectivity. Having read her (and fact checked) her material before, I am satisfied that she is being honest and heartfelt as she pleads the case of the downtrodden. However, she occasionally comes across as someone with an agenda and single-minded viewpoint that holds the power to convince you of using every rhetorical/written trick in an expansive arsenal. Of course, there are always other sides to the story, and economic complications that Klein does not even attempt to touch on. The Shock Doctrine is a book whose strength lies in its explanation and case studies of “disaster capitalism”, crony corporatism, and “disaster apartheid—using disasters and other crises as opportunities and excuses to transfer land and other resources into the hands of powerful, favored multi-national corporations. She puts into a New York Times Bestseller plenty of evidence for her accusations and claims of a corporate, elite attempt to ‘remake’ a world, undemocratically and ideologically in story after story where the disadvantaged are taken advantage of by the rich, who become even richer: a regular routine, worthy of investigation, which Naomi Klein handles well in both research and prose.
 

Etching of the Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas © EFE

In An Account, Much Abbreviated, Fray de las Casas pleads to the King on behalf of the native peoples of the new world, describing the campaign of the past forty years prior (1542) by Spaniards to “dismember, slay, perturb, afflict, torment, and destroy the Indians by all manner of cruelty.” He recalls “islands both large and small, the least-favored of them more fertile and lovely than the garden of the king”, once so populous that they compared to ‘beehives’, now empty, “almost devoid of population.” “Into and among these gentle sheep…did creep the Spaniards.”  Pulled from their islands, the native people “were killed while being brought, and because of being brought to…Hispaniola when the stock of the natives (there) had come to an end.” De las Casas speaks of dozens of islands “despoiled of people”—“twelve million souls killed tyrannically and unjustly…perhaps above fifteen million” on behalf of the Christian faith. He claims that the “their ultimate end…was to stuff themselves with the riches of the Indians—in a very few days,” and to create large estates for themselves for which they did not earn by noble blessing.  A product of “the insatiable greed and ambition that they have had—greater than any the world has ever seen.”

De las Casas holds back little in his dialogue to the king, describing the devastation of the five native Hispaniola kingdoms. The acts that the Spaniards committed, as described by De las Casas were truly, in his words “so inhumane, so pitiless, and so savage” that their barbarism and pettiness wrought the wrath of God. In one duplicitous instance, he recounts “an evil Christian captain” having violated the wife of a native king, who himself fled, in an effort to regroup his people to take vengeance. This induced the Spaniards to a frenzied slaughter in their search to find him. When the native king was finally captured and sent by ship (with a large quantity of gold), bound for Castile, it was lost at sea, “His vengeance for such great injustices.” Snatched from their homes and “suspecting nothing,” the Indians were eventually eradicated or forcibly transported. Removed from their “admirable, healthful, and fertile” lands, the native peoples were perhaps displaced for the soils “where the most excellent sugar of the island is made.” Falling “ever lower and hurling themselves ever deeper in to accursed judgment,” the Spaniards would then move to the Islands of San Juan, Jamaica, and elsewhere to repeat the “abominable slaughters, tyrannies, and oppressions.”[1]

The type of labor that the native peoples in captivity would be forced into consisted of the destruction of their native lands via mining and deforestation; the land ‘legally’ acquired “paz por compra” (peace by purchase). No longer able to hunt and gather on their homelands, the native people soon were forced to rely on the Spaniards for food, who began to trade food in return for land. According to Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert and David Schecter, who studied The environmental dynamics of a colonial fuel-rush: Silver Mining and Deforestation in New Spain, 1522 to 1810, found the “effects on local landscapes and human communities and the pace, scale, and extent of mining-driven deforestation” in the area of New Spain “remarkable,” stating that “these changes radically reconfigured both the biophysical (ecosystems, soil composition, hydrology) and human characteristics of the colonial mining belt.” The discovery more precious metals and fuel rushes expedited frontier expansion Studnicki-Gizbert and Schecter argue that “the massive transformation of ecologies and land use patterns wrought by mining inevitably had an impact on the lives of aboriginal groups.” The hypothesis is that ‘purchasing peace’ only ratcheted “the inability of the (Indians) to provide for themselves with sufficient food from their own initiative” by undercutting their methods of subsistence.

This in turn rendered “rendered (the Indians) more susceptible to their incorporation or removal by Spanish colonial society.”  A new type of food scarcity forced them into roles as tenants and laborers, who in order to get by, pillaged their former lands for the Spaniards. The trees were removed, and “by scouring the landscape of trees, mining set the stage for the development of colonial forms of land-use.” The growth and demand of new world metals, especially silver, “which guaranteed a consistently high demand…and acted as a constant underlying factor in the expansion” of the colonial mining enterprise.  Because the processing of silver required great amount of heat, the forests became an over-relied upon energy source. The process would sustain itself until “the spread of fields and pastures in the areas surrounding the mines of New Spain foreclosed on the full regeneration of forests,” pushing miners and smelters further into the frontier “in search of virgin stands of trees.” Deforestation and the associated development of New Spain “transformed existing ecologies and the human communities that interacted with them” as well.  Mining also had a transformational effect on labor systems, creating a more organized and structured labor force according to Studnicki-Gizbert and Schecter, who believe that it “fuelled settlement and urbanization.”

This gave rise to the spread of agriculture (as opposed to foraging) “and the establishment of a new colonial society of indigenous, Afro-Mexican, and Iberian settlers.” and “was an important…motive for the cultural and socio-legal transformation of indigenous peoples into “Indio” subjects of the Crowns of Portugal and Spain.” [2] This would amalgamate into the rise of Mexico City, as a cosmopolitan point of trade. By the 17^th century, exhausted of opportunity, Indian migrants would make their way to the vice-regal capital. Richard Boyer, author of Mexico in the Seventeenth Century: Transition of a Colonial Society, finds that this influx of Indian migrants “occurred during the demographic collapse of native people.” Remarking how the Indian population “declined relentlessly” since the arrival of the Spaniards, Boyer notes that epidemics created a labor shortage “precipitated…economic contractions” and “decreases in silver and agricultural production and the reduction of trade resulted,” both overseas and internally.  He finds that the Spaniards acquired their great estates from vacant Indian lands in the mid-1630s, when many debt-ridden miners were ruined and forced to abandon their mines.

“By the middle of the century the industry was controlled by financiers in Mexico City,” and that “it alone could supply capital for the reorganization of mining and farming.” Debt “bound the provinces to the capital.” Boyer argues that “the huge emporium of the capital exerted pressure on the surrounding region to specialize production for that market.”  Towns close to Mexico City became more oriented toward market crops, rather than subsistence agriculture. He also points out that the division of labor within the city “reached the point where many Indians, having severed their ties to the land and become permanent town dwellers, were completely ignorant of agriculture.” Food became pricier and in the 1620s, as costs of transportation increased. “Opportunism and trivial extortion were habitual,” as monopolies gouged Indian producers and consumers, who to pay the most, even though “directly or indirectly, virtually all food, fuel, and fodder used in the metropolis was supplied by Indian labor.” Archbishop Perez de la Serna intervened and demanded price controls from the viceroy.  Boyer remarks that the residents of Mexico City “viewed the ensuing quarrel between the viceroy and archbishop as a struggle between the secular defender of monopolists and the priestly defender of the poor.” [3]

On the havoc and devastation wrought during the ‘conquest’ of Cuba and the search for Indians who fled into the wilderness, Fray de las Casas laments upon the ‘bare’, waste’, “desert of solitude”—the depopulated land—and “great shame and pity” by the Spaniards who “so thoroughly laid waste to all that island and left it uninhabited.”[4] It was, as he said, greed and ambition, manifested in the ethic and will of the Spaniards to take material possession of the New World—under the license of King and Crown—under such conditions of depravity and force. To demand upon the Indian their labor, to extract their metals and cut their trees—to ultimately deprive them of self-sustainability and further, to confiscate their land—makes them worthy of the damning he rightfully placed upon them. The frontier continues to be mined and deforested, and the people of the land continually forced into migration, wage-labor, and at the pricing will of monopolies, merchants, and financiers for a piece of their earth.

[1] An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies.
Bartolomé de las Casas (1542) [excerpt]

[2] The environmental dynamics of a colonial fuel-rush:
SILVER MINING AND DEFORESTATION IN NEW SPAIN, 1522 TO 1810

Studnicki-Gizbert, Daviken; Schecter, David. Environmental History 15. 1 (Jan 2010): 94-119.

[3] Mexico in the Seventeenth Century: Transition of a Colonial Society

Richard Boyer. The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Aug., 1977), pp. 455-478

[4] De las Casas.