Thought for the Day

[bcholmes]

The problem, obvious in retrospect, was the premise on which his entire theory rested: the idea that before healing can happen, everything that existed before needs to be wiped out. [Electro-shock experimenter Ewen] Cameron was sure that if he blasted away at the habits, patterns and memories of his patients, he would eventually arrive at that pristine blank slate. But no matter how doggedly he shocked, drugged and disoriented, he never got there. The opposite proved true: the more he blasted, the more shattered his patients became. Their minds weren't "clean;" rather, they were a mess, their memories fractured, their trust betrayed.

Disaster capitalists share this same inability to distinguish between destruction and creation, between hurting and healing. It's a feeling I had frequently when I was in Iraq, nervously scanning the scarred landscape for the next explosion. Fervent believers in the redemptive powers of shock, the architects of the American-British invasion imagined that their use of force would be so stunning, so overwhelming, that Iraqis would go into a kind of suspended animation, much like the one described in the [CIA interrogation] Kubark manual. In that window of opportunity, Iraq's invaders would slip in another set of shocks -- these ones economic -- which would create a model free-market democracy on the blank slate that was post-invasion Iraq.

But there was no blank slate, only rubble and shattered, angry people -- who, when they resisted, were blasted with more shocks, some of them based on those experiments performed on Gail Kastner all those years ago. "We're really good at going out and breaking things. But the day I get to spend more time here working on construction rather than combat, that will be a very good day," General Peter W. Chiarelli, commander of the U.S. Army's First Cavalry Division, observed a year and a half after the official end of the war. That day never came. Like Cameron, Iraq's shock doctors can destroy, but they can't seem to rebuild.

— Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine

Comments

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

Yes.

There is not and never has been a blank slate.

There are people, who live their lives.