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The Internationalization of the Neo-Liberal Shock
Today, we can say that after years and years of testing all over the world, the time has come for the internationalization and globalization of war.
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Looking at the present day, under the light of the formulation revealed by Astrid [sic - it seems he means Naomi] Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” is an enlightening challenge and absolutely reveals the historical importance of the analysis that is carried out, even if, in my opinion, it suffers from a certain “historical punctuality” considering the moments of application of a process that has come to be known as “neo-liberal economic shock theory”.
Klein’s analysis, based on known historical facts, recounts secret CIA experiments in psychology and psychiatry, the application of the techniques in Pinochet’s Chile and many other countries (including post-Soviet Russia), and the neo-liberal doctrine of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys”, tells us of a process whereby the population is put into a permanent state of shock in order to leave it unresponsive (as in lobotomy treatments), so that, under the cover of the generated amorphism, extremely unpopular measures are applied which, above all, are diametrically opposed to the interests of the majority. The very process of discrediting politics and politicians also serves as a pretext for the same type of action. Take Trump, Bolsonaro, Milei, Meloni, Duda or Zelensky. The kind of demagogic shock (using corruption, mass migration, etc.) gives birth to a pretext that works under the same assumptions.
However, and bearing in mind the unquestionable topicality of the approach, analyzing the world today according to this theory reveals a truth that, in my opinion, negates the idea of a certain “historical punctuality” of the neo-liberal economic shock. In my opinion, Astrid Klein’s approach, at that time, showed us a world in which the US was unleashing — and is unleashing — processes of transformation aimed at subverting the national and popular sovereignty, democracy and freedom of the peoples, in order to place their nations at the service of the process of neo-liberal and imperialist accumulation. The successive clashes are taking place in circumscribed national spaces and in a chronology whose origins go back to Pinochet’s Chile, but which lacks a certain continuity, as if we were dealing with a gang that was jumping from country to country, without ever reaching the whole.
Now, while Klein’s approach proposes a certain national circumscription, the historical events of the last 23 years point us towards a globalization or internationalization of the shock doctrine, towards its historical continuity and towards a totalizing dimension, encompassing all dimensions of our lives from the outset and not just on arrival.
Given what we know today, I can’t help but think that the chronologically linked examples of the application of the shock doctrine are nothing more than experiments, constantly being perfected, aimed at an epilogue, an epilogue that we are experiencing today. The globalization and internationalization of the neo-liberal shock, along with its phenomenological diversification. It no longer only affects the economic or social component, but also health, the state, security, defense, information and propaganda. This is the clear materialization of another doctrine, the doctrine of “full spectrum dominance”.
With the turn of the 21st century, everything changed! On September 11, 2001, the world was shocked by a terrorist attack of spectacular proportions, which culminated in the collapse of three towers in New York. As if Hollywood had been asked to prepare a terrorist attack. The American — and Western — population was in a state of shock, stunned, and we soon began to see direct attacks on the way of life that so many considered to be eternal — remember Fukuyama — and historically perfected. In the US, we saw the publication of the Patriot Act and the start of the War on Terror.
State surveillance became part of American life and, a little later, European life, particularly after renewed waves of terrorist shocks in Spain, England and France. The proven link between the perpetrators of terrorist acts — Al-Qaeda — and their creators, very few took, or wanted to take, notice of. Today, we go into a supermarket, visit a museum, make a phone call or take a photograph and we have the guarantee that, somewhere in space, that information will be processed, aggregated, integrated, analyzed and stored. Terrorism has become part of our lives and, under that pretext, mass surveillance. Bin Laden became the devil himself, the demon who terrorized the dreams of our little children, who would be protected by the omnipresent Pentagon and other “deep state” agencies. It was this “deep state” that took the opportunity to generalize and normalize torture, concentration camps like Guantánamo and the secret, or not so secret, prisons where all those who oppose the imperial designs are still held today. It was time to internationalize the terror that the Middle East had felt almost since the founding of the Anglo-Saxon spearhead in the region, the Zionist state of Israel and its infamous Mossad.
Back in 2008, the world was shocked by the subprime crisis. Supposedly, the American banking system was collapsing, which was soon followed by Europe and many other countries around the world. The pretext of the banking crisis, then combined with the sovereign debt shock, created the ideal social ground for the acceptance of measures to unbridled attack the rights of workers and their families, the like of which had never been seen in Western European countries. Eastern Europe had already experienced this with the fall of the USSR.
Wages, pensions, vacations, collective bargaining, freedom of association, the right to strike, public jobs, working hours, various subsidies, public health services, education, housing — everything was cut outright, with a destructive drive only surpassed by Milei’s demented insanity. This is a known historical fact, documented and proven by the degradation of the victims’ living conditions: the neo-liberal dystopia has never worked, not even temporarily. It is only the most aggressive form of accumulation, materialized in suction, looting and outright plunder, destroying value and latent social potential.
These two moments of shock, the security shock in 2001 and the economic shock in 2008, in contrast to what was happening here and there until the end of the 1990s, with the interventions of the International Monetary Fund in various countries; these two cases represented an ambitious leap forward in the modus operandi of the ruling elites; neo-liberal plunder was now being carried out wholesale, on a widespread basis, benefiting from the international institutional and normative architecture, which had been set up after the Second World War and was fully dominated after the fall of the USSR.
The ground was prepared to move on from the punctual, case-by-case and circumscribed test to its globalization. Instead of attacking country by country, using the IMF as a catalyst for the process of dollarization and appropriation (mainly through privatizations) of capital and financial influence, or with the Pentagon as the advance guard of the forces of “freedom and democracy”; with 11/07/2001 and the “subprime crisis”, we were all able to witness the internationalization and globalization of the shock doctrine. The neo-liberal shockwaves were transmitted transnationally and globally. Few countries resisted its effects and its use as a pretext for imposing draconian economic and social measures. Those that did — and do — suffer the “sanctions from hell”! It was time to bring the savagery created elsewhere to Borrel’s “garden”.
People had not yet recovered from these two shocks when we woke up to the spasms of an even greater one, infinitely stronger and more powerful. The Covid-19 pandemic. If the previous ones had worked and no one relatively capable had questioned and complicated the accounts, why not try something even more overwhelming? The images from Wuhan traveled the world, and according to the chronicles, millions were going to die in China alone… Only to find out later that this was precisely where it didn’t happen.
Vaccines have become part of our lives like never before, paid for at a premium and preferably from a US source. Those that were produced, all over the world, were not on the Western menu, with very few exceptions and ample reserves. Ursula Von der Leyen negotiated bespoke contracts, now made secret and supplied with erasures so that they cannot be read in their entirety, having bought the equivalent of 5 vaccines per European citizen, most of them from the laboratory headed by her own husband. It was a time when every day, all of us, woke up to the sound, or reading, of the daily reports of deaths and infections. The succession of shocks lasted literally two years, and never before had humanity experienced an induced shock on this scale.
But while the amount of money raised by American pharmaceutical companies in this process of neo-liberal globalization of health, which thrives precisely on disease, has reached records never before achieved by Phizer, Moderna, Johnson&Johnson and others, the shockwaves have not been limited to this act of outright plunder, in which taxpayers’ money has been called upon to finance the development, acquisition, distribution and administration of vaccines. Another lottery was that of diagnostic tests. Never before had private testing laboratories profited so much.
But anyone who thinks that, under the cover of the neo-liberal shockwaves, the plundering has stopped at vaccines and diagnostic tests is mistaken. The world has witnessed a whole wave of privatization of health care, resulting from the increase in the relative financial power of the pharmaceutical industry and health services. With more economic power than ever before (and it was already a lot), as a result of the plundering that took place, it wasn’t long before they used it to put unprecedented pressure on public health services, seeking to privatize them. They finance parties, pay for information campaigns, television programs, conferences and even… new and possible pandemics!
To add to the shockwaves, fear and terror, even society closed its doors, just as it did in the Middle Ages when the plague came. It was a time when big companies made brutal profits from lay-offs paid for by states, particularly European ones, at a premium. They stopped, produced nothing, but continued to make a profit… Anything better than that? The whining didn’t stop, however, and, as always, subsidies rained down on companies — small companies at first — but which, as always and on arrival, ended up in the pockets of the big ones.
Once again, labor rights were trampled on, freedom of expression, freedom of opinion and even freedom of the press and information. In the mainstream press, nothing was said about the slightest criticism. As the “Twitter files” revealed, the big health corporations spared no effort to hide their trail of corruption, disease and blood. And in the end, after so much disinformation, censorship and manipulation, people are slowly beginning to admit that vaccines also kill, with the defenders of this pandemic therapy going into fallible justifications about the supposedly higher mortality of Covid-19.
In the USA, the country that produced the vaccines, the most people died. And please don’t see any pretension on my part to deny the important role of vaccines and public vaccination policies, when they are fair and dedicated to preserving health rather than profiting from disease. What has happened here is something quite different: a disease is introduced, acting as a shockwave, to make people drop their guards and sell expensive vaccines of dubious origin. Vaccines with accelerated and unreliable tests, manipulated, hidden and censored results, which were imposed on the majority of Western populations. The right to choose was violated, for example by forcing those who traveled to get vaccinated. When efforts go so far and so many rights are trampled on, paying to hide existing information, it’s because something is not well explained.
From 2020 to 2022, it was time to globalize the experiments that were already known to be taking place in poor countries, specifically in Africa. If the War on Terror globalized the terrorist shock as a pretext to invade, plunder, control, censor, persecute and monitor, processes that had already been tried in African countries, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America; with Covid-19, it was a question of expanding the pandemic shock that had previously been tried in impoverished countries. Countries where poverty is used as a pretext to test new transmission methods and innovative shock treatments. I’m not at all shocked that much of this work also finds theoretical support in the infamous Kissinger report, which is dedicated to finding solutions for controlling the world’s population. The secret laboratories we find all over the place will certainly not fail to bring us new shock waves.
Today, we can say that after years and years of testing all over the world, the time has come for the internationalization and globalization of war. After Euromaindan, a whole process of normalizing war, the fear and terror of war, began in our daily lives. First, with the way the Special Military Operation was handled, characterized as a barbaric invasion, during which new shocks were induced in the Western population, whether through false narratives such as the “Bucha massacre”, the bombing of “schools and hospitals”, the infamous — and cartoonish — bombing of NPP Zaporozhye, in which it can be said that it is full of Russian soldiers and, at the same time, that it is bombed by them; the ever-present possibility of chemical, biological and nuclear attacks by the same old people: the “infernal and evil” Russians.
Under the cover of the shockwaves, war, arms distribution and investment in the military-industrial complex are normalized, while health, housing, education and wages are left behind; the — previously impossible — nuclear war is gradually entering our minds, specifically through the constant threat of Russia’s “invasion of NATO”. No one talks about the nonsense this means, or the historical and scientific inconsistency of the hypothesis. It’s not time for that, it’s time for propaganda shock.
And if the conflict in Ukraine allowed for the internationalization of eternal war, dragging an entire Europe into its own economic and social suicide; the Ukrainian shock allowed for another globalization, that of uniform propaganda, that of a single narrative. Never before has a narrative been so solid in the international arena. Once again, it’s the same methodology: inflict successive doses of shock, as many as necessary, until even the most critical are left without a reaction. Not because the narrative is true, but because it becomes suffocating.
This shock has given rise to yet another pretext for attacking our rights, this time directly affecting freedom of expression and opinion. The fact is that the legacy of this therapy is the internationalization and normalization of censorship, whether direct, from Russian channels, or indirect, from all opponents, on social networks. Never again will information circulate as before, and it will be filtered under the pretext of the need to defend ourselves from disinformation and propaganda. In other words, successive shocks of disinformation and propaganda, giving rise to censorship against the truth. Because censorship, and let there be no mistake, is always against the truth. It always aims to hide the truth, the possibility of comparison, the dialectical movement in the construction of thought.
From this evolution, we can draw two direct conclusions: the process of applying the shock doctrine evolved from the nation state to the entire world; it also evolved, from the financial component, to broader ones, such as total war; always in an increasing logic of evolution from the least to the most complex, until, if we do not prevent it, our total destruction.
From the particular to the general, this is the movement that led to the refinement, expansion and globalization of the shock doctrine. The most impoverished countries serve as guinea pigs, allowing the test that is then generalized to the whole world. This is the essence of American and Western hegemony; this is why it is in direct contradiction with the interests of the peoples!
And they bring us into a world of permanently induced, international, multifaceted and totalizing shocks, always under the pretext for which lies in the “need for protection”; but the result is unequivocal: with each session, each layer, we find ourselves increasingly gagged, conditioned and impoverished.
The ultimate contradiction: the more shocked we are, the more disarmed we become!
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