Being my 150th thread, I thought I would do something important... something vital.
The following was inspired by author Naomi Klein and her coined phrase ‘disaster capitalism’. I have taken the horrific ideology presented in her
book and tried it on many militaristic endeavors, economic malfunctions and natural disasters that have occurred in the last 30 years. What develops
after an analysis is not only horrific but shows to be insanely out of control. We will undoubtedly be taken under its wing for quite possibly the
rest of our lives and generations to come if we don’t put a stop to it. The following is quite possibly one of the most important things you will
EVER learn, it is the key principle to how the world is run today and for anyone who wants to learn more about this I strongly suggest you purchase
Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine. The issue has been oddly enough, under addressed, I want to revive a CONTINUOUS communal understanding of
the concept in order for this knowledge to be used to make sense of what is happening around us.
Many here are familiar with D. Eisenhower's warning that has been misinterpreted for decades:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military
industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” –D. Eisenhower, 1961, farewell
address.
What he warned us about was the military industrial complex. Many people failed to understand why they were so dangerous. But their poison has been
revealed, disaster capitalism enacted through an economic and political shock doctrine. So what is ‘disaster capitalism’ and why is it so
important?
Enter the rabbit hole... you won’t be getting out of it anytime soon.
The Doctor
A clean slate. An empty brain. Tabula Rasa. This was the ultimate goal of CIA mind control and manipulation experiments which started in the 1950’s.
After rumours began to spiral of the Soviets developing a mind control mechanism the US was running scared thinking of ways to train troops in order
to resist these mind control tactics if they were ever caught by Soviets. So the initial experiments that started were not for the purpose of
manipulating someone’s mind but rather learning how to resist this manipulation... how quick things changed. The history of how these mind control
experiments became such an interest for the CIA and how they evolved to what many consider to be torture in the modern day is a complex and
interesting tale.
It begins in McGill University in the 1950’s. Doctor Ewen Cameron was conducting new electroshock experiments on his ‘patients’ who were
initially willing students of the university but once CIA funding became a factor some of these patients weren’t so consenting. Modern day survivors
of Dr. Cameron’s early work with electroshock are not only mentally handicapped but due to the electroshock suffer from cracks within their bones,
all over their body which only get worse with arthritis and ageing. The doctor from Montreal (who is now long dead) experimented not only with
electroshock solely but with other methods in extreme doses. The CIA’s funding of Dr. Cameron was revealed in the seventies through the Freedom of
Information Act. Cameron is arguably the inventor of contemporary US torture techniques with what was initially intended to cure patients. The
mentality went something like this:
- 1. A patient had to be deprived of all senses. Hoods placed over heads, heavy headphones over ears, cardboard over their arms, etc. All of this was
done in order to ‘soften up’ the victim so that they could not act to protect their best interests. The patients were also drugged with substances
such as LSD and PCP.
- 2. Next, Cameron believed that extensive electro shocks could ‘reform’ the brain from a faulty state. This could only be done after the patient
is completely hopeless and dependent. Cameron knew how to destroy the brain, how to turn an adult into a child, but he did not know how to
‘remake’ it.
- 3. The third stage was the attempt of actually remaking the brain, which Cameron failed to do. It was ‘psychic driving’ which was intended to
break up old pathological patterns. Methods used by Cameron during this stage included playing looped audio in a patient’s cell continuously.
By the end of his experiment, Cameron’s patient was not healed or reformed, but returned to a child like state where in some cases it was reported
that the patients forgot how to feed themselves, some had a completely defunct memory, remembering nothing for longer than 6 seconds. The horrific
methods used are no doubt familiar to those who have heard or seen the same tactics used by the US army in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
Cameron saw his shock therapy methods as a way of blasting his patients back to infancy, it was only once a patient was in complete shock that they
could be manipulated when they were most vulnerable, this is an important philosophy. His electric shocks were delivered by a machine called the
Page-Russell, it was used to send six consecutive jolts through a human body, it was reported that Cameron abused the machine to send in excess of 200
consecutive jolts.
You’re probably wondering what this has to do with Disaster Capitalism. Well let’s review Cameron’s methods, his shock tactics. His patient was
first deprived of all sense and drugged. They were then treated with electro shock therapy in order to completely destroy their psyche. Once
completely dependent, vulnerable and disillusioned with all that was happening around them, Cameron meant to brainwash them through audio recordings.
If we are to examine these shock tactics in a political sense, we create a very scary picture. No one could have possibly conceived that Cameron’s
methods could be applied to politics, but one man saw exactly that, the architect of the shock doctrine, Milton Friedman.
The Architect
Milton Friedman is a world renowned economist who comes from the Chicago School of Economic thought. He believed in a completely free market economy,
unregulated and unrestricted by government. Friedman had built a strong ideological community with his students and staff in the University of Chicago
in the 1950’s where they all supported this free form of corporatism as the only way that society could live in equilibrium; letting the economy run
wild, or so to speak. Dr. Cameron used electricity to inflict his shocks, but Friedman used policy. Friedman believed the only way that a complete
free market economy could be introduced into a society was all at once, policy had to be reformed literally over night and introduced all together.
This shock and awe tactic was what the economy needed to free itself and act on its own, or so Friedman thought.
All the problems of the economies of the time such as high inflation and soaring unemployment were according to Friedman and his followers the result
of an economy which was not truly free. There was to be no interference, no distortion of the system. Unlike Cameron who could operate on his guinea
pigs any time, Friedman could not and was relishing the opportunity to try his shock and awe tactics through policy. Many governments at the time
completely opposed such a thing as ignoring national borders or tax evasion, Friedman could gain no support for his shock doctrine, not even at home.
The home of the Chicagoan's was a total opposite of how they wanted the free market economy to run; when it to comes to making products affordable,
governments fixed prices; to protect workers from being exploited, they set up minimum wages; to make sure the maximum amount of people had education,
they socialized it. Friedman was convinced that this was doing untold harm to the equilibrium of the market. Friedman was further convinced that what
happened after a crisis depended solely on the ‘ideas’ that were lying around. These ‘ideas’ were his market reformation policies which would
be ready once disaster struck...
The motive of disaster is quite simple and the means even simpler. Disaster related functions (such as war, natural disasters, terror, civil unrest,
civil ‘security’, etc) can be performed by corporations in order to gain a profit. In essence, disaster capitalism applied through the shock
doctrine opens up new markets which were previously ‘untapped’. Through time Friedman realized, as stated above, that his shock doctrine had to be
tested somewhere outside of the United States. Friedman got his chance to test his shock tactics, which we will get to later. For now, it’s
important to realize the related ideology of shock tactics and how they originated. Much like Cameron’s work where the individual was treated with
electroshock therapy in order to completely distress and confuse them and then once vulnerable attempted to ‘reconstruct’ their mind, Friedman’s
policies were used as the electricity and when applied simultaneously it would distress and confused a society, a nation. Once distressed and
confused, whether in the case of Cameron and the individual or Friedman and the whole society, the subject was much more compliant and flexible.
CONTINUED
[edit on 16/3/2010 by serbsta]
