Finding courage: a conversation with Naomi Klein

By Nancy Sartor

Looking at her lineage, it's no wonder that Naomi Klein found her calling in political activism. Her grandparents were radicals and her parents ditched the United States for Canada during the Vietnam War. Her mother was active in the anti-pornography movement, earning the title “Bourgeois Feminist Fascist” from the Toronto Globe after releasing the seminal anti-porn film “This is Not a Love Story.”

While still in her 20s, Klein published “No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies,” a bestseller that challenged the growing power of international corporations. The book was dubbed the “movement Bible” by the New York Times, and Klein gained notoriety as a journalist and activist.

She has traveled extensively throughout North America, Latin America, Asia and Europe, tracking the rise of anti-corporate activism. She spent a year in Argentina, researching the plight of factory workers in Buenos Aires after the country’s economy collapsed in 2001. The resulting documentary, “The Take,” written by Klein and directed by fellow Canadian and outspoken journalist Avi Lewis, was released last year.

Klein writes internationally syndicated columns that appear in Canada’s Globe and Mail and the Guardian of London. A frequent media commentator (catch her on “Democracy Now”) and university guest lecturer.

Klein recently spoke to Southside Pride from her Toronto home about the state of the anti-globalization movement, neo-liberal shock policies, the Bush administration’s corporate branding of governance, and media reform.

SOUTHSIDE PRIDE: Your writings were and continue to be an inspiration to many people who are standing up to corporations around the world. More than five years after the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, how do you think the movement has changed?

KLEIN: I think it’s changed a lot. The significance of the Seattle protest was not that the movement was beginning, but that it was landing very decisively in North America because of opposition to the policies of globalization, or what most of the world calls neo-liberalism, which is a package of policies that is based on privatizing essential central services. It’s a belief that the role of government is essentially to facilitate investment for multinational corporations and create new investment opportunities—which is where privatization comes in—but also deregulation and downsizing of the state. There was certainly opposition to those policies in many forms pre-Seattle, which is what I wrote “No Logo” about.

In many parts of the world that opposition has gotten much stronger in recent years and has translated into political change, which you can see most clearly in Latin America. In the five years since Seattle, there has been a wave of electoral victories for progressive candidates and political parties who ran on election campaigns that opposed this particular development model—standing up to the International Monetary Fund, standing up to the World Trade Organization, standing up to the United States. I’m thinking of Argentina and Brazil. You also see it happening in Bolivia, Uruguay and India.

SSP: How do you think September 11 affected political activism in this country?

KLEIN: I think the opposition to neo-liberalism is much, much stronger than it was in 1999. But I think activism in general, and in the United States in particular since September 11, has been very timid.

I think that there’s a climate of fear in the United States around being perceived as anti-government. There’s a fear of being in the streets. I saw this very clearly when I was in New York during the Republican convention. Certainly the opposition to the Bush administration and the war in Iraq and the sort of corporate takeover of politics was very, very clear; but in terms of the opposition, the way it was expressed was very timid and controlled. I think that’s a broader social issue that people in the U.S. really need to grapple with: what is the role of dissent in a democracy?

SSP: Many people in the U.S. are concerned about outsourcing of jobs, falling wages and the lack of community, but relatively few people will protest, and not everyone can shop at co-ops or small businesses. What are some strategies people can employ to address these issues and change the course of policy?

KLEIN: There is more and more concern about outsourcing, about the effect of these policies on people’s jobs. There’s tremendous opposition to privatization of social security, which is the local manifestation of these neo-liberal policies.

I think political mass demonstrations are only one very small part of activism. The real work of political change is community-based and unglamorous—small meetings and organizing. And I think that’s happening more and more in this country. You see it in campaigns for a living wage, living wage amendments or increasingly in the national campaign against Wal-Mart and its effects on a living wage.

There’s also an interesting wave of activism going on now on university campuses and in high schools against military recruiting, which I think does show that people are shaking off some of that fear, particularly young people.

SSP: Can you talk more about public fear and how that is and has been manipulated by the government in the U.S. and abroad?

KLEIN: That ties in with what I’m going to be talking about at the conference: how different kinds of shock are used and the role of shock in imposing economic policies—policies that I believe are tremendously unpopular and generally opposed when people are given a chance to have their say. These policies are very often imposed through various forms of violence and different kinds of shock.

I’ve written a lot about this subject as it relates to Iraq and how the military campaign was described as “shock and awe.” If you read the theory behind calling it “shock and awe,” it was psychological, less of a military strategy than a psychological strategy.

What shock and awe was supposed to do was break down the desire of the Iraqis to resist [the occupation] because they would be so in awe of the sheer firepower that was descending upon them. That very clearly laid the ground for [implementing] this extremely radical form of shock—which is called economic shock therapy—laying off 500,000 people, plans to privatize 200 state-owned companies, cuts to food subsidies. The theorists of so-called shock therapy are very open about the fact that it is easiest to impose these policies on people who are already shocked, who are already destabilized.

One of the things that Americans need to admit is that since September 11 this country has been in a state of shock. Not, perhaps, as severe a state of shock as a country that’s facing a military bombardment or a tsunami, but Americans are also much less used to this feeling. And I think that there’s no doubt that the political leadership in the United States seized upon that state of shock in a very similarly opportunistic way that you see in Iraq and Afghanistan and post-tsunami Indonesia and Thailand, where you have these massive land grabs by real estate developers.
You see this in the United States, in the pushing through of very unpopular economic policies, [federal officials] governing with total impunity and crackdowns on dissent under the guise of security. But I also think that shock is slowly wearing off.

SSP: If the shock is indeed wearing off here in America, why do you think the Bush administration has been so successful with their political agenda?

KLEIN: One thing that the Bush administration is tremendously good at is applying the rules of corporate branding to governance. What I mean by branding is a rejection of traditional advertising of a product and a move to selling an identity. But more than just selling an idea, the real breakthrough in corporate branding is selling a customer’s aspirational identity back to themselves. Not selling the reality of yourself, but a dream of yourself. You buy into that identity and sort of merge with the brand. The idea is to create a tribe around a brand.

I think it explains a lot about how successful their election campaign was. I think Democrats and progressives in the United States didn’t even realize what was happening. The Republicans have been doing this very, very steadily—and under the radar as far as Democrats are concerned—with the idea of Republicanism. And it isn’t something they launched during the election campaign, they’ve been doing it for years and brought in the most expert corporate marketers to do it.

They are selling Republicans back to themselves, so that being a Republican
is not about whether or not to support a particular policy, it’s one of your core
identities. That makes it much, much harder to challenge from a political perspective.

I think Karl Rove has engineered this massive, co-branding campaign among [people] who they’ve identified as their core market. And what’s important to them are the church going, Nascar-driving, proud-to-be-a-redneck—or, you know, maybe not so educated but maybe not embarrassed about it—core. They’ve sort of embedded Republicanism deep in that core, which in many ways protects [the core] from traditional understandings of politics.

That’s the deepest way in which they’re corporatized, and we see the rest of it with their politics. I think that’s why you do have people voting against their direct economic interests—because [the administration] has successfully launched a false advertising campaign. These are not down-home folks, they are the corporate elite, but they are such expert marketers that they have presented themselves in this way. And so people are voting for losing their health care and other services.

SSP: So how do you convince people that they are being manipulated—politically and economically?

KLEIN: Well part of it is having some historical context. In places where people have not allowed themselves to be scared into reactionary responses, it’s because there is some sense of history.

I lived in Argentina for a year making this film [“The Take”] about what happened in Argentina after their economy crashed. Argentina lived through a very brutal military dictatorship, so they know how to identify the beginnings of fascism before it’s really in place. Because they lived through it, they learned the hard way.

So when their people took to the streets against the government, the first thing the government did was declared a state of siege—a state of emergency and a curfew—and told everybody that they had to go home. And people spontaneously had this reaction that was, “We know what they’re doing. They’re using fear to try to prevent us from expressing our political opposition,” and they knew that because they had experienced it—very brutally, in that they lost 30,000 people to a military dictatorship.

So they just, en masse, poured into the streets in 2001. When I was in Argentina talking to people, that was the most significant thing—that they had stood up to fear and there was this moment for the country.

I’ve also heard very similar descriptions from friends in Spain about their reaction to the Madrid bombing. Where you had a very reactionary government wanting to use the attack to justify their very unpopular presence in Iraq and to win the upcoming elections. To say, “I’m the father figure, everybody go home and be scared, I’ll take care of everything,” and people responded the way Argentineans responded.

In Spain you also have this history of fascism, and people could see it starting to arise and they just rejected it. They poured into the streets and had these marches against terror, which were really marches against being terrorized, against being afraid. Then they proceeded to elect a government that was proposing a completely different approach to the war on terrorism—you know, bring the troops back from Iraq and so on.

There isn’t the same history in the United States and I think that’s why people are much more easily manipulated. But I think knowing that history does help a little, and making those parallels to other parts of the world where you can see how terror is used as a political weapon. It’s easier to see it happening somewhere else than it is to see it happening to you.

But I also think it takes some political leadership, and unfortunately the United States doesn’t really have that right now.

SSP: Given our relatively short history as a country, and the lack of a fascist history at that, what do you think it will take for people in the United States to have a kind of organic movement of empowerment?

KLEIN: I think that the connection with the military is an important one, where there are some of the most powerful voices in the United States. Unfortunately they’re not being amplified, but they’re there. Mothers who lost their sons in Iraq are speaking out against the war, and soldiers who came home are saying this is an unfair trade.
I hear them at small conferences and teach-ins and I believe that if I were hearing them on CNN every night, which I should, it would make a difference. I think it’s newsworthy when you have soldiers who come home with an absolutely righteous core of moral indignation saying, “I was there and this is what happened.” Or a mother who says, “My son died while he was protecting inspectors looking for weapons of mass destruction that everybody knew didn’t even exist.” These are extremely powerful voices—chilling and emotional—and when people hear them it’s incredible.

I think it’s also about class, which raises all kinds of questions—uncomfortable questions—about class systems in the United States. Why is it that a certain sector of American society is considered so disposable that they have to make this ultimate sacrifice in order to get a university education? I mean, that’s why most of those people signed up.

SSP: Independent media is growing in this country—Democracy Now adds radio and television affiliates daily. But how do we address the problem of getting dissenting voices heard in the mainstream media?

KLEIN: I think it’s a balance because we do need to build these alternatives, but we also need to maintain the demand for broader access. I think that’s why the media reform movement is interesting, because it’s bridging alternative media projects, independent media projects and legislative demands to break up media consolidation, and I think some important policy demands are coming out of it.
But I also think that people need to get angry at the media and really identify it for what it is—which is a huge piece of the puzzle in terms of keeping us afraid and distracted.