Remember when "Shock and Awe" was started, and Rumsfeld did not care about the museums being robbed? Remember how the infrastructure was destroyed for no apparent reason? Ever wonder why Bremer thought he could just change all the laws in Iraq in one fell swoop?
Then you will want to read the new book by Naomi Klein "The Shock Doctrine" and watch or read an interview with Naomi Klein on Democracy Now! where she spells out the philosophy behind things like Pinochet's coup in Chile, the massacre in Tiananmen Square, 9/11, and other events.
Note: I have been waiting for a week or so for someone to diary this, since this interview was on the 17th of September. I searched several times, with no luck. Hopefully I did not miss it if someone did. If so, I apologize for this duplication. On the other hand, if no one has written about this, then it is high time someone did, IMHO.
To continue the diary:
This has all been planned, and executed, with a reason. Naomi calls it the Shock Doctrine, where you emotionally shock a person, group, or entire society with some kind of major event, or take advantage of a natural disaster such as what happened in New Orleans, that puts them into stunned fear so they look to authority to lead them because they are panicked.
From the interview:
Klein writes in the introduction to "The Shock Doctrine" that "The history of the contemporary free market was written in shocks." She argues that "Some of the most infamous human rights violations of the past thirty-five years, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market reforms."
So, those that would rule others with iron hands or impose their ideology will either wait for a natural disaster, or create a disaster, to make people more malleable to their agenda.
That is what happened to the US after 9/11, when the neocons jumped on the opportunity (Created? Allowed to happen? Who knows? It was amazingly convenient!) to take away our rights and impose things like tax cuts for the wealthy and start invading countries they have wanted to invade for years with the consent of the populace and Congress.
Notice how they rushed everything they could, ramming all kinds of things in the middle of the night without allowing anyone time to read them? It was all about "trust us" which is a major warning phrase if I ever saw one.
Milton Friedman and psychologists have had a big hand in this in our time:
NAOMI KLEIN: Remaking people, shocking them into obedience. This is a story about that powerful idea. In the 1950s, it caught the attention of the CIA. The agency funded a series of experiments. Out of them was produced a secret handbook on how to break down prisoners. The key was using shock to reduce adults to a childlike state.
TEXT: The following narration is excerpted from the CIA's 1963 and 1983 interrogation manuals.
NARRATION: It’s a fundamental hypothesis of this handbook that these are techniques are, in essence, methods of inducing regression of the personality. There is an interval, which may be extremely brief, of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock or paralysis. Experienced interrogators recognize this effect when it appears and know that at this moment the source is far more open to suggestion, far likelier to comply, than he was just before he experienced the shock.
NAOMI KLEIN: But these techniques don't only work on individuals; they can work on whole societies: a collective trauma, a war, a coup, a natural disaster, a terrorist attack puts us all into a state of shock. And in the aftermath, like the prisoner in the interrogation chamber, we, too, become childlike, more inclined to follow leaders who claim to protect us.
One person who understood this phenomenon early on was the famous economist of our era, Milton Friedman. Friedman believed in a radical vision of society in which profit and the market drive every aspect of life, from schools to healthcare, even the army. He called for abolishing all trade protections, deregulating all prices and eviscerating government services.
I don't want to copy more of the transcript for copyright reasons, so please go and read/watch this interview. It's worth it!
It really enlightened me on just what has been and is being done to all of us by those that would rule us for their own profit and power. I did not realize just how much of this is planned! After watching this, I plan to be far more cautious about letting myself become emotionally involved with what is happening, and wonder more about how they are trying to manipulate us. It becomes much more obvious if you are looking with an eye toward asking what direction they are trying to push us.
Oh, and about why Rumsfeld did not care about the Museums being looted, I'll let Naomi say it, since she says it much better than I ever could:
And then you had the famous statement from Donald Rumsfeld when he was confronted with this: "Stuff happens."
So, it was, I think -- it was this idea that because the goal was, in New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s famous phrase, not nation-building, but "nation-creating," you know, which is an extraordinarily violent idea, if you stop and think about what it means to create a nation in a nation that already exists, something has to happen to the nation that was already there, and we’re talking about a culture as old as civilization. So I think that because there was this idea that we were starting from scratch and this idea that is often portrayed, you know, in the US media as idealistic, of wanting to build a model nation in the heart of the Arab world that would spread to neighboring countries and lead to an opening up, this idea of building a model nation is -- you know, it has all kinds of colonial echoes. It really can't be done without some kind of a cleansing. And so, I think that the ease, the comfort level with the looting, with the erasing of Iraq's history, has to be seen within that vision of, OK, well, we’re starting over from scratch. So anything that’s already there is really just getting in the way. So if it’s loaded onto trucks and it’s sold in Syria and Jordan, that sort of just makes the job easier. And so, I think we saw that on many, many levels.
Does that anger and disgust you as much as it did me? There is no respect for a civilization, a people, or anything except the profit and power of the neocons. Art, history - none of that matters to these criminals!
Note: Itsmitch has a great diary written on this last week. I recommend people go check it out too, since there are links I did not include in this diary.