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.

PULSE: 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?

PULSE: 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.

PULSE: 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.

PULSE: 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.

PULSE: 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.

PULSE: What do you think it means to be a leader?

KLEIN: [Indian economist] Vandana Shiva is speaking at the conference, too, and one of the things she says is that every political leader worth their salt in history—from Gandhi to Martin Luther King—has expressed the same message, which is courage. Don’t be afraid, be courageous in the face of fear.

Real leaders don’t tell people to be frightened. They help people find a place of courage, even in the face of very real threats. The world’s a treacherous place, nobody’s kidding about that.

PULSE: Yes, to convey a message of empowerment and solidarity. Do you see anyone who might fulfill that leadership role in the United States?

KLEIN: Well, I don’t think it even necessarily has to be a figure. And I think this is important when I say “leadership.” I don’t think it’s that we all should wait at home until Martin Luther King shows up, you know? [laughs] I think that’s actually a really dangerous and also dis-empowering idea, that we need a sort of evangelical figure.

And it’s interesting — in the two examples I gave you of Argentina and Spain, there was no figure. It was a national mood. It was a moment more than it was a person. There was no one who told people not to be afraid; it was a collective click.

PULSE: 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.

PULSE: 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.

PULSE: The New York Times had a front-page story a few weeks ago about “video news releases” that are distributed by the administration and picked up by television networks and local affiliates, often without attributing the source of the so-called news item. What is your reaction to this practice? Isn’t it just propaganda?

KLEIN: Well what’s the difference between that and most major television networks’ Iraq coverage? I mean, they were embedded in the war from the beginning, and I don’t just mean having reporters embedded with troops. From the beginning they were just signing on and beating the drums of war, not asking the questions about weapons of mass destruction—handing over huge amounts of airtime to generals and not including anti-war critics.

In Iraq, the people don’t understand the difference between what they’re seeing from American journalists dressing up like soldiers, embedding themselves in the occupation, and what they had under Saddam, which were embedded journalists with the dictatorship.

PULSE: Talk about your journey through Iraq and your upcoming book.

KLEIN: When the war in Iraq began I was in Argentina, which is a country with an intense history of terror. I really learned to understand what was happening in Iraq by learning what had happened in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s, where you had a CIA-supported military coup. And during this incredibly brutal military dictatorship, a really sadistic regime, they imposed economic shock therapy on Argentina, using the opportunity of being able to terrorize the population to attack unions, to roll back wages, to start selling off fake assets and to run up huge bills with the International Monetary Fund.

Talking to Argentineans, I learned that this was a very clear strategy and I think a lot of the way we talk about human-rights violations now in the U.S. is completely de-politicized. You have big NGOs [non-governmental organizations] like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that issue reports about torture and disappearances, but it’s really de-politicized, it’s really taken out of the context of what else is going on—what political goals this kind of brutality serves. It’s like we get these catalogs of human rights abuses taken totally out of context.

And it was really interesting to be in Argentina and learn that context, and hear that most Argentineans blame the economic hardships they have today on the fact that these policies were imposed with so much violence in the ’70s.

So when I started to see the first contracts being handed out [in Iraq] to Bechtel and other companies, I knew from my work on globalization issues that these companies have been pushing privatization on Latin America very, very aggressively. If they’re rebuilding the water system in Iraq, I know that they have a political agenda because that’s what they do everywhere in the world.

Something very similar to what happened in Argentina is happening in Iraq: the shock of war serves as cover for economic theft, which in the end, makes democracy—when you finally get it—this sort of hollow promise. You get the vote, but all the power has already been zapped away—your country’s already been sold off and you’re locked into these deals with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that shackle your government for decades to come.

I lived in Argentina at the end of that process, where people were really realizing what had happened and were saying, “We don’t have democracy in this country even though we have the vote,” and, “We don’t have control of our economic destiny, our lives are being controlled elsewhere. They’re being controlled by French water companies and Spanish telephone companies and the IMF and the World Bank.” There was this feeling of being tenants in their own country.

So that’s how I got interested in the economic side of the war in Iraq. Part of the mistakes that have been made by liberation movements in the past is not paying attention to these economic deals in moments of transition and shock—just concentrating on the violence and not asking what the violence serving, and whom it is serving. Violence is designed to blind.

PULSE: What do you think about Paul Wolfowitz being appointed leader of the World Bank, despite his unpopularity in Europe?

KLEIN: Honestly, I think that it’s fitting. I think that Americans are starting to have unrealistic expectations of Europe. I think that the conflict between Europe and the U.S. over the war in Iraq was less a conflict over ends than over means, which I believe are the imposition of these economic policies and very violently opening up new markets.

The World Bank has always had shared support by Europe and the United States toward these economic ends. The World Bank is a major promoter of really lethal economic policies around the world and I don’t believe it is a poverty alleviation organization. I think it’s always been a tremendously ideological organization.

What my research shows is that the World Bank has been working from the earliest days, in terms of planning the economic restructuring—even though you had this reticence from European leaders on the tactics used to invade Iraq and the timing. As soon as they [the U.S. and allied forces] decided to invade, the hemming and hawing stopped and the World Bank came in to both Iraq and Afghanistan.

There has also been this silent handover that we haven’t heard about. We hear about the handover from the U.S.-appointed administration to an elected government both in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of course the elected government looks very much like the appointed government. But there has also been this other handover, which has been a handover from the direct U.S. economic control to proxy economic control through the World Bank.

In some ways I think that Wolfowitz is the perfect man for the job because I really believe there is a very clear connection between these economic policies and war—that so-called reconstruction from war and natural disasters. Civil war has really become the frontier now, the new frontier for the imposition of these policies, precisely because people are rejecting them when they have the freedom and the lack of fear to do so. All over Latin American they’re doing this.

In many ways, these institutions are extremely predatory and are really looking for more prone subjects. I think it’s tremendously disturbing what they’ve done—like embedding privatization policies. The World Bank has embedded privatization policies in emergency relief in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they’ll have a grant about emergency health relief, which just gets pushed through without any debate because it’s an emergency grant. But in it are conditions for privatization policies.

I believe these projects are really two sides to the same coin and this is what I wrote about from Iraq. The World Bank has been very much involved since the beginning, so in many ways this isn’t a new job for him. It’s kind of a lateral shift within the same project.

PULSE: How did you prepare for your trip to Iraq and what did you do there?

KLEIN: I started doing economic research and the more I saw the contracts and the deals and the trade shows in Washington, the more I realized that I had to go to Iraq to research it myself.

It was actually a really hard decision to make because the war was still going on, and it took a turn for the worse while I was there, which was during the first siege of Fallujah. It was when the second front was opened up against Muktada al-Sadr and really the turning point when the war started up again.

Things started getting worse when I was getting ready to go to Iraq and I almost cancelled the trip. I remember writing to a friend of mine who was already there and said, “I’m really afraid and that’s why I’m going, because my fear is the problem.” Not just my fear, but fear in general, and it’s the fear that keeps us from scrutinizing, that keeps us from resisting. I deliberated and deliberated and just decided that the fact that I’m afraid is evidence of the problem.

I spent the first couple weeks visiting state-owned factories, talking to workers and economic advisers and really doing the economic research. It got so bad that before I left I was just visiting hospitals and talking to mothers who’d lost their kids. When things get that bad that’s the only thing you can do. ||

Naomi Klein is the keynote speaker at the University of Minnesota conference “Globalization, Modernities and Violence.” The event, which is sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change, is a free and open public forum and takes place April 15 and 16. For details, go to icgc@umn.edu or call 612-624-0832.

For more information on Naomi Klein, check out her website at NoLogo.org.