Interviews with Naomi Klein

Under Surveillance: Q&A With Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 01:15:47 -0400

June 16th, 2008

Rolling Stone, May 29, 2008

In Issue 1053, Naomi Klein examines China's surveillance industry and how with the help of U.S. contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. Here she speaks with Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson about her experiences writing and reporting the story and its implications for America.

How did that trip to China come about and what was it like to be able to report on the security industrial complex of China while being in the heart of it?

Out of Shock

Naomi Klein — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:17:36 -0400

May 23rd, 2008

Lee Randall, The Scotsman, May 21, 2008

Easy, frequent laughter and juddering sentences born of difficult births aren't what I'm expecting from Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, a deeply upsetting book that novelist John Le Carré has called "impassioned, hugely informative, wonderfully controversial, and scary as hell".

Klein, a 38-year-old Canadian journalist, author and film-maker based in Toronto, came to our attention in 2000 with No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, an international bestseller attacking the globalisation movement.

She's been called a combative theorist and a polemicist, and while insisting it's not her intention, she polarises people like no one else. Reviews praise her to the skies – one called Shock Doctrine "lucid, calm, impeccably researched, gorgeously readable" – or denigrate her as a confused leftie with weak arguments. Thus I'm warily expecting a lecture, and disarmed by the mixture of strength and sweetness that Klein evinces during our conversation.

A System Built on Crisis and Violence

Naomi Klein — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 18:14:03 -0500

December 17th, 2007

Anthony Arnove, Socialist Worker, December 14, 2007

When you look at how the disaster of the U.S. occupation of Iraq is portrayed these days, the emphasis now is always on the mistakes the Bush administration made and its incompetence in planning for the occupation. In The Shock Doctrine and your essay “Baghdad Year Zero,” you paint a very different picture of the underlying reasons for the invasion and occupation. Why do you think that the framework of “mistakes” and “mismanagement” is still the primary way people analyze the war, despite the evidence?

When you push people about what they believe the broader mission is, they don't really have an answer, because all of the “official” stories have fallen away.

Body Shock: A 40th Anniversary Conversation with Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 13:48:48 -0500

November 20th, 2007

Greg Grandin, NACLA, November/December 2007

Naomi Klein is a Canadian journalist and regular contributor to The Nation and the London Guardian. Beginning with No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (1999), Klein’s work has explored the two major forces that have shaped the post–Cold War world: the extension of radical free-market capitalism and, after 9/11, the resurgence of imperial militarism. More than just investigating the excesses, abuses, and popular resistances to neoliberalism and war, Klein’s journalism consistently links them, exploring how the corporate globalism of the Clinton years flowed seamlessly into the neoconservatives’ preemptive warfare doctrine. Latin America, the first region where neoliberalism was imposed and the first to produce a sustained resistance movement to it, has long been a central focus of Klein’s work, which includes, in addition to her writings, The Take, a 2004 documentary she produced with her husband, Avi Lewis, documenting the takeover of La Forja, a Buenos Aires auto plant, by its workers following Argentina’s 2002 economic meltdown. NACLA editorial committee member Greg Grandin interviewed Klein on the occasion of NACLA’s 40th anniversary.

Naomi Klein -- Shocking the World Bank and IMF Crowd With Her Analysis of 'Disaster Capitalism'

Naomi Klein — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

October 16th, 2007

Mark Karlin, BuzzFlash, October 16, 2007

The window of opportunity opens up, and it is deliberately exploited, whether it's using a window of opportunity in New Orleans to close down housing projects, or using the chaos of civil war in Iraq to ram through an oil privatization law.

-- Naomi Klein, author, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Ever since we read Naomi Klein's "No Logo" -- about the relationship between globalized "branding" and the exploitation of workers and national economies -- we have a been a huge fan of her writing.

Klein (a Canadian, born of American parents) is a serious writer. She is more interested in getting it right than being a celebrity. In fact, her exhaustively researched body of work on the havoc caused by "disaster capitalism" is roundly ignored by the American mainstream press -- and generally used for target practice by the corporate Canadian media.

The Bono-ization of Activism

Naomi Klein — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

October 12th, 2007

Brigid Delaney, CNN, October 12, 2007

Naomi Klein's 2000 book No Logo galvanized a generation to resist the lure of brands and corporatization.

Direct action such as protests and guerilla tactics such as culture jamming and graffiti were encouraged. Back then the movement had teeth and energy, but very quickly it has not just deflated but sharply turned into a world of hyper consumption, according to Klein.

Welcome to the Pro-Logo generation that is more likely to buy a wristband and ticket to Live Earth than hit the streets in protest. Speaking this week at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in the UK, to promote her new book The Shock Doctrine, Klein attacked the "Bono-ization" of the protest movement, referring to U2 frontman Bono who is also an active anti-poverty campaigner.

After Shock

Naomi Klein — Mon, 8 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

October 8th, 2007

Oscar Reyes, Red Pepper Magazine, October/November 2007

From Poland to Iraq and from China to New Orleans, neoliberalism has risen on the back of what Naomi Klein calls ‘disaster capitalism’. She spoke to Oscar Reyes about her new book, The Shock Doctrine, and new forms of resistance

What trajectory took you from writing about brand culture and documenting the recovered factories in Argentina to the reporting of ‘disaster capitalism’ in Iraq and elsewhere?

I was living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and we were shooting a scene on the roof of an occupied factory when the Iraq war began. This was the root of The Shock Doctrine. The analysis of the war in Argentina and many parts of Latin America was ‘this is what happened to us’ – neoliberalism came to Latin America with blood and fire and was now being brought to the Middle East by the same means. Being there in that moment and seeing the war through a Latin American lens is what drew me to this historical look at the very real use of shocks to impose shock therapy.

Shock and Awe

Naomi Klein — Wed, 3 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

October 3rd, 2007

Dana McNairn, Monday Magazine, October 3, 2007

Naomi Klein’s latest book has an unsettling premise, complete with a disturbing Canadian contribution, in what has already been dubbed “bleakonomics” by no less a luminary than Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz.