Naomi Klein - great quote on official terrorism by free market supporters

Since the fall of Communism, free markets and free people have been packaged as a single ideology that claims to be humanity's best and only defense against repeating a history filled with mass graves, killing fields and torture chambers. Yet in the Southern Cone (i.e., Chile and Argentina after the coups in the 1970s), the first place where the contemporary religion of unfettered free markets escaped from the basement workshops of the University of Chicago and was applied in the real world, it did not bring democracy; it was predicated on the overthrow of democracy in country after country. And it did not bring peace but required the systematic murder of tens of thousands and the torture of between 100,000 and 150,000 people.

There was, as Letelier wrote, an "inner harmony" between the drive to cleanse sectors of society and the ideology at the heart of the project (the coups in i.e., Argentina and Chile in the 1970s and the ideological war that motivated them). The Chicago Boys and their professors, who provided advice and took up top posts in the military regimes of the Southern Cone, believed in a form of capitalism that is purist by its very nature. Theirs is a system based entirely on a belief in "balance" and "order" and the need to be free of interferences and "distortions" in order to succeed. Because of these traits, a regime committed to the faithful application of this ideal cannot accept the presence of competing or tempering worldviews. In order for the ideal to be achieved, it requires a monopoly on ideology; otherwise according to the central theory, the economic signals become distorted and the entire system is thrown out of balance.

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (2007) pages 102-103.

My comments are in parentheses. Please read this book if you have not already read it.

... it should be this one! Check out the short film at her website -- it covers some of her main points, and the book is very comprehensive in filling in the background.

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

She is on book tour now, and her talks are well worth attending.

Three other books to consider reading as well: "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" (closer look at the disaster capitalism and Bush nepotism complex that was so corrupt and incompetent); "The Assault on Reason"; and "Are We Rome?" (some surprising links between Klein's observations on privatization, and what happened at the end of the Roman Empire).