This documentary that looks at the concept of 'disaster capitalism' which is capitalism which feeds off and depends on natural disasters, war and terror in order to prosper. Famous early proponents of it were Augusto Pinochet's fascist regime in Chile and the neo-liberal conservative administrations of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA. Its name, 'the shock doctrine' coming from the way patients used to act after shock therapy, where immediately after this treatment they became far more pliant, easier to manipulate. If true, I guess some similar shock therapy will be in the pipeline off the back of the current pandemic. Interesting stuff on the whole.

Although the subject of this documentary is the kind of material for heated discussions afterwards that will leave me with a headache and anger, I have to say it was interesting to follow. I'm not sure capitalists will like this documentary though, for sure not the big multi-national coorporations, as it only proves nothing good comes from capitalism, unless you're on the receiving end. It's just another example of the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer. In a world where the poor dominate in large numbers they're still dominated by an elite of ultra rich people. One day this will come to an end once we reach the point of no return but that won't be in our lifetime. The documentary contains a lot of influent people, from dictators to 'normal' world leaders, a lot that should be hanged in my humble opinion. Stories about torture look like the most normal thing in the world to those people, making the rich even richer seemed to be their only goal, and for that they have to control the masses by shock doctrines. It's all well explained if you take time to listen and try to understand. I'm glad I watched it, it won't change much of my pessimistic view of the world, it rather fortifies it.

We're all familiar with economic shock therapy, the idea that sometimes a massive destabilisation of the economy is the first step towards recovery. What Naomi Klein argues in her book, 'The Shock Doctrine', is that chaos is not just an occasionally necessary precursor of reform, but it rather exploited or at worst engineered by reform's proponents, because the consequences of the changes proposed would not be accepted by the people if offered to them a la carte in a less pressured environment. Michael Winterbottom's film develops Klein's arguments, and presents a fairly conventional alternative history of the world. But there are still some interesting details: I didn't know that it was Eisenhower, of all people, who first warned about the military-industrial complex; and it's welcome to see a different interpretation of what happened in Chile in the 1970s to the outrageous story told by Niall Fergusson in his recent BBC series, 'A History of Money'. Yet I still felt slightly disappointed by this film, because while it exposes the lies of the new right to be friends of freedom and democracy (by showing how they need to suppress freedom to get their ideas through),it doesn't address the other part of the argument, namely, whether their economic ideas are basically sound. Perhaps it does indeed take unpopular policies to rescue broken economies; one can dispute that this belief justifies coercion, but should a rational people accept shock as a price worth paying? There are lots of good arguments that say no, but the film doesn't make them; the case that equality is an aid to the efficiency of a country, as well as a moral good in itself, is here taken for granted, although this is arguably the key point of difference between left and right. I fear that this film will not convert anyone while the right's most insidious claim, that a competitive jungle is, however distasteful, the best of all possible worlds, goes unchallenged.