Journalism

September 19th, 2001
By Naomi Klein

What if our leaders are actually following us, instead of the other way around?

What if they are scouring the overnight polls and reinventing themselves to be the kind of leaders we say we want? What if they wage war not because they have found an effective response to terrorism, but because we have told the pollsters we are growing impatient?

According to a New York Times poll, 58 per cent of Americans support going to war "even if means many thousands of innocent civilians may be killed." Can we really live with that? I’m not talking only about morality but also about strategy: can we sustain the potential fallout from all this "collateral damage?"

Collateral damage is the jargon used to describe the "unintended" consequences of war, the innocent civilians that die when bombs rain down. But there are many more unintended consequences of war, so many, in fact, that the CIA invented a phrase to describe what happens when short-term wartime decisions come back to haunt the people who made them: "blowback."

In the reports that have come out about Osama bin Laden’s life, it is clear that ...

September 14th, 2001
By Naomi Klein

Now is the time in the game of war when we dehumanize our enemies.

They are utterly incomprehensible, their acts unimaginable, their motivations senseless. They are "madmen" and their states are "rogue." Now is not the time for more understanding—just better intelligence.

These are the rules of the war game.

Feeling people will no doubt object to this characterization: war is not a game. It is real lives ripped in half; it is lost sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers, each with a dignified story. Tuesday’s act of terror was reality of the harshest kind, an act that makes all other acts seem suddenly frivolous, game-like.

It’s true: war is most emphatically not a game. And perhaps after Tuesday, it will never again be treated as one. Perhaps September 11, 2001 will mark the end of the shameful era of the video game war.

Watching the coverage on Tuesday was a stark contrast to the last time I sat glued to a television set watching a real-time war on CNN. The Space Invader battlefield of the Gulf War had almost nothing in common with what we have seen this week ...

September 7th, 2001
By Naomi Klein

Actually, I don’t have time to respond to all the distortions in this week’s Economist but I couldn’t let this one stand. Here is a letter to the editor I just sent.

To the editors of The Economist

In your happy little leader "Brands are good for you," you quote a passage from my book No Logo referring to ours as "a fascist state where we all salute the logo and have little opportunity for criticism because our newspapers, television stations, Internet servers, streets and retail spaces are all controlled by multinational corporate interests." By taking these words out of context, you have intentionally distorted my meaning to suit your own weak argument.

As I pointed out to your reporter, the very next sentences in the book directly refute this vision of brand totalitarianism. The passage goes on to say: "there is good reason for alarm. But a word of caution: we may be able to see a not-so-brave new world on the horizon, but that doesn’t mean we are already living in Huxley’s nightmare… Instead of an airtight formula, [corporate censorship] is a steady trend, clearly intensified by synergy and ...

September 5th, 2001
By Naomi Klein

Part of the tourist ritual of traipsing through Italy in August is marvelling at how the locals have mastered the art of living—and then complaining bitterly about how everything is closed.

"So civilized," you can hear North Americans remarking over four-course lunches. "Now somebody open up that store and sell me some Pradas NOW!" This year, August in Italy was a little different. Many of the southern beach towns where Italians hide from tourists were half-empty, and the cities never paused. When I arrived two weeks ago, journalists, politicians and activists all reported that it was the first summer of their lives when they didn’t take a single day off.

How could they? First, there was Genoa, then: After Genoa.

The fallout from protests against the G8 in July is redrawing the country’s political landscape—and everybody wants a chance to shape the results. Newspapers are breaking circulation records. Meetings—anything having to do with politics—are bursting at the seams. In Naples, I went to an activist planning session about an upcoming NATO summit; more than 700 people crammed into a sweltering classroom to argue about "the movement’s strategy After Genoa." Two days ...

August 30th, 2001
By Naomi Klein

When Rio hosted the first Earth Summit in 1992, there was so much goodwill surrounding the event that it was nicknamed, without irony, the Summit to Save the World. This week in Johannesburg, at the follow-up conference known as Rio + 10, nobody is claiming that the World Summit on Sustainable Development can save the world—the question is whether the summit can even save itself.

The sticking point is what UN bureaucrats call "implementation" and the rest of us call "doing something." Much of the blame for the "implementation gap" is being placed at the doorstep of the United States. It was George W. Bush who abandoned the only significant environmental regulations that came out of the Rio conference, the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. It was Bush who decided not to come to Johannesburg (even his father showed up in Rio), signaling that the issues being discussed here-from basic sanitation to clean energy-are low priorities for his Administration. And it is the US delegation that is most belligerently blocking all proposals that involve either directly regulating multinational corporations or dedicating significant new funds to sustainable development.

But the Bush-bashing is too ...

July 10th, 2001
By Naomi Klein

"This conference is not like other conferences."

That’s what all the speakers at "Re-Imagining Politics and Society" were told before we arrived at New York’s Riverside Church. When we addressed the delegates (there were about 1,000, over three days in May), we were to try to solve a very specific problem: the lack of "unity of vision and strategy" guiding the movement against global corporatism.

This was a very serious problem, we were advised. The young activists who went to Seattle to shut down the World Trade Organization and to Washington, DC, to protest the World Bank and the IMF had been getting hammered in the press as tree-wearing, lamb-costumed, drumbeating bubble brains. Our mission, according to the conference organizers at the Foundation for Ethics and Meaning, was to whip that chaos on the streets into some kind of structured, media-friendly shape. This wasn’t just another talk shop. We were going to "give birth to a unified movement for holistic social, economic and political change."

As I slipped in and out of lecture rooms, soaking up vision galore from Arianna Huffington, Michael Lerner, David Korten and Cornel West, I was struck ...

June 20th, 2001
By Naomi Klein

In the aisles of Loblaws, between bottles of President’s Choice Memories of Kobe Sauce and Memories of Singapore noodles, there is a new in-store special: blacked out labels on organic foods. These boxes used to say “Free of Genetically Modified Organisms” but then Canada’s largest grocery chain sent down an edict that such labels were no longer permitted.

At first glance, Loblaws’ decision doesn’t seem to make market sense. When the first frankenfoods protests came to Europe, chains like Tesco and Safeway scrambled to satisfy consumer demand by labeling their own lines “GMO-Free.” And when Loblaws entered the health food market with its line of President’s Choice Organics, it seemed to be going the same route. In advertisements, the company proudly pointed out that certified organic products “must be free of genetically modified organisms.”

Then, the about-face, made public last week: not only won’t Loblaws make the GM-free claim on its own packages, it won’t allow anyone else to make the claim either. Company executives claim there is just no way of knowing what is genuinely GM free — apparently, it’s too confusing.

Loblaws’ argument points to a much broader strategy ...

June 13th, 2001
By Naomi Klein

I’ve never joined a political party, never even been to a political convention. Last election, after being dragged by the hair to the ballot box, I was overcome by a wave of ennui more acute than the pain suffered by my friends who simply ingested their ballots.

Does this mean I’m a no-brain, knee-jerk anarchist, as many a Globe letter writer has claimed? Perhaps. But then why do I find myself agreeing that we need a new left political alliance, maybe even a new party?

What’s clear is that the left as it is currently constituted—a weakened NDP, and an endless series of street protests—is a recipe for fighting like crazy to make things not quite as bad as they would be otherwise. A revolutionary goal for the left would be to actually make things better.

Is the New Politics Initiative the answer? It could be.

First, the basics. The NPI, leaked to the press last week, is not a new party trying to overthrow the NDP and crown Svend Robinson king of the socialists. It’s an idea about what a new party could and should be: more internally democratic, ...

June 6th, 2001
By Naomi Klein

A woman with long brown hair and a cigarette scratched voice has a question. "What does this place look like to you," she asks, with the help of an interpreter. "An ugly ghetto, or something maybe beautiful?"

It was a trick question. We were sitting in a ramshackle squat in one of the least picturesque suburbs of Rome. The walls of the stumpy building were covered in graffiti, the ground was muddy, and all around us were bulky, menacing housing projects. If any of the 20-million tourists who flocked to Rome last year had taken a wrong turn and ended up here, they would have immediately dived for their Fodor’s and fled for somewhere with vaulted ceilings, fountains and frescoes.

But while the remains of one of the most powerful and centralised empires in history are impeccably preserved in downtown Rome, it is here, in the city’s poor outskirts, where I caught a glimpse of a new, living politics. And it is as far away from Roman emperors and Caesar’s armies as you can possibly get.

The squat in question is called Corto Ciccuito, one of Italy’s many "centri sociali." Social ...

May 30th, 2001
By Naomi Klein

When I was 17, I worked after school at an Esprit clothing store in Montreal. It was a pleasant job, mostly involving folding cotton garments into little squares so sharp that their corners could take out your eye.

But, for some reason, corporate headquarters didn’t consider our T-shirt origami to be sufficiently profitable. One day, our calm world was turned upside down by a regional supervisor who swooped in to indoctrinate us in the culture of the Esprit brand—and increase our productivity in the process. "Esprit," she told us, "is like a good friend."

I was skeptical, and I let it be known. Skepticism, I quickly learned, is not considered an asset in the low-wage service sector. Two weeks later, the supervisor fired me for being in possession of that most loathed workplace character trait: "bad attitude."

I guess that was one of my first lessons in why large multinational corporations are not "like a good friend," since good friends, while they may do many horrible and hurtful things, rarely fire you.

So I was interested when, earlier this month, the TBWA/Chiat/Day advertising agency rolled out the new "brand identity" ...