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Naomi Klein
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Naomi Klein (b. May 8, 1970, Montreal, Quebec) is a Canadian journalist, author and activist well known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization.
n was brought up in a secular Jewish family with a history of left-wing activism and social justice work. Her parents used to be Americans, but moved to Canada (specifically Montreal, where there is a significant Jewish community), to resist being drafted to the Vietnam War. Her father, Michael, is a physician and a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility.
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Naomi Klein (b. May 8, 1970, Montreal, Quebec) is a Canadian journalist, author and activist well known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization.
Family
Klein was brought up in a secular Jewish family with a history of left-wing activism and social justice work. Her parents used to be Americans, but moved to Canada (specifically Montreal, where there is a significant Jewish community), to resist being drafted to the Vietnam War. Her father, Michael, is a physician and a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her mother, documentary film-maker Bonnie Sherr Klein, directed and scripted the anti-pornography film Not a Love Story. Her only sibling, Seth, is director of the British Columbia office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Her paternal grandparents were Marxists who began to turn against the Soviet Union after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and had abandoned Communism entirely by 1956. Her grandfather, an artist, was fired for organizing the first strike at Disney.
Klein's husband, Avi Lewis, comes from a similar background. He is a TV presenter and has collaborated on documentaries with her. Her in-laws are the writer and activist Michele Landsberg and politician and diplomat Stephen Lewis, son of David Lewis, the founder of the New Democratic Party. He and his family are more rooted in Toronto than she and hers were in Montreal (her parents have since moved to BC), which is one reason why she has made her home in Canada's largest city.
Early life
Klein spent her teenage years as a mall rat, obsessed by designer logos. As a child and teenager, she found it "very oppressive to have a very public feminist mother" and she rejected politics, instead embracing "full-on consumerism". She credits two crises with changing her outlook. First of all, when she was 17 and preparing for the University of Toronto, her mother had a stroke and became severely disabled. Naomi, along with her father and brother, took care of Bonnie through the period in hospital and at home, making educational sacrifices to do so. That year off stopped her "from being such a brat".
She made it the next year to UofT, when the second event unfolded. The 1989 École Polytechnique massacre of female engineering students proved her wake-up call to feminism.
Klein's writing career started early with contributions to The Varsity, a student newspaper, where she served as editor-in-chief. She dropped out of university to become an intern at the Toronto Globe and Mail, followed by an editorship at This Magazine.
Career in journalism
In 2000, Klein published the book No Logo, which for many became a manifesto of the anti-corporate globalization movement. In it, she attacks brand-oriented consumer culture by describing the operations of large corporations. She also accuses several such corporations of unethically exploiting workers in the world's poorest countries in pursuit of greater profits. In this book, Klein criticized Nike so severely that Nike published a point-by-point response to perceived inaccuracies. No Logo became an international bestseller, selling over one million copies in over 28 languages.
In 2002 Klein published Fences and Windows, a collection of her articles and speeches written on behalf of the anti-globalization movement (all proceeds from the book go to benefit activist organizations through The Fences and Windows Fund). Klein also contributes to The Nation, In These Times, The Globe and Mail, This Magazine, and The Guardian.
Klein has written on various current issues, such as the Iraq War. In a September 2004 article for Harper's Magazine, she argues that, contrary to popular belief, the Bush administration did have a clear plan for post-invasion Iraq, which was to build a completely unconstrained free market economy. She describes plans to allow foreigners to extract wealth from Iraq, and the methods used to achieve those goals. The 2008 film War, Inc. was partially inspired by her article, Baghdad Year Zero.
In 2004, Klein and her husband, Avi Lewis, released a documentary film called The Take about factory workers in Argentina who took over a closed plant and resumed production, operating as a collective. The first African screening was in the Kennedy Road shack settlement in the South African city of Durban, where the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement began.
Klein ranked 11th in an internet poll of the top global intellectuals of 2005, a list of the world's top 100 public intellectuals compiled by the Prospect magazine in conjunction with Foreign Policy magazine. She was the highest ranked woman on the list.
On the 24th February 2009, Klein was awarded the inaugural Warwick Prize for Writing from the University of Warwick.
The Shock Doctrine
Klein's third book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, was published on September 4, 2007, becoming an international and New York Times bestseller translated into 20 languages. The book argues that the free market policies of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics have risen to prominence in countries such as Chile under Pinochet, Russia under Yeltsin and the United States. The book also argues that policy initiatives such as the privatization of Iraq's economy under the Coalition Provisional Authority were pushed through while the citizens of these countries were in shock from disasters or upheavals. It is also claimed that these shocks are in some cases, such as the Falklands war, created with the intention of being able to push through these unpopular reforms in the wake of the crisis.
The Shock Doctrine was also adapted into a short film of the same name, released onto YouTube. The film was directed by Jonás Cuarón, produced and co-written by his father Alfonso Cuarón. The video has been viewed over one million times.
Other activities
Klein once lectured as a Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics.
Klein was the keynote speaker at the Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians (ACJC)'s first National conference.
In the Guardian newspaper, 10 January 2009, in light of the Israeli bombing of Gaza, Klein made the case for a boycott of Israel to bring about the "end of the occupation", in line with the mass boycott movement against South African apartheid.
Criticism
Klein has been criticized by The Economist, which claims Klein ignores the good capitalism does in the world and holds naive or nebulous ideas for alternatives. In response, Klein has complained of a tendency to 'ignore the reporting, attack the author'. Johan Norberg has criticized what he described as flaws in The Shock Doctrine. He pointed out instances in which he believes Klein has distorted history and he criticized the book for what he said was a misleading presentation of Milton Friedman's views and actions. Reviewing the book, Jonathan Chait (senior editor of the The New Republic) criticized Klein for employing "an extremely crude sort of Marxist economicism," ignoring facts that contradicted her thesis, and "pay[ing] shockingly (but, given her premises, unsurprisingly) little attention to right-wing ideas."
Klein argued that Norberg's and Chait's criticism have been largely fraudulent, arguing that 'most of the attacks on The Shock Doctrine involve manufacturing claims, falsely attributing them to me, then handily tearing them down' and complaining that such criticisms have been overly personal. She wrote: 'Again and again, readers of The New Republic are left with the distinct impression that The Shock Doctrine is a work of opinion journalism, rather than a thesis based on research and reporting.'
Norberg has subsequently responded to Klein's defense.
Klein has also been criticised from the left. She was criticized in Z Communications for her portrayal of Peron in her documentary film The Take, which they felt made him appear to be a social democrat. Also, her August 2004 Nation column 'Bring Najaf to New York' was cited by several prominent liberal opinion makers as an example of left minded people making excuses for far right movements. Klein argued that Muqtada Al Sadr's Mahdi Army "represents the overwhelmingly mainstream sentiment in Iraq." She went on to say "Yes, if elected Sadr would try to turn Iraq into a theocracy like Iran, but for now his demands are for direct elections and an end to foreign occupation".
Christopher Hitchens, a former Nation columnist, responded, calling her position on the Iraq War "reactionary" and arguing that Klein, along with Tariq Ali and Michael Moore were "fellow travelers with fascism" (as Ali had called for 'solidarity' with the insurgency and Moore had compared Iraqi insurgents to the Minutemen). Marc Cooper, also a former Nation columnist, attacked the assertion that Al Sadr represented mainstream Iraqi sentiment and that American forces had brought the fight to the holy city of Najaf. He wrote "Klein should know better. All enemies of the U.S. occupation she opposes are not her friends. Or ours. Or those of the Iraqi people. I don’t think that Mullah Al Sadr, in any case, is much desirous of support issuing from secular Jewish feminist-socialists." Norman Geras wrote on his blog, "Klein's willing to cut him [Al Sadr] some slack. He's only a theocrat, after all, who wants to turn Iraq into a theocracy like Iran; he's not of the Republican Party".
Books
- 2000. No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs. ISBN 0312421435
- 2002. Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. ISBN 0312307993
- 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. ISBN 0805079831
Filmography
External links
Media
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- - CBC Television's Hot Type Klein talking about her book No Logo (2000).
- (December 7, 2007), lecture from 2007 book tour.
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Metadata: see Wikipedia:Persondata -->
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