by Naomi Klein
Many Lebanese citizens, however, were distinctly less cooperative. Despite the fact that a lot of their homes still lay in ruins, thousands participated in a general strike, organized by a coalition of unions and political parties, including the Islamist party Hezbollah. The demonstrators insisted that if receiving reconstruction funds meant raising the cost of living for a war-ravaged people, it hardly deserved to be called aid. So while Siniora was reassuring donors in Paris, strikes and road blockades brought the country to a halt—the first national revolt specifically targeting postwar disaster capitalism. Demonstrators also staged a sit-in, which went on for two months, turning downtown Beirut into a cross between a tent city and a street carnival. Most reporters characterized these events as shows of strength by Hezbollah, but Mohamad Bazzi, the Middle East bureau chief for New York’s Newsday, said that this interpretation missed their true significance: “The biggest motivator driving many of those camped out in downtown isn’t Iran or Syria, or Sunni versus Shiite. It’s the economic inequality that has haunted Lebanese Shiites for decades. It’s a poor and working-class people’s revolt.”38
The location of the sit-in provided the most eloquent explanation for why Lebanon was proving so shock resistant. The protest was in the part of downtown Beirut that residents refer to as Solidere, after the private development company that built and owns almost everything in its confines. Solidere is the result of Lebanon’s last reconstruction effort. In the early nineties, after the fifteen-year civil war, the country was shattered and the state was in debt, with no money to rebuild. The billionaire businessman (and later prime minister) Rafiq Hariri made a proposal: give him the land rights to the entire downtown core and let him and his new real estate company, Solidere, turn it into the “Singapore of the Middle East.” Hariri, who was killed in a car bombing in February 2005, bulldozed almost all the standing structures, turning the city into a blank slate. Marinas, luxurious condominiums (some with elevators for limousines) and lavish shopping malls replaced the ancient souks.39 Almost everything in the business district—buildings, plazas, security forces—is owned by Solidere.
To the outside world, Solidere was the shining symbol of Lebanon’s postwar rebirth, but for many Lebanese it had always been a kind of holograph. Outside the ultramodern downtown core, much of Beirut lacked basic infrastructure, from electricity to public transit, and the bullet holes inflicted during the civil war were never repaired on the facades of many buildings. It was in those neglected slums surrounding the gleaming center that Hezbollah built its loyal base, rigging up generators and transmitters, organizing trash removal, providing security—becoming the much vilified “state within a state.” When the residents of the run-down suburbs ventured into the Solidere enclave, they were often thrown out by Hariri’s private security guards; their presence frightened the tourists.
Raida Hatoum, a social justice activist in Beirut, told me that when Solidere began its reconstruction, “people were so happy the war was over and the streets were being rebuilt. By the time we became aware that the streets had been sold, that they were privately owned, it was too late. We didn’t know that the money was a loan and we’d have to pay it back later.” That rude awakening of finding out that the least advantaged people had been stuck with the bill for a makeover that benefited only a small elite has made the Lebanese experts in the mechanics of disaster capitalism. It is this experience that helped keep the country oriented and organized after the 2006 war. By choosing to hold their mass sit-in inside the Solidere bubble, with Palestinian refugees camped outside the Virgin megastore and high-end latte joints (“If I ate a sandwich here, I’d be broke for a week,” one protester remarked), the demonstrators were sending a clear message. They did not want another reconstruction of Solidere-style bubbles and rotting suburbs—of fortressed green zones and raging red zones—but a reconstruction for the entire country. “How can we still accept this government that steals?” one demonstrator asked. “This government that built this downtown and accumulated this huge debt? Who’s going to pay for it? I have to pay for it, and my son is going to pay for it after me.”40
Lebanon’s shock resistance went beyond protest. It was also expressed through a far-reaching parallel reconstruction effort. Within days of the cease-fire, Hezbollah’s neighborhood committees had visited many of the homes hit by the air attacks, assessed the damage and were already handing out $12,000 in cash to displaced families to cover a year’s worth of rent and furnishings. As the independent journalists Ana Nogueira and Saseen Kawzally observed from Beirut, “That is six times the dollar amount that survivors of Hurricane Katrina received from FEMA.” And in what would have been music to the ears of Katrina survivors, the Hezbollah leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, promised the country in a televised address, “You won’t need to ask a favor of anyone, queue up anywhere.” Hezbollah’s version of aid did not filter through the government or foreign NGOs. It did not go to build five-star hotels, as in Kabul, or Olympic swimming pools for police trainers, as in Iraq. Instead, Hezbollah did what Renuka, the Sri Lankan tsunami survivor, told me she wished someone would do for her family: put the help in their hands. Hezbollah also included community members in the reconstruction—it hired local construction crews (working in exchange for the scrap metal they collected), mobilized fifteen hundred engineers and organized teams of volunteers. All that help meant that a week after the bombing stopped, the reconstruction was already well under way.41
In the U.S. press, these initiatives were almost universally derided as bribery or clientelism—Hezbollah’s attempt to purchase popular support after it had provoked the attack from which the country was reeling (David Frum even suggested that the bills Hezbollah was handing out were counterfeit).42 There is no question that Hezbollah is engaged in politics as well as charity, and that Iranian funds made Hezbollah’s generosity possible. Equally important to its efficiency, however, was Hezbollah’s status as a local, indigenous organization, one that rose up from the neighborhoods being rebuilt. Unlike the alien corporate reconstruction agencies imposing their designs from far-off bureaucracies via imported management, private security and translators, Hezbollah could act fast because it knew every back alley and every jury-rigged transmitter, as well as who could be trusted to get the work done. If the residents of Lebanon were grateful for the results, it was also because they knew the alternative. The alternative was Solidere.
We do not always respond to shocks with regression. Sometimes, in the face of crisis, we grow up—fast. This impulse was in powerful evidence in Spain, on March 11, 2004, when ten bombs ripped through commuter trains and rail stations in Madrid, killing nearly two hundred people. President José María Aznar immediately went on television and told Spaniards to blame the Basque separatists and to give him their support for the war in Iraq. “No negotiation is possible or desirable with these assassins who so many times have sown death all around Spain. Only with firmness can we end the attacks,” he said.43
Spaniards reacted badly to that kind of talk. “We are still hearing the echoes of Franco,” said José Antonio Martines Soler, a prominent Madrid newspaper editor who had been persecuted under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. “In every act, in every gesture, in every sentence, Aznar told the people he was right, that he was the owner of the truth and those who disagreed with him were his enemies.”44 In other words, the very same qualities that Americans identified as “strong leadership” in their president after September 11 were, in Spain, regarded as ominous signs of a rising fascism. The country was three days away from national elections, and, remembering a time when fear governed politics, voters defeated Aznar and chose a party that would pull troops out of Iraq. As in Lebanon, it was the collective memory of past shocks that made Spain resistant to the new ones.
All shock therapists are intent on the erasure of memory. Ewen Cameron was convinced that he needed to wipe out the minds of his patients before he could rebuild them. The U.S. occupiers of Iraq felt no need to stop the looting
of Iraq’s museums and libraries, thinking it might make their jobs easier. But like Cameron’s former patient Gail Kastner, with her intricate architecture of papers, books and lists, recollections can be rebuilt, new narratives can be created. Memory, both individual and collective, turns out to be the greatest shock absorber of all.
Despite all the successful attempts to exploit the 2004 tsunami, memory also proved to be an effective tool of resistance in some areas where it struck, particularly in Thailand. Dozens of coastal villages were flattened by the wave, but unlike in Sri Lanka, many Thai settlements were successfully rebuilt within months. The difference did not come from the government. Thailand’s politicians were just as eager as those elsewhere to use the storm as an excuse to evict fishing people and hand over land tenure to large resorts. Yet what set Thailand apart was that villagers approached all government promises with intense skepticism and refused to wait patiently in camps for an official reconstruction plan. Instead, within weeks, hundreds of villagers engaged in what they called land “reinvasions.” They marched past the armed guards on the payroll of developers, tools in hand, and began marking off the sites where their old houses had been. In some cases, reconstruction began immediately. “I am willing to bet my life on this land, because it is ours,” said Ratree Kongwatmai, who lost most of her family in the tsunami.45
The most daring reinvasions were performed by Thailand’s indigenous fishing peoples called the Moken, or “sea gypsies.” After centuries of disenfranchisement, the Moken had no illusions that a benevolent state would give them a decent piece of land in exchange for the coastal properties that had been seized. So, in one dramatic case, the residents of the Ban Tung Wah Village in the Phang Nga province “gathered themselves together and marched right back home, where they encircled their wrecked village with rope, in a symbolic gesture to mark their land ownership,” explained a report by a Thai NGO. “With the entire community camping out there, it became difficult for the authorities to chase them away, especially given the intense media attention being focused on tsunami rehabilitation.” In the end, the villagers negotiated a deal with the government to give up part of their oceanfront property in exchange for legal security on the rest of their ancestral land. Today, the rebuilt village is a showcase of Moken culture, complete with museum, community center, school and market. “Now, officials from the sub-district come to Ban Tung Wah to learn about ‘people-managed tsunami rehabilitation’ while researchers and university students turn up there by the bus-full to study ‘indigenous people’s wisdom.’”46
All along the Thai coast where the tsunami hit, this kind of direct-action reconstruction is the norm. The key to their success, community leaders say, is that “people negotiate for their land rights from a position of being in occupation”; some have dubbed the practice “negotiating with your hands.”47 Thailand’s survivors have also insisted on a different kind of aid—rather than settling for handouts, they have demanded the tools to carry out their own reconstruction. Dozens of Thai architecture students and professors, for example, volunteered to help community members design their new houses and draw their own rebuilding plans; master boat builders trained villagers to make their own, more sophisticated fishing vessels. The results are communities stronger than they were before the wave. The houses on stilts built by Thai villagers in Ban Tung Wah and Baan Nairai are beautiful and sturdy; they are also cheaper, larger and cooler than the sweltering prefab cubicles on offer there from foreign contractors. A manifesto drafted by a coalition of Thai tsunami survivor communities explains the philosophy: “The rebuilding work should be done by local communities themselves, as much as possible. Keep contractors out, let communities take responsibility for their own housing.”48
A year after Katrina hit, a remarkable exchange took place in Thailand between the leaders of that country’s grassroots reconstruction effort and a small delegation of hurricane survivors from New Orleans. The visitors from the United States toured several rebuilt Thai villages and were taken aback by the speed with which rehabilitation had become a reality. “In New Orleans, we’re waiting around on the government to do things for us, but here you all are doing by yourselves,” said Endesha Juakali, founder of the “survivors’ village” in New Orleans. “When we go back,” he pledged, “your model is our new goal.”49
After the community leaders from New Orleans returned home, there was indeed a wave of direct action in the city. Juakali, whose own neighborhood was still in ruins, organized teams of local contractors and volunteers to gut the flood-damaged interiors in every house on the block; then they moved on to the next one. He said that his trip to the tsunami region gave him “a good perspective on…how the people of New Orleans are going to have to put FEMA aside and the city and state government aside and begin to say, ‘What can we do right now to start to bring our neighborhoods back in spite of the government, not because of it?’” Another veteran of the Asia trip, Viola Washington, also returned to her New Orleans neighborhood, Gentilly, with an entirely new attitude. She “broke down a map of Gentilly into sections, organized representative committees for each section and appointed leaders who meet to discuss rebuilding needs.” She explained that “as we fight the government to get our money we don’t want to be doing nothing to try and get ourselves back.”50
There was still more direct action in New Orleans. In February 2007, groups of residents who had lived in the public housing projects that the Bush administration was planning to demolish began “reinvading” their old homes and taking up residence. Volunteers helped clean out apartments and raised money to buy generators and solar panels. “My home is my castle, and I’m taking it back,” announced Gloria Williams, a resident of the housing project C. J. Peete. The reinvasion turned into a block party complete with a New Orleans brass band.51 There was much to celebrate: at least for now, this one community had escaped the great cultural bulldozer that calls itself reconstruction.
Uniting all these examples of people rebuilding for themselves is a common theme: participants say they are not just repairing buildings but healing themselves. It makes perfect sense. The universal experience of living through a great shock is the feeling of being completely powerless: in the face of awesome forces, parents lose the ability to save their children, spouses are separated, homes—places of protection—become death traps. The best way to recover from helplessness turns out to be helping—having the right to be part of a communal recovery. “Reopening our school says this is a very special community, tied together by more than location but by spirituality, by bloodlines and by a desire to come home,” said the assistant principal of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.52
Such people’s reconstruction efforts represent the antithesis of the disaster capitalism complex’s ethos, with its perpetual quest for clean sheets and blank slates on which to build model states. Like Latin America’s farm and factory co-ops, they are inherently improvisational, making do with whoever is left behind and whatever rusty tools have not been swept away, broken or stolen. Unlike the fantasy of the Rapture, the apocalyptic erasure that allows the ethereal escape of true believers, local people’s renewal movements begin from the premise that there is no escape from the substantial messes we have created and that there has already been enough erasure—of history, of culture, of memory. These are movements that do not seek to start from scratch but rather from scrap, from the rubble that is all around. As the corporatist crusade continues its violent decline, turning up the shock dial to blast through the mounting resistance it encounters, these projects point a way forward between fundamentalisms. Radical only in their intense practicality, rooted in the communities where they live, these men and women see themselves as mere repair people, taking what’s there and fixing it, reinforcing it, making it better and more equal. Most of all, they are building in resilience—for when the next shock hits.
NOTES
N.B.: Quotations and facts that come from interview
s with the author are generally not cited in the notes.
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Spanish to English were done by Shana Yael Shubs.
All dollar amounts in the book are in U.S. currency.
In some cases where there are sources for multiple facts in a paragraph, one superscript note number appears at the end of the paragraph rather than a number after each individual fact. In the notes section here, the sources are listed in the order in which the facts appear in the paragraph.
If there is a source for a footnote, it is cited in the numbered endnote most closely following the asterisk in the text; such sources are marked FOOTNOTE.
Web addresses for news articles available online are not included because of the transient nature of Web architecture. In cases where a document is available exclusively online, the home page where it appears is cited, not the longer URL for the specific text, once again because links change frequently.
Many original documents cited in the text, as well as Web links and an extensive bibliography and filmography, can be found at www.naomiklein.org.
INTRODUCTION
Blank Is Beautiful: Three Decades of Erasing and Remaking the World
1. Bud Edney, “Appendix A: Thoughts on Rapid Dominance,” in Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (Washington, DC: NDU Press Book, 1996), 110.
2. John Harwood, “Washington Wire: A Special Weekly Report from The Wall Street Journal’s Capital Bureau,” Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2005.
