Naomi Klein appeared on Democracy NOW! this morning to discuss her article Baghdad Year Zero appearing in Harper’s Magazine. She also discussed the New York City premiere at the Film Forum on Wednesday night of The Take, a documentary by Klein and journalist Avi Lewis, which follows the progress of workers who have reclaimed their factories and jobs since the collapse of Argentina’s economy in 2001. The workers have continued to receive overwhelmingly positive community support for their direct democracy takeovers from owners who’d received millions in corporate tax handouts over the years only to take the money and run.
Baghdad Year Zero is a stunning indictment of the neoconservative’s idealised and unrealistic vision for post-Saddam Iraq and the Bush administration’s failure to predict the intensity of and continuing disregard for the reasoning behind the increasingly violent reaction to the attempted implementation of this shock and awe economic plan.
h pointed to an article scrawled by Billy Kristol last May, Of Mice and Men, in which he called for sites where Americans are attacked to be declared a combat zone and anyone celebrating there be subject to attack. Don Imus’s sidekick this morning evoked the models of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as solutions.
We illegally invade a country that posed no imminent threat. We then attempt to steal its assets out from under its people. When this systematic slavery is resisted the revolt should be terminated by the most violent means in our arsenal?
Will it take another Nagasaki before we shut this gov’t down? Or even worse, would we take that sitting down as well?