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Butz. I looked forward to reading this book immensely, and I was not disappointed. Also I recommend reading: "THE HOAX OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY" by Arthur R.
The research is impeccable, but doesn't intrude itself into your reading. this is more than just a "worthy" book, it's also a good read. It is thought provoking, a little bit shocking - okay, more than a little bit - and you will be very glad that you read it. By which I mean, it doesn't feel as though you are reading a text book. The new introduction extends the thesis to politics, and to Barack Obama's campaign specifically. This is the kind of thing we should occasionally read to keep in touch with our world - and it's more than a should, I want to re-emphasize.
hint: look up "Mein Kampf"). How enlightening.As a thinking socialist concerned with the steady destruction of communal ideals by the rising tide of jack-booted chauvinists like Klein, this reviewer holds her kind of mushy bigotry, which apparently passes for thinking in the modern "Left", responsible for the collapse of a true left-wing in the U.S. In her style, she sprinkles her writing with once-trendy yester-century militarist terms like "resistance," "war," "fighting," "warrior," and "our struggle" (sound familiar, Na***Nazi. But she destroys her message by couching it in an intellectual - or rather anti-intellectual - framework that is a relic of the 1960s New Left, which was not new, and was far more self-aggrandizing than Leftist, and which disintegrated when its thinking, paralleling that of Thomas Aquinas when the Age of Science and the Enlightenment dawned, could not account for the fall of the "workers' paradise" of the Soviet Union and Stalinism, or the persistence of non-material values such as religion in modern society. An appalling book by a clueless fashionista college-dropout who spent her youth demonstrating rather than preparing for a career.
Nuff said. The ills of society, yes, even a socialist society, can best be served by mo and mo logos, not no logos at all, which the Soviets proved harms the poor and the powerless most of all. Klein confesses as much in the last paragraphs of her book, acknowledging the impact of 9/11, and ends with the bewildered whimper that the WTC attacks must represent some kind of sneaky revenge of abstract "patriarchy." In other words, her Enemy in the end has become simply Men. It seems even she is not above grabbing all the money she can. It includes feminist graduates of Vassar and Harvard, "liberal" movie stars and media tycoons, and power-mad over-paid kingpins of academia as much as the "evil corporations" that Klein loves to rail against. It is to be noted, finally, that Klein did not publish this book herself, but contracted with the evil multinational capitalist corporation Random House to publish it for her (not too hypocritical, are we, Naomi)., and that on the reverse title page she stridently defends her "moral right" of attribution to No Logos with the zealotry of a bulldog. There is an internationalized ruling class, but it is not white, or male, or patriarchal, as politically-correct and none-too-introspective Klein easily assumes - but multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and includes gays as much, if not more than, heterosexual men and women. Please, Naomi, learn something about Socialism (Leszek Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism is a good place to start) before you engage in more embarrassing adolescent posturing like No Logos - or stick to ripping tags from jeans and mattresses.Having lived in the Soviet Union for a time, this reviewer can assure the reader that returning to the vibrant media of a West alive with music and advertising is an enormous relief to the dully vacant air-waves, total information vacuum where even a street address was a state secret, and complete absence of consumer-oriented and occasionally-helpful public signs that is the iron rule in control-freak Stalinist countries.
Whining endlessly about the oppression of "insidious capitalism" and the white male conspiracy that allegedly prevented her from finding a job and forced her to live in a garment factory after she "matriculated," her tome is packed with the adolescent vocabulary of a vulgar class-war Marxism that was already outdated and intellectually bankrupt when Lenin desperately attempted to revive it in 1902 by writing "What is to Be Done.", marking the passing of apocalyptic Marxism into dictatorial Communism, with bloody results obvious to anyone who has bothered to read a newspaper in the past fifty years or learned some actual history as opposed to shouting slogans and waving placards in school-yards.In Klein's mythos, the free speech of people who are not exactly like her is "terrorism," while displaying services in the media which people just might wish to know about is "crass commercialism," and defending one's own property from defamation by others is "sponsor interference." Klein repeatedly advocates the kind of petty vandalism of private property, including trashing other people's websites and spray-painting billboards, that spoiled teenagers engage in to impress each other, showing the egocentrism of her outlook, and breezily inviting impressionable readers to acquire criminal records. and persons like Klein responsible for bringing the thinking-man's Marxism into near universal disrepute. Pass this dog up. Used to shouting down disagreement in the lawless environment of today's college class-rooms, she actually celebrates the contemporary decline of American universities and the end of diversity of thought and free speech on modern campuses by publicly-funded politicized gangs by styling herself an "identity warrior" (read "brownshirt thug" or "yes to racism and sexism when it empowers me, but not when it might empower someone else").The shame of it all is that her most basic premise is valid. Logos are indeed intrusive, and advertising is indeed pervasive and perhaps too unregulated, and corporate penetration of public schools should definitely be reversed or eliminated.
The book is a fantastic account of atrocities in the third world led by those in the uncontrolled open markets of beyond free world borders and protected by the corruption of both the governments within many of the third world countries and the WTO. Such as the U.S.
The book defines the reality of these hardships. and its economic slaves of 1900, these third world countries are enduring similar hardships.
The book is daunting when first looked at due to its size and small print. The existing argument, however, is that all countries must go through this stage of economic rise in order to achieve first world status as did all other classless societies in the past.
The next stage is to determine if there is a better way, and if so, how can we as a society facilitate change. However, once picked up, one can not put it back down.
One can not fathom the hardships people must endure who must make the decision (or are forced) to work in such terrible environments.
She is an intelligent, caring, involved human being observing a world gone crazy. When your child HAS TO have the I-pod with the touch screen to be cool, then we have a lot to worry about. To call Klein a lefty is to entirely miss the point of what she is saying.
Oh, but that was kind of the point of her other book. Klein explores these and other issues with her usual intelligence and charm. That we are creating robots of our children and moving all our production overseas should be alarming to all Americans.
Is still better than anything I've read since her best book, The Shock Doctrine. Even better, get the western multi-nationals out completely, just nationalize their natural resources back and let them decide their own destiny. thank goodness that someone out there is talking about them
She is not an ideologue. As for the guy talking about alternatives for children making soccer balls in Pakistan in one review, perhaps he should consider the alternative of just paying them a living wage.
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