Naomi Klein (born May 8, 1970,
Montreal, Quebec) is a
Canadian journalist,
author and
activist known for her political analyses and
criticism of corporate globalization.
Family
Naomi Klein was brought up in a
Jewish family with a history of
left-wing activism. Her parents moved to
Montreal,
Canada from the USA in 1967 as
war resisters to the
Vietnam War.
Her mother, documentary
film-maker Bonnie Sherr Klein, is best known for her
anti-pornography film
Not a Love Story.
Her father, Michael Klein, is a physician and a member of
Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her brother Seth Klein is director of the
British Columbia office of the
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Her paternal grandparents were communists who began to turn against the
Soviet Union after the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and had abandoned
communism by 1956. In 1942 her grandfather Phil Klein, an animator at
Disney, was fired as an
agitator after the
Disney animators' strike,
and went to work at a shipyard instead. Klein's father grew up surrounded by ideas of social justice and racial equality, but found it "difficult and frightening to be the child of Communists", a so-called
red diaper baby.
Klein's husband,
Avi Lewis, comes from a similar leftist background. He is a TV journalist and documentary filmmaker. His parents are the writer and activist
Michele Landsberg and politician and diplomat
Stephen Lewis, son of
David Lewis, one of the founders of the Canadian
New Democratic Party, son in turn of
Moishe Lewis, born Losz, a Jewish labour activist of "
the Bund" who left
Eastern Europe for Canada in 1921.
Klein and her husband live in
Toronto.
Early life
Klein spent her teenage years as a
mall rat, obsessed with 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 the
University of Toronto, 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 with contributions to
The Varsity, a student newspaper, where she served as editor-in-chief. After her third year at the U of T, she dropped out of university to take a job at the
Toronto Globe and Mail, followed by an editorship at
This Magazine, the Canadian equivalent of the American magazine,
The Nation.
Career in journalism
No Logo
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.
became an international bestseller, selling over one million copies in over 28 languages.
Fences and Windows
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.
Iraq war criticism
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.
Klein's August 2004 Nation column "Bring Najaf to New York" 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".
, 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.
Cooper wrote that "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."
, an advocate of the Iraq invasion, argued that Klein,
Tariq Ali, and
Michael Moore were "fellow travelers with
fascism."
The Take
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 was criticized in
Z Communications for her portrayal of
Peron in
The Take, which they felt made him appear to be a social democrat.
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 (specifically, the privatization of the
New Orleans Public Schools after
Hurricane Katrina). 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 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.
, Tom Redburn, Robert Cole, and
Jonathan Chait have criticized
The Shock Doctrine. Norberg argued that she "confuses
libertarianism with the quite different concepts of
corporatism and
neoconservatism" and accused Klein of "defaming"
Milton Friedman with
straw man arguments and
half-truths regarding Friedman's stances on
corporate welfare,
Augusto Pinochet, the
War in Iraq.
Redburn wrote in
The New York Times: "she essentially accuses Friedman of being the godfather of a Mafia-like gang ... There’s a measure of truth about the dark side of globalization ... but [corporatism] is a lot to lay on poor Milton."
He claimed that Klein incorrectly groups neoconservatism with
neoliberals like
Bill Clinton as part of a single ideology."
In
The Times (London), Cole, while characterizing
The Shock Doctrine as "lucidly written and comprehensively researched" also criticizes it as "lean[ing] heavily on partisan contributions from the cuttings library and the blogosphere." He continues, "...even the most credulous must question [her] parallels between the sadistic electro-shock experiments [...] and attempts to rebuild Eastern Bloc societies after the implosion of Soviet-style command economies."
, senior editor of the
The New Republic, criticized Klein for employing "an extremely crude sort of Marxist economicism [sic]," ignoring facts that contradicted her thesis, and "pay[ing] shockingly (but, given her premises, unsurprisingly) little attention to right-wing ideas."
Klein has responded to criticism from those she called "free-market ideologues,"
by charging that
they make straw man misrepresentations about her positions and claiming that
their criticisms have been overly personal. She also accused: "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."
The publication of
The Shock Doctrine increased Klein's prominence, with the
New Yorker judging her "the most visible and influential figure on the American left—what
Howard Zinn and
Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago." On February 24, 2009, the book was awarded the inaugural
Warwick Prize for Writing from the
University of Warwick in England. The prize carried a cash award of £50,000.
Criticism of Israeli policies
In March 2008 Klein was the keynote speaker at the first national conference of the
Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians.
In light of the
Gaza War in January 2009, Klein made the case for the
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign to boycott
Israel, arguing that "the best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa."
In summer 2009, on the occasion of the publication of the
Hebrew translation of her book
The Shock Doctrine, Klein went to Israel and the
West Bank and
Gaza, combining the promotion of her book and the BDS campaign. In an interview to the Israeli newspaper
Ha'aretz she emphasized, that it is important to her "not to boycott Israelis but rather to boycott the normalization of Israel and the conflict."
In a speech in
Ramallah on the 27th of June she apologized to the
Palestinians for not joining the BDS campaign earlier.
Her remarks, particularly that "[Some Jews] even think we get one get-away-with-genocide-free-card" were characterized in the
Jerusalem Post as "violent" and "unethical," and as the "most perverse of aspersions on Jews, an age-old stereotype of Jews as intrinsically evil and malicious."
Klein was also prominent as a spokesperson for the protest against the
spotlight on Tel Aviv at the
2009 Toronto International Film Festival, a spotlight that Klein claimed was a very selective and misleading portrait of Israel.
Other activities
Klein once lectured as a Miliband Fellow at the
London School of Economics.
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.
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
Filmography
