Writing as Activism

I spoke to writer Naomi Klein about being one of the representatives of an unnamed movement in an unnamed war.

Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo, the book which went fishing in the dirty waters of the planet’s multinational corporations, and which chronicled localised responses from around the world to the globalisation of capital. She has also published Fences and Windows, a collection of her columns and essay written during 2001 from the frontline of the anti-globalisation movement.

In her work as a writer-activist, Klein moves all around the world, a witness to the violence and oppression needed to keep the neoliberal system in place, and also to the sparks of human possibility that offer more compassionate models of economic production. From Argentina to Iraq to South Africa to her home country of Canada, she is chronicling a global war that might not officially exist but which leaves millions dead each year from Aids and other treatable and preventable diseases, from malnutrition, from economic warfare, from corporate-sponsored state brutality.

I ask Klein if she ever gets overwhelmed in the face of all this. For although her work essentially entails writing about hope, the landscape in which that hope glimmers with such beauty and possibility, is one that is grey and monolithic and violent and profoundly inhuman. And when you’re presented to the world as a spokesperson for a movement that doesn’t actually exist in any formalised traditional sense, it must sometimes become a lot to deal with on a purely human level.

While I’m speaking to her in Toronto, she is on deadline for two columns. I offer to reschedule the interview but she insists that it’s fine to do it now, and when she does finally end the conversation, it’s because she’s being harassed by her editor. She clearly has vast personal resources, and, where many would sound pressurised, she is lucid, generous and articulate. And just a hint of tired. So how does she survive?

“I’m not an overwhelmingly optimistic person. Maybe…I know it’s a cliché but the other option is just not an option, because it’s total despair, really.” I suggest to Klein that even if she feels that despair at times, it would be out of place in her writing, which is really about the methods being used by communities to keep that despair at bay.

“I think it’s important,” responds Klein, “to see the weakness that is embedded in all displays of extreme force. On some level, all displays of extreme force are recognition of weakness, in that the weaker and more vulnerable a regime feels, the more they will turn to brutality. And that’s true of the United States and what’s happening in Guantanamo Bay. It was their vulnerability after September 11 that made them turn to these tactics that nobody’s allowed to call a Gulag.”

Klein was in Iraq recently when it became clear that the American forces had completely lost the support of the Shiite South, who had originally been with them – or at least were taking a wait-and-see attitude. “That’s when the torture and the mass rounding-up of people started to increase. And it has continued to increase, the more the occupiers themselves are in their own kind of prison.” Now prisoners of the green zone, the Americans are building an extension onto Abu Ghraib, says Klein, because they literally can’t go into the cities and towns and talk to people.

“So they round them up and bring them to prisons and interrogate them en masse. That’s intelligence gathering in Iraq. And it’s not an exaggeration. So when you’re confronted with that level of inhumanity and horror, it is really easy to just be overwhelmed by the force of that. Because there’s no doubt that it’s an awesome military force and one that can make you feel very, very helpless. But there is a direct relationship between their feeling of weakness and their use of force. It’s an obvious link.”

Those of us without amnesia will remember how in South Africa at the end of the 1980s, the apartheid state went into psychotic overdrive as its wall’s finally started falling with the trumpets of insurgency. Says Klein, “I don’t think that one responds to that with shiny, happy hope. That’s slightly inappropriate.” And she laughs. “But I do think it’s important not to be blind to the weakness inherent in those horrific displays of force.”

Then I ask her a question that is not so much a question as an entire branch of philosophy. There is an undercurrent in our conversation in which we share a certain moral position. It is something which, to the two of us, and to billions of other people, is blindingly self-evident. It is based on simple ideas such as people being more important than profits, cultures being more important than branding, communities being more important than companies. Simple things such as universal human rights. But to millions of other people – especially it would seem, a large proportion of people who vote in elections in the West – these things are far from obvious. In fact, in many camps these concepts are reconstituted as leftist lies and socialist propaganda.

“I don’t believe it’s a question of good and evil,” says Klein. “But I do think that people are prisoners of their ideology, certainly of fundamentalist ideology. And I think that decisions are made on that basis, and are then just fiercely defended. And the feelings of threat when confronted with evidence that the ideology is wrong is, is…I think that is evil. Whether it is defending policies in Iraq or defending policies on Aids. I mean we can’t really mince words about the numbers of people dead we’re talking about here.

“But I think ideology is inherently blinding and that’s why fundamentalism of all kinds is deeply dangerous, because there’s nothing more dangerous than a fundamentalist scorned. And it’s precisely because people don’t think of themselves as bad, but think of themselves as good, that the defensiveness kicks in. If you think about Bush, it’s almost as if the more the evidence mounts of these atrocities, whether in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, the more his claims to righteousness increase.

“There’s really a direct correlation. And I don’t think it’s just Orwellian, in the sense of deliberately saying the opposite of what is true. I think the worse things get, the more ferocious the need becomes to believe in one’s righteousness.”