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The
world saw a video last week of Royal Canadian Mounted
Police officers using a Taser against a Polish man in
the Vancouver International Airport in October. The man,
Robert Dziekanski, died soon after the attack. In recent
days, more details have come out about him. It turns out
that the 40-year-old didn’t just die after being
shocked—his life was marked by shock as well.
Dziekanski was a young adult in 1989 when Poland began a
grand experiment called “shock therapy” for the nation.
The promise was that if the communist country accepted a
series of brutal economic measures, the reward would be
a “normal European country” like France or Germany. The
pain would be short, the reward great.
So
Poland’s government eliminated price controls overnight,
slashed subsidies, privatized industries. But for young
workers such as Dziekanski, “normal” never arrived.
Today, roughly 40 percent of young Polish workers are
unemployed. Dziekanski was among them. He had worked as
a typesetter and a miner, but for the past few years he
had been unemployed and had had run-ins with the law.
Like so
many Poles of his generation, Dziekanski went looking
for work in one of those “normal” countries that Poland
was supposed to become but never did. Two million Poles
have joined this mass exodus during the past three years
alone. Dziekanski’s cohorts have gone to work as
bartenders in London, doormen in Dublin, plumbers in
France. Last month, he chose to follow his mother to
British Columbia, which is in a pre-Olympics construction boom.
“After
seven years of waiting, [Dziekanski] arrived to his
utopia, Vancouver,” said the Polish consul general,
Maciej Krych. “Ten hours later, he was dead.”
Much of
the outrage sparked by the video, which was made by
another passenger at the airport, has focused on the
controversial use of Tasers, already implicated in 17
deaths in Canada and many more in the United States.
But what
happened in
Vancouver
was about more than a weapon. It also was about an
increasingly brutal side of the global economy—about the
reality that many victims of various forms of economic
“shock therapy” face at our borders.
Rapid
economic transformations like Poland’s have created
enormous wealth—in new investment opportunities;
currency trading; in leaner, meaner companies able to
comb the globe for the cheapest location to manufacture.
But from Mexico to China to Poland, they also have
created tens of millions of discarded people, the people
who lose their jobs when factories close or lose their
land when export zones open.
Understandably, many of these people often choose to
move: from countryside to city, from country to country.
As Dziekanski appeared to be doing, they go in search of
that elusive “normal.”
But
there isn’t enough normal to go around, or so we are
told. And so, as migrants move, they often are met with
other shocks. A treacherous electrified fence on Spain’s
southern border, or a Taser gun on the US-Mexican
border. Canada, which used to be known around the world
for its openness to refugees, is militarizing its
borders, with the line between immigrant and terrorist
blurring fast.
Dziekanski’s inhuman treatment at the hands of the
Canadian police must be seen in this context. The police
were called when Dziekanski, lost and disoriented, began
shouting in Polish, at one point throwing a chair. Faced
with a foreigner such as Dziekanski, who spoke no
English, why talk when you can shock? It strikes me that
the same brutal, shortcut logic guided Poland’s economic
transition to capitalism: Why take the gradual route,
which would require debate and consent, when “shock
therapy” promised an instant, if painful, cure?
I
realize that I am talking about very different kinds of
shocks here, but they do interconnect in a cycle I call
“the shock doctrine.” First comes the shock of a
national crisis, making countries desperate for any cure
and willing to sacrifice democracy in the process. In
Poland in 1989, that first shock was the sudden end of
communism and the economic meltdown. Then comes the
economic shock therapy, the undemocratic process pushed
through in the window of crisis that jolts an economy
into growth but blasts so many people out of the
picture.
Then, in
far too many cases, there is the third shock, the one
that disciplines and deals with the discarded people:
the desperate, the migrants, those driven mad by the
system.
Each
shock has the potential to kill, some more suddenly than
others.
Klein
is the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of
Disaster Capitalism. |
