No Is Not Enough

by Naomi Klein

  This insouciance is representative of an extremely disturbing trend. In an age of ever-widening income inequality, a significant cohort of our elites are walling themselves off not just physically but also psychologically, mentally detaching themselves from the collective fate of the rest of humanity. This secessionism from the human species (if only in their minds) liberates them not only to shrug off the urgent need for climate action but also to devise ever more predatory ways to profit from current and future disasters and instability.

  What we are hurtling toward is the future I glimpsed in New Orleans and Baghdad all those years ago. A world demarcated into Green Zones and Red Zones and black sites for whoever doesn’t cooperate. And it’s headed toward a Blackwater-style economy in which private players profit from building the walls, from putting the population under surveillance, from private security and privatized checkpoints.

  A World of Green Zones and Red Zones

  This is the way our world is being carved up at an alarming rate. Europe, Australia, and North America are erecting increasingly elaborate (and privatized) border fortresses to seal themselves off from people fleeing for their lives. Fleeing, quite often, as a direct result of forces unleashed primarily by those fortressed continents, whether predatory trade deals, wars, or ecological disasters intensified by climate change.

  Hands are wrung about the “migrant crisis”—but not nearly so much about the crises driving the migrations. Since 2014, an estimated thirteen thousand people have drowned in the Mediterranean trying to reach European shores. For those who make it, safety is far from assured. The massive migrant camp in Calais, France, was nicknamed “the jungle”—an echo of the way Katrina’s abandoned people were categorized as “animals.” In late 2016, just before Trump was elected, the Calais camp was bulldozed.

  But it’s the Australian government that has gone the furthest in treating human desperation as a contagion. For five consecutive years since 2012 migrant boats headed for Australia’s coastline have been systematically intercepted at sea and their occupants flown to remote detention camps on the islands of Nauru and Manus. Numerous reports have described the conditions in the camps as tantamount to torture. But the government shrugs. After all, they don’t run the camps—private, for-profit contractors do (of course).

  Conditions are so degraded on Nauru that in one week in 2016, two refugees set themselves on fire in an attempt to awaken the world to their plight. It hasn’t worked. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull continues to refuse demands coming from many Australians to welcome the refugees into their vast country. “We cannot be misty-eyed about this,” he says, asserting that Australians “have to be very clear and determined in our national purpose.”

  Nauru, incidentally, is one of the Pacific islands vulnerable to sea-level rise. Its residents, after seeing their home turned into a prison for people fleeing war in places such as Somalia and Afghanistan, will quite possibly be forced to become migrants themselves. It’s another glimpse into an already-here future: tomorrow’s climate refugees recruited into service as today’s prison guards.

  Jets, Drones, and Boats

  The irony is particularly acute because many of the conflicts driving migration today have already been exacerbated by climate change. For instance, before civil war broke out in Syria, the country faced its deepest drought on record—roughly 1.5 million people were internally displaced as a result. A great many displaced farmers moved to the border city of Daraa, which happens to be where the Syrian uprising broke out in 2011. Drought was not the only factor in bringing tensions to a head, but many analysts, including former secretary of state John Kerry, are convinced it was a key contributor.

  In fact, if we chart the locations of the most intense conflict spots in the world right now—from the bloodiest battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq—what becomes clear is that these also happen to be some of the hottest and driest places on earth. The Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has mapped the targets of Western drone strikes and found an “astounding coincidence.” The strikes are intensely concentrated in regions with an average of just 200 millimeters (7.8 inches) of rainfall per year—so little that even slight climate disruption can push them into drought. In other words, we are bombing the driest places on the planet, which also happen to be the most destabilized.

  A frank explanation for this was provided in a US military report published by the Center for Naval Analyses a decade ago: “The Middle East has always been associated with two natural resources, oil (because of its abundance) and water (because of its scarcity).” When it comes to oil, water, and war in the Middle East, certain patterns have become clear over time. First, Western fighter jets follow that abundance of oil in the region, setting off spirals of violence and destabilization. Next come the Western drones, closely tracking water scarcity as drought and conflict mix together. And just as bombs follow oil, and drones follow drought—so, now, boats follow both. Boats filled with refugees fleeing homes ravaged by war and drought in the driest parts of the planet.

  And the same capacity to discount the humanity of the “other,” which justifies civilian deaths and casualties from bombs and drones, is now being trained on the people in the boats (or arriving on buses or on foot)—casting their need for security as a threat, their desperate flight as some sort of invading army.

  The dramatic rise in right-wing nationalism, anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and straight-up white supremacy over the past decade cannot be pried apart from this maelstrom—from the jets and the drones, the boats and walls. The only way to justify such untenable levels of inequality is to double down on theories of racial hierarchy that tell a story about how the people being locked out of the global Green Zone deserve their fate, whether it’s Trump casting Mexicans as rapists and “bad hombres,” and Syrian refugees as closet terrorists, or prominent Conservative Canadian politician Kellie Leitch proposing that immigrants be screened for “Canadian values,” or successive Australian prime ministers justifying sinister island detention camps as a “humanitarian” alternative to death at sea.

  This is what global destabilization looks like in societies that have never redressed their foundational crimes—countries that have insisted slavery and Indigenous land theft were just glitches in otherwise proud histories. After all, there is little more Green Zone/Red Zone than the economy of the slave plantation—of cotillions in the master’s house steps away from torture in the fields, all of it taking place on the violently stolen Indigenous land on which North America’s wealth was built.

  What is becoming clear is that the same theories of racial hierarchy that justified those violent thefts in the name of building the industrial age are visibly resurfacing as the system of wealth and comfort they constructed starts to unravel on multiple fronts simultaneously.

  Trump is just one early and vicious manifestation of that unraveling. He is not alone. He won’t be the last.

  A Crisis of Imagination

  Searching for a word to describe the huge discrepancies in privileges and safety between those in Iraq’s Green and Red zones, journalists often landed on “sci-fi.” And of course, it was. The walled city where the wealthy few live in relative luxury while the masses outside war with one another for survival is pretty much the default premise of every dystopian sci-fi movie that gets made these days, from The Hunger Games, with the decadent Capitol versus the desperate colonies, to Elysium, with its spa-like elite space station hovering above a sprawling and lethal favela. It’s a vision deeply enmeshed with the dominant Western religions, with their grand narratives of great floods washing the world clean, with only a chosen few selected to begin again. It’s the story of the great fires that sweep in, burning up the unbelievers and taking the righteous to a gated city in the sky. We have collectively imagined this extreme winners-and-losers ending for our species so many times that one of our most pressing tasks is learning to imagine other possible ends to the human story, ones in which we come toge
ther in crisis rather than split apart, take down borders rather than erect more of them.

  Because we all pretty much know where the road we are on is leading. It leads to a world of Katrinas, a world that confirms our most catastrophic nightmares. Though there is a thriving subculture of utopian sci-fi, the current crops of mainstream dystopian books and films imagine and reimagine that same Green Zone/Red Zone future over and over again. But the point of dystopian art is not to act as a temporal GPS, showing us where we are inevitably headed. The point is to warn us, to wake us—so that, seeing where this perilous road leads, we can decide to swerve.

  “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” So said Thomas Paine many years ago, neatly summarizing the dream of escaping the past that is at the heart of both the colonial project and the American Dream. The truth, however, is that we do not have this godlike power of reinvention, nor did we ever. We must live with the messes and mistakes we have made, as well as within the limits of what our planet can sustain.

  But we do have it in our power to change ourselves, to attempt to right past wrongs, and to repair our relationships with one another and with the planet we share. It’s this work that is the bedrock of shock resistance.

  PART IV

  HOW THINGS COULD GET BETTER

  She’s on the horizon…I go two steps, she moves two steps away.

  I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead.

  No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her.

  What good is utopia? That’s what: it’s good for walking.

  —EDUARDO GALEANO

  Walking Words, 1995

  CHAPTER TEN

  WHEN THE SHOCK DOCTRINE BACKFIRES

  When I was in my late teens, my mother had a debilitating series of strokes, which turned out to have been caused by a brain tumor. The first stroke came as a complete shock—she was younger than I am now, physically active and professionally driven. One minute she was biking, the next she was in a neurological ICU, incapable of moving or of breathing without a respirator.

  Up until my mother’s stroke, I had been a pretty difficult teenager—I was withdrawn from my parents, wild with my friends, serially dishonest. I did well at school for the most part, my one saving grace, but home life was strained or worse.

  In the instant that my mother’s life changed forever, I did too. I discovered I knew how to be helpful. Affectionate (imagine). I grew up overnight. After brain surgery, she gradually recovered some, though far from all, of her mobility. Watching her adapt to a different life as a disabled person, I learned a lot about the power of humans to find new reserves of strength.

  It is true that people can regress during times of crisis. I have seen it many times. In a shocked state, with our understanding of the world badly shaken, a great many of us can become childlike and passive, and overly trusting of people who are only too happy to abuse that trust. But I also know, from my own family’s navigation of a shocking event, that there can be the inverse response as well. We can evolve and grow up in a crisis, and set aside all kinds of bullshit—fast.

  Resistance, Memory, and the Limits to No

  This is true for whole societies as well. Faced with a shared trauma, or a common threat, communities can come together in defiant acts of sanity and maturity. It has happened before, and the early signs are good that it might be happening again.

  The Trump administration is coming after huge sectors of the population at once: tens of millions of people impacted by proposed budget cuts, civil rights activists, artists, Indigenous tribes, immigrants, climate scientists…Their military belligerence and environmental arson are attacks that reach far outside US borders to wage war on global stability and planetary habitability. It’s clear that, like many shock therapists before them, Trump and his gang are betting that this all-at-once strategy will overwhelm their adversaries, sending them scrambling in all directions and ultimately causing them to give up out of sheer exhaustion or a sense of futility.

  This blitzkrieg strategy, though it has often worked in the past, is actually quite high-risk. The danger of starting fights on so many fronts is that if it doesn’t succeed in demoralizing your opponents, it could very well unite them.

  On the day Trump signed the permit approving the Keystone XL oil pipeline, Ponca Nation member Mekasi Camp Horinek shared a version of this theory with reporter Alleen Brown:

  I want to say thank you to the president for all the bad decisions that he’s making—for the bad cabinet appointments that he’s made and for awakening a sleeping giant. People that have never stood up for themselves, people that have never had their voices heard, that have never put their bodies on the line are now outraged. I would like to say thank you to President Trump for his bigotry, for his sexism, for bringing all of us in this nation together to stand up and unite.

  When Argentina Said No

  Because shock tactics rely on the public becoming disoriented by fast-moving events, they tend to backfire most spectacularly in places where there is a strong collective memory of previous instances when fear and trauma were exploited to undermine democracy. Those memories serve as a kind of shock absorber, providing populations with shared reference points that allow them to name what’s happening and fight back.

  It’s a lesson I learned when I glimpsed another kind of future on the streets of Buenos Aires over fifteen years ago. At the end of 2001 and the beginning of 2002, Argentina was in the grips of an economic crisis so severe that it stunned the world.

  In the 1990s, the country had opened itself to corporate globalization so rapidly and so thoroughly that the International Monetary Fund held it up as a model student. The iconic logos of global banks, hotel chains, and US fast-food restaurants glowed from the Buenos Aires skyline, and its new shopping malls were so fashionable and luxurious that they frequently drew comparisons with Paris. Time magazine, on its cover, declared Argentina’s economy a “miracle.”

  And then it all came crashing down. Amidst a spiraling debt crisis, the government attempted to impose a new round of economic austerity, and all those gleaming global banks had to board up their windows and doors to prevent customers rushing in to withdraw their life savings. Protests spread across the country. In the suburbs, supermarkets (owned by European chains) were looted. In the midst of this chaotic scene, Fernando de la Rúa, then Argentina’s president, went on television, his face shiny with sweat, and announced that the country was under attack from “groups that are enemies of order who are looking to spread discord and violence.” He declared a thirty-day state of siege—which gave him the power to suspend a range of constitutional guarantees, including freedom of the press—and ordered everyone to stay in their homes.

  For many Argentinians, the president’s words sounded like a prelude to a military coup—and that proved a fatal misstep. People, no matter their age, knew their history, including the fact that when the military staged its brutal coup in 1976, the need to restore public order against internal enemies had been the pretext. The junta stayed in power until 1983, and in that time it stole the lives of some thirty thousand people.

  Determined not to lose their country again, and even while de la Rúa was still on television ordering people to stay in their homes, Buenos Aires’s famed central square, Plaza de Mayo, filled up with tens of thousands of people, many banging pots and pans with spoons and forks, a wordless but roaring rebuke to the president’s instructions. Argentinians would not give up their basic freedoms in the name of order. Not again, not this time.

  And then this great gathering found its voice, and a single rebellious cry rose up from the crowds of grandmothers and high school students, motorcycle couriers and unemployed factory workers, their words directed at the politicians, the bankers, the IMF, and every other “expert” who claimed to have the perfect recipe for Argentina’s prosperity and stability: “¡Que se vayan todos!”—everyone must go! Demonstrators stayed in the streets even after protesters were killed in clashes with p
olice, bringing the total who lost their lives across the country to more than twenty. Amidst the mayhem, the president was forced to lift the state of siege and flee the presidential palace in a helicopter. As a new president was appointed, the people would rise up and reject him in disgust—again and then again, flipping through three presidents in just three weeks.

  Meanwhile, in the rubble of Argentina’s democracy, something strange and wonderful started to happen: neighbors poked their heads out of their apartments and houses and, in the absence of a political leadership or a stable government, began to talk to each other. To think together. A month later, there were already some 250 “asambleas barriales” (neighborhood assemblies, small and large) in downtown Buenos Aires alone. Picture Occupy Wall Street—but everywhere. The streets, parks, and plazas were filled with meetings as people stayed up late into the night, planning, arguing, testifying—and voting on everything from whether Argentina should pay its foreign debts, to when the next protest should be held, to how to support a group of workers who had turned their abandoned factory into a democratic cooperative.