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==Early life==
==Early life==
Klein spent her teenage years as a [[shopping mall|mall]] rat, obsessed by designer logos.<ref name="Hand-to-Brand"/> 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]]". Klein attended St. Geroge's High School of Montreal, then the most expensive private high school in Montreal. 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.<ref name="abilities"/> 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.<ref name= "abilities"/> That year off stopped her "from being such a brat".<ref name="Hand-to-Brand"/>
Klein spent her teenage years as a [[shopping mall|mall]] rat, obsessed by designer logos.<ref name="Hand-to-Brand"/> 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.<ref name="abilities"/> 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.<ref name= "abilities"/> That year off stopped her "from being such a brat".<ref name="Hand-to-Brand"/>


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]].<ref name="montreal-massacre"/>
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]].<ref name="montreal-massacre"/>

Revision as of 03:58, 11 October 2009

Naomi Klein
Occupationjournalist, author, activist
Subjectalter-globalization, anti-corporatism, anti-war
SpouseAvi Lewis
Website
http://www.naomiklein.org
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Naomi Klein.

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.[1] Her mother, documentary film-maker Bonnie Sherr Klein, is best known for her anti-pornography film Not a Love Story.[2] 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,[3] 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.[4]

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.[5]

Klein and her husband live in Toronto.

Early life

Klein spent her teenage years as a mall rat, obsessed by designer logos.[6] 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.[7] 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.[7] That year off stopped her "from being such a brat".[6]

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.[8] 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.[4]

Career in journalism

Main article: 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.[9] No Logo became an international bestseller, selling over one million copies in over 28 languages.[10]

Fences and Windows

Main article: 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,[11] 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.[12][13] The 2008 film War, Inc. was partially inspired by her article, Baghdad Year Zero.[14]

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."[15] 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".[15] Marc Cooper, 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.[16] 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."[16] Christopher Hitchens, an advocate of the Iraq invasion, argued that Klein, Tariq Ali, and Michael Moore were "fellow travelers with fascism."[17]

The Take

Main article: 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.[18]

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.[19]

The Shock Doctrine

Main article: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

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[10] translated into 20 languages.[20] 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.[10]

Johan Norberg, 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.[21][22] 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."[23] He claimed that Klein incorrectly groups neoconservatism with neoliberals like Bill Clinton as part of a single ideology."[23]

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."[24] Jonathan Chait, 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."[25]

Klein has responded to criticism from those she called "free-market ideologues,"[26] 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."[26]

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."[27]

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."[28] In a speech in Ramallah on the 27th of June she apologized to the Palestinians for not joining the BDS campaign earlier.[29] 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." [30]

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.[31]

Other activities

Klein once lectured as a Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics.[32]

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.[33]

Books

Filmography

References

  1. ^ "Video: Naomi Klein at last night's town hall". DepartmentOfCulture.ca. September 4, 2008. Retrieved 2009-02-17.
  2. ^ "Biography of Bonnie Sherr Klein (*1941): Filmmaker, Author, Disability Rights Activist". Library and Archives Canada.
  3. ^ Tom Sito (July 19, 2005). "The Disney Strike of 1941: How It Changed Animation & Comics". Animation World Magazine. Retrieved March 25, 2009.
  4. ^ a b Larissa MacFarquhar (December 8, 2008). "Outside Agitator: Naomi Klein and the New Left". The New Yorker.
  5. ^ Avi Lewis. "Extended story by Avi Lewis: Who do you think you are?". CBC television.
  6. ^ a b Katharine Viner (September 23, 2000). "Hand-To-Brand-Combat: A Profile Of Naomi Klein". The Guardian. Retrieved 2009-02-17.
  7. ^ a b Bonnie Sherr Klein (Spring 1993). "We are Who You are:Feminism and Disability". Abilities. Enablelink.org. Retrieved 2009-02-17.
  8. ^ "Naomi Klein: The Montreal Massacre". Bigthink.com. Retrieved 2008-10-10.
  9. ^ "Nike's response to No Logo". Nike. 2000-03-08. Archived from the original on 2001-06-18.
  10. ^ a b c "Unconventional Wisdom Since 1865". The Nation.
  11. ^ Naomi Klein (2004). "Baghdad year zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia". Harper's Magazine. The Harper's Magazine Foundation. Retrieved 2007-09-09. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  12. ^ Klein, Naomi (2004-10-13). (Interview). Interviewed by Amy Goodman http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/13/144220. Retrieved 2009-02-17. {{cite interview}}: Missing or empty |title= (help); Unknown parameter |callsign= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |program= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |subjectlink= ignored (|subject-link= suggested) (help)
  13. ^ Klein, Naomi (January 22, 2004). "The Persuaders: Interview Naomi Klein" (Interview). Retrieved 2009-02-17. {{cite interview}}: Unknown parameter |callsign= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |program= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |subjectlink= ignored (|subject-link= suggested) (help)
  14. ^ Ryan Gilbey (August 31, 2007). "I'm basically a brand (article about John Cusack's career)". The Guardian. Retrieved 2009-02-17.
  15. ^ a b Naomi Klein (August 26, 2004). "Bring Najaf to New York". The Nation. Retrieved 2009-02-17.
  16. ^ a b Marc Cooper (August 27, 2004). "Najaf to New York? Better: New York to Najaf". Self published blog. Retrieved 2009-02-17.
  17. ^ Christopher Hitchens (September 7, 2004). "Murder by Any Other Name: The rest of the world may be tiring of jihad, but The Nation isn't". Slate. Retrieved 2009-02-17.
  18. ^ Kim Phillips-Fein (May 10, 2005). "Seattle to Baghdad". n+1. Retrieved 2009-02-17.
  19. ^ Daniel Morduchowicz (September 20, 2004). "The Take". Z Space. Retrieved 2009-02-17.
  20. ^ "Author Spotlight: Naomi Klein". RandomHouse.ca. Retrieved 2009-02-17.
  21. ^ Norberg, Johan (October 2008). "Defaming Milton Friedman: Naomi Klein's disastrous yet popular polemic against the great free market economist". Reason Magazine.
  22. ^ Johan Norberg (May 14, 2008). "The Klein Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Polemics". Cato Institute. Retrieved 2009-02-17.
  23. ^ a b Tom Redburn (29 Sept, 2007). "It's All a Grand Capitalist Conspiracy". New York Times. Retrieved 2009-09-30. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  24. ^ Robert Cole (12 Oct, 2007). "Review of The Shock Doctrine". The Times. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  25. ^ Jonathan Chait (July 30, 2008). "Dead Left". The New Republic. Retrieved 2009-09-18.
  26. ^ a b Naomi Klein (September 2nd, 2008). "One Year After the Publication of The Shock Doctrine, A Response to the Attacks". NaomiKlein.org. Retrieved 2009-02-17. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  27. ^ Naomi Klein (January 10, 2009). "Enough. It's time for a boycott". The Guardian. Retrieved 2009-07-13.
  28. ^ Naomi Klein (July 2, 2009). "Oppose the state, not the people". Ha'aretz. Retrieved 2009-07-13.
  29. ^ Naomi Klein (July 7, 2009). "Naomi Klein in Ramallah: I am ashamed that it took me this long". The Faster Times. Retrieved 2009-07-13.
  30. ^ Noam Schimmel (July 18, 2009). "'The Jews' get-away-with-genocide-free-card'". Jerusalem Post.
  31. ^ Naomi Klein (September 10, 2009). "We don't feel like celebrating with Israel this year". Globe and Mail.
  32. ^ "Visiting teaching fellows". London School of Economics and Political Science. Retrieved 2007-09-09.
  33. ^ "Intellectuals—the results". Prospect Magazine. Prospect Publishing Limited. 26th July 2008. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

Further reading


External links

Media

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