hce_nthu
114年
英文
第 29 題
📖 題組：
Reading 2 Most people who survive a devastating disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed; they want to reaffirm their relatedness to the places that formed them. “When I rebuild the city I feel like I’m rebuilding myself,” said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans’ heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after Hurricane Katrina. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called “reconstruction” began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere and rooted communities, then quickly moving to replace them with a kind of corporate New Jerusalem—all before the victims of war or natural disaster were able to regroup and stake their claims to what was theirs. Mike Battles puts it best: “For us, the fear and disorder offered real promise.” The thirty-four-year-old ex-CIA operative was talking about how the chaos in post-invasion Iraq had helped his unknown and inexperienced private security firm, Custer Battles, to shake roughly $100 million in contracts out of the federal government. His words could serve just as well as the slogan for contemporary capitalism—fear and disorder are the catalysts for each new leap forward. When I began this research into the intersection between superprofits and megadisasters, I thought I was witnessing a fundamental change in the way the drive to “liberate” markets was advancing around the world. Having been part of the movement against ballooning corporate power that made its global debut in Seattle in 1999, I was accustomed to seeing similar business-friendly policies imposed through arm-twisting at World Trade Organization summits, or as the conditions attached to loans from the International Monetary Fund. The three trademark demands— privatization, government deregulation and deep cuts to social spending—tended to be extremely unpopular with citizens, but when the agreements were signed there was still at least the pretext of mutual consent between the governments doing the negotiating, as well as a consensus among the supposed experts. Now the same ideological program was being imposed via the most boldly coercive means possible: under foreign military occupation after an invasion, or immediately following a cataclysmic natural disaster. September 11 appeared to have provided Washington with the green light to stop asking countries if they wanted the U.S. version of “free trade and democracy” and to start imposing it with Shock and Awe military force. As I dug deeper into the history of how this market model had swept the globe, however, I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of the American economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman’s movement from the very beginning—this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance. It was certainly the case that the facilitating disasters were getting bigger and more shocking, but what was happening in Iraq and New Orleans was not a new, post-September 11 invention. Rather, these bold experiments in crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of strict adherence to the shock doctrine.
Reading 2 Most people who survive a devastating disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed; they want to reaffirm their relatedness to the places that formed them. “When I rebuild the city I feel like I’m rebuilding myself,” said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans’ heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after Hurricane Katrina. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called “reconstruction” began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere and rooted communities, then quickly moving to replace them with a kind of corporate New Jerusalem—all before the victims of war or natural disaster were able to regroup and stake their claims to what was theirs. Mike Battles puts it best: “For us, the fear and disorder offered real promise.” The thirty-four-year-old ex-CIA operative was talking about how the chaos in post-invasion Iraq had helped his unknown and inexperienced private security firm, Custer Battles, to shake roughly $100 million in contracts out of the federal government. His words could serve just as well as the slogan for contemporary capitalism—fear and disorder are the catalysts for each new leap forward. When I began this research into the intersection between superprofits and megadisasters, I thought I was witnessing a fundamental change in the way the drive to “liberate” markets was advancing around the world. Having been part of the movement against ballooning corporate power that made its global debut in Seattle in 1999, I was accustomed to seeing similar business-friendly policies imposed through arm-twisting at World Trade Organization summits, or as the conditions attached to loans from the International Monetary Fund. The three trademark demands— privatization, government deregulation and deep cuts to social spending—tended to be extremely unpopular with citizens, but when the agreements were signed there was still at least the pretext of mutual consent between the governments doing the negotiating, as well as a consensus among the supposed experts. Now the same ideological program was being imposed via the most boldly coercive means possible: under foreign military occupation after an invasion, or immediately following a cataclysmic natural disaster. September 11 appeared to have provided Washington with the green light to stop asking countries if they wanted the U.S. version of “free trade and democracy” and to start imposing it with Shock and Awe military force. As I dug deeper into the history of how this market model had swept the globe, however, I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of the American economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman’s movement from the very beginning—this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance. It was certainly the case that the facilitating disasters were getting bigger and more shocking, but what was happening in Iraq and New Orleans was not a new, post-September 11 invention. Rather, these bold experiments in crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of strict adherence to the shock doctrine.
Following the author’s logic, which of the following would NOT be considered an example of shock doctrine?
- A The disorder and nationalist excitement resulting from the Falklands War in 1982 enabled Margaret Thatcher to use forceful measures to suppress the striking British miners and initiate the first privatization frenzy in a Western democracy.
- B The events surrounding the Tiananmen Square massacre in China in 1989 created a situation in which the Communist Party was able to implement policies that transformed much of the country into an export zone, with workers who were often too afraid to demand their rights.
- C The Bush administration used the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001 to wage a war against Iraq and establish a corporate security complex at home that transformed the United States into a more privatized and security-focused society.
- D After the 2004 tsunami, the Sri Lankan government implemented policies that allowed foreign investors to build large resorts along the coastline, which displaced fishing communities who were unable to rebuild their villages near the water.
- E Vladimir Putin invoked the Soviet Union’s victory over fascism in World War II to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as an act to ‘denazify’ and liberate the country from what he claimed were neo-Nazi elements.
思路引導 VIP
請回想一下文章中提到的『三項商標式的要求』（trademark demands），它們主要指向國家的哪一個層面——是領土的擴張、歷史榮譽的恢復，還是經濟體制的重新洗牌？接著觀察這五個選項，哪一個情境的『最終目的』明顯與其他四項追求的利益本質不同？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
恭喜你精準地鎖定了 (E) 這個選項！這展現了你對文章中「震撼主義」（Shock Doctrine）核心定義的深刻理解。這道題目的挑戰性在於，選項中的情境大多涉及災難或衝突，容易讓人混淆；但你成功辨識出，作者所定義的模式必須包含「利用危機帶來的恐懼，趁亂強行推動大規模的市場化與私有化經濟政策」。
經濟掠奪與意識形態的區別
在選項 (A) 到 (D) 中，我們都能看見政府或權力者如何利用戰爭、屠殺或天災後人民的混亂，將公共資源轉手給企業或縮減社會支出。然而，選項 (E) 的性質完全不同，它描述的是普丁利用歷史敘事（二戰勝利）來進行地緣政治侵略與政治動員，這與本文強調的「災難資本主義」（Disaster Capitalism）——即利用災難來掃除市場障礙、獲取超額利潤的邏輯——有本質上的差異。
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