Naomi Klein: history revisionist

It's bad enough that the woman is an irredeemably pathological liar when it comes to politics, when she's not finding creative new ways to libel Milton Friedman, she's essentially apologizing for tyrants. From Reason:

By Klein's account, China is another country that violently imposed Friedmanite reforms. To make this case, she rewrites the history of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, claiming the protesters were primarily opposed to economic liberalization, instead of one-party dictatorship. According to Klein, the Communist Party, led by Deng Xiaoping, attacked them to save its free market program and advance yet more sweeping reforms while people were still in shock.

If the students were indeed protesting economic reform, they seldom expressed that grievance at the time. Instead, they demonstrated in favor of democracy, government transparency, and equality before the law, and against bureaucracy and violence. The protesters first gathered to mourn former Secretary General Hu Yaobang, one of China's most important economic reformers. The protests soon grew to include everybody who wanted liberal democracy-both those who wanted more economic reform and those who wanted less. Klein equates the second element with the whole protest.

There may have been violence involved with the implementation of liberalization in the Chinese economy, but it's nothing on the order of violence used to implement the Maoist policies that can be directly attributed to deaths of tens of millions of workers. Any violence used to liberalize the Chinese economy can at least be excused by the fact that Mao so thoroughly botched the Chinese economy and agricultural system, that the need for liberalization was so extreme that it was a matter of life and death for many Chinese. Still, nothing need be conceded to Klein on this point, as history has shown that on the matter of state-directed violence, China returned to something resembling sanity once the liberalizes took over from Mao.

Everytime that Klein tries to see a capitalist boogeyman behind the crimes of a country ruled by a Communist Party, it becomes more and more obvious that she is a modern day Walter Duranty.