review

A while ago I read The Shock Doctrine, by Canadian writer Naomi Klein (published in 2007). It is one of those books that explains what is wrong with the world. In this case the privatisation of nations, and all the bad things that come along with it, are highlighted.

In her book Naomi Klein describes how shock therapy is applied to national economies as it is applied literally, to human beings (electroshock). She gives examples of Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Indonesia, China, Poland, Russia, South Africa and Iraq in particular. The economic shock doctrine as she describes it, was originally designed at the Chicago School of Economics, by Milton Friedman in particular. Milton Friedman argued that freedom and free markets exist together harmoniously, but Naomi Klein proves that in fact for a completely free market economy (laissez-faire) to exist, a democracy is not possible. She does this by giving a detailed account of the history of the aforementioned countries. In every single one of them democracy has been replaced by a dictatorship or a failed "democratic" government, in order to shock its population into obedience and to make it accept the exploitation by oppressive regimes, often to the benefit of US corporations.

One of the more prominent and recent of examples is the Iraq war. While to many it is now known that the Iraq war was mostly a corporate venture, Naomi clarifies how the war was accepted by using shock therapy in the US itself, in Iraq and in the Middle East. She lays out in great detail how major corporations such as Halliburton, Lockheed Martin and Blackwater carried out a privatised war with contracts awarded by the US government, followed by the "rebuilding" of the country by permanently privatising public services, resulting in a government that is a mere conveyor belt of public funds to corporations.

Besides the failed states in which these exploitations of the public by a corporate elite occur, Naomi mentions a number of different disasters such as the 2001 attacks in New York, the 2004 earthquake in the Indian Ocean and the 2005 impact of Hurricane Katrina. She explains how in each of those situations the respective governments seized the opportunity to force privatisation onto the local people, by using disaster capitalism.

In all The Shock Doctrine is a book that is really worth reading if you know or don't know about the practices I mentioned above, and want to know exactly how and why they happened and are happening. The analyses by Naomi Klein are both scary as well as having an angering effect on their reader, but are essential for anyone who wants to know what corporations are doing to this world.*

* An extensive account of what corporations are doing to people (sweatshop labour in particular) and the environment can be found in No Logo (2000), also by Naomi Klein.

I recently watched a three part documentary called Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. I highly recommend it in case you haven't seen it yet and haven't read the original book upon which it was based. I will attempt to write a short summary which will hopefully trigger you to see the documentary or read the book.

In the documentary Diamond basically explains why it is that Europeans were able to conquer the world, and why there is such inequality between the peoples on this planet these days in terms of the resources that they possess.

Image from the Guns, Germs, and Steel documentary, showing the fertile crescent and the directions in which people, certain crops and farm animals were able to spread.

The theory starts in the so called fertile crescent, which is an area which is located in what is today divided into nations such as Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Egypt, and so on. Many thousands of years ago the people in this part of the Middle East were farmers that 1) were able to farm wheat and barley, and 2) held domesticated animals such as pigs, sheep, goats, cows, etc. Because these people produced food in such a productive manner (using animals for meat, milk, clothing and especially muscle power, as well as sowing crops in stead of gathering or planting them), they were able to create a surplus of food. This wasn't the case in other areas on the planet, where the people had to devote a lot more time to feeding themselves, and because they hunted and gathered, they also moved around a lot.

In the fertile crescent the people lived in one place (because of their way of managing crops and domestic animals), where they constructed long lasting homes. As their villages grew bigger, they were able to produce more food because of the increased population. This increase in population and the change in the way of life changed their society/ organisation. Because of this change, some people could devote themselves to doing other things than producing food: developing new skills and technologies. One of those important new technologies involved using fire to heat stones, which could then be used to make plaster for use in their homes. This led to learning how to work with fire, which eventually led to being able to forge steel with it.

Another important fact that the documentary highlights, is that these farm animals and crops were indigenous to the climate zone in which Europe, Northern Africa and a big part of Asia are situated. Therefore these animals and crops were able to easily spread along the same line of latitude, but not far south or north of it (see image), which is what the people in the fertile crescent were also forced to do when the area was hit by drought. This led to the transformation of societies along these lines, and into Europe. Because the people who now lived in Europe had an advantage compared to the rest of the world, their development was sped up greatly.

In the next thousands of years the people living in Europe evolved into civilisations which then fought amongst themselves, and thusly developed advanced weaponry and other technologies were useful in battle. Eventually they crossed oceans in order to satisfy their greed for new resources in the new world. The documentary gives the example of the Spanish heading into Inca territory in South America. They had a great advantage over the indigenous peoples there because they brought with them their developed technology (i.e. guns and high quality swords). Another "weapon" they used without knowing, were the germs that the Spanish carried into Mexico years earlier. Smallpox was killing people from Central America all the way down to the Inca Empire, while the Europeans were able to withstand diseases much better because they had encountered several plagues in the past. Because of this, possibly up to 95% of the indigenous people were decimated by the raging plague, so the continent was virtually emptied for the Europeans to colonize.

All these facts combined give a pretty good explanation to the question I mentioned earlier. The people in Europe developed faster because they had a geographical advantage. The benefits of living there gave them a head start, which people in many other parts of the world didn't get. It is still a theory of course, but it sure sounds a lot more convincing to me than attributing the advantage of the European peoples to them being bolder or more inventive.

Note: The documentary also goes on to describe why the Europeans failed to advance their colonies further north on the continent of Africa, and obviously explains what I have explained above in much greater detail.

So, you're a Linux user and you want to process some footage, be it of your mom's birthday or perhaps your own humble video project. You don't want to resort to Windows (or obviously a Mac for that matter) which are supposedly (and probably) easier platforms to edit video.

Give it a shot with your Linux system first. I've no experience capturing video from a digital camera yet, but that should be possible with Kino. I have a simple digital photo camera which can record videos in XVID/MP3 format, or so KDE tells me. I took some random shots with it over the years that I have all saved, so I figured I might experiment with these recordings for a bit, since I plan to do more video editing in the future to process old VHS tapes to digital storage.

Avidemux

The first program I tried was Avidemux. This program allowed me to cut up, stick together and apply certain visual changes to videos. One feature I needed Avidemux for was the altering of the frames per second. The first editing program that I used got into trouble when video samples had a frame rate that wasn't exactly 25 per second. Avidemux can also alter the image by adding filters. These filters can do things like resize the image, add colours to it, blur the image, sharpen the image, add scan lines to it, add subtitles or even add a whirl effect to the video. The most useful application of Avidemux is perhaps the possibility to convert a video to another video (and audio) format.

The Open Movie Editor

Another interesting program is the Open Movie Editor. This software is designed to be an editor rather than a conversion utility. It allows for quick and simple placing of video samples on a time line, while cutting them up or arranging them into a proper sequence. Audio tracks can be added in the same manner. Transitions between scenes (i.e. inserted video files or cut up samples) can be achieved very easily by letting two scenes overlap for a number of seconds. By doing this the overlap becomes visible in the timeline and when the video is played the one part of video is automatically faded into the other. I had some trouble finding an audio and video codec that would actually save the video sequence to a file that was properly readable. The probable cause of this is that I used a precompiled version and not too many codecs were installed or detected the right way by the Movie Editor.

Kdenlive

Because of this I tried another editor, named Kdenlive. I finally settled on this one because

1. it exports videos properly, providing many audio and video codecs
2. sports a couple of effects/ transition types by default
3. is a KDE application and is therefore graphically integrated and translated into Dutch (I like consistency)

The only disadvantage in my case was that for some yet unexplained reason Kdenlive would crash every now and then, but saving the project regularly takes care of that. This is probably again because of the fact that I used a pre-compiled version. I know it's not a good excuse but everyone deserves to be lazy every now and then. Usually I compile software myself, but because I'm now using Kubuntu on a laptop in stead of my usual Slackware set up this makes it very tempting to apt-get everything.

The results

I've uploaded two of my experiments to this website, so anyone reading this can admire or ignore the results of my video editing adventure. The first video shows some of the (very bad quality and out of focus) material which I recorded with my photo camera while moving, using transitions and some other effects. Eventually I used Kdenlive for this, but I achieved about the same using the Open Movie Editor.

The second one (also made with Kdenlive) is a recording of people walking down a shopping street. It's been slowed down, a "charcoal" effect has been applied to it, and the beginning and ending of the video demonstrate the blur effect.

I have probably missed out on a lot of alternatives, but these are the tools I've chosen to use for now, and Kdenlive does the job quite nicely. Finally I've taken some screenshots of the three programs that I tried: