Book Review for Foreign Control Watchdog, Christchurch – ‘Doppelganger’

Doppelganger

A Trip Into the Mirror World

By Naomi Klein

Allen Lane (Penguin books) 2023 

pp 348 plus pp 40 notes  (plus links and more notes at NaomiKlein.org)

Other titles by Klein:  No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything

A Doppelganger is a double, a person very much like another person, or even oneself, or somehow being confused with oneself by others.   Likely with some unexpected reactions by oneself or others to this duo.  Or an individual with a split personality like Jeckle and Hyde.  “For Freud, doppelgangers represented paths not taken, choices not made”.   Or multiverse stories like depicted in the recent movie ‘Everything, Everywhere, All at Once’.  The historical European colonialist attitude to indigenous cultures, disrespecting them and murdering them, then applying those attitudes to eat themselves from the inside in a ‘final solution’ of the German Nazis with the European Jews, creating a western / German doppelganger war in the 20^th C.  The subject of doubles is not unknown in literature.  (e.g Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Double, 1846, “A terrible multitude of duplicates had sprung into being”).

If I had ever heard of this phenomenon I don’t recall it. But we are living in a unique time in history and strange but real things are appearing from the collective.  The Post Truth Era where denial has reached mainstream.  The path we know we have to take for climate change, but are refusing to take, a cultural doppelganger.  It might do for us to ponder how two activists seemingly similar in their earlier lives get to be so seemingly different, so opposed to each other, as well as how could a larger public get the two of them mixed up.

Klein is a story teller here, not just a descriptor.  It is her personal story and she has found the experience surprizing and challenging, perhaps even life changing.  While our world of climate change, nuclear threats, inequality, divisiveness and prejudice, racism and threats of ultimate violence, and wonderland-type rabbit holes is an important part of her story, the depth description and analysis of all that actually takes place only in the latter sections of the book, after her personal story is mostly told, and that is where her story and our world, comes to make more sense. 

Klein’ first experience with the mixup was in 2011 in a public toilet near a planned march to support ‘Occupy’ when one of the marchers said to another, ‘Did you see what Naomi Klein said?’  Naomi Klein had said nothing about the march, though she supported it.  Klein suddenly figured it out, and said to them, “I think you are talking about Naomi Wolfe.”  Since then N. Wolfe has become a well known critic of vaccines, and a loud and confident spinner of conspiracy theories.  Both Jewish, both with a fairly rare but powerful first name from the Hebrew bible.  That’s just the beginning of her story, her relationship to ‘Other Naomi” (capital ‘O’, capital ‘N’).

Early on in her journey Klein recognizes that there are concerns about control shared by N. Wolfe and throughout society.  But how did N. Wolfe get so focused on vaccines and deep conspiracies after her feminist years, while N. Klein had for some time been concerned and written much about climate change, corporate control, etc. and still was.   N. Klein eventually had to become obsessed with N Wolfe’s journey in order to understand how it was insinuating itself into her life.   That N. Wolfe had dropped into Steve Bannon’s world made it all worse but more necessary.  This is the kind of discussion which all of Part Two (150 pages) is about.   Klein tells her story from as many angles as she can, trying to get that clear picture of what all this crazy stuff is about.

Wolf was a feminist known for writing ‘The Beauty Myth’.  But as Klein encountered her later she had become a regular guest of Steve Bannon.  Playing to fears, many shared by Klein, but their stories , their explanations very different.  Why when the explanations are right out there and which we know, do people so desperately want them not to be true, so that fantastical other explanations need to be invented?

Klein rediscovered Jewish author Philip Roth who in ‘Operation Shylock’ created a character named Philip Roth (Real Roth) who wrote books, same titles as his own, and there was another character named Philip Roth (Fake Roth) who is an activist not an author, an ‘actor’ so perhaps more ‘real’ than Real Roth.  Roth’s theme is about creation of a ’New Jew’, a ‘gun toting, muscle bound Israeli’, ‘a Maccabean mirror of the chauvinist nationalists in Poland, Ukraine, and Germany who had used Jews as their scapegoats for so long’.

Another doppelganger example is the expropriation of terms like ‘othering’ used by Bannon to describe criticisms of his armed and bully followers.  She also discovers that some former supporters of the Canadian NDP (leftish party) had jumped to the far-right People’s Party skipping the tory Conservative Party in the process, creating a doppelganger self. 

A last example in Part Two from her own story is about autism, her son T. being autistic.  She has been happy to learn that autism is on a spectrum of neurodiversity, not an illness or a condition, not something to try to change.  She points to other cultures in other times when people might complain about ’changelings’, left them by a ‘fairy’ who had stolen their real child.  (Irish and Celtic legends, for example.)  There the autistic and the ‘normal’ was a doppelganger double.  Klein notes how that kind of story became centre to the Nazis and led to many state murders even before the gas chambers.  Even today I read a report of an elected official in Europe recommending special needs kids be returned to institutions, and ADHD people should be severely disciplined.   

In Part Three and Part Four more descriptions of connections and threats are analysed.  But through all this, I kept wondering when Klein was going to start digging deeper into ‘who we are’ to examine the source of all this rabbit hole phenomenon.  Who We Are as a culture, as a species.  My margin notes are full of this question.  Previously when I had read (part of) The Shock Doctrine, I had noticed the same reluctance and I gave up finishing it.  While the later stories become more focused on that, she rarely gets around to an explanation as to where from and why now the denial has come.     

Klein comes close at the end of Part Two.  Seeming more like an introduction to Parts Three and Four than a summary to Part Two, in the last paragraph of Part Two is this sentence,  “At bottom, I suspect that much of the mirroring and doubling we are seeing comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see, to really look at – in our midst, in our past, and in the tumultuous future racing towards us.” 

We may not bear to look at it, but by 2024 in The Post Truth Era, I think we in our collective do understand that our consumer-ist societies are not our future.  And we find the changes required to deal with it terrifying, and we ‘can’t bear to see’.  That is what has catalysed both the mainstream denial and rabbit hole behaviour.  Klein does not emphasize that deeper look into our collective where she would find that source of our massive denial.  But this must become a front and centre place in our discussions if we are to work through it all.  The denial is overwhelming as evidenced in Aotearoa / New Zealand by the new empty-headed desperado government, but at the same time it is shallow so there is a chance the denial might over time fade into the dustbin of history.   When / If that happens, will future generations even be able to imagine what we were like in our now?