Dark Mirrors
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pages. 2023.
More than 10,000 Palestinians and counting—including thousands of children and dozens of journalists—have already been killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) since the shocking October 7th Hamas attacks into Israel. An Israeli blockade is starving Gaza of food, water, and energy while the IDF pummels it with bombs and artillery fire, including strikes on hospitals, apartment buildings, refugee camps, universities, bakeries, and civilian convoys, sometimes massacring hundreds of people at a time. Documentation and discussion of these atrocities has been accompanied by discourse and meta-discourse so contradictory and divorced from morality or reality that it can make you feel like you are going insane. Desperate cries for help and heart-wrenching humanity show up alongside chilling justifications for slaughter.
Watching a genocide unfold over social media is a horrifying and disorienting modern experience. In this context, Naomi Klein’s latest book—released less than a month before the routine daily violence of Israeli apartheid exploded to newfound levels—is, unfortunately, perhaps even more timely than anticipated. In Doppelganger, Klein (partially) turns away from her normal focus on climate justice and corporate malfeasance towards a semi-biographical examination of the dangerous and distorting political and technological mirrors of our modern world. After being confused with the liberal feminist writer turned anti-vaccine crusader Naomi Wolf for years, Klein draws on history, politics, art, and psychology to figure out what exactly happened to her personal doppelganger and follows those threads to their systemic roots.
Wolf has become a regular guest on former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s podcast, which Klein spent many hours listening to and analyzing for Doppelganger. This early part of the book dragged a little to me, perhaps because I am skeptical that Bannon is particularly talented despite being a popular figure in the “mirror world,” which Klein defines as “a world uncannily like our own, but quite obviously warped” where people like Wolf end up after mixing slivers of populist truth—such as pharmaceutical companies valuing profits over people—with ruling class ideology to form poisonous concoctions. She refers to this fusion of the Far Right and the ostensibly apolitical woo-woo as diagonalism, which is an “alliance…of convenience…with increasingly explicit shared beliefs.” Diagonalism is on the rise, fueled by the morbid symptoms of a decaying empire experienced without class consciousness.
While Doppelganger mostly targets the reactionaries underpinning diagonalism and the structural forces that feed them, Klein does include some gentle critiques of the Left. I think some of them are a little unfair—e.g. the Left will get censored regardless of our position on deplatforming reactionaries—but they are mostly clarifying and useful. In particular, Klein discusses the ways in which the perverse incentives of a privatized internet combine with our society’s liberal, individualist conditioning. She astutely describes how social media inherently forces us to create doppelgangers of ourselves for public consumption. Politics then becomes just another exercise in self-branding as we attempt to curate perfect ideological identities for clout and post our way to transforming society instead of investing in the slow and unglamorous work of building collective power with other people. As Klein details, no matter how meticulously we curate our “digital doubles,” once they exist they are out of our control, subject to the cruel projections of others and profit-seeking algorithms.
While not a new phenomenon by any means, corporate-owned social media also accelerates our incentives to magnify and fixate on small differences instead of commonalities, which sows damaging conflict and, as Klein puts it, “short-circuit[s] potential solidarities.” Unacknowledged guilt and shame gets weaponized and projected in ways we are often not consciously aware of. Dealing with the messy contradictions of our present reality in service of changing it requires deep wells of empathy, seriousness, and adaptability that personal branding politics precludes: “Brands are not built to contain our multitudes.” People are malleable and moveable, and politics is not something we are, it is something we do.
In order to create transformative political change, mass movements need to be harnessed and directed via organization. Being in an organization often requires subsuming our individual will to the collective and going along with democratic decisions we disagree with, which is a particularly difficult learning process in a society where, at every turn, we are incentivized and taught to value our egos above all else. So the forces of disorganization abound, not only from the external threat of a ruling class who wants you to fail, but also from within. Modern history is littered with organizations that fell apart from splitting and infighting, but we have a duty to ourselves and the rest of the world to align our actions with the seriousness of what we say we want to build.
As US-built bombs massacre the residents of Gaza and the IDF ground invasion rolls in, the importance of making progressive change here comes into the starkest relief. Doppelganger builds up to the subject of Israel-Palestine in the powerful penultimate chapter, The Unshakeable Ethnic Double. Klein draws on her Jewish background to recount the history of Israeli settler-colonialism and illuminate how the victims of genocide can then become oppressors: “Jewish victimization and vulnerability” became the basis for “the post-Holocaust Zionist claim to Palestine.” Palestinians became the imagined “eternal enemy” of the Jewish people, incapable of reconciliation or solidarity and inherently violent and criminal, to justify the crimes of Israel’s founding and the brutal treatment thereafter. Gaza is an open-air prison where Palestinians are not permitted to leave and inflows of resources and food are controlled by Israel, and residents of the West Bank face constant military attacks, police suppression, and settler incursions.
Long before October 7th, this was an untenable situation of apartheid that could really only be resolved in two ways: a pluralistic state with equal rights for all or the complete removal of Palestinians from their historic lands. The Israeli government is obviously choosing the latter. To riff on a term that Klein popularized, we might think of what Israel is now doing as disaster colonialism. The Hamas attacks are being used as an excuse to kill or displace Palestinians with complete abandon and accelerate this process, not only in Gaza but in the West Bank as well.
The only way to justify this is to not see Palestinians as human, which has been on full display with the genocidal rhetoric that many Zionists have been using. I have never seen so many people so openly support such wanton and horrific violence. But the thing about dehumanizing others is that in the process you dehumanize yourself and actually make yourself less secure by creating enemies. The Israeli government has complete disregard for their citizens who are being held hostage, many of whom have been killed by IDF bombs, and has refused offers to negotiate their release. To quote Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Where life is precious, life is precious.”
At the same time, millions of people—across differences of religion, race, and gender—around the world are speaking up and taking to the streets in support of Palestine and demanding a ceasefire. The tidal waves of solidarity on display inspire faith in humanity as they generate a vicious backlash in turn. Publicly supporting the cause of Palestine has always carried serious risks—harassment, intimidation, job security—but these have ratcheted up in the last few weeks to new levels. People are being attacked, doxxed, and fired for expressing anything but total support for Israel, as speech advocating for Palestinian freedom is treated as somehow more harmful than killing, maiming, poisoning, and permanently traumatizing an entire population—pure projection and cynicism. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian and a DSA member, is facing a bipartisan onslaught of criticism and censure. Her response says it all:
"It’s a shame my colleagues are more focused on silencing me than they are on saving lives, as the death toll in Gaza surpasses 10,000. Many of them have shown that Palestinian lives simply do not matter to them."
In this climate, I feel scared to speak too publicly about what is happening, especially since I am unemployed and looking for work and I am going to become a father in a few months. But as a relatively privileged citizen of the country that is funding, supplying, and supporting these atrocities, how can I not? How could I live with myself if I stood idly and just watched this happen? What kind of world am I building for my child to grow up in? The fact that they will be born here in the US and not in Hell on Earth is simply a matter of luck, the same as it was for me.
This understanding forms the foundation of my politics. In Doppelganger, Klein says, “...we are all surrounded by evidence of the different people we might have been, and might still become, under slightly different circumstances.” How do we create the best conditions for everyone to thrive and not be a victim or perpetrator of unnecessary, politically created suffering? How can we foster collective well-being? As Klein notes, there is an inherent mismatch between the ways that our capitalist society creates conditions of precarity and competition and our fundamental dependence on each other and on the biosphere we inhabit. As these contradictions heighten amidst ecological and political breakdown, the abhorrent cruelty on display in Palestine is a terrible glimpse at what the future for more and more of the world will be if we do not radically change course through solidarity.
Anti-Zionist Jews like my friend and comrade Thea Riofrancos have forcefully rejected the atrocities committed in their name: “never again must mean never again for anyone.” And the families of the Jewish hostages taken by Hamas on October 7th have adopted a simple demand to trade all of the Palestinians in Israeli custody for all of the Israelis in Hamas custody: “Everyone for everyone.” This is a beautiful slogan that can have multiple meanings, like all of us standing for—and fighting for—the collective well-being of the entire world. An empathetic politics that recognizes our interconnectedness and shared humanity. Or, as Klein writes towards the end of Doppelganger: ‘It will not be enough to protect “our” people; we will need to have the stamina of true solidarity, which defines “our people” as “all people.”’ Everyone for everyone.