Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

Development Education Silences
Naomi Klein (2023) Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, London: Allen Lane.
Naomi Klein has authored groundbreaking, revelatory books about globalisation, corporate power and neoliberalism. They have addressed, with insight, the systemic causes of inequality, extreme wealth accumulation and abuses of political power that have characterised the past fifty years of neoliberalism. In No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (2000), Klein reported on how the rapid free trade acceleration triggered by globalisation was accompanied by value chains of production in which multinational corporate leaders became more aggressively engaged in marketing their brands than producing their products. The outsourcing of production to low wage and low tax export processing zones in the global South resulted in high levels of labour exploitation from which corporate head offices washed their hands while reaping lucrative profit margins.
Perhaps even more influential for international development practitioners was Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2008) in which she described ‘how neoliberal economic hegemony had been birthed by the systematic exploitation of large-scale shocks’ (Klein, 2023: 52). From the United States’ (US)-backed coup that overthrew Chile’s socialist president, Salvador Allende, in 1973 onward, Klein exposed how the disorientation caused by traumatic shocks and disasters such as the 2003 illegal and disastrous US invasion of Iraq, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2004, provided cover for the rapid introduction of market-driven ‘reforms’. And, in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (2015), Klein captured the urgency of the climate emergency caused largely by an unrestrained market economy laying waste to the natural environment. She persuasively argued for a green new deal that not only rejected free market fundamentalism but reimagined an economy that repaired broken democracies and social inequalities, and realigned our relationship with the natural environment based on respect and sustainability rather than extraction.
In her latest book, Doppelganger, Klein sees a clear thread between each of her works which are ‘about the ravages of expanding market logics and corporate power, with the blast zone growing ever larger’ (Klein, 2023: 52). Doppelganger is not an easy title to categorise for booksellers and librarians. It is part autobiography/memoir, would certainly slot into economics, politics and sociology, and has significant commentary on social media and surveillance capitalism, and epidemiology. It is also peppered with cultural and historical references to ‘doubles’, particularly online profiles, which we have actively cultivated to share private actions in a way that can be mined for corporate aggrandisement. But central to Klein’s book is another double to whom she became entwined by others. The ‘other Naomi’, Naomi Wolf, is the feminist author of The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (Wolf, 1990), and a former celebrated liberal whom a younger Klein had admired and interviewed. Following a public humiliation in a BBC interview that trashed the research underpinning her new book, Wolf’s stock quickly collapsed as her book was pulped and she became professionally marginalised. She put these reverses down to groundless conspiracies just as the COVID-19 pandemic began to take hold and was seized upon by the far-right to advance conspiratorial hoaxes about vaccines and restrictions designed to limit the spread of the virus.
The ‘Mirror World’
Riding a tide of public discontent about restrictions and vaccines, Wolf created a web platform called the DailyClout to host her blogs and videos, and started referring to herself as a ‘tech CEO’. She also became a fellow traveler of Steve Bannon, the former campaign manager for Donald Trump and ‘now a full-time propagandist for authoritarian and neofascist movements from Italy to Brazil’ (Klein, 2023: 58). Wolf became a regular contributor to Bannon’s popular podcast, War Room, and other far-right platforms propagating frightening and unproven theories about the side effects of taking vaccines, the threats posed to civil liberties and democracy by lockdowns, with the vaccine passports deemed nothing short of ‘slavery forever’ (Ibid.: 123). Klein describes the conspiracy bubble created by Bannon, Wolf and others as the ‘Mirror World’ populated by a mix of the QAnon hard-right, health sub-cultures, businesses threatened by shutdowns, concerned parents and neo-Nazis. What gave the ‘Mirror World’ plausibility for followers of Bannon and Wolf was that there was ‘always some truth mixed in with the lies’ (Ibid.: 175). Klein acknowledges that the COVID-19 verification apps were ‘unwisely referred’ to as ‘passports’ (Ibid.: 77) and were grist to the mill of Wolf’s ceaseless conveyor belt of wild accusations: public health measures are ‘sterilizing us, killing our babies, tracking our every move, turning children into affectless drones, overthrowing the U.S. constitution, eroding the power of the West’ (Ibid.: 32). Wolf did this while appropriating the language of the Black civil rights movement, denouncing COVID-19 public health measures as a power grab and vault toward authoritarianism. The hard reality was that a quarter of a million American deaths from COVID-19 would have been preventable had there been a wider take-up of the vaccine (Ibid.: 120), and ‘disaster doppelgangers’ (Ibid.: 107) like Bannon and Wolf helped undermine what was already a deeply flawed government response to tackling the virus.
Ignoring root causes of inequality
So, not only was Naomi Klein’s online identity being merged by many with the ‘other Naomi’, but a fake ‘Mirror World’ of COVID-19 conspiracy theories succeeded in drawing public ire away from the economic policies that allowed the virus to claim so many preventable deaths in the US. While public anger was elevated by right-wing online influencers at the effects of neoliberal policies and the inadequate response to the virus from a hollowed-out state, these same voices rarely pointed to the economic sources of social and class inequalities. A ‘viral underclass’ of poor, frontline workers mostly from Black and minority communities were cruelly exposed to the virus, and denied government support to stay on salary and work from home (Ibid.: 82). ‘[T]he burden of pandemic response was shifted from the collective to the individual’, argues Klein, ‘all in the name of getting back to business as usual’ (Ibid.: 81). And globally, Bill Gates – that celebrated stalwart of philanthropy – defended the use of World Trade Organisation (WTO) intellectual property rights that enabled big pharmaceutical corporations to use patents to prevent sharing life-saving vaccines with the global South (Ibid.: 39). While governments committed trillions of taxpayers’ money to rescue corporations struggling during lockdowns, workers were laid off in large numbers and billionaire wealth rocketed (Ibid.: 225).
Klein asks some searching questions about the political left during the pandemic: did it do enough to challenge the conspiracies emanating from the ‘Mirror World’? Did it agitate enough to have patent waivers enforced at the WTO to ensure that everyone received the vaccine while citizens in the global North had already received two or three doses? Did it do enough to protect the rights (and lives) of frontline workers when they risked everything to sustain healthcare, transport, food distribution and retail? Has the left done enough to expose what Klein calls the shadow lands (Ibid.: 238)? They are the ‘zones of hyper-exploitation, human containment, and ecosystem poisoning that are not glitches in the system but have always been integral parts of what makes our world run’ (Ibid.: 236). Does the left work hard enough at building alliances with people who are not in our movements? (Ibid.: 126).
Development education’s doppelganger
Many of the questions posed by Klein of the political left could equally be directed at the development education (DE) sector, which has, as its rationale, addressing the root causes of poverty and inequality, and supporting action toward positive social change. Is the DE sector doing enough to build alliances with civil society organisations that share our values and goals to challenge the toxic far-right rhetoric that is becoming increasingly prevalent in Ireland and across the world? (Meade, 2024). ‘It’s highly strategic to pick up the resonant issues that your opponents have carelessly left unattended,’ argues Klein (2023: 126), suggesting that during the pandemic the liberal left did not do enough to challenge the lies coming from the conspiratorial right. ‘[M]any liberals and progressives opted to defend the status quo measures, despite the fact that we could, and should, have done much more’ (Ibid.: 121).
The development education sector in Ireland and elsewhere is arguably today a doppelganger of its former radical self by ignoring the inequality created by oligarchic wealth, the threats to democracy posed by techno-capitalism, the mortgaging of our natural environment by fossil fuel multinationals, and the cruelty visited on the most vulnerable amongst us by austerity. How much of this is not known by the development education sector and currently ignored by practitioners and policy-makers? To what extent has development education acknowledged historical injustices caused by settler colonialism including the theft of people and land, and the eradication of Indigenous peoples? As a sector with its radical origins in the global South governed by an impulse toward tackling injustice wherever it exists, we know that ‘true solidarity with the oppressed means fighting at their side to transform the objective reality which has made them “beings for another”’ (Freire, 1996: 31). Where has our solidarity been evident in the struggle against neoliberalism, austerity, racism, the rise of the far-right and oligarchic wealth accumulation?
For the most part, the development education has looked away or wilfully ignored these converging crises enveloping our world (Fricke, 2022; Bryan and Mochizuki, 2023; Meade, 2024; McCloskey, 2022). And, this extends to the six month Israeli war on Gaza in regard to which Francesca Albanese (2024: 1), the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, concludes in her latest report ‘that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met’. It took our national development education network five months from the start of Israel’s war on Gaza to organise its first event on the crisis and it was titled ‘We Need to Talk About Gaza’ (my italics: IDEA, 2024). There has been no advance on that to date (10 April): no statement calling for a ceasefire; no exhortation to participate in national demonstrations to end the war; no government advocacy work; and no solidarity extended to Palestinians either in Ireland or in Gaza and the West Bank. I thought of this dreadful litany of inaction when reading this sentence in Doppelganger: ‘one of the hardest habits of thought to shake is the reflex to look away, to not see what is in front of us, and to not know what we know’ (Klein, 2023: 274).
Jewish radicalism
Much of the final section of Doppelganger is devoted to Jewish identity, attitudes to antisemitism and the founding of the state of Israel, and a strong tradition of Jewish intellectual radicalism and action. The Jewish Labour Bund, for example, was a socialist party formed at the end of the nineteenth century with thousands of members, mostly concentrated in Ukraine and Poland, and committed to the principle of doi’kayt (hereness) which argued that rather than flee to a ‘far-off Jewish homeland’ Jews should ‘stay here – and make here better’ (Ibid.: 287). The Bundists regularly debated and mocked the ‘thereness’ of Zionists holding fast to the belief that ‘Jews would be free when everyone was free, and not by building what amounted to a militarized ghetto on Palestinian land’ (Ibid.: 291).
Klein also shares the inspiring socialist experiment of ‘Red Vienna’, which from 1919-1934 under the control of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria, became ‘a laboratory for socialist and humanist policies, a haven for secularists and Jewish intellectuals inside a country dominated by conservative Catholic politicians’ (Ibid.: 206-07). A radical socialist programme resulted in the housing of 200,000 working-class people, the creation of universal welfare programmes, and provision of child-centred health, welfare and social services (Ibid.). Many of these welfare programmes were led by socialist Julius Tandler, who said: ‘He who builds children palaces tears down prison walls’ (Ibid.: 208). When the Nazis seized power, they appropriated these services for themselves as ‘sinister doppelgangers’ (Ibid.: 210) but, for Klein, the Jewish Bund and Red Vienna represent inspiring exemplars of ‘alternative ways of resisting and living’ (Ibid.: 337). They were flowerings of democratic socialism and examples of what unity and solidarity among working classes can achieve.
Doppelganger was published before the six-month war on Gaza but Israel is described in the book as a ‘doppelganger of the colonial project, specifically settler colonialism’ which is why Zionism was strongly opposed by the Jewish Bund (Ibid.: 299). It is a colonial process that requires ‘active unseeing’ by Israel’s settlers. In fact, Doppelganger argues that many of the dangerous personal and political doubles examined in the book share one thing in common; they are ‘all ways of not seeing’ (Ibid.: 322). There are no easy answers presented here to the troubling deception and fear spread by the ‘Mirror World’ but Klein argues ‘only unity among members of the working classes - regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or religion - will ever stand a chance of winning a fairer world’ (Ibid.: 289). With a critical pedagogy designed to demythicise the world and challenge stereotypes, development education is better placed than most pedagogies to resist the spread of populism and disinformation. But this first requires that the sector stops averting its gaze from the social and economic crises assailing our world.
References
Albanese, F (2024) ‘Anatomy of a Genocide Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese’, Human Rights Council Fifty-fifth session, 25 March, Ref: A/HRC/55/73, available: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session55/advance-versions/a-hrc-55-73-auv.pdf (accessed 8 April 2024).
Bryan, A and Mochizuki, Y (2023) ‘Crisis Transformationism and the De-Radicalisation of Development Education in a New Global Governance Landscape’, Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review, Vol. 36, Spring, pp. 51-77.
Freire, P (1996) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London: Penguin.
Fricke, H-J (2022) ‘Addressing “Root Causes”? Development Agencies, Development Education and Global Economics’, Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review, Vol. 35, Autumn, pp. 77-100.
IDEA (2024) ‘Exploring Contemporary Crises and Issues through GCE, We Need to Talk About Gaza’, 6 March, available: https://www.ideaonline.ie/exploring-contemporary-crises-and-issues-through-gce-we-need-to-talk-about-gaza (accessed 8 April 2024).
Klein, N (2000) No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, London: Harper Collins.
Klein, N (2008) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, London: Penguin.
Klein, N (2015) This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, New York: Simon and Schuster.
McCloskey, S (2022) Global Learning and International Development in the Age of Neoliberalism, Abingdon, Routledge.
Meade, E (2024) ‘Epistemic Injustice, the Far Right and the Hidden Ubiquity of Neoliberalism’, Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review, Vol. 38, Spring, pp. 14-33.
Wolf, N (1990) The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women, London: Chatto and Windus.
Stephen McCloskey is Director of the Centre for Global Education and editor of Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review. He is author of Global Learning and International Development in the Age of Neoliberalism (2022, Routledge).