“Like all segregated societies that are layered on top of each other, Israel and Palestine are not two distinct geographies. Instead, they make up a singular doppelganger society, requiring a doubling of everything.”
(from Chapter 14 of Doppelganger)
An Excerpt
ISRAEL, PALESTINE, AND THE DOPPELGANGER EFFECT
Since publishing Doppelganger in September, 2023, some of the most gratifying feedback I have received has been about what one reader called “the Jewish parts.” These passages are mainly (though not exclusively) in two chapters that come late in the book: “The Nazi in the Mirror” and “The Unshakable Ethnic Double.”
They wrestle with many tricky themes, including the persistence of antisemitism as an ancient conspiracy theory, and the dangers of a particular kind of trauma-forged identity politics as they play out in Israel. These are themes I have been writing about since I was teenager, yet this time, I found that the figure of the doppelganger, or the doubled self, opened them up in new and surprising ways.
These two chapters also get into the ongoing debates about how the Nazis were influenced by European colonial and racial segregation in the Americas—and how a failure to reckon with those connections shaped and misshaped Israeli history, and contributed to exiling Palestinians into an unbearable purgatory. Israel-Palestine has been described by many as the “open wound” of the modern world: never healed, never even bandaged. On October 7, 2023, that wound was ripped open in ways we cannot yet begin to comprehend.
I am grateful to my publishers for giving me permission to share these pages with you, at no charge. My preference, of course, if for them to be read in context, as part of the whole book. But I think they also stand alone. And since holidays are when many of us have time to talk with loved ones who see the world differently, my immediate hope is for this material to help make some of those conversations a little more productive.
The word I hear most often to describe these battles over land, identity, and safety is “intractable.” I get it and I have experienced that intractability myself. And yet we cannot surrender to this blockage. I wrote Doppelganger because I am convinced that we can break out of our partitioned narratives, that we can look at and listen to and learn from our doubles, even the ones we most reject. It may be our only hope.
Since publishing Doppelganger in September, 2023, some of the most gratifying feedback I have received has been about what one reader called “the Jewish parts.” These passages are mainly (though not exclusively) in two chapters that come late in the book: “The Nazi in the Mirror” and “The Unshakable Ethnic Double.”
They wrestle with many tricky themes, including the persistence of antisemitism as an ancient conspiracy theory, and the dangers of a particular kind of trauma-forged identity politics as they play out in Israel. These are themes I have been writing about since I was teenager, yet this time, I found that the figure of the doppelganger, or the doubled self, opened them up in new and surprising ways.
These two chapters also get into the ongoing debates about how the Nazis were influenced by European colonial and racial segregation in the Americas—and how a failure to reckon with those connections shaped and misshaped Israeli history, and contributed to exiling Palestinians into an unbearable purgatory. Israel-Palestine has been described by many as the “open wound” of the modern world: never healed, never even bandaged. On October 7, 2023, that wound was ripped open in ways we cannot yet begin to comprehend.
I am grateful to my publishers for giving me permission to share these pages with you, at no charge. My preference, of course, if for them to be read in context, as part of the whole book. But I think they also stand alone. And since holidays are when many of us have time to talk with loved ones who see the world differently, my immediate hope is for this material to help make some of those conversations a little more productive.
The word I hear most often to describe these battles over land, identity, and safety is “intractable.” I get it and I have experienced that intractability myself. And yet we cannot surrender to this blockage. I wrote Doppelganger because I am convinced that we can break out of our partitioned narratives, that we can look at and listen to and learn from our doubles, even the ones we most reject. It may be our only hope.
CHAPTER 13: THE NAZI IN THE MIRROR
Copyright © 2023 by Naomi Klein. Reproduced with permission from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved. Permission for reproduction or use of this material must be obtained from the publisher; send all queries to: permissions@macmillan.com
In January 2022, a convoy of truckers took over Canada’s capital city and stayed for several weeks. Many of the demonstrators claimed that they and their families were facing a “genocide” caused by Covid vaccines and brazenly compared their imagined plight to the actual genocides suffered by Indigenous nations across the Americas. One night, I decided to take a break from the convoy news and watch something that I hoped might help me make sense of these and other strange happenings: the four-part HBO miniseries Exterminate All the Brutes, from the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck. Slow and deliberate, it leaves lots of time to think. At one point in the voice-over, Peck says, “The very existence of this film is a miracle.” It is certainly a sign that more secrets and ghosts are escaping their burial grounds.
Peck’s earlier films—including Lumumba, about the assassination of the Congolese liberation leader and prime minister Patrice Lumumba; I Am Not Your Negro, about the life and thought of James Baldwin; and The Young Karl Marx—had, he explained, each told a piece of the violent story of how our world was born. Now Peck was reaching for a unifying theory that runs through these and other chapters, attempting to identify a worldview that could stitch together the various massacres and holocausts and political assassinations that cleared land for European settlers in the Americas and made it possible to pillage Africa and build racial apartheid in the United States.
“The foundation of it all,” Peck says, is embedded in the title he chose, inspired by the 1992 book “Exterminate All the Brutes,” by the Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist, who took it from a fateful line in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, first published in 1899, which tells the story of a colonial ivory-trading mission in central Africa. Conrad drew on numerous examples of Europeans setting out to “civilize the savages” as a high-minded excuse for asserting a right to their lands, wealth, and bodies. Inevitably, that civilizing urge tipped into a blinding drive to wipe out the natives—a conclusion foretold as soon as one group of people set themselves up as biologically superior to all others.
That sentence—“exterminate all the brutes”—is the murderous annihilatory impulse to pursue one’s interests at all costs. It is the supremacist mindset that casts the extinguishments of entire peoples and cultures not merely as an unavoidable element of the march of progress but also as a salutary stage in the evolution of the human species. “And if the inferior race must perish, it is a gain, a step toward the perfecting of society which is the aim of progress,” Mr. Travers explains in Conrad’s novel The Rescue, a distillation of the mindset that drowned whole continents in blood, and that was certainly at work here in Canada, in its so-called schools for indigenous children with their secret cemeteries. Within this mindset, genocide is not a crime; it’s merely a difficult but necessary stage, one blessed (for the believers) by God or (for the rationalists) by Charles Darwin, who wrote in The Descent of Man, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” A “great replacement” theory if ever there was one.
What I did not expect was to discover that Peck’s opus was a doppelganger story….
To continue reading the rest of Chapter 13 and Chapter 14 from Doppelganger—for free—please download the pdf here.
Copyright © 2023 by Naomi Klein. Reproduced with permission from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved. Permission for reproduction or use of this material must be obtained from the publisher; send all queries to: permissions@macmillan.com
In January 2022, a convoy of truckers took over Canada’s capital city and stayed for several weeks. Many of the demonstrators claimed that they and their families were facing a “genocide” caused by Covid vaccines and brazenly compared their imagined plight to the actual genocides suffered by Indigenous nations across the Americas. One night, I decided to take a break from the convoy news and watch something that I hoped might help me make sense of these and other strange happenings: the four-part HBO miniseries Exterminate All the Brutes, from the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck. Slow and deliberate, it leaves lots of time to think. At one point in the voice-over, Peck says, “The very existence of this film is a miracle.” It is certainly a sign that more secrets and ghosts are escaping their burial grounds.
Peck’s earlier films—including Lumumba, about the assassination of the Congolese liberation leader and prime minister Patrice Lumumba; I Am Not Your Negro, about the life and thought of James Baldwin; and The Young Karl Marx—had, he explained, each told a piece of the violent story of how our world was born. Now Peck was reaching for a unifying theory that runs through these and other chapters, attempting to identify a worldview that could stitch together the various massacres and holocausts and political assassinations that cleared land for European settlers in the Americas and made it possible to pillage Africa and build racial apartheid in the United States.
“The foundation of it all,” Peck says, is embedded in the title he chose, inspired by the 1992 book “Exterminate All the Brutes,” by the Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist, who took it from a fateful line in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, first published in 1899, which tells the story of a colonial ivory-trading mission in central Africa. Conrad drew on numerous examples of Europeans setting out to “civilize the savages” as a high-minded excuse for asserting a right to their lands, wealth, and bodies. Inevitably, that civilizing urge tipped into a blinding drive to wipe out the natives—a conclusion foretold as soon as one group of people set themselves up as biologically superior to all others.
That sentence—“exterminate all the brutes”—is the murderous annihilatory impulse to pursue one’s interests at all costs. It is the supremacist mindset that casts the extinguishments of entire peoples and cultures not merely as an unavoidable element of the march of progress but also as a salutary stage in the evolution of the human species. “And if the inferior race must perish, it is a gain, a step toward the perfecting of society which is the aim of progress,” Mr. Travers explains in Conrad’s novel The Rescue, a distillation of the mindset that drowned whole continents in blood, and that was certainly at work here in Canada, in its so-called schools for indigenous children with their secret cemeteries. Within this mindset, genocide is not a crime; it’s merely a difficult but necessary stage, one blessed (for the believers) by God or (for the rationalists) by Charles Darwin, who wrote in The Descent of Man, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” A “great replacement” theory if ever there was one.
What I did not expect was to discover that Peck’s opus was a doppelganger story….
To continue reading the rest of Chapter 13 and Chapter 14 from Doppelganger—for free—please download the pdf here.