Maureen O’Hara, the flame-haired ‘Queen of Technicolor’ celebrated for her on-screen chemistry with John Wayne, hated to be confused with Maureen O’Sullivan, who was Jane to Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan. But they were both Irish-born Hollywood actresses called Maureen, so it kept happening. I once heard John Sessions describe the time he met the octogenarian O’Hara. He prepared for the encounter by repeating to himself: ‘Don’t call her Maureen O’Sullivan.’ They got on famously until, inevitably, the wrong name slipped out. She took it ‘as badly as you can possibly imagine’.
The public soon lost track of which Naomi was droning on about the genocidal logic of ‘late capitalism’
Likewise, Naomi Klein hates it when people mix her up with Naomi Wolf – hates it so much, in fact, that she’s written a book about it. Since 1999, when Klein published No Logo, a razor-sharp evisceration of cool brands and their Third World sweatshops, she’s been mistaken for Wolf and vice versa. They’re both Jewish feminists with a knack for twisting the tail of corporate America. Wolf, eight years older than Klein, hit the intellectual jackpot with The Beauty Myth (1990), which blamed capitalism for, among other things, killing 150,000 anorexic young women.
Ironically, Wolf’s publicists didn’t have a problem advertising her own approximation to male ideas of beauty, while Klein’s artfully branded No Logo became, as she admits, ‘an accessory to be carried around and not read’. Neither Wolf nor Klein hit the jackpot again, but liberal commissioning editors had them both on speed dial and the public soon lost track of which Naomi was droning on about the genocidal logic of ‘late capitalism’.
Then, with the arrival of Covid, the comedy of prickly namesakes turned nasty. Wolf had always been prone to conspiracy theories. Now, writes Klein, she became ‘a relentless source of Covid-related misinformation’. On at least seven tech platforms, she portrayed measures to control the virus as plots ‘with the nefarious goals of grabbing our DNA, sickening us, sterilising us, killing our babies…’ Bill Gates and the Chinese Communist party were trying to destroy the West with ‘tainted murderous vaccines’. She tweeted that ‘vaccinated people’s urine/faeces’ should be separated from the main sewage system lest they contaminate unvaccinated people’s drinking water.
Meanwhile, far-right pundits lapped up this life-threatening drivel. Hand in hand, these former enemies crossed the line from lockdown scepticism – then, as now, a perfectly respectable point of view – to credulous paranoia. And Klein recognised it: not from her encounters with the right-wing fringe, but from her experience as the mother of an autistic child in Toronto. Here she encountered ‘an industry of strange magical cures’ that ranged from ‘sound waves and subliminal messages that promised to re-programme brains’ to doses of chlorine dioxide, a bleach used in paper mills.
Plus, notoriously, the 25-year-old theory proposed by the British doctor Andrew Wakefield that autism was associated with the MMR vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella. This myth has been utterly debunked; Wakefield has been struck off the UK medical register for falsifying data. But the damage was done: he had reawakened a fear of vaccines that dates back to Edward Jenner’s pioneering treatment for smallpox. The internet kept it alive until Covid, at which point far-right opportunists gleefully customised it.
Klein identifies the moment at which her ‘big-haired doppelganger’, as she calls her, went into full meltdown. In 2019 Wolf claimed in her book Outrages that there had been ‘several dozen’ executions of men convicted of sodomy in Victorian Britain; in fact, as she was humiliatingly informed live on BBC Radio 3, she had misread court documents and all those convicts had been released. Outrages was pulped. In normal circumstances Wolf would have disappeared. But, argues Klein, once she went over the edge she was caught in the arms of millions of conspiracy believers. That rings true. I’ve interviewed dozens of these people over the years; many of them are affronted by their contemporaries’ failure to applaud their genius, and so step gratefully into what Klein calls a ‘mirror world’ where twits and charlatans make up the deficit of praise.
The problem with Doppelganger is that its Naomi also lives in a mirror world. Klein has spent her entire life trapped in the alternative reality of the far left. In 2007 she declared that, thanks to the beneficent rule of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela had become ‘a zone of relative economic calm and predictability’. These days her search for an alternative to the global conspiracy of capitalism leads her, absurdly, to the airbrushed paradise of ‘Red Vienna’ after the first world war, which built ‘metaphorical palaces for children in order to tear down prisons’ and was ‘tolerant of neurodiversity’. She passes quickly over the inconvenient fact that its leaders believed in eugenics; Red Vienna, she thinks, offers a ‘possible portal out of doppelganger world’.
What does that mean? Anything Klein chooses, it seems. She falls back endlessly on the formula ‘x is a doppelganger of y’ to glue together her obsessions. Thus the European settlers of America were constructing ‘doppelganger’ societies – New England, New Amsterdam, geddit? – whose genocidal character inspired Hitler. Klein’s conflation of capitalism, colonialism and genocide is as tediously familiar as the rhetoric of a New World Order; if she’s going to convince us that it’s not a conspiracy theory then she’s going to have to provide some robust empirical support. She thinks she’s found it, close to home, in the ‘mass killing’ of Indigenous children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School run by the Catholic Church in British Columbia – an ‘apocalypse’ of at least 200 children whose graves were revealed by ground-penetrating radar. Those claims were first made in 2021; by the time Doppelganger went to press not one single body had been discovered and it seemed likely that investigators had mistaken soil disturbances for graves. Klein’s only response is to note that one of the articles pointing this out was written by ‘a long-time opponent of Indigenous rights’ who was attempting to ‘stamp out’ a ‘truthful telling of history’. To repeat: so far, not one body has been found. And it makes you wonder: when Klein looks in the mirror, which Naomi gazes back at her?
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