Doppelganger, page 31
The influences were more recent and contemporary as well. When Hans Asperger and other doctors in Germany and Austria began deciding which disabled people would live and which were “unworthy of life,” they were heavily influenced by the United States, where the world’s first eugenics-based law to mandate involuntary sterilization was passed in Indiana in 1907 and soon spread to other states. Through laws like these, the U.S. eugenics movement had already provided a pseudoscientific rationale for the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of would-be parents whose genes were deemed threats to the overall pool—a project riddled with built-in biases about the relative intelligence of those of Anglo and Nordic stock. The Nazis took this precedent and radically expanded it, with an estimated 400,000 people sterilized during their rule, but their innovations in this realm were a matter of scale and speed, not kind.
James Q. Whitman, author of Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, published in 2017, documents many of the Nazis’ American debts in chilling detail. A professor of law at Yale University, Whitman makes the case that the legal contortions the United States had developed to deny full citizenship rights based on race helped inspire the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which would legalize stripping German Jews of their citizenship and denying them political rights, while banning sex, marriage, and reproduction between Aryans and Jews (the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law on the Protection of German Blood and German Honor). They found templates for the new Jewish ghettos they created partly by studying the systems of legalized segregation developed under Jim Crow laws and those for Native reservations; South Africa’s apartheid system also provided key inspiration.
Most foundationally, many Nazis were students and fans of the American frontier mythology—the presumed right to push westward to claim ever more territory for settlement. The German analogy was Lebensraum, or space required to live and grow, which Hitler adopted and translated into an imperative to conquer and seize lands to the east of Germany. As in the America West, this territory was occupied by many who were considered obstacles to the project—by Slavs and Jews. Praising European settlers for having “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand,” Hitler claimed it was now Germany’s turn to engage in cleansings and mass relocations on its own frontier.
“There is only one task: To set about the Germanization of the land by bringing in Germans and to regard the indigenous inhabitants as Indians,” Hitler said in 1941. He said at another point that year, “In this business I shall go straight ahead, cold-bloodedly … I don’t see why a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat wheat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indians.” On his right to lay claim to Ukraine’s grain, Hitler joked, “We’ll supply the Ukrainians with scarves, glass beads and everything that colonial peoples like.”
The Nazis saw some of the residents of the lands they usurped as fit for slave labor, but the Jews were considered beyond redemption and therefore faced eradication, in part to make room for German settlers. As the war went on, the scale and speed of death was unprecedented—no one had previously built gas ovens or crematoria and put them to use day after day to eliminate a vast population. But though the Nazis’ killing spree took state-sponsored hate to new extremes, extermination for the purposes of land theft was not Hitler’s innovation. “Auschwitz was the modern industrial application of a policy of extermination on which European world domination had long since rested,” Lindqvist writes. However, he continues, “when what had been done in the heart of darkness was repeated in the heart of Europe, no one recognized it. No one wished to admit what everyone knew.”
That is incorrect. Several leading Black intellectuals saw the parallels with great clarity at the time. W. E. B. Du Bois, in The World and Africa, published soon after the end of the Second World War, wrote, “There was no Nazi atrocity—concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood—which Christian civilization of Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.” What was new: it was now fellow Europeans who were being cast as the inferior race.
In Discourse on Colonialism, the Martinican author and politician Aimé Césaire charged that Europeans tolerated “Nazism before it was inflicted on them.” Until these methods came home to European soil, “they absolved it … shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.” Hitler’s crime for the Allies, Césaire believed, was that he did to Jews and Slavs what “until then had been reserved exclusively for” the nonwhite colonized in foreign lands. But seen from the perspective of the Caribbean, it was all one long, continuous, snaking story.
Césaire was explicit that, in his view, Hitler was not merely the enemy of the United States and the United Kingdom—he was their shadow, their twin, their twisted doppelganger: “Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon.”
The Mirror Shatters
This analysis destabilizes pretty much all the stories that I grew up with, which taught us that the Holocaust was a singular event without precedent, so far outside the bounds of human history that it was essentially impossible to comprehend. We learned, in myriad ways, that there was something sacrilegious about even speaking of the Nazi Holocaust in the same breath as any other crime, that to do so made it less horrific, less shocking, somehow ordinary. But what if ordinary is horrific? What if that’s the point: that Nazism is not an aberration from an otherwise uplifting story of enlightenment and modernity, but its not-so-distant double, its other face?
Referencing Germany’s great scribe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lindqvist writes, “The idea of extermination lies no farther from the heart of humanism than Buchenwald lies from the Goethehaus in Weimar. That insight has been almost completely repressed, even by the Germans, who have been made sole scapegoats for ideas of extermination that are actually a common European heritage.”
There are many well-known arguments for why the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis was different. It was higher tech. Death came faster. It was industrial in its scale. All true. But it’s also true that every holocaust is different. Every genocide has its own particular characteristics, and every hated group is hated in its own special way. By sheer numbers of dead, the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas surpasses all others. In terms of modern technologies, the transatlantic trade in kidnapped and enslaved Africans, and the plantations the trade served in the antebellum South and the Caribbean, were highly modern for their times. So cutting-edge, scholars have shown, that the systems developed to transport, insure, depreciate, track, control, and extract maximum wealth from this coerced labor shaped many aspects of modern accounting and human resources management. And as Rinaldo Walcott, a scholar of race and gender, writes in his manifesto On Property, “The ideas forged in the plantation economy continue to shape our social relations.” Among those social relations are modern policing, mass surveillance, and mass incarceration.
On what else does the claim to exceptionalism rest? The fact that European Jewry was so deeply assimilated and embedded in European culture, so committed to being “civilized,” as it was defined on the continent at the time. Many of those killed were even rich. But what of the established Japanese families sent to internment camps in the United States and Canada in this same period? What of the arson and massacre of “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, well before the war? Different scales of crimes, to be sure, yet all show the limits of assimilation as protection. The refusal to believe that they could be the targets of Nazi slaughter was the undoing for many Jews in Germany and Austria: for far too long, they told themselves they were too cultured and too educated to ever be cast as brutes. What Du Bois and Césaire tried to tell us is that culture, language, science, and economy are no protection against genocide—all it takes is sufficient military force wielded by a power willing to denounce your culture as savage and declare you brutes. That is the story of colonial violence the world over. Casting people as unattached to land—because they practice a different form of agriculture, because they move with the seasons, whatever story served the end goal—has always been a precursor to genocide. Jews were declared “rootless” before they were slaughtered, much as colonial powers had declared Indigenous peoples nomadic and therefore uncivilized as a prelude to stealing their land on pain of annihilation on every continent on the planet.
Many people whose cultures, lands, and bodies had been targeted in these ways recognized the logic behind Hitler’s political project precisely because it was familiar. After Kristallnacht in 1938, for instance, a delegation from the Australian Aborigines League wrote a protest letter condemning “the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi Government of Germany” and, in a little-known historical chapter, hand-delivered it to the German consulate in Melbourne (the consulate refused to accept it). This was well before Western governments were willing to confront Hitler; yet these Indigenous leaders, who were still fighting for basic rights of their own, clearly saw the gravity of the threat. The Nazis’ industrial killing was new, and the Jewish case is different. But so is every case. And some things are all too similar.
The flip side of the post–World War II cries of “Never again” was an unspoken “Never before.” The insistence on lifting the Holocaust out of history, the failure to recognize these patterns, and the refusal to see where the Nazis fit inside the arc of colonial genocides have all come at a high cost. The countries that defeated Hitler did not have to confront the uncomfortable fact that Hitler had taken pointers and inspiration on race-making and on human containment from them, leaving their innocence not only undisturbed but also significantly strengthened by what was indeed a righteous victory.
This is Lindqvist’s point: “Two events need not be identical for one of them to facilitate the other. European world expansion, accompanied as it was by shameless defense of extermination, created habits of thought and political precedents that made way for new outrages, finally culminating in the most horrendous of them all: the Holocaust.” And 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.
When Lindqvist wrote “Exterminate All the Brutes,” it was the early 1990s, and the climate crisis was barely in his sightlines. He did not yet know that European powers and their settler colonial states would spend the next three decades effectively deciding to let continents where those “inferior races” reside burn and drown because, once again, the alternative interrupted the flow of limitless wealth accumulation. We must now ask this: What if full-blown fascism is not the monster at the door, but the monster inside the house, the monster inside us—even we whose ancestors have been victims of genocide?
This, I fear, is the deepest danger posed by the Mirror World and its increasingly belligerent war on history. The door to the Shadow Lands was cracked open; truths were flying out that would no longer be contained. The most abused shadow workers in our economy—immigrant women and men on temporary work visas laboring in four care homes in a single day, or packing chicken parts in impossibly cold and bloody facilities—were finally on our television screens. Not because they were being cheered as heroes, but because they were the ones in the so-called hot spots: the ones whose bodies were piling up in morgues and refrigerated trucks. We had no choice but to see and to reckon with what had been so long hidden and repressed. Then, when so many of us streamed into the streets that first Covid spring and shouted the names of the murdered and, then, one year after that, when we bowed our heads in grief for the little ones who never returned, more truths were escaping.
Like that couple in the Pre-Raphaelite painting, more and more of us were beginning, just beginning, just barely, to see ourselves and our place in a larger world crowded with spectral presences. For some, it made us faint. For others, it made us mad. For a great many, it made us want to change: to expel the monster inside the collective unconscious, or at least try. Try to be the kind of people whose daily lives do not require the annihilation of other lives and other ways of life.
“Forces opposed to justice stand ready to reverse the gains of yesterday’s struggles entirely, should the opportunity present itself,” writes Olúfmi O. Táíwò in Reconsidering Reparations, published in 2022. By then, the forces of forgetting were already roaring back—to slam that door, and to shroud our countries in innocence and righteousness once again. “There is a resistance to memory inside memory itself,” writes the historian of psychoanalysis Jacqueline Rose.
One year after the announcement about unmarked school burial grounds in Kamloops, the New York Post ran a piece quoting an influential conservative ideologue and a longtime opponent of Indigenous rights, Tom Flanagan, who called the revelation of the graves “the biggest fake news story in Canadian history” and a case of “moral panic.” It seems that to many people, a truthful telling of history feels like treachery—and must be stamped out. But if those truths are stuffed back away, they will keep haunting us and keep reemerging in the Mirror World in distorted, twisted form.
On May 14, 2022, an eighteen-year-old white supremacist obsessed with the Great Replacement theory and low birth rates among whites drove to a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York, with the aim of killing as many Black people as possible. He murdered ten people with a legally purchased AR-15-style rifle. He livestreamed the massacre, as others had before him, performing himself as his generation had been taught to do. He left a long, rambling manifesto behind, praising Nazis and calling himself, among other things, an “ecofascist.” Julian Brave NoiseCat, a writer and colleague from the climate justice movement, noticed some uncanny parallels at work:
I’m struck by the similarity of right-wing conspiracy theories to actual policies towards Indigenous peoples.
‘replacement theory’—Manifest Destiny
QAnon (mass institutionalized child abuse)—boarding and residential schools
‘plandemic’—smallpox, alcohol, bioterrorism
It’s all so Freudian. The fear that it will happen to them stems from an implicit admission that they did it to others.
As though the Black, Brown and Indigenous downtrodden are just as hateful as they are and are going to turn around and do to them what they did to us.
Is that part of what we are seeing? Are increasingly violent conspiracy theorists in the Mirror World afraid of being rounded up, treated as second-class, occupied, and culled because on some level they know that these are the genocidal behaviors that created and sustain their relative but increasingly precarious privileges? Are they terrified that if the truths of the Shadow Lands—past, present, and future—are ever fully revealed and reckoned with, then it can only result in a dramatic role reversal, with the victims becoming the victimizers?
Well, it has happened before. In fact, it’s happening right now, in a place where everything is doubled, where doppelganger politics govern every aspect of life. It’s happening in Israel, and in its partitioned shadow land, Palestine. Our last stop, and the place where so many forces we have encountered on this winding journey converge and collide.
14
THE UNSHAKABLE ETHNIC DOUBLE
“It’s anti-Semitism.”
The power is out for the fifth time in this winter of record-breaking windstorms and mudslides, and I have decamped to my parents’ place to siphon electricity for my laptop. Mom is taking advantage of this rare alone time to caution me against dwelling on the Wolf issue. (A bit late for that!)
“They see you both as a type,” she says over a bowl of defrosted vegetable soup. “Why draw attention to it?”
She seems sad when she tells me this, deflated. Focusing on my doppelganger trouble—using it to spin out this web of theories about digital doubles and personal brands and the Mirror World and the Shadow Land—will only, she feels certain, attract more of the kind of dangerous attention that is the real reason behind the confusion in the first place. Which, for her, is obvious. It’s the Jew thing.
Others have made points that back her up. Jeet Heer, a columnist for The Nation and an avid Wolf watcher, wrote after one of her more egregious streaks of Covid misinformation, “At this point, confusing Naomi Klein with Naomi Wolf is just anti-Semitism. I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules. Your brain should be able to handle more than one Naomi.”
I don’t make the rules, either. Hannah Arendt had a rule, though. “If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew,” she wrote. “Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.” So is that what I have to do? What I have been putting off doing all this time? Do I have to defend myself from all this as a Jew?
Join the club, White Lady, I hear some of you saying.
This is fair. Countless people on this planet riven with racial hierarchies contend with far more heinous forms of ethnic and racial projection, forced to represent only their skin color to white eyes. They also log on to social media to find themselves blamed and credited for the words and actions of others. The Australian poet Omar Sakr regularly shares outrageous stories about TV bookers and random readers confusing him with a parade of other public figures with brown skin. Once, he was even sent a complete travel itinerary so that he could arrive for his guest appearance on a home improvement show with which he had no prior contact. And the show made the same error with another writer, Osman Faruqi.
