The paratext, fittingly, features a ‘raving’ endorsement by a pundit much given to raving — raving about the world-changing generosity and genius of the billionaire Melinda Gates, raving about how unfortunate it was that Hitler discredited eugenics, raving about how dangerous social media was made by mean black girls, raving about how the inferior races are out-breeding the true Europeans. On the cover of Doppelgänger, the ever-raving Michelle Goldberg confesses she’s been raving about it also, because she ‘can’t think of a book that better captures the berserk period we’ve been living through.’ A period, she elsewhere raves, in case you were curious, in which ‘the Left’ doesn’t see the ‘demographic threat’ of brown and black immigrants in Europe whom she claims, on no basis, refuse to work in care professions or pay their taxes, a period when Imams just say whatever crazy ass thing they think without ending up in jail just as if they were Priests or Rabbis or Michelle Goldberg herself, a period when the working class doesn’t adore the Gates couple, a period when there are people who don’t even fret about population and racial demographics.
While immigration is obviously part of the solution [to declining European birth rate], immigration on the necessary scale is almost certain to produce serious nationalist backlashes. According to an article published a few years ago in the Journal of Population Research, if Italy’s 1995 fertility rate remained constant, then without immigration the country’s population size a century hence would be a mere 14 percent of what it is today. Even if Italy could smoothly adjust to a majority-immigrant society, will those immigrants really support a system in which a good part of their taxes go to maintaining a bunch of old Italians who they don’t necessarily feel any connection to? — Michelle Goldberg
I hesitated even to quote this, it is so eye-stingingly nasty. And then of course it provokes one to answer (has she ever been in a care home or hospital in Italy?), but then one has already given ground (jfc I don’t need to empirically prove to her that immigrants have human feeling and civic responsibility equal to whatever it is she thinks she is while gentrifying New York City). One cannot help but feel pure hatred for the author of that paragraph — the smugness, the profound mendacity, the moral rot, the chicanery, the troll. It’s just absolutely fascist, as is everything Goldberg writes, her whole project, her oeuvre, although her style, tho not as decent and civil as her friend Naomi Klein’s, usually involves wrapping this Nazi viciousness in liberal cottons: she presents typically as neo-Fabian, civilizing missionary who recites Gates Foundation bafflegab about ‘women and girls,’ but not infrequently her texts are punctuated by outbursts lifted from the manifesto of Andras Behring Breivik. As I wrote elsewhere in my review of her eugenics manifesto, The Means of Reproduction: ‘Goldberg shares Breivik's obsession with one Mullah Krekar, quoted by Breivik repeatedly and centrally staged by Goldberg in her depiction of the Muslim demographic menace posing a threat to "European values" (feminism, gay rights) and European standard of living (by, she suggests without a shred of evidence, reluctance to pay taxes to support their welfare states). While admitting that the "conservative" analysis that appears as Breivik's rationale for murdering socialist Norwegian schoolchildren is "exaggerated", Goldberg stresses it is "not wrong."'
In many ways, Goldberg is the roman-salute-throwing, Norwegian mass murderer’s whiny liberal doppelgänger (both of them owing most of their postures to the double sided slug liberal fascist Slavoj Zizek), and for this reason she is a fitting tout outside the gate of Naomi Klein’s book about, well, the Other, the threats to the establishment to which they belong.
Klein’s essay-memoir Doppelgänger is itself a doppelgänger, some manipulative storytelling slipped as changeling into the place of historical political explanation. The text contains a discussion of the right wing success with large dissident audiences in the spectacle that is itself a perverted imposter fashioned to kill and supplant the critique of capital and media — that real world doppelgänger that inspired all the doppelgänger books of modernity Klein has been reading —and the rapid, dazzling expansion, in digitality, of its capacities to masquerade as humanity and our physical, linguistic, social and spiritual products, in order to dispossess and enslave us.
Klein’s cuckoo’s egg is an attempted reterritorialization. That is, she wants to emerge from the shaken snowglobe and the kaleidoscopic gambits reasserting the irreconcilable distinction between 1 & 2
She herself, of course, is pushing 1. It’s the System (God’s Will) while Other Naomi, as she calls her, is the Oriental Naomi — with bigger hair, Rational Naomi insists, rabbit holes, and Vagina where Rational Naomi has a Climate Changing Everything —purveying 2. It’s the Plot (work of Satan).
to be continued shortly….