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Authors Who Haven't Read Their Own Books

Review Essay of Naomi Klein, 'Doppelganger' (Allen Lane, £25).

Andrew Barr

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/453962/doppelganger-by-klein-naomi/9780241621301

If Dante were writing today, I’d hope he’d reserve space in one of his Circles of Hell for people who haven’t read their own books.

I’m not referring to ‘celebrities’ who have outsourced the writing about their brilliant careers and incisive opinions to ghost-writers, and who do not bother to read the books produced in their names because they haven’t got to where they are today by reading books.

I’m referring to the journalists and historians and sundry ‘intellectuals’ who have spent years researching and writing books on subjects of great social and/or political importance, books which contain an important message, but who have completely failed to digest the message they have themselves conveyed in their own work.

A little personal background might shed some light here. I began my career as an author by writing about wine, because I knew something about the subject, having been involved in the wine society at college, and because in Britain in the 1980s there was a great thirst for knowledge about wine among ‘Yuppies’ who were keen to adopt a middle-class lifestyle without having enjoyed the benefit of a middle-class background. My opinion was that a lot of rot was talked about wine by people who benefited from maintaining an air of mystique around the subject, and I was convinced that a debunk of the pretensions surrounding wine connoisseurship would appeal to those among the nouveaux riches who felt socially embarrassed about their ignorance of the subject.

I published my first book, Wine Snobbery, in 1988, at the age of 27. It proved a succès de scandale. It offended many people in the wine business, because it explained in historical and viticultural and oenological detail the means by which the image of the superiority of certain wines, or certain types of wines, had been created, an image that (I argued) was not supported by reality.

At the time, and for a while afterwards, I described Wine Snobbery as my ‘angry young man’ book. I did not yet realise that what I had exposed about the world of wine could no less readily be exposed in many (perhaps most) other areas of life by anyone who had some knowledge of the subject at hand, and the gumption (or foolhardiness) to challenge established shibboleths.

I followed Wine Snobbery with much more ‘serious’ books, one on the grape variety Pinot Noir, and two social histories of drinking, first on Britain (Drink: an informal social history), then on America (Drink: a social history of America). In the latter, I sought to re-envisage the history of America since early colonial times through the prism of drinking habits and attitudes to drink, an historical approach that had become fashionable at the time – writing a history of a very specific subject in order to shed light on a much wider story. From the particular to the general. I still think it’s a good approach. The historical equivalent of the political slogan, ‘Think globally, act locally.’

In fact, I’m using the same approach nowadays, only in a different context, seeking to interpret the collapse of liberal democracy and its replacement by technocratic tyranny through the prism of Judaism – from the perspective of Jewish history and Jewish religion and Jewish culture and Jewish morals and ethics. Which isn’t something that anyone else is doing.

This brings us to Naomi Klein. I used to be a fan of Klein. I think many of ‘us’ were. I wasn’t so interested in her first book No Logo, about corporate branding, but I thought The Shock Doctrine, published in 2007, to be quite brilliant – and it transformed my understanding of the world. Essentially it describes how the American military-industrial complex has for several decades started wars and destroyed whole countries in order that American businesses could make a fortune by rebuilding the countries in question upon American capitalist principles. I would still recommend reading The Shock Doctrine, not least because it precisely foreshadowed what has been done to Western countries since the announcement of the COVID ‘emergency’ in the spring of 2020. The guns that had previously been turned on ‘developing’ countries have been turned back on the ‘developed’ ones. Western liberal democracies are being hollowed out, in order to ‘build back better’.

To judge from a reading of Doppelganger, Klein herself has not read The Shock Doctrine. Obviously, she wrote it, but she clearly wrote it to convey a message – a message which she has herself entirely failed to digest. If Klein had really understood the message of her own book from sixteen years ago she would not now have written a book dedicated to debunking what she apparently regards as a dangerous conspiracy theory that the whole COVID emergency was planned – or at the very least exploited – in order to introduce a new form of totalitarianism in the form of ‘technocracy’, an attempt to control and diminish the lives of the citizens of Western countries through technological means. The Naomi Klein who wrote The Shock Doctrine would have called out the Naomi Klein who has written Doppelganger. Once upon a time, Klein believed in ‘conspiracies’.

The approach that Klein has taken to unravel what she considers to be a ‘mirror world’ of ‘conspiracy theories’ is to focus on an individual ‘conspiracy theorist’ in the person of Naomi Wolf and then use her as an exemplar to generalise about what Klein sees as an entire ‘conspiracy’ movement. The reason why Klein has chosen Wolf as her exemplar is that the two of them are frequently confused, to the extent that Klein has come to see Wolf as her doppelgänger, her evil twin – hence the title of the book. It’s an interesting concept (albeit one that Klein pushes too far), but it’s also dangerous territory, because surely the Klein of 2007, the one that wrote The Shock Doctrine, would also regard the Klein of today – the one who’s ‘sold out’ – as her doppelgänger, her evil twin?

As for the morality of Klein’s focus on Wolf, well, I’ve already said I like a microcosm-to-macrocosm approach, one that focuses on something very specific as a means of understanding big and complex issues which are not so readily explicable in themselves. In this case, however, I don’t think that the approach is a healthy one. I mean, 348 pages dedicated to Klein’s obsession with Wolf! How narcissistic can you get? Klein is very keen on the notion of personal brands and how they should be protected. What about Wolf’s brand? Does that not deserve protection too?

It would be a tedious business to dissect Klein’s many tenuous assertions relating to the COVID issue, and I don’t think there would be any benefit in it. People who have set out their stall on Klein’s side of the Great Divide cannot be persuaded to change their minds by reference to evidence about the harm caused both to individuals and to society by lockdowns and masks and the so-called COVID ‘vaccines’. That would require them to admit that they have willingly believed a lie for the last three and a half years, which would be just too painful for them to accept. It would require them to accept that the system in which they have placed all their trust has been playing them for fools all along. And people on ‘our’ side don’t need me to point out all the errors in Klein’s book, because they have been knee-deep in data for years now.

One example should suffice: Klein seeks to ridicule her opponents for their apparent inability to decide whether COVID is a lethal bio-weapon or a relatively mild ‘flu-like virus (p. 288). Yes, there has been a lot of disagreement about the origins and virulence of COVID. But both explanations make Klein look stupid. If COVID’s a lethal bio-weapon, then it’s embarrassing that Klein should have dismissed all claims of a conspiracy, and if it’s a relatively mild virus, then that makes a nonsense of all the repressive measures of which Klein so clearly approves. Alternatively, COVID could be mild in most cases but serious in some others, but that’s a nuance Klein appears to be incapable of comprehending.

I am also more than a little astonished at Klein’s lack of curiosity to investigate any of the evidence about the harms caused by the COVID ‘vaccines’, or indeed by the vaccines that preceded them. Why would a mother be so ready to discuss the issues associated with raising an autistic child yet reject out of hand all the evidence linking the ‘autism epidemic’ to excess childhood vaccination, and instead resort to a gratuitous ad hominemattack on Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who revealed it, while signally failing to adduce any substantial argument as to why she believes him to have been incorrect (pp. 195-202)? Klein tells us that Wakefield is in the wrong because organisations and publications controlled by the pharmaceutical industry have told us he’s in the wrong. That’s not research, that’s prejudice. Why does Klein make no reference, for example, to the public admission in 2014 by William Thompson, senior scientist at the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), that Wakefield had been right all along? (Brett Wilcox, Jabbed, 2018 pp. xix, 298-9.) Is it not just a tiny bit hypocritical of someone who constantly rails about the evils of capitalism to be so willing to countenance the lies spread abroad by multinational corporations and by the governments and media outlets they so clearly influence?

In writing Doppelganger, Klein appears to have abandoned the intellectual rigour she demonstrated in The Shock Doctrine. Her technique – surprising for a long-standing academic, one would have thought, especially for one who goes out of her way to criticise her supposed doppelgänger for her own most egregious failure of research (pp. 64-5) – is to counter what she describes as unsubstantiated assertions by Wolf by offering unsubstantiated counter-assertions of her own. She seeks to ridicule Wolf and others, without offering evidence as to why she thinks they should be ridiculed. She accuses Wolf (p. 36) of ‘saying things that sounded a little like the argument I had made in The Shock Doctrine but refracted through a fun-house mirror of plots and conspiracies … I felt like she had taken my ideas [and] fed them into a bonkers blender …

‘All the while, Wolf’s followers hounded me about why I had sold out to the “globalists” and was duping the public into believing that masks, vaccines and restrictions on indoor gatherings were legitimate public-health measures, as opposed to a pretext for a worldwide shock doctrine, of the kind I had written about in my books.’

I’m sorry, Ms Klein, but simply telling people that they have misunderstood your book is no substitute for explaining to people why you think they have misunderstood your book. Later in Doppelganger Klein has written a section entitled ‘Some Conspiracies are Real’ (pp. 235-40). Which conspiracies are real? Well, the ones that Klein tells us we should believe, apparently. Not the other ones, the ones Klein tells us not to believe – only she doesn’t explain to us why we shouldn’t believe them. She simply expects us to take her word for it.

For example, Klein tells us that we should believe that there was a conspiracy by the United States government and its intelligence agencies to effect the violent overthrow of the socialist Allende administration in Chile in 1973, so that they could use the country as a petri dish for previously untested ‘neo-liberal’ economic policies, but that we should disbelieve the ‘conspiracy theory’ that the United States and other Western governments effected by means of lockdown the overthrow of the Constitution and the rule of law so that they could use their own countries as petri dishes for the increased digitalisation of their economies as a means of greater social control. Yet that’s exactly the kind of explanation Klein embraced in The Shock Doctrine – a book that was criticised by a number of reviewers for supposedly over-indulging in ‘conspiracy theories’.

Doppelganger marks the culmination (I sincerely hope) of a general phenomenon I have noticed ever since the populist rebellion of 2016 – Trump and Brexit – whereby regime-compliant ‘intellectuals’ have massed ranks to resist the populist tide by either pretending not to understand or genuinely not understanding the messages of their own books. Authors who insist that their books really didn’t mean what people who have read them thought they meant. Authors who insist that when they themselves had said that their books might be understood to convey a particular message, they hadn’t actually meant what people understood them to have said they meant. That’s the very definition of ‘gaslighting’, surely? Telling people that they should disbelieve their own convictions and their own memory and the evidence of their own eyes?

Which brings us (of course) to George Orwell’s 1984. The book that warned of a world in which ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your own eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.’ Orwell’s 1984has repeatedly been described as the primary blueprint for the acts of governmental repression that have been implemented since 2020 under the guise of supposedly combatting a virus, acts of repression underwritten by a policy of gaslighting the public into imagining that no such repression was taking place.

Dorian Lynskey, author of The Ministry of Truth: a biography of George Orwell’s 1984(longlisted for the 2020 Orwell Prize), a journalist who writes for the supposedly pro-libertarian magazine The Spectator and website Unherd, appears entirely unaware of any correspondence between current events and the future of which Orwell warned in 1984. Lynskey’s own personal act of gaslighting is to link the story of 1984 with the populist policies of Trump and Brexit, and to encourage us to disregard the evidence of our own eyes that the world of which Orwell warned is currently being implemented by the enemies of populism in the form of a technocratic globalist state, in the furtherance of which history has been rewritten and literature has been re-edited and language has been redefined and statues have been toppled and roads have been renamed. The job of Winston Smith, the protagonist of 1984, who worked in the Ministry of Truth, was to rewrite history to support the current political position of the ruling Party. The philosophy of the Party was that ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’

At one point Lynskey (p. 183) quotes Orwell explaining the message of 1984 to a trade union official, saying that he intended his book as a warning that ‘totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere. I do not believe that the kind of society which I described necessarily will arrive, but I believe … that something resembling it could arrive.’ Well, it’s busy arriving right now. Lynskey, like Klein, has failed to read and understand the message of his own book.

Orwell understood that totalitarian regimes need an object of hate, to deflect attention away from the real oppressors and on to a scapegoat. In 1984 he created the character of Emmanuel Goldstein and the Two-Minute Hate for this purpose. Goldstein is the only obviously Jewish character in Orwell’s book and it’s unlikely to have been an accident. Did Orwell understand that Jewish middlemen – bankers and courtiers – had served as scapegoats throughout European history to act as a buffer between popular resentment and the ruling classes who were responsible for it? Naomi Klein (who is Jewish) is certainly aware of this: she refers to this aspect of history in the best section of her book, on ‘the Jewish Question’ (pp. 285-8). Klein also says here that what she learned from Holocaust education was that ‘It was a directive, a sacred duty, to oppose hate and discrimination in all its forms, no matter who was the target’ (p. 298).

So why then has Klein endorsed the campaign of hate and discrimination against Naomi Wolf and her fellow ‘anti-vaxxers’ who were blamed by the government and the media for endangering the social order in words frighteningly reminiscent of 1930s Germany? Why then does Klein show such contempt for the Freedom Convoy of Canadian truckers who protested against the ‘vaccine mandate’ in the winter of 2022 (pp. 260-4)? Why does she seek to smear a protest that was led by Jews (not a fact she mentions) as having been inspired by antisemites and other racists? On what grounds does she claim working people to have been brainwashed by populist demagogues, apparently regarding them as incapable of forming their own opinions?

In 1984 Winston Smith kept a diary, in which he wrote that, ‘If there is hope, it lies in the proles’ – the working classes. Smith believed that if the proles ever became conscious of their own strength, they would rise up and bring down the ruling Party. In the conclusion to The Ministry of Truth (‘Oceania 2.0’), Dorian Lynskey criticises Orwell for his failure to foresee that ‘the common man and woman would embrace “doublethink” as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that 2 + 2 was whatever they wanted it to be’ (p. 265). It would seem that Lynskey, just like Klein, believes ordinary people have been brainwashed because they have supported such populist causes as Trump and Brexit. Lynskey, like Klein, appears unable to comprehend that working people could have chosen to do this without having been duped.

Yet in fact the opposite is true. The ‘common man’ has not generally fallen for ‘doublethink’ (self-delusion) to the same extent as the ‘intellectuals’. In the last few years, a substantial proportion of the working classes, who have never regarded the system as being on their side, have seen through the COVID and climate-change frauds for what they are – instruments of repression and social control. It is the middle classes – the equivalent of the Party members in Orwell’s book – who have pretty much entirely bought into the lies and propaganda propagated by the state and its lackeys in the corporate media, perhaps because they are so deeply invested in the system that they are psychologically incapable of seeing that it is not in fact on their side. Or maybe just because they think they are too clever and too well educated to have been hoodwinked?

Orwell was avowedly a man of the Left, who was led to write 1984 in part because of his personal experience of the failure of the Left to recognise the dangers of the left-wing version of totalitarianism – Communism – yet the error of the 1930s is today being blithely repeated by those among the ‘intelligentsia’ who would equally regard themselves as being on the Left. They have repeated exactly the same mistake that Orwell warned about, of being so obsessed with what they see as the potential threat of totalitarianism coming from the Right that they completely fail to notice the actual introduction of totalitarianism by the supposed Left.

Naomi Klein, to her credit, has identified this failing among herself and fellow travellers. In one of the more self-aware passages in Doppelganger (‘Reverse Marionettes,’ pp. 117-121), Klein acknowledges that she and others on the Left failed sufficiently to investigate the potential adverse consequences of lockdown and of the COVID vaccines for the reason that this territory had already been occupied by the Right – ‘because we didn’t want to be like them.’

A brave confession, and a highly embarrassing one. That people on the Left shied away from investigating the truth because people on the Right were doing so. That, whatever their previous positions might have been, when it came to COVID they ignored their own principles and meekly fell into line behind their governments. What hypocrisy! What cowardice!

One of the very few public figures from the Left to have braved the opprobrium of supposed colleagues and spoken out against the rise of technocratic totalitarianism is the subject of Klein’s book-length disapproval, Naomi Wolf. Which may indeed help to explain why Klein has targeted Wolf for such a barrage of criticism: that Wolf has has betrayed the Party. If only Klein had read and properly understood the message of the book she herself had written sixteen years earlier, perhaps she might instead have followed Wolf along her path of enlightenment.