Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

In 2022, Wolf makes a point of defying COVID-19 regulations at a cafe in New York and then gleefully points out that she faced no consequences for doing so. She instructs her audience to follow her example to prove that mask mandates are meaningless. Klein points out that, at this point, COVID-19 regulations were already loosening in America and that mask mandates were only ever meant to be temporary health measures. They were not, as Wolf claimed, the first step on a slide into a fascist regime. In her Tweet about the event, Wolf uses language to liken her actions to the work of Black activists who fought against Jim Crow laws during the Civil Rights Movement. She frequently draws parallels between COVID-19 regulations and Jim Crow laws, enslavement, the Holocaust, and apartheid, in what Klein calls “racial role-playing."

Diagonalists like Wolf use racial role-playing to legitimize their positions without acknowledging real racial injustices taking place in America, including anti-Black racism in policing or the disproportionate effect of the pandemic on Black and Indigenous communities. It is largely white women who draw these parallels, and they are drawing them at a time when protests about anti-Black racism and police brutality are forcing America to reckon with its racist, colonial past and present. Many white women see themselves as having lost their status in society for disagreeing with COVID-19 health measures, and therefore as being victims of discrimination. It is ironic that the same people who appropriate the language of the Civil Rights Movement are the ones who oppose school curricula that discuss racism.

Similar conversations take place in Canada, where the country is facing a reckoning with its own colonial past. In the wake of the discovery of 200 graves at a residential school, the country has to grapple with the fact that Indigenous children were forcibly taken away from their families in an attempted cultural genocide. A small convoy of truckers visits Indigenous communities to express their solidarity. While this reckoning takes place, those who feel that they have lost their status rally around a different cause: the anti-vaccine, anti-mandate conspiracy cause that centers white Canadians. A huge trucker convoy protests outside the Canadian Parliament, inspiring other nationalist, conspiracy-fueled protests around the world. The truckers protest COVID-19 mandates and spread the racist idea that white Christian people are being “replaced” by immigrants.

The anti-vaccine convoy protests are an attempt by people in the Mirror World to force difficult truths back into the Shadow Lands and to reassert innocence and superiority both as a nation and as individuals. Many people, especially white people, feel so uncomfortable with discussions about colonialism that they cast “themselves as cosmic victims of every crime against humanity of the past five hundred years combined” (278) rather than the perpetrators (and descendants of the perpetrators). This results in many conspiracy theories being deeply contradictory. For every real problem, conspiracy theorists put forward a twisted, mirrored problem that only serves to hide the reality of what is happening in the world. 

Klein watches the miniseries Exterminate All the Brutes (2021), directed by Raoul Peck. It helps her understand what is happening with the trucker convoy and around the world. Peck attempts to parse the history of colonization in Africa and the Americas. The phrase “exterminate all the brutes” comes from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). To Peck, it signifies the drive to pursue one’s own interests at any cost, even if that cost is the extermination of whole groups of people.

Peck utilizes doppelganger theory to examine the Holocaust and argues that it was not, as many people have claimed, a singularly evil event without historical precedents or antecedents. Rather, it was a horrific culmination of centuries of colonial violence that began in Europe, where it targeted Jewish and Muslim people, then crossed to Africa, Australia, and the Americas where it targeted Black and Indigenous peoples, before coming back to Europe in the form of Nazi ideology. Hitler was not an evil “other,” but rather the West’s shadowy doppelganger.

Many Nazi ideas originally come from elsewhere: Concentration camps were used by the British during the Boer War; the extermination of those who were perceived to be inferior was carried out by Europeans in Africa, Australia, and the Americas; and the US already had a thriving eugenics program that sterilized mostly Black and Indigenous peoples at the beginning of the 20th century. The Holocaust combined all of these ideas into an extreme event. Non-Jewish Europeans had to reckon with Nazism as a twisted doppelganger of their own history; each person might have (as Klein quotes from Aimé Césaire), “without his being aware of it […] a Hitler inside him” (286).

Klein grew up with the idea that the Holocaust was “a singular event without precedent, so far outside the bounds of human history that it was essentially impossible to comprehend” (286). She now believes that while many aspects of the Holocaust made it different from other genocides, the truth is that all genocides are different from one another. By positioning the Holocaust as being unprecedented, Europeans failed to confront the origin and development of many Nazi ideas within their societies. Colonial genocide is not identical to the Holocaust, but the two are linked.

The Mirror World’s war on history and truth obscures these historical patterns. Those (like Wolf) who describe anti-COVID-19 measures as “genocide” worry that if they lose their social power, a real genocide will be enacted upon them by those they have victimized in the past. This role reversal is in fact happening now, in Israel and “its partitioned shadow land, Palestine” (291).