The Curious Case of Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf

Welcome to Perspective’s newsletter, our view on what’s been happening over the past week. This week, Rowan considers the confusion between the two Naomis while Peter looks at the surge of the right across Europe. (If this email has been forwarded, you can subscribe here).

The Curious Case of Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf

When I told a friend that Naomi Klein had just won the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, she replied, “Hasn’t she gone bonkers?” I said, “Are you sure you’re not thinking of Naomi Wolf?” She looked stricken, saying, “Oh god, I can’t remember which one’s which.” This pretty much sums up the premise of Klein’s latest book Doppelganger, which examines the similarities between the two women (both liberal Jewish authors from North America, who had breakthrough “big ideas” books in the 1990s, Wolf’s Beauty Myth and Klein’s No Logo) meaning they were often confused, though their paths radically diverged after the covid virus hit in 2020. Klein followed a mainstream narrative and what you might call the orthodox science, while Wolf went to war on covid vaccines, lockdowns and mandates, meaning her name is now permanently yoked to “batshit crazy” and “conspiracy theorist”.

What makes Klein’s new book so compelling and important is that she widens the doppelganger analogy to include all of us. Doesn’t everyone who ventures online begin to develop a social media persona who’s different to the real self? Is late capitalism, with its power grab by big corporations meaning many individuals feel they have no agency, the true villain here? And is the liberal establishment partly to blame because of the way it tried to censure legitimate avenues of enquiry (the closure of schools, the lab-leak theory) over the pandemic’s course? (We at Perspective have had our own moments of controversy, such as when intrepid Kiwi writer Joanna Grochowicz questioned the saintliness of New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern.)

Klein’s mind has been focused elsewhere since the horror of October’s Hamas attack and the carnage then wreaked on Gaza by Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership. Her condemnation of the bloodshed and the “selective” information put out in the reporting of the conflict, means she’s now a controversial figure herself. Klein told Women’s Prize guests on Thursday that posters featuring her book had been torn down and that she had no idea if protestors still confused her with Wolf, who, in a stranger-than-fiction twist, was also in London last week protesting her right to speak openly about vaccine harms. Or more likely they were targeting her for her stance on Gaza. Mind you, Wolf was widely slated for being critical of Israel in 2014. Doppelganger world can be incredibly confusing. Here’s the conclusion of Klein’s speech, which I tracked down on TikTok:

“I no longer have any doubts about the power of words. Either their power to harm, or to help liberate. We know that words must matter because so many forces are working overtime to make them unsayable and unprintable. Jobs are lost, careers are ruined, reputations smeared, organisations banned, all over words: apartheid, occupation, settler colonialism, anti-Zionism, genocide. This we might think of as the word front of the war, though it does not bear comparison with the missile and bomb front. I still don’t think there are any bystanders. I think we either come together to defend the right to speak freely, even when we disagree, or that right will be lost. In Gaza, poets, scholars, novelists and journalists have risked everything – including their lives – to share their words with the world. The least we can do is listen.”

Gongs and groans

I always groan when new “honours” are announced. Yes, I’m delighted that the veteran campaigner of the Post Office scandal, Alan Bates, has been knighted. But, to my mind, these are the only gongs that should be handed out – awards for non-celebs, who have devoted their lives to unfashionable causes and the kind of low glamour jobs that are essential for society to function. I love it when lollipop ladies and dedicated foster parents get a reward for their endeavours. But it seems ludicrous to give rich, famous actors, rock stars and sportspeople an extra prize for being hugely successful, rich and popular. Yes, many of them do commendable work for charity but they’re only asked to lend their presence in the first place because they’re famous. Needless to say, I would also ban politicians, diplomats and civil servants from these lists – rewarded as they already are with big pensions on the public purse. And I’d boot all the ennobled political party donors straight down the steps of the Lords. OK, I find it hard not to go along with Tracey Emin’s damehood, since she continues to invest so much energy into reviving her home town of Margate, despite her tough start in life and latterly suffering so hideously from cancer; her brilliant work – criminally – still commands lower prices at auction than that of many male peers. But let’s draw the line there before Damien Hirst gets a knighthood for services to pickling and formaldehyde. 

A step to the right

Imagine, if you will, a previously fringe group of heavy metal and punk acts storming the stage at the Eurovision song contest, kicking aside the usual chintzy-shmuck-pop line-ups and grabbing – only to smash – the glass microphone. Something like that (just not as fun) happened in the European elections over 6-9 June, where far-right parties, many of which openly support winding back EU free-movement and integration, won the popular vote in five countries, including Italy, France and Austria, and came second or third in five others.

Ursula von der Leyen, the leading centrist candidate and current President of the European Commission, tried to put a good spin on things, hailing the fact that some had predicted it to be worse, and that her European People’s Party had still won the largest number of the 720 seats on offer. But it was French president Emmanuel Macron who stole the headlines, announcing a Sunak-style suicidal national election in response to National Rally – who sit in the European parliament as part of the far-right Identity and Democracy Party (ID) – notching up more than double the vote of Macron’s Renaissance. The French will now beat us to the ballot box, with their election set for 30 June. Some see Macron’s rash announcement as analogous to David Cameron’s decision to call the EU membership referendum in 2016, and as likely to end in disaster for the current centre-left majority in the National Assembly. It could even be interpreted as the first step towards “Frexit”.

More troubling in my book is the rise and rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, AfD, which took second place in their country’s vote. Just two weeks before the polls, AfD, which has become increasingly open about its radical anti-immigration policies, was kicked out of ID for being too extreme. The leader of National Rally’s parliamentary wing, Marine Le Pen, explained the party’s expulsion from the far-right grouping by saying it was “clearly controlled by radical groups” and intent on “going from one provocation to the next”. She was referring to AfD leaders meeting with extremist groups to discuss plans to expel “unassimilated” foreigners from Germany, and their former lead candidate in the European election, Maximillian Krah, telling an Italian news agency that being a member of the Nazi SS didn’t mean that you were “automatically a criminal”.

Some have pointed out that the result increases the geographical polarisation of the EU, with left and green parties faring better in northern countries, and far-right parties surging in the south, reflecting their greater concern with issues around immigration. But coming in the same week that Reform overtook Conservatives in at least one opinion poll in the UK, the step to the right isn’t just a Continental dance step. This week Reform also faced allegations that it’s providing a political home for extremists, when it was revealed that around ten per cent of the party’s candidates are friends on Facebook with the British fascist leader Gary Raikes. The party has also been put on the back foot by the resurfacing of remarks made in 2022 by Reform candidate Ian Gribbin that Britain should have taken Hitler’s offer of neutrality during World War II, and of Reform candidate Steve Chilcott's declaration in 2017 that “Islam and Nazis are the same thing”. Party leader Nigel Farage says he needs “time to think” before he decides whether to “disavow” (note, not deselect) these and other Reform candidates who have been overly candid about their true inclinations.

Because of our first-past-the post system, the effect of Reform will only be to increase Labour’s majority and they are unlikely to gain much of a foothold themselves. For now, at least. Could it be that Farage is looking at the European results and feeling a little nostalgic for the days when Britain was a member of the EU and he a leading British MEP? Right now, instead of apologising for his colleagues, he could be propping up a bar on the Rue de Brabant in Brussels, having a beer with his mates.

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Book of the Week

Scaffolding
By Lauren Elkin
(400pp, £16.99, Vintage, hb)
Reviewed by Belinda Bamber

Lauren Elkin's new Paris-set novel, Scaffolding, featuring slender young women discussing Lacan or smoking Lucky Strikes while talking about sex, came out two days after the death of French chanteuse Françoise Hardy on 11 June. The gamine singer, famous in the 1960s for her fringe and wistful songs of love and loneliness, is exactly the figure you might have in mind when reading Elkin's dual narrative about Anna in 2019 and Florence in 1973. Each is in the process of kitchen renovations in the same Belleville apartment, but a generation apart. As Anna peels away her predecessor's owl tiles and yellow wallpaper, she's also unpacking her listlessness, her stalled career as a psychoanalyst and her grief at a recent miscarriage. A new friend, the alluring Clémentine, is a member of the Colleuses who stick feminist posters across the city in dead of night. She helps Anna to start thinking outside the self-imposed confines of her flat, which she leaves only for daily runs and a trip to the boulangerie, where a mysterious older man insists on paying for her baguettes.

This story delivers everything you'd hope for as an English reader in search of a little Gallic chic: flirtations, sexual confusions, dangerous liaisons, sensual erotic encounters and old boyfriends who reappear with a perfect sprinkling of silver in their facial hair. Clémentine is an eternal student who writes poetry, takes pictures and does a little life modelling alongside her protest actions. Though perhaps what makes the story feel truly French is that the young women of both eras endlessly examine existential questions of desire, freedom and infidelity. “Marriage is a kind of boundary” declares Clémentine, “it’s a border protecting a country of two, and I’m against borders”.

As you might expect from the author of Les Flaneuses, there's a continual dialogue between external and internal. Paris is the metaphorical map of Anna's emotional life, from the paths she chooses to the builders’ "Bang bang bang", echoing the sexual activities in both her fantasies and bedroom – while the scaffolding of the title encompasses the building works and Anna's efforts to re-establish her sense of self. This search for personal liberation is set against the post-war Liberation of Paris and those who struggle with painful history. “The city [is] a place where we have to live together with our ghosts, that’s what we’re all trying to accept,” Anna concludes.