This is not about what-ifs: What if the understanding of Hitler as a doppelganger to the colonial project—as expressed by W. E. B. Du Bois and Aimé Césaire and Walter Benjamin and Abram Leon—had been heeded eight decades ago? It wasn't. But it's not too late to listen now, and to have what we hear inform what we do next. We are told that the way things are is the only way they can be, because every other model has supposedly already been tried, and all have failed. But these ideas about different ways of being and thinking and living did not all fail; rather, many of them fell, crushed by political violence and racial terror. Being crushed is not the same as failing, because what was crushed can be revived, reimagined anew. For Freud, doppelgangers represented paths not taken, choices not made. We could also choose to see them as reminders of roads that can still be taken, of pasts that are still pertinent to our present.

QUESTION: How does the colonial/doppelganger reading of Hitler connect to concrete present action? The author gestures at this but the practical 'what we do next' remains open.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 1109