Liberal vaccine nationalism tacitly sacrificed lives beyond Western borders.

Evidence

What would we see if we, like the couple in that Pre-Raphaelite painting, met ourselves in the woods? I fear that many of us would also faint from fright. Because in mapping the contours of the Mirror World, I can’t avoid seeing that the mindset that is the poison at the heart of this strange and tragic chapter reaches well beyond the diagonalist axis. On this side of the glass, how much did we do to push our governments to keep mask mandates in place to protect the immunocompromised? Or to make clean, filtered indoor air a right in every workplace? Or to share the vaccines beyond our borders? In North America and Europe, our governments wanted us to get our second and third shots. What if we had refused until everyone in the world had their first ones? What bodies did we tacitly sacrifice by going with the flow? And how much did those of us who were lucky enough to work from home do to make sure that the workers we celebrated as “essential” were actually paid and protected as if they were essential? Did we fight for their right to organize, or did we keep ordering from Amazon simply because it was convenient? The truth is that most of us could have done much more. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 624

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is the hinge of the book’s whole device: the Mirror World accusation is turned back on the liberal side, which is what makes the doubling genuinely analytic rather than self-congratulatory.
• XREF: Connects to Klein’s earlier works on how structural policy choices invisibly allocate sacrifice — ‘this changes everything’ framing of who bears climate costs. Also echoes the reading-mission question of whether the device holds: here the doubling is used to indict the reader’s own side, which is the strongest version of the device.