Suppressed political alternatives were crushed by violence, not proven unviable

Evidence

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. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1109

Categorization

• XREF: Ties directly to Freud’s doppelganger theory discussed earlier in the book — paths not taken. — connects to: Armed non-state groups emerge to replace states that abandon caretaking for pure repression — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 652; Police violence, not ideology, converted skeptics into Euromaidan protesters. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 465; Disappeared violent street politics is explained by severed links and co-optation, not institutionalization — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 656
• SEED: An essay angle: distinguishing ‘models failed because they were tried and didn’t work’ from ‘models were crushed by force’ as a recurring rhetorical move that forecloses left alternatives.