Book Review: Naomi Wolf's the Bodies of Others

A great book, from a feminist who is turning to God and her Jewish roots.

Naomi Wolf is a very famous feminist writer. Her most famous book was probably “The Beauty Myth”; some of her other titles include “The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulations Other People Use to Control Your Life”, and “Promiscuities.”

“The Bodies of Others” is a gripping account of the Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates in New York and around the world from 2020 to 2022. Naomi Wolf is a truthful historian and journalist, and recounts the facts honestly and impartially, whilst at the same time bearing witness to her own experience of this dreadful period.

The Audiobook Narrator

Rather than reading the book, I actually listened to the audiobook version of Naomi Wolf’s the Bodies of Others. I have to say the most curious and peculiar aspect of this audiobook is that the narrator is male, something that caused me a slight mental disjunct in the beginning; however quickly I got used to this, for Naomi Wolf’s strong authorial voice quickly overrode the narrator’s gender and does so throughout the book.

Introduction

The Introduction to the Bodies of Others begins with the massive Canadian truck protests, barely even covered in the mainstream media, and the totalitarian measures the Canadian government took to try to control these peaceful protests.

On February 14, 2022, as protesting Canadian truckers filled Parliament Square in Ottawa, giving joyous hope to all those worldwide who were done with pandemic totalitarianism, it was Chrystia Freeland, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Deputy Prime Minister, who gave chilling proof of how far the global elites would go to enforce absolute compliance to their diktats by the citizenry. “As of today, a bank or other financial service provider will be able to immediately freeze or suspend an account without a court order,” she announced. “In doing so, they will be protected against civil liability for actions taken in good faith . . . If your truck is being used in these illegal blockades, your corporate accounts will be frozen. The insurance on your vehicle will be suspended.”

In the circles Naomi Wolf moved in, Chrystia Freeland was actually an acquaintance, if not a friend.

Naomi Wolf then outlines the historical and political context of the lockdowns and mandates, recounting the aims of the globalists behind these undemocratic measures, which is very clearly to enlarge their own power base and line their own pockets.

Lockdown

In Chapter One, “Lockdown”, she recounts hearing for the first time about the Covid lockdowns that were happening in Italy in a passage I found very memorable.

At the Southbank Centre I was seated on a low platform next to a young Italian intern. We were chatting as we waited for the post-lecture wine and snacks backstage. She was preoccupied, though, and explained that she was worried because she could not reach her mother in Milan. She said the region had been "put under lockdown."

I remember the sense of vertigo I felt when she said that. What? That could not happen in Italy, in a free, modern nation. I understood that "lockdown," the holding of citizens against their wishes in one area, the restrictions of their liberty to assemble freely only happened under totalitarian systems. I remember a kind of shudder going through me as I tried not to let the young women see how concerned her words had made me feel.

I knew what it meant. The flower of Europe was being struck at the root.

She goes on to recount the damage done to society by lockdowns and mandates.

The Milgram Experiment

Later on in the book Naomi Wolf gives the historical background of the science and political philosophy underlying these measures.

Naomi Wolf mentions the dreadful experiment at Yale conducted by Stanley Milgram, in which he convinced his experimental subjects to apparently electrocute someone in another room (really an actor, pretending to be electrocuted), simply at the insistence of an authority figure. 65% of Milgram’s subjects were willing to go along with this charade, believing it was really happening.

Dr. Milgram found that sixty-five percent of participants were willing to shock their purported subjects (“learners”) to the highest voltage level possible on the insistence of an authority figure. “Participants demonstrated a range of negative emotions about continuing,” he noted. “Some participants thought they had killed the learner. Nevertheless, participants continued to obey, discharging the full shock to learners. One man who wanted to abandon the experiment was told the experiment must continue. Instead of challenging the decision of the experimenter, he proceeded, repeating to himself, ‘It’s got to go on, it’s got to go on.’”

In a sense, this experiment was replicated on a mass scale over the two years of the pandemic. A great many people instinctively felt something was terribly wrong; that what they were being told did not accord with their own experience. But at the same time, they were being subjected to a massive propaganda campaign invoking authority and superior understanding; a campaign, aligned with unthinkably lucrative direct incentives in some cases, led by a network of global elites, who, lovely as they might be one on one, and as nice as most doubtless were to their own kids, unhesitatingly executed vast cruelties and inflicted untold damage.

This experiment was at the back of my mind throughout the whole dreadful period: as a Christian what shocked me in particular was the cruelty many Christians were willing to inflict on others. Christian hospitals and old people’s homes, firing their staff for refusing the ineffective and harmful experimental vaccinations. Christian employers refusing to employ unvaccinated casual workers, or even ‘kindly’ offering to keep the job for them for when they could do it later, an even greater cruelty really, keeping them on a string of false hope when they actually needed a job and an income.

Why didn’t more people disobey? Why weren’t people willing to lie to the government to help their neighbours? The answer is, they cared more about their own businesses and their own participation in civil life than their neighbours’ well being. “I simply can’t afford a $200,000 fine. My business can’t absorb that.” Well do you think your employee’s mortgage can absorb not having a job?

I suspect as well that people believed the whole narrative that said everyone had a duty to take this experimental product. Ignorant, foolish people have been following along with this whole thing, and it’s still going on: in Western Australia people still are not allowed to visit old people’s homes or hospitals if not vaccinated.

The Milgram experiment, which many of my generation heard about when we did our tertiary studies, perhaps explains why it was educated men and women aged in their forties and fifties in particular among my group of friends and acquaintances who were more cautious about swallowing the bulldust.

Satan and God, and the battle for our souls.

One of the most startling aspects of Naomi Wolf’s journey through this pandemic, which I have been following on her substack, https://naomiwolf.substack.com/, is that she has returned to prayer and belief in God and is willing to speak publicly about this. She is Jewish and had been attending synagogue; she was actually banned from her synagogue for not being vaccinated and not masking, despite having an exemption for a long-standing medical condition.

Like many Jews in Israel today, she is responding to the New Testament witness at least in some measure and seeing clearly the evil that is happening, while the Western World, whose literature and culture for 2000 years has been steeped in the Bible and Christian beliefs, seems to be completely asleep, and so many Christians in the West are simply collaborating with the globalist forces that are threatening our freedoms.

Early on in the pandemic, I asked a renowned medical-freedom activist how he stayed strong in his mission as his name was besmirched and he faced career attacks and social ostracism. He replied with Ephesians 6:12: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

I thought of that a lot over the intervening months. It made more and more sense to me. After many years of thinking that my spiritual life was not that important, I started to pray again. I’d once have thought that was very personal, almost embarrassingly so, and thus it was not something I should mention in public. But now, at a gathering in the woods with the health-freedom community, I told the group that I was now willing to speak about God publicly. Why? Because I had looked at what had descended on us from every angle, using my normal critical training yet found that it was so elaborate in its construction  in a newly literal and immediate way in the presence, the possibility, the necessity of a countervailing force — that of God.

As a classical liberal writer in a post-war world that was a huge leap for me to take — and to say it out loud. Grounded postmodern intellectuals are not supposed to talk about or believe in spiritual matters, certainly not in public. We are supposed to be shy about referencing God Himself, and definitely not talk about evil or the forces of darkness. As a Jew I come from a tradition in which Hell (or “Gehenom”) is not the Miltonic hell of the later Western imagination, but rather a quieter interim spiritual place.

“The Satan” exists in our literature (in Job for example) but neither is this the Miltonic Satan, that rock star, but a figure more modestly known as “the accuser.” We Jews, though, do have a history and literature that lets us talk about spiritual battle between the forces of God and negative forces that debase, that profane, that seek to ensnare our souls.

We have seen this drama before, and not that long ago. Other traditions of course also have ways to discuss and understand the spiritual battle taking place through humans, and through human leaders, and here on earth. Of course, if you know intellectual history, you understand it was not always eccentric for intellectuals to talk in public about God, and even about God’s adversary, and to worry in public about the fate of human souls.

Mind and soul are not in fact at odds, and the body is not in fact at odds with either. Indeed, this acceptance of our three-part, integrated nature is part of our Western heritage. This is a truth only recently obscured or forgotten, a memory of our integrity as human beings that is only for the last seventy years or so, under attack.

The object of this spiritual battle?

It seemed to be for nothing short of the human soul.