The Myth of Emmanuel Goldstein

Guest Post by NC Scout via American Partisan

It is said that politics is a form of warfare, a notion to which I would agree. In recognizing this fact, further questions must be generated. If it is indeed warfare, who are the belligerents? What are their goals? How do they exert influence? What is their metric of success? Let us consider, just for a moment, that the war is not simply between peoples but between the locus of control and the people seeking to subvert it. Their goal is power and the maintenance of it. Further, we must also understand that every weapon, every move, has a counter. Should this be the case, one must recognize the measures that locus of control takes in its own self interest. His name is Emmanuel Goldstein and he is the resistance.

Warfare is now firmly in its Fourth Generation. The term de jour is non-state actors, be it genuine internal spheres of resistance or groups functioning as proxies by competing national influence. Sure, there’s nation-states, but these are better understood as those spheres of influence extending from economic interest. Nationalism is a dirty word to transnational corporatism. In an era of every expanding global markets demanding inclusion, there can be no room for adherence to national ideals or goals. America is a nothing more than dying cash cow with no real culture of its own and the world knows it. The Rockefellers know it as well, and the race is on to kill the competition on battlefields in Ukraine before the jig is up.

But that war is here at home as much as it is abroad. A cultural war, sure, but also very much a violent one, fighting to maintain the grasp on power driving a unipolar global order enjoyed since 1992. This brings us to Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein, the antagonist to INGSOC in 1984. Winston Smith, being a free man only in his head, desperate for a victory or anything that makes sense, falls for the mysterious resistance that Goldstein represents. It was all fake, of course. There was no Goldstein, there was no resistance. There was only the Party, using Goldstein and the broadcasted two minutes of hate to virtue signal party allegiance, maintaining their firm grasp on power. But they very wisely knew that politics is an extension of war, and at least one faction won’t go along – how do you combat internal dissent? Create your own enemy and give them something to get behind, culling the most competent along the way.

In conflict theory sociology, social orders are constantly in a state of struggle with themselves. Groups are divided into sub-groups with competing goals for the distribution of society’s goods, turning and aligning with one another at various points to serve the larger interest of their mass base. Competing groups only coalesce for short periods when a superordinate goal is introduced – an external threat to the larger social body, whipping everyone up into a fever pitch, usually irrationally, putting aside those competing social goals to stand against the larger enemy. The overt goal and the covert goal are not one in the same; you all stand against this enemy and in doing so, you forget your issues with the real threat. If you’ve made your own, you can pick and choose where its employed, serving duplicitous goals of appealing to the desperate (Look, they’re doing something! I support them!) and making your own ritualists react in anger when the cameras take the perp photos (Look at those reprobates! How dare they! We hate them!). After all, the brave heroes are keeping you safe from them, swooping in just in time before they could do more damage. It is what Cass Sunstein would come to label the Goldstein Effect, stating “the ability to intensify public concern by giving a definite face to the adversary, specifying a human source of the underlying threat.”

Governments have long known this is how order is maintained at home. It is far easier to govern while standing against a perceived external threat than internal. Further, the ability to manage internal threats to governmental power is to simply stand up your own. When the very real threat of organic movements takes hold, false ones must be created in order to siphon off any chance at meaningful resistance or social change. The FBI is tasked with domestic security inside the US and as such functions as one of the largest and best resourced intelligence gathering organizations in history. As such, one of its primary taskings is keeping tabs on organizations that pose a threat to internal stability, and in recognizing that, routinely creates or co-opts phony organizations to manage those threats. This is very easily done harvesting social media data, even easier done when simply fabricated. The FBI, like the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the NKVD, has long known that meaningful resistance, made at the local most level, is nearly impossible to penetrate. Their answers were slightly different through the years, with population displacement or outright pogroms, both risking greater instability in the American social system. The lone option to make headway then is to co-opt; create parallel organizations to create confusion and competition among the targeted mass base keeping the political center mostly intact. It is a very, very old technique recognized by Machiavelli, Gramsci and Sun Tzu, preying on those so desperate for a win they fall to their own gullible impulses. Orwell learned the technique well from his front-row experience as a policeman putting down resistance in Burma to British hegemony, fusing that experience with his disillusionment with Soviet utopianism in 1984.

This brings us to the United States. Socially we have entered a time of extreme dissatisfaction with the government on both ends of the political spectrum, itself an extension of the corporate overlording, overarching hegemony. Both the Right and the Left are experiencing these social pressures, leaving the mass base of both looking for adherence to an organization, any organization, which simply makes sense. It is far easier to virtue signal your beliefs than do much, if anything, to physically stand for them. We don’t wanna be on a list, now do we? This problem is infinitely exacerbated by social media, where no veracity of anything can truly be made. The Arab Spring was the perfect testbed for the weaponization of social media against targeted populations. The legwork and timing of color revolutions was now mitigated to minutes, with artificial social media accounts, memes, and AI wielding influence. From Tahir Square to Euromaidan, the same collective flash mob revolts fomented by western power abroad followed the same pattern here at home. After all, if everyone’s doing it, so should you. Emmanuel Goldstein is the targeted government itself. Now support the current thing.

The next incarnation of this strategy is to simply create movements that do not exist in reality at all; catchy name, fake accounts, lots of followers, very little substance, always national in focus and no visible leader. How dare you criticize. The organization thus becomes Emmanuel Goldstein, and its followers in the flesh, little more than actors playing a role for a brief moment in time.

But, they’re arrested, you say! Heh, that. There is no justice, only crime. In the era of zero prosecutorial oversight, cases are granted continuances until they vanish from the public eye, then vanish altogether. Left, Right, it does not matter. The real goal was caught on camera, interpreted different ways by the different factions. Either cheer your comrades or throw popcorn at the screen, but either way, you watched, you reacted. There is an emotional investment. From there the debate begins among the factions and the government wins. At least those people are doing something, anything! So it is said. And the purity tests begin. No actual resistance ever happens, all according to the plan.

Emmanuel Goldstein is a very clever device reflective of Orwell’s insight, should we be so wise to recognize it. For a free people to meaningfully organize, they must first understand that they are indeed engaged a war, one that the opposition, the brokers of power, will ruthlessly wage upon them and their progeny using every tool at their disposal. The media is exactly that, social included, with the myth of phony resistance being among their best weapons. Their biggest fear, the counter to that weapon, is you not falling for it.

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