Emmanuel Goldstein is afictional character and the principalenemy of the state ofOceania inGeorge Orwell's 1949dystopian novelNineteen Eighty-Four. The political propaganda ofThe Party portrays Goldstein as the leader of The Brotherhood, a secret, counter-revolutionary organization who violently oppose the leadership of Big Brother and theIngsoc régime of The Party.
He is also the author ofThe Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (The Book), a counter-history of the revolution that installed The Party as the government of Oceania. It slanders Big Brother as atraitor of the revolution. Throughout the story, Emmanuel Goldstein appears only inMinitrue (Ministry of Truth) propaganda films on atelescreen, while rumours claim that The Party wrote The Book.[1]
Emmanuel Goldstein was a member of theInner Party and brother-in-arms ofBig Brother during the revolution that installed The Party as the government of Oceania. In their turn tototalitarianism, by way of English Socialism (Ingsoc), Goldstein broke with Big Brother and The Party, and then founded The Brotherhood to oppose their government of Oceania.[2] Party propaganda teaches that Goldstein is an enemy of the state and that The Brotherhood is aleaderless resistance of cells of secret agents waging counter-revolution against Big Brother and The Party with the ideology ofThe Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, The Book written by Goldstein.[3]
In the course of daily life in Oceania, Goldstein is always the subject of theTwo Minutes Hate, a daily programme of propaganda that begins at 11:00 hours; the telescreen shows an over-sized image of Emmanuel Goldstein for the assembled citizens of Oceania to subject to loud insults and contempt. To prolong and deepen the anger of the spectators, the telescreen then shows images of Goldstein walking among the parading soldiers of the current enemy of Oceania—either Eurasia or Eastasia. The Two Minutes Hate programme shows Goldstein as both an ideological enemy of the Ingsoc régime of The Party and a traitor aiding the national enemy of Oceania.[4]
The Party's scapegoating of Goldstein justifies the voiding ofcivil rights, the implementation of universal surveillance, and perpetual scarcity. Save for The Party's cultivation of a vague, but fervent,patriotism for Oceania, the Proles are excluded from the politics of Oceania, and only members of the Inner Party concern themselves with the existence or the non-existence of Emmanuel Goldstein and The Brotherhood; thus, when the protagonistWinston Smith asksO'Brien, a member of the Inner Party, if The Brotherhood exists, O'Brien replies:
That, Winston, you will never know. If we choose to set you free when we have finished with you, and if you live to be ninety years old, still you will never learn whether the answer to that question is Yes or No. As long as you live it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind.[5]
In the course of a session of torture, O'Brien tells Winston that members of the Inner Party, including himself, wrote The Book, yet O'Brien's reply does not answer Winston's questions about the existence or the non-existence of Emmanuel Goldstein and The Brotherhood. This claim may actually be a lie to deceive Winston.[1]
In the 1950s, soon after publication of the novelNineteen Eighty-Four, political commentators and literary critics noted the likeness between the fictional character Emmanuel Goldstein and the Russian revolutionaryLeon Trotsky, who had been a political partner ofVladimir Lenin in realising theRussian Revolution of 1917.[6] After thedeath of Lenin in 1924, despite being anOld Bolshevik, Trotsky lost the intramural party politics of succession toJoseph Stalin, who then assassinated the character of Trotsky to justify his expulsion, first from office, then from theRussian Communist Party in 1925, and then from the USSR in 1929—public condemnation as anenemy of the people.[7]
In foreign exile from the Communist politics of Soviet Russia, Trotsky wroteThe Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? (1937), wherein he denounced Stalin as an ideologically illegitimate leader of the Russian Communist Party and of the Soviet state whose policies and actions betrayed the principles of the Russian Revolution (1917).[7] Trotsky also argued in the same book for the restoration of the right of criticism in areas such aseconomic matters, the revitalization oftrade unions and free elections of multipleSoviet parties.[8] Trotsky further contended that the excessive totalitarianism under Stalin had undermined the potential development of the Soviet Union.[9]
In the USSR, Stalin consolidated his absolutepower over party and government with theGreat Purges (1936–1938) by imprisoning and by killing his personal and political enemies—including every Old Bolshevik with a legitimate claim to be a candidate for leader of the Communist Party and for leader of the Soviet state.[10]
Throughout the 1930s, Stalinist propaganda called for the death of Trotsky, who was depicted as theenemy of the state who instigated every problem in the Soviet Union and in the Socialist world. Stalin succeeded against his nemesis when theNKVD secret agentRamón Mercader assassinated Trotsky in Mexico City, in 1940.[11] Concerning the ideological differences between the varieties of Marxist philosophy that areStalinism andTrotskyism, Orwell said:
The fact that Trotskyists are everywhere a persecuted minority, and that the accusation usually made against them, i.e. of collaborating with theFascists, is obviously false, creates an impression that Trotskyism is intellectually and morally superior to Communism; but it is doubtful whether there is much difference.[12]
However, literary criticJeffrey Meyers, who reviewed the political allegories in Orwell's work, stated that:
Orwell ignores the fact that Trotsky passionately opposedStalin's dictatorship from 1924 to 1940, which featured Siberian prison camps, the deliberately createdUkraine famine and the massive slaughter during theMoscow Purge Trials of 1937.[13]
Meyers also added that Orwell drew on the views of aright-wing combatant to reinforce his arguments. In contrast, Meyers citedIsaac Deutscher's biographical account of Trotsky which presented him to be a much more civilised figure than Stalin and suggested that he would not havepurged the Red Army generals or millions of Soviet citizens.[13]
Regarding the likeness between fictional and true-life enemies of the state, in 1954, the writer Isaac Deutscher said that Emmanuel Goldstein's book,The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism—known as The Book in the story ofNineteen Eighty-Four—was Orwell's paraphrasing of Trotsky'sThe Revolution Betrayed.[14] In 1956, the literary criticIrving Howe praised the writing craft of the novelist Orwell in his replication of Trotsky's style of writing for The Book by Goldstein; thus Winston Smith's readings in The Book are the best-written passages of novelistic story-telling inNineteen Eighty-Four.[6] The critic Adrian Wanner said that The Book is a political parody of the Marxist philosophy and analyses that Trotsky presents inThe Revolution Betrayed, and noted that Orwell was politically ambivalent about Trotsky being a different type of Communist from Stalin.[15] In correspondence with the American writerSidney Sheldon, Orwell said that the Stalinist world portrayed inNineteen Eighty-Four:
was based chiefly on Communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what Communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of theRussian Foreign Office.[16]
In the article "The Orwell Hypothesis: Nixon's Quantum Jump?" (1971), the opportunistic geopolitics of U.S. President Richard M. Nixon'sofficial visit (21–28 February 1972) to the People's Republic of China—then a Communist enemy of the U.S. during thetripolar stage (1956–1991) of the Cold War—were compared to the historical and political analyses of Emmanuel Goldstein about the continually shifting military alliances among the three super-states, Eastasia, Oceania, and Eurasia, described in the novelNineteen Eighty-Four (1949).[17]
In the critical essay "Compassion for Nixon Hard to Summon" (1974), by Nick Thimmesch, and in the defensive essay "Do We Really Need Vengeance from Nixon?" (1976), by Tom Tiede, the authors discuss themass psychology of American society's vilification of ex-president Nixon is a consequence of the criminalWatergate scandal (1972–1974), and that such political and personal vilification was a form of the Two Minutes Hate programs, which focused the collective anger of the body politic against ex-president Nixon as an enemy of the people of the United States.[18][19]
About the aftermath of the11 September 2001 attacks against the U.S., in the essay "Osama and Goldstein" (2001), Prof. William L. Anderson said that the ideological and political utility of publicly showing parallels between Emmanuel Goldstein andOsama bin Laden facilitated and justified the U.S. government's unilateral attacks against the perceived enemies of the state and the perceived enemies of the people of the United States of America.[20]
About the political utility of comparing Osama bin Laden, leader ofal-Qaeda, to Emmanuel Goldstein, leader of The Brotherhood, in11 September 2001: War, Terror and Judgement (2002), Bülent Gökay and R.B.J. Walker said that:
Goldstein is the Osama Bin Laden figure in Orwell's novel [Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)], an extremely elusive person who is never seen, never captured, but believed by the leadership of Oceania to be still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters. Since Goldstein is never captured, the battle against his crimes, treacheries, sabotages must never end.[21]
InWorst-Case Scenarios (2009), thejuristCass Sunstein coined the term theGoldstein Effect to describe a government's "ability to intensify public concern, by giving a definite face to the adversary, specifying a human source of the underlying threat."[22] In the case of the AmericanWar on Terrorism (2001), the government of the U.S. and the American news media respectively identifiedSaddam Hussein of Iraq (r. 1979–2003) and Osama bin Laden, of Saudi Arabia, as synonymous withterrorism, which parallels The Party's psychological manipulations of the population of Oceania with and during the sessions of Two Minutes' Hate featuring the sights and sounds of the wars and conspiracies of Emmanuel Goldstein and The Brotherhood against Oceania, The Party, and Big Brother.[22]
In "The Ironies of George Soros's Foundation Leaving Budapest" (2018), the pseudonymous author, M.S., said that in right-wing Hungarian politics, the politicallyprogressive financierGeorge Soros is used as aGoldstein figure, an enemy of the people of Hungary, because Soros criticised Prime MinisterViktor Orbán for poorly managing the2015 European migrant crisis. In right-wing circles, thereactionary politics ofantisemitism facilitated and justified propagatingconspiracy theories about Soros seeking to impose a foreign ideology upon the Hungarian people:
Mr Orbán'sFidesz party campaigned in the recent election by plastering the country with ominous posters of Mr Soros. He has come to serve the same role for the [Orbán] government as Emmanuel Goldstein did for the totalitarian state [of Oceania] in George Orwell's1984: A mythical, shadowy enemy used to focus people's hatred, and whose imaginary schemes supposedly justify the régime's complete grip on power.[23]
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