wingedbeast

The Two Minutes of Hate

There's a lot to unpack with The Two Minutes of Hate. Let's start with the general concept. Two minutes, every day, in which every citizen of Oceana is to spend targeting the enemies of Oceana, symbolized by one person, with their hatred. This specific hatred of this specific figure and all the figure represents is an integral part of patriotism to Oceana.

The parallels come easily. Communists and their sympathizers. Terrorists and their sympathizers. The gays. The devil. And, as I think Orwell was well aware, antisemitism.

1984 is about methods of control that you might not notice if you didn't have the language for it. And, Two Minutes of Hate is a good language to use. Hatred galvanizes, distracts, and tests. Because, within the culture, there's always a test to make sure that you have enough hate for the hatred. And, we might not notice because we put it freaking everywhere so that it's practically invisible.

Note the song that Rodd and Todd Flanders sang, in bed and in their sleep, to the annoyance of Bart Simpson. One of the key verses goes as follows.

And if the Devil doesn't like it
He can sit on a tack!
Ouch!
Sit on a tack!
Ouch!
Sit on a tack!
And if the Devil doesn't like it
He can sit on a tack!
Ouch!
Sit on a tack to stay!

The Simpsons didn't make up those lyrics. They were written by George Willis Cooke, who died in 1923 (thank you wikipedia). They were written to be sung, by good little Christian children, around the campfire. What is supposed to be a song about being joyous because of the Prince of Peace and the incarnation of not just a god of love but God who is love just wouldn't have been complete without this bit of hate.

Most cultures don't have that specific time set just for the hate. Usually, it's woven into the fabric of pride of culture, pride of religion, devotion to purpose, etc. In 1984, it's brought out, primarily, just to show that it's there, a thing used to control you, a thing to watch out for and not to be comfortable around.

To the text. Skipping over the initial screech that starts the hate.

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed onto the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeek of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was a renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activites, had been condemned to death and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared.

The text will never say it outright, but it's entirely possible that Emmanuel Goldstein is a fiction. (As in a fiction within the fiction, you pedants who I imagine are reading this blog for reasons that are unspecified but undoubtedly complimentary to me.) That name isn't the only bit that would trigger latent-to-blatant antisemitism (see below). But, there's also that story.

That story should look familiar to you. Elements parallel with some of post-revolution Russia, of course, when Stalin purged anybody who might threaten his dominance by the grave crime of being more popular. They also parallel with the current narrative regarding Satan.

It is not impossible for Goldstein to be real, with some additional crimes hung on him for good measure. Neither is it impossible for someone real to have been the basis of a useful fiction. Neither is it impossible for this useful fiction to be crafted, whole cloth, using previous patterns as a framework.

The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foriegn paymasters, perhaps even-so it was occasionally rumoured-in some hiding-place in Oceana itself.

About the only thing that *is* impossible is for everything attributed to him to be true. There's simply no way that a nation as large as Oceana to have no other sources of internal opposition or for all to have unified leadership like that. For context, Oceana covers all of Britain, some of the nearby Europe, all of the Americas, nearly a full third of the globe.

A bit of (very-amateur) religious history. "The Devil" wasn't always a singular person within Abrahamic stories. At the time in which the story of Job was written, for example, "the devil" was less a person and more a role, "the accuser". Like the prosecution, the devil was there to make sure people didn't get away with their sins. It would have made, at one point, no more sense to think there was only one devil than it would have been to look at the plethora of "man walks into a bar" jokes and think there was only one Bartender.

As generations go by, thinking and mythologies change to suit the needs of various storytellers and their previous expectations. A unified force of evil, one sure to lose of course, has a number of uses for a culture. One use can be someone upon whom to hang all dissent, regardless of its nature, thus making all disagreement with orthodoxy similarly evil.

Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard-a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheeplike quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venemous attack upon the doctrines of the Party-an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it.

Again, it's not impossible for Goldstein to be a real person. So much of him just screams "strawman". A well-constructed straw-man to be sure. Like any good strawman, his job isn't just to exist and be hated. He's got to bring, with him, all sorts of collateral damage.

He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed-and all this in rapid polysyllabic pseech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any party member would normally use in life.

At least one of that, you're not supposed to mind. We know nothing about Eurasia, save that Oceana is sometimes at war with it. But, he's designed for a society rife with antisemitism and opposition to hate and then he takes, with that, much of the key-building blocks of a free society.

It was that reference to Newspeak that first keyed me off, on reread, to Goldstein being ficitonal. Newspeak is a new language. It's being worked even currently, as we'll find out later. How would Goldstein even know those words, let alone have internalized them enough to write them into a speech (or, potentially, shout them in a rant)? I didn't get that on the first read-through.

I guess I might have thought that they were editing his transmissions. More realistically, I'd just accepted that he would be the opposition party within the text, that we might meet him at some point and join his resistance... That might be a spoiler. But, eh, we've all had more than fifty years.

And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army-row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the background to Goldstein's bleating voice.

Note that, at the moment, Oceana is at peace with Eurasia. That doesn't mean that they're trading partners or that there's an absence of hatred. Obviously, there's some encouraged racism being applied, not just the antisemitism. We could see this as a mistake, for a State that could, at any point, be at war with Eurasia, and forgot that, for the purpose of this particular Two Minutes Hate, they weren't.

Or, we could see this as just encouraging a hatred of anybody not Oceana, making it less likely to attempt to move or look outward and easier to be at war in the next moment.

Or, maybe I'm way off. Please comment?

Either way, we're not done with the Two Minutes of Hate. But, next time will focus more on Winston Smith's internal state. There will be a content note.