The New Neo

In this post I’ll be presenting the “Two Minutes Hate” excerpt from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I think the template for the passage’s physical description of Goldstein (the object of the Hate) may have been Trotsky, at least in part. Here’s a video of Trotsky in exile, speaking in English, of all things – and although he’s certainly not speaking about Orwell or about anti-Semitism, he’s speaking about something that’s relevant to Orwell’s book: the Moscow show trials:

Here’s the passage by Orwell, to refresh your memory. It’s masterful and still relevant, unfortunately, including describing the contagious group nature of the required Party exercise in hating [emphasis mine]:

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. … Goldstein was the 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 activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. 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: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea,
under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even–so it was occasionally rumoured–in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.

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 sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous 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. …

Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were–in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. …

… The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

That fits in well with this recent substack essay by Guy Goldstein (no relation to Emmanuel). He writes that anti-Semitism and especially the blood libel work as memes, and always have, even long before the internet began. Memes have a simple and effective emotional power:

The lecturer at UCL [University College London] did not revive the Damascus Affair [an ancient blood libel against Jews] because she respects history. She revived it because she understands narrative power. Blood libels do not survive for centuries because they are persuasive. They survive because they are built like memes. They are easy to grasp, easy to repeat, easy to weaponize, and perfectly engineered to bypass critical thinking.

Memes are some of the most powerful weapons in the cultural world our kids live in. A meme is not a joke. It is a piece of information designed to move through people fast. It spreads by emotion, imitation, and recognition. It crosses languages without effort. It does not wait for logic to catch up. That is why militaries study memes and why extremists deploy them. They are perfect carriers for ideas that need to hit hard and travel quickly. They succeed because they compress a whole worldview into a single format the brain can absorb in seconds. And blood libel was doing this long before the internet. It was a weaponized meme template built to trigger disgust, create panic, and spread without friction. …

The adults fighting antisemitism have not understood this. We keep arriving with facts. We bring timelines, context, nuance, longform arguments, citations, and appeals to reason. Meanwhile antisemitism arrives with images, punchlines, tropes, and emotionally loaded shortcuts.

Here’s the solution the author suggests:

If we want to counter the oldest hate, we need to switch languages. We need to teach young people to recognize the pattern of antisemitism the way they recognize a recycled meme format. Once they see the template, the narrative collapses. They do not need to memorize history to reject it. They need to understand the shape. …

… It is time to stop losing a battle that was never about facts at all.

I hate to criticize that suggestion when I certainly don’t have a better one. Nevertheless, I just don’t see how it would work. Maybe, just maybe, it would work as a preventative, but I really don’t see how it could possibly change someone’s mind who already believes the lies. It seems to me that “recognize the pattern” is also too logical, and that the counter to the memes would have to be memes strong enough and emotional enough to compete with hatred and fear.

Anti-Semitism – Jew-hatred, in other words – seems to fit a deep need in so many people. It’s one that Orwell understood and described, although his dystopian novel was not about that. Hatred spreads on a visceral and emotional level, and to counter it with logic, the teaching of history, and rational thought seems weak and ineffective. Suggestions?