Emmanuel Goldstein

Emmanuel Goldstein is a fictional character and the principal enemy of the state of Oceania in George Orwell's 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The political propaganda of The Party portrays Goldstein as the leader of The Brotherhood, a secret, counter-revolutionary organization who violently oppose the leadership of Big Brother and the Ingsoc régime of The Party.

He is also the author of The 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 a traitor of the revolution. Throughout the story, Emmanuel Goldstein appears only in Minitrue (Ministry of Truth) propaganda films on a telescreen, while rumours claim that The Party wrote The Book.

Emmanuel Goldstein was a member of the Inner Party and brother-in-arms of Big Brother during the revolution that installed The Party as the government of Oceania. In their turn to totalitarianism, 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. Party propaganda teaches that Goldstein is an enemy of the state and that The Brotherhood is a leaderless resistance of cells of secret agents waging counter-revolution against Big Brother and The Party with the ideology of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, The Book written by Goldstein.

In the course of daily life in Oceania, Goldstein is always the subject of the Two 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.

The Party's scapegoating of Goldstein justifies the voiding of civil 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 protagonist Winston Smith asks O'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.

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.

In the 1950s, soon after publication of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, political commentators and literary critics noted the likeness between the fictional character Emmanuel Goldstein and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who had been a political partner of Vladimir Lenin in realising the Russian Revolution of 1917. After the death of Lenin in 1924, despite being an Old Bolshevik, Trotsky lost the intramural party politics of succession to Joseph Stalin, who then assassinated the character of Trotsky to justify his expulsion, first from office, then from the Russian Communist Party in 1925, and then from the USSR in 1929—public condemnation as an enemy of the people.