The Great Impoverishment: Amsoc, War is Peace, Emmanuel Goldstein and Julian Assange... and Bin Laden, too

Amsoc is the new American socialism, a variant of Ingsoc, or English socialism as portrayed by George Orwell in his novel 1984.

Emmanuel Goldstein is one of the original founding members of the Party that rules Oceania in 1984. It is Oceania that was ruled by the Party, consisting of the Inner Party and the Outer Party, and the iconic Big Brother. The common Proles, or workers, made up the remaining 85% of the population. Oceania was a political entity that usually was at war with its enemies  - or allies for the time being  - of Eurasia and East Asia.
It is Goldstein who is the object of the daily Two-Minute Hate, providing an ideological enemy to supplement the external material enemy Eurasia or East Asia. The constant threat of Goldstein firms up the devotion to Big Brother.

Goldstein wrote The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, an oligarchy being a "rule by a group - and not too large a group" from the Greek oligos meaning "some, a few". There is a vast gap between the wealthiest 5%,  or 15%,  and the rest of the population.
From the fictional book of the fictional Goldstein we learn that Orwell's 1984 concedes that the 19th and 20th century Capitalism could possibly lead to a state where great benefits could be available to large numbers of people, much more than at any time in the past. However, if such a process were to continue uncontrolled, then the workers and proletarians and poor:


", become politically conscious and so depose the ruling oligarchy; therefore, ". . . in the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance". Given that large-scale, mechanised production could not be eliminated once invented, the Party arranges the destruction of surplus goods — before that makes "the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent", hence perpetual war:

is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population . . . It is a deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.

 (Wikipedia, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism)

Each [power bloc: Oceania, Eurasia, and East Asia] is in effect a separate universe within which almost any perversion of thought can be safely practiced . . . The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they chose.

To wit, "the war" is "waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact", therefore, war is peace.

(Wikipedia, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism)


Well, that's a lot of ground work. So what does it all mean?
The Oligarchy is being established as we speak. The vast differences in wealth have already established an oligarchy: rule by the few and rich and powerful.
The Power Blocs of the Oligarchies are in various stages of development:  NATO is the embryonic form for Oceania, and China will use the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation as a template for East Asia; Russia will use a renaissance of the Warsaw Pact for Eurasia.
The Chinese Communist Party will form the Oligarchy ruling party of East Asia, the present Oligarchy in Russia will develop and transform into the Oligarchy of Eurasia, and the Oligarchy of the West is already established as the Oligarchy for Oceania - it merely hasn't become "self-aware" yet!

The Great Impoverishment    (not the Great Recession as the media would have it) we see now as the world's governments struggle to reduce deficits is not going to necessarily be a temporary hiatus: it will be made permanent if the forces of repression gain the upper hand over the next few years.


The Two-Minute Hate has already been incarnated as the Osama bin Laden news clip. To this we add the demonisation of Julian Assange whose WikiLeaks is the enemy of the Ministry of Truth: that vast bureaucracy whose sole purpose was to create the Lie of History for Big Brother and the Party.


Will Julian Assange become a man without a country, always on the run, holed up in Pakistan like that other emblematic enemy of Oceania... er, enemy of the West, Osama bin Laden? Only time will tell. How many more Emmanuel Goldsteins do we need?



--qed--
 some pix:   http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/