The God Emperor and Venezuela

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Britain is known as Airstrip One. Image Source: picssr.

In mid-January 2019, a Wiki user with the handle ZiaLater created a world map of nations according to their support in the country's current presidential crisis of Venezuelan interim president Juan Guaidó.

I was immediately struck by the fact that the Venezuela president recognition map 2019 is almost identical to the map of the world in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

Venezuela president recognition map 2019 (January 2019). Image Source: Wiki.

Orwell's fictional superstates in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Image Source: Reddit.

Although the similarity between the two maps could confirm yet again that Orwell accurately predicted the future, it might mean instead that big geopolitical alignments don't change as much as we think they do. There are many continuities between Orwell's time and ours. The inchoate superstates Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia were and are always there, waiting to be born. This made me wonder what catalysts really prompt the imperial birth of superstates. In Orwell's novel, the catalyst is a nuclear war.

Image Source: Architizer.

In our reality, perhaps one catalyst is unified world religion, as announced by the Pope and other religious leaders, last week (see here, here, here), to be realized through the French Revolutionary concept of fraternity. Fraternity is normally the domain of the ideology of nationalism; yet here, the Vatican is sidelining nationalism and recapturing fraternity to support a global religion which will even include non-believers. Or perhaps one of the catalysts is the universal passport planned for all Africans, as reported in mid-January, 2019.

Image Source: Granite Grok.

No one thinks of a nationalist populist leader like Trump as an imperialist. Border walls notwithstanding, perhaps another catalyst which realizes the Orwellian map is centralization achieved through strongman politics. This was illustrated this week in Italy, where a local Tuscan carnival, Carnevale di Viareggio, featured a God Emperor Trump float, armed with a Twitter sword. The designer Fabrizio Galli created the float in a reference to a character in the war game, Warhammer 40,000.

The float was intended as a criticism of Trump. Instead, videos of the carnival went viral on the Internet. To quote one Youtuber, whose attitude was echoed by thousands: "Fucking outstanding. Whether this was meant as a criticism of Trump or not, this is a fantastic crystallisation of what Trump means."

God Emperor Trump Conquers Italy (English Subs) (10 February 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

God emperor Trump float is EPIC (11 February 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

40K Lore For Newcomers - Who Is... The Emperor? - 40K Theories (21 March 2018). Video Source: Youtube.

"A fantastic crystallisation of what Trump means." And what is that? It would be easy to dismiss the float's appeal to the fantasies of immature minds. The float confirmed Trump's uncanny ability to turn reality into Reality TV, a role-playing game, or an online Punch and Judy show. A master of the Streisand Effect, he is exponentially inflated the more he is criticized, and through his actual lack of appeal.

It is an inversion of the original formula for popularity and something which his critics find very difficult to understand. They need to grasp the fact that the more they attack and ridicule him, the stronger he gets. As American circus owner and showman Phineas T. Barnum (1810-1891) may have said: There is no such thing as bad publicity.

The carnival float showed how well Trump translates into memedom. The 19th century cult of personality has morphed into the 21st century cult of memes. The former was symptomatic of political religions. The latter is a sign of worship of technology. Under one video of the carnival float, a Youtuber referred to the Youtube like button: "Likes to the like god!" It is not Trump who is being worshiped, but the power of the medium he so cannily exploits. Whether his publicity is good or bad, it is repeatable. The meme's users admire Trump because they gain power by sharing images and information related to him. In memedom, the quality or truth of the information does not matter, so much as its virality.

Virality has real consequences. The US election of 2016 proved to Trump's memeing brigades that sharing information in the virtual realm can transform the real world. This was how Trump became associated with empowerment among people who felt disempowered.

This was a huge revelation and an evolutionary moment in 21st century politics. Trump's victory in 2016 showed firstly that shareable information could have a real world impact. Secondly, the more opponents tried to cast that information in a negative light and the more they tried to suppress it, the more shareable that information became, and the greater its real world impact.

While it defies the logic of conventional politicking, there is no contradiction in the fact that a nationalist populist isolationist like Trump would support imperial adventures in Venezuela. Strongman leadership, cemented by memedom, gains appeal as Internet users worldwide learn the secret of the meme formula. As it spreads across the Internet to the homes of those who have been left out of the equations of the great players of old power politics, that secret lends itself to a different kind of centralization and expansion of power.