Manufacturing Dissent: Baudrillard, 1984, Brazil, and the Staged Enemy

How Totalitarian Systems Simulate Their Own Opposition to Justify Total Control

"While classical propaganda in totalitarian and mass-media systems sought ideological unity through censorship and the Big Lie, the emerging Propaganda 2.0 model... monetises anger by manufacturing dissent and deliberately populating the public sphere with absurd, polarising narratives." "Within this model, dissent is not a failure of the system but its primary commodity: outrage, scandal, and perpetual disagreement function as renewable resources that can be continuously harvested, circulated, and monetised." "Where anticommunism or the war on terror once provided a stable enemy, the platform environment produces a permanent culture war in which the target is endlessly replaceable... The propaganda system therefore no longer aims to secure belief but to sustain volatility." "The Economic Policy of Online Media: Manufacture of Dissent" By Peter Ayolov, Routledge 2023 ### Introduction: When War Becomes a Performance In 1991 Jean Baudrillard shocked philosophers, journalists and political commentators alike by publishing a series of essays under the deliberately provocative title The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. The title immediately appeared absurd. Television viewers around the world had watched cruise missiles illuminate the Baghdad sky, military briefings dominated global news and newspapers printed photographs of burning oil fields, retreating Iraqi columns and coalition victories. Thousands of people had died. How could anyone seriously claim that the Gulf War had not taken place? Baudrillard's answer was neither historical denial nor political provocation for its own sake. He fully acknowledged that bombs exploded, soldiers fought and civilians suffered. His argument was much more unsettling. What the overwhelming majority of humanity experienced was not the war itself but a carefully mediated representation of war—a technological, televisual and symbolic construction that gradually replaced direct reality. The public consumed not combat but its simulation. The conflict existed primarily as an informational spectacle, organised through twenty-four-hour news coverage, military briefings, satellite imagery and carefully selected visual narratives. The event became inseparable from its representation. War itself increasingly disappeared behind the signs of war. Ten years later Baudrillard returned to the same philosophical problem in The Spirit of Terrorism, written immediately after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Once again he refused the conventional explanation. Terrorism, he argued, was not simply an external force attacking Western civilisation but the symbolic reversal of a global system that had become so universal that it could no longer produce genuine external enemies. The attacks did not represent the clash of two independent worlds. They represented the internal contradiction of a global order turning its own technological, financial and communicational power back upon itself. Terrorism became less a military phenomenon than a symbolic event perfectly designed for global media circulation. Like the Gulf War, it was simultaneously real and hyperreal, physical and virtual, material and spectacular. The image became inseparable from the event. The world witnessed not merely destruction but its global transmission. Baudrillard's two books therefore belong to a single philosophical project. First, war ceased to exist in its traditional form. Then terrorism inherited its place as the privileged spectacle of the twenty-first century. This article argues that Baudrillard's project can be taken even further. The true provocation is not merely that the Gulf War did not take place or that terrorism functions as a symbolic event. Rather, the very "Spirit" invoked in The Spirit of Terrorism never existed in the first place. There is no autonomous spirit of terrorism, no independent spirit of history, no spirit of reason, no spirit of progress, no spirit of capitalism and no spirit of communism. These are linguistic abstractions detached from the living bodies that temporarily produce them. They resemble software without hardware. Human beings breathe, suffer, cooperate and die; spirits do not. What modern political language repeatedly presents as autonomous historical subjects are merely names given to collective patterns emerging from millions of interacting bodies. Terry Gilliam's Brazil perhaps illustrates this insight more accurately than any philosophical treatise. Frequently described as the closest cinematic adaptation of George Orwell's 1984, Brazil transforms permanent war into permanent terrorism and reveals that modern bureaucracy itself requires an imaginary enemy to justify its own endless existence. Read together, Orwell's novel, Gilliam's film and Baudrillard's philosophy expose the same historical transformation: war becomes spectacle, terrorism becomes administration and spirit becomes language. The greatest illusion of the modern age is not simply that wars are televised, but that abstractions have replaced human beings as the apparent actors of history itself. ## Part I: The Gulf War Did Not Take Place: Manufacturing War Through Representation Jean Baudrillard's famous assertion that "the Gulf War did not take place" has often been misunderstood as an exercise in postmodern provocation or historical denial. Nothing could be further from his intention. His argument was directed neither against the existence of bombs nor against the suffering of soldiers and civilians. Rather, it challenged the disappearance of war as a direct historical experience and its replacement by an entirely new technological phenomenon: war as representation. Modern military conflicts increasingly occur simultaneously on two battlefields. One remains material, where human bodies continue to bleed, destroy and die. The other is symbolic, where governments, military institutions, journalists and communication networks construct a coherent narrative for global audiences. Baudrillard argued that by the time of the First Gulf War the second battlefield had already become dominant. The overwhelming majority of humanity experienced the conflict exclusively through television screens, carefully selected military footage, satellite transmissions and official briefings. Precision-guided missiles appeared almost elegant through cockpit cameras. Night-vision images transformed destruction into green electronic abstractions. Casualties disappeared almost entirely from Western broadcasts, while military technology itself became the central protagonist. The war gradually ceased to function as an unpredictable encounter between opposing armies and instead became an immense media performance organised for worldwide consumption. Reality remained present, but only as raw material continuously processed into images. The public no longer witnessed war; it consumed its simulation. This transformation anticipated the emergence of what Baudrillard later described as hyperreality, where representation no longer reflects reality but increasingly replaces it. War therefore became less a political event than an informational commodity circulating through global communication networks. Later scholars discussing Baudrillard's work have emphasised precisely this shift from conventional warfare towards media-driven simulation, arguing that modern conflicts increasingly unfold as technologically mediated spectacles whose symbolic dimension becomes inseparable from their military objectives. This transformation profoundly altered the political function of conflict itself. Classical wars sought territorial conquest, military victory or diplomatic advantage. Hyperreal wars pursue something additional and perhaps even more significant: legitimacy through visibility. Governments no longer merely wage wars; they manage narratives, control visual evidence, regulate journalistic access and transform military operations into continuous public performances. Victory increasingly depends upon maintaining the appearance of control before global audiences. The battlefield therefore expands beyond geography into the communicational infrastructure itself. Every missile strike, every press conference, every televised address and every circulating photograph becomes part of the military campaign. The conflict no longer belongs exclusively to soldiers but equally to broadcasters, algorithms, journalists and spectators participating in the endless reproduction of images. This is precisely why Baudrillard's thesis remains remarkably relevant long after the Gulf War itself. Contemporary conflicts—from the attacks of 11 September to the wars in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and Gaza—have unfolded within communication systems immeasurably more powerful than those available in 1991. Social media, smartphones, artificial intelligence, satellite imagery and algorithmic recommendation systems have accelerated the production of simultaneous realities in which every participant inhabits a different informational battlefield. The struggle increasingly concerns not simply what happened but which version of reality achieves global circulation. War therefore becomes inseparable from communication itself. In this sense Baudrillard's title was not describing a single historical conflict but announcing the arrival of a new political condition. Modern wars certainly continue to produce genuine destruction, yet their public existence depends increasingly upon representation. They occur because they are watched, interpreted, repeated and endlessly reproduced. The battlefield has become a theatre whose audience encompasses the entire connected planet. If earlier societies fought wars to change history, contemporary societies increasingly manufacture history through the spectacle of war itself. From this point onward the transition to terrorism becomes almost inevitable. Once war becomes representation, the next historical step is no longer the disappearance of conflict but the manufacture of an enemy whose principal function is to sustain the spectacle continuously. ## Part II: The Spirit of Terrorism: Manufacturing the Enemy If The Gulf War Did Not Take Place describes the disappearance of war into media simulation, then The Spirit of Terrorism explains what replaces it. The transition is not accidental. Once modern states discovered that wars could no longer mobilise societies continuously, a new form of permanent conflict became necessary. Traditional wars possess inconvenient characteristics: they eventually end, treaties are signed, armies withdraw and societies attempt to return to ordinary life. Terrorism, however, possesses no natural conclusion. It is indefinite, invisible and potentially omnipresent. Unlike conventional armies, it has no fixed territory, no clearly identifiable government and no definitive battlefield. Consequently, it can justify permanent states of emergency, continuous surveillance, expanding security bureaucracies and the indefinite postponement of normal political life. Baudrillard's central argument is therefore not that terrorism is imaginary but that its political function has fundamentally changed. The spectacular image of terrorism increasingly becomes more significant than terrorism itself. The attacks of 11 September 2001 certainly occurred. Buildings collapsed and thousands died. Yet their historical significance cannot be separated from their unprecedented media circulation. The event was simultaneously physical destruction and global broadcast, reality and representation, violence and communication. It entered history not simply because of what happened in New York but because billions experienced the same images repeatedly for days, months and years afterwards. The spectacle became inseparable from the event itself. Terrorism was transformed into the defining symbolic language of the twenty-first century. It became the perfect communicational event because it compressed fear, uncertainty, spectacle and political legitimacy into a single endlessly reproducible image. As Baudrillard argues, terrorism emerges from within the very structures of globalisation that attempt to eliminate every external alternative. Rather than confronting the West from outside, it reflects the contradictions produced by a system seeking universal expansion and encountering resistance generated by its own logic. Gerry Coulter's analysis similarly emphasises that Baudrillard understands terrorism, globalisation and media as inseparable components of what he calls the "Fourth World War," a conflict in which symbolic communication increasingly becomes the primary battlefield. Yet Baudrillard's title itself contains an irony that perhaps remained underdeveloped within his own philosophy. What exactly is this "Spirit of Terrorism"? Does such a spirit actually exist? The expression immediately recalls Hegel's Spirit of History, Marx's famous declaration that "a spectre is haunting Europe," the Christian Holy Spirit, the Enlightenment's Spirit of Reason and countless other historical abstractions that appear to act independently of the individuals supposedly embodying them. Throughout Western intellectual history these invisible entities have repeatedly been presented as genuine historical actors directing human affairs. Nations possess spirits, civilisations possess spirits, revolutions possess spirits and historical epochs allegedly breathe with their own autonomous consciousness. Yet none of these spirits has ever been encountered outside language itself. They possess no biological existence, no nervous system, no metabolism and no body. They neither breathe nor suffer. Only human beings do. The spirit emerges only after millions of living individuals have already acted, spoken, struggled and died. Language then retrospectively compresses these innumerable bodily interactions into singular abstract entities such as "History," "Reason," "Progress" or "Terrorism." These abstractions are extraordinarily useful because they simplify complexity into manageable narratives, but they also conceal the material reality from which they emerge. Instead of recognising millions of bodies acting under specific historical conditions, societies begin to imagine that invisible spirits themselves produce events. The abstraction gradually replaces its creators. Terrorism thus becomes less the activity of particular organisations or individuals than a metaphysical force apparently haunting civilisation itself. The result is politically invaluable. An invisible spirit cannot surrender, negotiate or disappear. It can only justify permanent vigilance. The enemy consequently becomes detached from every concrete body and transformed into a universal possibility existing everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. In this sense the true "Spirit of Terrorism" is not an external force threatening modern society. It is the linguistic fiction through which modern societies organise perpetual insecurity. Once the spirit has been invented, the production of enemies becomes endless because abstractions require no empirical limits. They expand indefinitely, reproducing themselves through media, bureaucracy and political discourse long after the particular events that initially generated them have faded into history. ## Part III: Brazil and 1984: Manufacturing Dissent Through the Staged Enemy If George Orwell's 1984 explains how modern power manufactures truth, Terry Gilliam's Brazil demonstrates how it manufactures terrorism. Although Brazil has often been described as an absurdist dystopian comedy inspired by Orwell's novel, it can equally be understood as its logical continuation. Orwell imagined a totalitarian society sustained by permanent war. Oceania survives because it constantly fights invisible enemies whose existence can never be independently verified. The objective of war is not victory but social organisation. It justifies rationing, surveillance, censorship and the concentration of political power. Whether Eastasia or Eurasia actually constitutes an existential threat becomes increasingly irrelevant because the political function of war lies not in defeating the enemy but in maintaining domestic obedience. Permanent conflict produces permanent unity. Gilliam inherits precisely this insight but updates it for the bureaucratic age. In Brazil the permanent enemy is no longer a foreign superpower but terrorism itself. Bombings occur continuously throughout the film, yet they appear strangely disconnected from any coherent political movement. Restaurants explode while customers calmly continue eating behind hastily erected plastic screens. Buildings collapse almost as routine administrative inconveniences. Government propaganda constantly reminds citizens that terrorists threaten civilisation, while bureaucratic paperwork expands endlessly in response. Terrorism functions less as a political reality than as a permanent administrative necessity. The Ministry of Information exists because terrorism exists, and terrorism remains necessary because the Ministry exists. Bureaucracy and terrorism become mutually reinforcing fictions, each legitimising the endless expansion of the other. The film quietly undermines the official narrative by revealing that many of the disasters attributed to terrorists originate within the system itself. Pipes burst, heating systems malfunction, automated machinery constantly breaks down and the technological infrastructure appears permanently on the verge of collapse. Rather than admitting institutional incompetence, however, the state systematically attributes every disruption to external enemies. Even Harry Tuttle, the only individual officially labelled a terrorist, commits no recognisable acts of political violence. His offence is astonishingly banal. He repairs broken heating systems without completing the authorised bureaucratic procedures. He bypasses administrative regulations in order to solve practical problems directly. His independence from bureaucratic control transforms him into a dangerous criminal. Gilliam therefore inverts the traditional definition of terrorism. The terrorist is not the individual who destroys infrastructure but the individual who exposes that the infrastructure is already collapsing under its own administrative weight. Bureaucratic deviance becomes indistinguishable from political extremism. The state manufactures dissent by criminalising efficiency itself. Anyone capable of operating outside official procedures threatens not public safety but the legitimacy of bureaucracy. Terrorism consequently becomes less a description of violent behaviour than a bureaucratic category assigned to individuals refusing institutional mediation. The enemy is produced precisely because the administrative machine requires continuous justification for its own existence. Read through Baudrillard, Brazil becomes more than a dystopian satire; it becomes a philosophical diagnosis of contemporary political communication. The society portrayed in the film no longer distinguishes clearly between reality and propaganda because propaganda has become reality. Terrorist attacks, technological failures, bureaucratic incompetence and media narratives circulate within a single self-reinforcing symbolic system. The distinction between authentic and fabricated threats gradually loses political significance because both fulfil exactly the same administrative function. Baudrillard similarly argues that modern systems no longer confront external enemies but increasingly generate their own symbolic antagonists from within. Terrorism appears as the immune response of a global order that has eliminated genuine alternatives and therefore reproduces opposition internally. Gilliam visualises precisely this condition. The bureaucratic state does not merely respond to terrorism; it requires terrorism. Every explosion, whether accidental or intentional, every malfunction, every administrative error and every deviation from official procedure immediately reinforces the necessity of additional paperwork, further surveillance and expanding institutional control. Orwell described a regime that manufactured truth. Gilliam depicts one that manufactures enemies. Baudrillard explains the philosophical mechanism underlying both. Once power becomes inseparable from communication, dissent itself must also become communicational. The staged enemy becomes more valuable than the defeated enemy because permanent insecurity guarantees the permanent reproduction of the institutions established to combat it. In this sense Brazil may indeed represent the most accurate cinematic continuation of 1984. Orwell imagined the politics of permanent war. Gilliam imagined the bureaucracy of permanent terrorism. Baudrillard provided the philosophical vocabulary that reveals both as different stages in the same historical transformation: the replacement of political reality by its endlessly reproducible spectacle. ## Conclusion: Manufacturing Dissent Jean Baudrillard's The Gulf War Did Not Take Place and The Spirit of Terrorism should therefore be read not as two independent philosophical interventions but as consecutive chapters of the same historical diagnosis. The first describes the transformation of war into spectacle; the second explains how terrorism inherits the political function once performed by conventional warfare. War no longer requires continuous territorial conquest. Instead, modern systems increasingly require continuous symbolic conflict. The battlefield migrates from geography to communication, from military confrontation to the permanent production of images, narratives and enemies. Terrorism becomes the ideal successor because unlike conventional war it possesses no obvious conclusion. It exists everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. It justifies surveillance without temporal limits, bureaucracy without institutional limits and emergency without political limits. Once conflict becomes communicational rather than military, victory itself becomes secondary. What matters is the uninterrupted reproduction of insecurity. This is precisely why Terry Gilliam's Brazil may be understood as the closest cinematic continuation of George Orwell's 1984. Orwell imagined a political order sustained by permanent war. Gilliam imagined the next historical stage—a society sustained by permanent terrorism. The transition is subtle but decisive. In 1984 the Party manufactures foreign enemies to justify its monopoly on truth. In Brazil the bureaucratic state manufactures terrorism to justify its monopoly on administration. Throughout the film terrorist bombings appear almost routine, yet the narrative quietly suggests that many of these catastrophes originate not from organised political resistance but from the state's own decaying technological infrastructure and administrative incompetence. Every exploding pipe, every collapsing heating system and every bureaucratic mistake immediately becomes another terrorist incident. The government never confronts its own failures because terrorism functions as the universal explanation for everything that goes wrong. Even Harry Tuttle, officially designated a terrorist, commits no ideological violence. His real offence is repairing broken heating systems without bureaucratic authorisation. The state criminalises efficiency because independent problem-solving threatens the administrative order more profoundly than sabotage itself. Terrorism therefore becomes less a political movement than a bureaucratic category through which the state continually manufactures dissent in order to justify its own existence. Baudrillard's philosophy unexpectedly clarifies this logic. Terrorism is not merely an external enemy attacking global civilisation. It increasingly functions as the system's own symbolic necessity. A totalising political order cannot survive indefinitely without opposition because power requires resistance in order to legitimise itself. Once genuine external enemies disappear, they must increasingly be replaced by internal, symbolic or continuously reproducible antagonists. Whether these enemies are entirely real, partially real or politically exaggerated becomes almost irrelevant. Their function remains identical. They sustain the permanent expansion of surveillance, administration, security institutions and media spectacle. Gilliam's fictional bureaucracy therefore illustrates visually what Baudrillard formulates philosophically: modern systems do not simply respond to enemies—they require them. The enemy becomes part of the machinery of governance itself. Yet the argument developed throughout this article ultimately extends beyond Baudrillard. The greatest illusion is not simply that wars become spectacles or that terrorism becomes simulation. It is the belief contained within the very title The Spirit of Terrorism. There is no autonomous Spirit of Terrorism, just as there is no independent Spirit of History, Spirit of Progress, Spirit of Democracy, Spirit of Capitalism or Spirit of God. These spirits are linguistic abstractions that acquire an appearance of independent existence only because language repeatedly transforms collective human activity into singular metaphysical actors. Only bodies exist. Only living human beings breathe, suffer, cooperate, build cities and destroy them. "Spirit" emerges afterwards as an explanatory fiction imposed upon millions of interacting bodies. The abstraction gradually replaces its creators until societies begin believing that invisible entities rather than ordinary human beings govern history. Perhaps this is the common insight shared by Orwell, Gilliam and Baudrillard. Modern power no longer depends primarily upon manufacturing consent, as classical theories of ideology suggested. It depends upon manufacturing dissent. Every stable system requires carefully managed opposition, continuously reproduced threats and permanent emergencies that justify its own expansion. War becomes spectacle. Terrorism becomes administration. The enemy becomes communication. The greatest triumph of modern political systems is therefore not defeating their enemies but endlessly reproducing them. The most powerful weapon of the twenty-first century is no longer the bomb or the missile but the staged enemy itself. Once dissent can be manufactured, power no longer needs victory. It needs only the perpetual performance of conflict. References Baudrillard, J. (1995) The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Translated by P. Patton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Baudrillard, J. (2002) The Spirit of Terrorism. Translated by C. Turner. London: Verso. Bartle, J. (2023) 'The spirit of simulation: Jean Baudrillard after 9/11', Journal of Political Ideologies, 28(3), pp. 315–331. Coulter, G. 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