Avant-garde elites aligned with totalitarian mobs despite persecution of artists

Evidence

A similar frame of mind explains the remarkable fact that Hitler’s and Stalin’s widely publicized opinions about art and their persecution of modern artists have never been able to destroy the attraction which the totalitarian movements had for avant-garde artists; this shows the elite’s lack of a sense of reality, together with its perverted selflessness, both of which resemble only too closely the fictitious world and the absence of self-interest among the masses. It was the great opportunity of the totalitarian movements, and the reason why a temporary alliance between the intellectual elite and the mob could come about, that in an elementary and undifferentiated way their problems had become the same and foreshadowed the problems and mentality of the masses. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 796

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the later readings on how intellectual vanguard legitimization precedes or accompanies mass exclusionary politics — the same elite-mob convergence the Islamophobia literature assumes in colonial and postcolonial contexts. — connects to: Stalinism and Nazism together destroyed the avant-garde — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 252