Both Hitler and Stalin grounded their worldviews in formative early ideological commitments

Evidence

Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf (New York, 1939): In Vienna, “I laid the foundations for a world concept in general and a way of political thinking in particular which I had later only to complete in detail, but which never afterward forsook me” (p. 129).—Stalin came back to Pan-Slav slogans during the last war. The 1945 Pan-Slav Congress in Sofia, which had been called by the victorious Russians, adopted a resolution pronouncing it “not only an international political necessity to declare Russian its language of general communication and the official language of all Slav countries, but a moral necessity.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2387

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s account of the ideological core of totalitarian movements formed in pre-political early experience; useful scaffolding for the racism/expansionism mechanisms in the Islamophobia readings.