Bureaucracy attracted the best intelligentsia while race attracted the worst

Evidence

OF THE TWO main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered in South Africa and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt, and India; the former was originally the barely conscious reaction to tribes of whose humanity European man was ashamed and frightened, whereas the latter was a consequence of that administration by which Europeans had tried to rule foreign peoples whom they felt to be hopelessly their inferiors and at the same time in need of their special protection. Race, in other words, was an escape into an irresponsibility where nothing human could any longer exist, and bureaucracy was the result of a responsibility that no man can bear for his fellowman and no people for another people. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 534 (#expands, via linked claim)

Although in the end racism and bureaucracy proved to be interrelated in many ways, they were discovered and developed independently. No one who in one way or the other was implicated in their perfection ever came to realize the full range of potentialities of power accumulation and destruction that this combination alone provided. Lord Cromer, who in Egypt changed from an ordinary British charge d’affaires into an imperialist bureaucrat, would no more have dreamed of combining administration with massacre (“administrative massacres” as Carthill bluntly put it forty years later), than the race fanatics of South Africa thought of organizing massacres for the purpose of establishing a circumscribed, rational political community (as the Nazis did in the extermination camps). — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 487 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Race and bureaucracy are imperialism’s two paired ruling devices — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 534; Racism and bureaucracy developed separately before combining for total destruction — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 487; Imperial racism and bureaucracy supply the elements of totalitarian rule — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 567 (+2 more)

Related

• Race and bureaucracy are imperialism’s two paired ruling devices (similarity 0.89)
• Racism and bureaucracy developed separately before combining for total destruction (similarity 0.88)
• Imperial racism and bureaucracy supply the elements of totalitarian rule (similarity 0.86)
• Racist worldviews require modern bureaucracy to implement extermination (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Race and bureaucracy are imperialism’s two paired ruling devices #expands (0.85) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 534
• Racism and bureaucracy developed separately before combining for total destruction #complicates (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 487
• Imperial racism and bureaucracy supply the elements of totalitarian rule #expands (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 567
• Race-thinking supplied a natural aristocracy to replace the feudal nobility #exemplifies (0.80)
• Racist worldviews require modern bureaucracy to implement extermination #expands (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 223