Camps conditioned both guards and prisoners to fear the outside world

Evidence

Bettelheim, op. cit., describes the process by which the guards as well as the prisoners became “conditioned” to the life in the camp and were afraid of returning to the outer world. Rousset, therefore, is right when he insists that the truth is that “victim and executioner are alike ignoble; the lesson of the camps is the brotherhood of abjection” (p. 588). — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2839

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘brotherhood of abjection’ parallels the deepethical collapse where perpetrator and victim share a degraded status — relevant to how totalitarian systems destroy moral categories entirely.
• QUESTION: Rousset’s equality-of-ignominy claim is contested — worth seeing how later scholarship (e.g., Primo Levi’s ‘gray zone’) reworks it.