Camps serve as laboratories verifying totalitarianism’s core belief that everything is possible

Evidence

THE CONCENTRATION and extermination camps of totalitarian regimes serve as the laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible is being verified. Compared with this, all other experiments are secondary in importance—including those in the field of medicine whose horrors are recorded in detail in the trials against the physicians of the Third Reich—although it is characteristic that these laboratories were used for experiments of every kind. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 979

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the camps as empirical verification of totalitarianism’s founding axiom — that everything is possible.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s necropolitics toolkit — the camp as the space where sovereignty over bare life is exercised.