Concentration camps are essential power instruments, not pointless atrocities.

Evidence

The uselessness of the camps, their cynically admitted anti-utility, is only apparent. In reality they are more essential to the preservation of the regime’s power than any of its other institutions. Without concentration camps, without the undefined fear they inspire and the very well-defined training they offer in totalitarian domination, which can nowhere else be fully tested with all of its most radical possibilities, a totalitarian state can neither inspire its nuclear troops with fanaticism nor maintain a whole people in complete apathy. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1023

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to necropolitics and the biopolitical administration of death that the Islamophobia readings will assume; also to Foucault’s discipline.