Even victims accepted their own execution as sacrifice to the regime.

Evidence

Ciliga reports how the condemned party members “thought that if these executions saved the bureaucratic dictatorship as a whole, if they calmed the rebellious peasantry (or rather if they misled them into error), the sacrifice of their lives would not have been in vain” (op. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2691

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The logic whereby condemned victims internalize the regime’s justification for their own deaths — sacrifice as rationalization — is a genuinely dense mechanism worth sitting with.
• XREF: Resonates with the reader’s sacrifice addendum article on ritual human sacrifice as stabilizing stratified societies — here the sacrifice is coerced yet self-rationalized.