Export of violence made its administrators masters incapable of creating anything new

Evidence

While the administrators of permanently increasing power in the past era of moderate imperialism did not even try to incorporate conquered territories, and preserved existing backward political communities like empty ruins of bygone life, their totalitarian successors dissolved and destroyed all politically stabilized structures, their own as well as those of other peoples. The mere export of violence made the servants into masters without giving them the master’s prerogative: the possible creation of something new. Monopolistic concentration and tremendous accumulation of violence at home made the servants active agents in the destruction, until finally totalitarian expansion became a nationand a people-destroying force. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 375

Categorization

• XREF: The distinction between destroying and creating—servants who become masters without the prerogative of creation—echoes how bureaucratic rationality in later readings enables exclusion without responsibility.