Front organizations are two-way facades for the movement and the outside world
Evidence
The world at large, on the other side, usually gets its first glimpse of a totalitarian movement through its front organizations. The sympathizers, who are to all appearances still innocuous fellow-citizens in a nontotalitarian society, can hardly be called single-minded fanatics; through them, the movements make their fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can spread their propaganda in milder, more respectable forms, until the whole atmosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements which are hardly recognizable as such but appear to be normal political reactions or opinions. The fellow-traveler organizations surround the totalitarian movements with a mist of normality and respectability that fools the membership about the true character of the outside world as much as it does the outside world about the true character of the movement. The front organization functions both ways: as the façade of the totalitarian movement to the nontotalitarian world, and as the façade of this world to the inner hierarchy of the movement. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 855
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: The dual-facade definition of front organizations — key concept to carry forward.
- XREF: The bidirectional façade concept parallels how respectability politics functions in later Islamophobia-based movement analysis.