Full totalitarian rule requires a surplus population large enough to absorb great losses

Evidence

The point is that in all these smaller European countries nontotalitarian dictatorships were preceded by totalitarian movements, so that it appeared that totalitarianism was too ambitious an aim, that although it had served well enough to organize the masses until the movement seized power, the absolute size of the country then forced the would-be totalitarian ruler of masses into the more familiar patterns of class or party dictatorship. The truth is that these countries simply did not control enough human material to allow for total domination and its inherent great losses in population. … Only where great masses are superfluous or can be spared without disastrous results of depopulation is totalitarian rule, as distinguished from a totalitarian movement, at all possible. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 745

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes a totalitarian movement (organizing masses for power seizure) from totalitarian rule (governing through mass destruction), with population surplus as the enabling condition.
• XREF: Connects to necropolitics and biopolitics — the expendability of population as a condition of sovereignty — later Islamophobia readings.