Government-sponsored mobs linked police, church, and intellectuals in pogroms

Evidence

There is of course a patent similarity between the French mob organization during the Dreyfus Affair (see p. 111) and Russian pogrom groups such as the “Black Hundreds” in which the “wildest and the least cultivated dregs of old Russia [were gathered and which] kept contact with the majority of the Orthodox episcopate” (Fedotow, op. cit.)—or the “League of the Russian People” with its secret Fighting Squadrons recruited from the lower agents of the police, paid by the government, and led by intellectuals. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2451

Categorization

• DEFINE: Identifies the shared structure of the mob as a political instrument in both French antisemitism and Russian pogroms — state-adjacent, clergy-connected, intellectually led.
• XREF: This is the ‘mob’ concept that Arendt builds toward in her analysis of totalitarian movements; connects to the reader’s German book on mob psychology if any. — connects to: A small organized mob can manufacture consent for the whole community — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 462