Ideology transforms into a purely organizational device once totalitarian policy forms

Evidence

The dichotomous principle of class struggle having become an organizational device, having, as it were, petrified into uncompromising hostility against the whole world through the secret police cadres in Russia and the Comintern agents abroad, Bolshevik policy has become remarkably free of “prejudices.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 889

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core scaffolding concept: in totalitarian movements, ideological doctrines lose their substantive content and function purely as organizational devices for mobilizing hostility.
• XREF: Connects to Weber’s routinization of charisma and to the general scaffolding point that totalitarian ideology is de-content-ful, instrumental power. — connects to: Revolutionary optimism degenerated from autonomous will into worship of the organization. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 144; Counterterrorism policy derives from Cold War totalitarianism theory linking ideology to violence — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 566