Mass-terror regimes produce identical disavowal excuses from their intellectuals

Evidence

It is quite characteristic that messages on all levels habitually stressed the “obligations undertaken to Comrade Stalin,” and not to the regime or the party or the country. Nothing perhaps underlines more convincingly the similarities of the two systems than what Ilya Ehrenburg and other Stalinist intellectuals have to say today in their efforts to justify their past or simply to report what they actually thought during the Great Purge. “Stalin knew nothing about the senseless violence committed against the Communists, against the Soviet intelligentsia,” “they conceal it from Stalin” and “if only someone would tell Stalin about it,” or, finally, the culprit was not Stalin at all but the respective chief of police. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1957

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the Arendt thesis that totalitarianism obliterates individual moral responsibility — connects to later Islamophobia readings on how diffuse institutional power enables denial.
• SHARE: The parallel between Stalinist and Nazi intellectuals’ identical ‘the leader didn’t know’ excuses is a striking comparison worth sending to anyone working on totalitarianism.