Monopolized responsibility dissolves individual accountability throughout the totalitarian movement

Evidence

This total responsibility for everything done by the movement and this total identification with every one of its functionaries have the very practical consequence that nobody ever experiences a situation in which he has to be responsible for his own actions or can explain the reasons for them. Since the Leader has monopolized the right and possibility of explanation, he appears to the outside world as the only person who knows what he is doing, i.e., the only representative of the movement with whom one may still talk in nontotalitarian terms and who, if reproached or opposed, cannot say: Don’t ask me, ask the Leader. Being in the center of the movement, the Leader can act as though he were above it. It is therefore perfectly understandable (and perfectly futile) for outsiders to set their hopes time and again on a personal talk with the Leader himself when they have to deal with totalitarian movements or governments. The real mystery of the totalitarian Leader resides in an organization which makes it possible for him to assume the total responsibility for all crimes committed by the elite formations of the movement and to claim at the same time, the honest, innocent respectability of its most naive fellow-traveler. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 869

Categorization

• XREF: This mechanism of diffused responsibility feeding the ‘nobody to ask’ logic connects to the bureaucratic rationality theme in the reader’s toolkit — how mass exclusion becomes routinized. — connects to: Ethical appeals to individual responsibility let impersonal structures evade accountability — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 139
• QUESTION: Arendt says outsiders’ hopes of appealing to the Leader are ‘perfectly futile’ — worth chasing how this reflects on liberal strategies of engaging totalitarian regimes.