Murder preserves existence while totalitarianism erases the fact of having lived.

Evidence

In any event, the fearful imagination has the great advantage to dissolve the sophistic-dialectical interpretations of politics which are all based on the superstition that something good might result from evil. Such dialectical acrobatics had at least a semblance of justification so long as the worst that man could inflict upon man was murder. But, as we know today, murder is only a limited evil, The murderer who kills a man—a man who has to die anyway—still moves within the realm of life and death familiar to us; both have indeed a necessary connection on which the dialectic is founded, even if it is not always conscious of it. The murderer leaves a corpse behind and does not pretend that his victim has never existed; if he wipes out any traces, they are those of his own identity, and not the memory and grief of the persons who loved his victim; he destroys a life, but he does not destroy the fact of existence itself. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 989

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Arendt’s distinction between killing and erasing existence entirely — the annihilation of the self as a being who existed is the crux of total domination, denser than most political-theory passages.
• XREF: Foreshadows and grounds Arendt’s later work on the banality of evil and the crime against humanity as distinct from murder; also resonates with necropolitics readings on the erasure of the dead. — connects to: Totalitarian mass murder expresses what the masses have already become rather than a death-wish. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 254