Mutual denunciation strengthens a totalitarian ruler while wrecking social well-being.

Evidence

There was never any doubt that the “flood of mutual denunciations” during the Great Purge was as disastrous for the economic and social well-being of the country as it was effective in strengthening the totalitarian ruler, but we know only now how deliberately Stalin set this “ominous chain of denunciations in motion,” when he proclaimed officially on July 29, 1936: “The inalienable quality of every Bolshevik under present conditions should be the ability to recognize an enemy of the Party no matter how well he may be masked.” (Italics added.) For just as Hitler’s “Final Solution” actually meant to make the command “Thou shalt kill” binding for the elite of the Nazi party, Stalin’s pronouncement prescribed: “Thou shalt bear false testimony,” as a guiding rule for the conduct of all members of the Bolshevik party. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 47

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism of denunciation-as-ruling-technique parallels the later Islamophobia framework’s account of how surveillance and informant cultures bind populations into complicity.
• QUESTION: Arendt pairs the Nazi command to kill with the Bolshevik command to bear false witness — is the analytic point that both are commands that override ordinary moral law, and could this pairing structure a comparative argument?