Nazism and Bolshevism converged on identical structure from opposite origins.

Evidence

In this, as in so many other respects, Nazism and Bolshevism arrived at the same organizational result from very different historical beginnings. The Nazis started with the fiction of a conspiracy and modeled themselves, more or less consciously, after the example of the secret society of the Elders of Zion, whereas the Bolsheviks came from a revolutionary party, whose aim was one-party dictatorship, passed through a stage in which the party was “entirely apart and above everything” to the moment when the Politburo of the party was “entirely apart from and above everything”; finally Stalin imposed upon this party structure the rigid totalitarian rules of its conspiratory sector and only then discovered the need for a central fiction to maintain the iron discipline of a secret society under the conditions of a mass organization. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 873

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates how ‘conspiracy fiction’ functions as an organizational centerpiece discovered only after totalitarian structure congeals.
• XREF: connects to: Vienna simultaneously hosted Hitler’s antisemitism model and Austro-Marxist socialism — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 203; Nazi and American researchers described nearly the same personality types with opposite valuations. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 429