Only detached imagination, not direct witness, permits sustained thinking about totalitarian horror

Evidence

Only the fearful imagination of those who have been aroused by such reports but have not actually been smitten in their own flesh, of those who are consequently free from the bestial, desperate terror which, when confronted by real, present horror, inexorably paralyzes everything that is not mere reaction, can afford to keep thinking about horrors. Such thoughts are useful only for the perception of political contexts and the mobilization of political passions. … The reduction of a man to a bundle of reactions separates him as radically as mental disease from everything within him that is personality or character. When, like Lazarus, he rises from the dead, he finds his personality or character unchanged, just as he had left it. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 987

Categorization

• XREF: A methodological claim about how one writerly stance (the un-smitten imagination) can think horrors usefully while eyewitnesses cannot — relevant to the reader’s own critical-writing practice. — connects to: Totalitarianism’s novelty was so extreme it paralyzed even great minds — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1134