Permanent conquest backfires by awakening national resistance in the conquered.

Evidence

England’s rule by permanent conquest, since it “simply failed to destroy” Ireland (Chesterton), had not so much aroused her own “slumbering genius of imperialism” as it had awakened the spirit of national resistance in the Irish. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 350

Categorization

• XREF: The Irish case is Arendt’s proto-test case for how colonial domination manufactures the very national consciousness that resists it — directly relevant to later arguments about Orientalist rule manufacturing the ‘Other’ it claims to describe.