Police-led suppression uniquely aims at depopulation, while military suppression does not

Evidence

Moreover, the significance of this change in the balance of power had been manifest before, at the occasion of the suppression by force of the Hungarian Revolution. The bloody crushing of the revolution, terrible and effective as it was, had been accomplished by regular army units and not by police troops, and the consequence was that it did by no means represent a typically Stalinist solution. Although the military operation was followed by the execution of the leaders and the imprisonment of thousands, there was no wholesale deportation of the people; in fact, no attempt at depopulating the country was made. And since this was a military operation and not a police action, the Soviets could afford sending enough aid to the defeated country to prevent mass starvation and to stave off a complete collapse of the economy in the year following the revolution. Nothing, surely, would have been farther from Stalin’s mind under similar circumstances. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 50

Categorization

• XREF: Previews necropolitics and Arendt’s claim later in the book that totalitarian police terror targets populations, not just political enemies.
• DEEPTHINKING: The contrast between military conquest (which must keep a population economically viable) and police terror (which depopulates) is a dense, non-obvious distinction about the logic of totalitarian violence.