Secret police provocation manufactured the resistance they claimed to suppress

Evidence

Since the totalitarian secret police begins its career after the pacification of the country, it always appears entirely superfluous to all outside observers—or, on the contrary, misleads them into thinking that there is some secret resistance. The superfluousness of secret services is nothing new; they have always been haunted by the need to prove their usefulness and keep their jobs after their original task had been completed. The methods used for this purpose have made the study of the history of revolutions a rather difficult enterprise. It appears, for example, that there was not a single anti-government action under the reign of Louis Napoleon which had not been inspired by the police itself. Similarly, the role of secret agents in all revolutionary parties in Czarist Russia strongly suggests that without their “inspiring” provocative actions the course of the Russian revolutionary movement would have been far less successful. Provocation, in other words, helped as much to maintain the continuity of tradition as it did to disrupt time and again the organization of the revolution. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 948

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: to what extent did provocation actually drive revolutionary movements, and does this pattern recur in modern totalitarian states’ manufactured ‘enemy’ threats?
• XREF: connects to: Countering conspiracy by infiltration threatens civil liberties as Hoover’s did — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 343