Shared traumatic experiences alone cannot generate political community or programs.

Evidence

The attempts to build up a European elite with a program of intra-European understanding based on the common European experience of the concentration camps have foundered in much the same manner as the attempts following the first World War to draw political conclusions from the international experience of the front generation. In both cases it turned out that the experiences themselves can communicate no more than nihilistic banalities. Political consequences such as postwar pacifism, for example, derived from the general fear of war, not from the experiences in war. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 988

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how the Islamophobia field treats collective trauma — whether shared victimhood can ground solidarity or only transmit banalities.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: if experience can’t found community, what does — for Arendt, the fear-guided insight into what total domination serves?