Soviet police formations were armored against reality by trained contempt for all facts

Evidence

The tremendous shock of disillusion which the Red Army suffered on its conquering trip to Europe could be cured only by concentration camps and forced exile for a large part of the occupation troops; but the police formations which accompanied the Army were prepared for the shock, not by different and more correct information—there is no secret training school in Soviet Russia which gives out authentic facts about life abroad—but simply by a general training in supreme contempt for all facts and all reality. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 886

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how contemporary bureaucratic rationality and elite formations sustain exclusion — relevant to the Islamophobia readings on mechanisms of institutional ideology.