The army organized mob violence through the antisemitic press

Evidence

The organization of the mob by the General Staff was remarkable. The trail leads straight from the army to the Libre Parole which, directly or indirectly, through its articles or the personal intervention of its editors, mobilized students, monarchists, adventurers, and plain gangsters and pushed them into the streets. If Zola uttered a word, at once his windows were stoned. If Scheurer-Kestner wrote to the colonial minister, he was at once beaten up on the streets while the papers made scurrilous attacks on his private life. And all accounts agree that if Zola, when once charged, had been acquitted he would never have left the courtroom alive. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 315

Categorization

• XREF: Instantiates the state-organizing-the-mob mechanism that Arendt later centralizes in totalitarianism; also connects to the scaffolding on how institutions manufacture ‘popular’ violence.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion whereby official state institutions (the General Staff) secretly orchestrate what appears to be spontaneous popular fury is a dense, paradigm-shifting observation about the manufacture of mass politics.