The movement’s onion-like layered structure is retained unchanged in the totalitarian state

Evidence

Since totalitarianism in power remains faithful to the original tenets of the movement, the striking similarities between the organizational devices of the movement and the so-called totalitarian state are hardly surprising. The division between party members and fellow-travelers organized in front organizations, far from disappearing, leads to the “co-ordination” of the whole population, who are now organized as sympathizers. The tremendous increase in sympathizers is checked by limiting party strength to a privileged “class” of a few millions and creating a superparty of several hundred thousand, the elite formations. Multiplication of offices, duplication of functions, and adaptation of the party-sympathizer relationship to the new conditions mean simply that the peculiar onion-like structure of the movement, in which every layer was the front of the next more militant formation, is retained. The state machine is transformed into a front organization of sympathizing bureaucrats whose function in domestic affairs is to spread confidence among the masses of merely co-ordinated citizens and whose foreign affairs consist in fooling the outside, nontotalitarian world. The Leader, in his dual capacity as chief of the state and leader of the movement, again combines in his person the acme of militant ruthlessness and confidence-inspiring normality. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 928

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘onion-like structure’ — each layer fronts the next more militant formation — as the organizational core that survives the seizure of power.
• XREF: connects to: Nazism made the movement, not the state, the spiritual centre of totalitarianism — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1127