The refugees’ actual suffering served as propaganda proving no rights existed

Evidence

The official SS newspaper, the Schwarze Korps, stated explicitly in 1938 that if the world was not yet convinced that the Jews were the scum of the earth, it soon would be when unidentifiable beggars, without nationality, without money, and without passports crossed their frontiers. And it is true that this kind of factual propaganda worked better than Goebbels’ rhetoric, not only because it established the Jews as scum of the earth, but also because the incredible plight of an ever-growing group of innocent people was like a practical demonstration of the totalitarian movements’ cynical claims that no such thing as inalienable human rights existed and that the affirmations of the democracies to the contrary were mere prejudice, hypocrisy, and cowardice in the face of the cruel majesty of a new world. The very phrase “human rights” became for all concerned—victims, persecutors, and onlookers alike—the evidence of hopeless idealism or fumbling feeble-minded hypocrisy. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 671

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The murderous inversion at the core: the victims’ real suffering becomes the strongest evidence for the persecutor’s worldview that rights are a fiction — the suffering itself discredits the democracies.
• XREF: Connects to how contemporary anti-immigrant rhetoric lets the migrants’ condition ‘prove’ the claims of those who produced it — same self-fulfilling logic.