The terrorism charge both outlaws threats and erases internal social divisions.

Evidence

Khrushchev’s explanation of the crimes he conceded—Stalin’s insane suspiciousness—concealed the most characteristic aspect of totalitarian terror, that it is let loose when all organized opposition has died down and the totalitarian ruler knows that he no longer need to be afraid. This is particularly true for the Russian development. Stalin started his gigantic purges not in 1928 when he conceded, “We have internal enemies,” and actually had still reason to be afraid—he knew that Bukharin compared him to Genghis Khan and was convinced that Stalin’s policy “was leading the country to famine, ruin, and a police regime,” as indeed it did—but in 1934, when all former opponents had “confessed their errors,” and Stalin himself, at the Seventeenth Party Congress, also called by him the “Congress of the Victors,” had declared: “At this Congress …there is nothing more to prove and, it seems, no one to fight.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 43 (#complicates, via linked claim)

What they had looked forward to was the establishment of new institutions and the creation of a new code of law which, no matter how revolutionary in content, would lead to a stabilization of conditions and thus check the momentum of the totalitarian movements at least in the countries where they had seized power. What happened instead was that terror increased both in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany in inverse ratio to the existence of internal political opposition, so that it looked as though political opposition had not been the pretext of terror (as liberal accusers of the regime were wont to assert) but the last impediment to its full fury. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 901 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Terror intensified as internal political opposition disappeared — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 901; Totalitarian terror intensifies after all opposition has been eliminated, not before. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 43; The War on Terror deliberately deepens civilizational divides rather than repairing them — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 168

Broader Connections

• Totalitarian terror intensifies after all opposition has been eliminated, not before. #complicates (0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 43
• Terror intensified as internal political opposition disappeared #complicates (0.70) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 901