Total terror emerges only after opposition is already defeated
Evidence
The road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogies and precedents. The extraordinarily bloody terror during the initial stage of totalitarian rule serves indeed the exclusive purpose of defeating the opponent and rendering all further opposition impossible; but total terror is launched only after this initial stage has been overcome and the regime no longer has anything to fear from the opposition. In this context it has been frequently remarked that in such a case the means have become the end, but this is after all only an admission, in paradoxical disguise, that the category “the end justifies the means” no longer applies, that terror has lost its “purpose,” that it is no longer the means to frighten people. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 985
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEFINE: Cryptic but crucial: total terror is defined by having lost all instrumental purpose — terror as end-in-itself.
Related
- Totalitarian terror intensifies after all opposition has been eliminated, not before. (similarity 0.86)
- Terror intensified as internal political opposition disappeared (similarity 0.85)
- Totalitarian terror targets objective enemies rather than actual opponents (similarity 0.83)
- Terror is the essence of totalitarian government, not a means to an end (similarity 0.83)
- Total terror replaces positive law as the medium translating ideology into reality (similarity 0.82)
- Totalitarian terror peaks when resistance has already vanished (similarity 0.82)
- Modern totalitarian terror rules the obedient rather than punishing rebels. (similarity 0.81)
- Totalitarian ideology requires perpetually new categories of victims to survive (similarity 0.80)
- Totalitarian domination exceeds utilitarian rule into the realm where everything is possible (similarity 0.80)
- Totalitarian ideology coerces through the fear of abandoning a first premise (similarity 0.80)
- Totalitarian belief vanishes with the movement that sustained it. (similarity 0.80)
- Totalitarian movements require permanent motion and cannot survive stabilization. (similarity 0.80)
- Total terror accelerates the death sentences nature or history have already pronounced (similarity 0.80)
- Calling terrorism transcendent evil blocks the worldly analysis needed to counter it (similarity 0.80)
- Totalitarian terrorism served as self-expression rather than calculated policy (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Totalitarian terror peaks when resistance has already vanished
#corroborates(0.95) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2709 - Totalitarian prophecy becomes foolproof only once the movement holds power
#complicates(0.70) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 818