Total terror replaces positive law as the medium translating ideology into reality

Evidence

By lawful government we understand a body politic in which positive laws are needed to translate and realize the immutable ius naturale or the eternal commandments of God into standards of right and wrong. Only in these standards, in the body of positive laws of each country, do the ius naturale or the Commandments of God achieve their political reality. In the body politic of totalitarian government, this place of positive laws is taken by total terror, which is designed to translate into reality the law of movement of history or nature. Just as positive laws, though they define transgressions, are independent of them—the absence of crimes in any society does not render laws superfluous but, on the contrary, signifies their most perfect rule—so terror in totalitarian government has ceased to be a mere means for the suppression of opposition, though it is also used for such purposes. Terror becomes total when it becomes independent of all opposition; it rules supreme when nobody any longer stands in its way. If lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian domination. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1047

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the structural role of terror in totalitarian government — it occupies the place positive law holds in lawful government.
• XREF: Connects to the Islamophobia field’s use of biopolitics and necropolitics: terror as the administration of who may live and who must die.