Totalitarian camps require permanent arbitrary persecution to survive

Evidence

Any, even the most tyrannical, restriction of this arbitrary persecution to certain opinions of a religious or political nature, to certain modes of intellectual or erotic social behavior, to certain freshly invented “crimes,” would render the camps superfluous, because in the long run no attitude and no opinion can withstand the threat of so much horror; and above all it would make for a new system of justice, which, given any stability at all, could not fail to produce a new juridical person in man, that would elude the totalitarian domination. The so-called “Volksnutzen” of the Nazis, constantly fluctuating (because what is useful today can be injurious tomorrow) and the eternally shifting party line of the Soviet Union which, being retroactive, almost daily makes new groups of people available for the concentration camps, are the only guaranty for the continued existence of the concentration camps, and hence for the continued total disfranchisement of man. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1011

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the concept that camps function precisely through the arbitrariness and instability of persecution criteria, not through any fixed enemy category.
• XREF: Connects to the toolkit idea of the fluid, ever-shifting enemy definition that later Islamophobia readings will rely on.