Totalitarian complicity is made total by implicating victims in the crimes

Evidence

Through the creation of conditions under which conscience ceases to be adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible, the consciously organized complicity of all men in the crimes of totalitarian regimes is extended to the victims and thus made really total. The SS implicated concentration-camp inmates—criminals, politicals, Jews—in their crimes by making them responsible for a large part of the administration, thus confronting them with the hopeless dilemma whether to send their friends to their death, or to help murder other men who happened to be strangers, and forcing them, in any event, to behave like murderers. The point is not only that hatred is diverted from those who are guilty (the capos were more hated than the SS), but that the distinguishing line between persecutor and persecuted, between the murderer and his victim, is constantly blurred. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1015

Categorization

• XREF: Blurring between persecutor and persecuted connects to Arendt’s later banality-of-evil thesis and to how colonial administration co-opted the colonized as intermediaries. — connects to: Totalitarian police erase victims’ existence rather than merely kill them; The immensity of crimes makes murderers’ lies more credible than victims’ truth; Totalitarian leaders used confessed, irreversible crimes to bind followers. (+4 more)
• DEFINE: Constitutes the full definition of ‘really total’ complicity: victims forced to behave like murderers, and the persecutor/victim distinction dissolved.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1015

Broader Connections

• Victims’ rational conduct was engineered to serve their own destruction #expands (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 95
• The Holocaust succeeded partly through victims’ rational actions. #exemplifies (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 386
• Totalitarianism spreads complicity through the whole population to erase hierarchies #expands (0.80)
• Totalitarian leaders used confessed, irreversible crimes to bind followers. #expands (0.75)