Totalitarian detention erases the victim’s memory entirely, unlike ordinary murder

Evidence

In totalitarian countries all places of detention ruled by the police are made to be veritable holes of oblivion into which people stumble by accident and without leaving behind them such ordinary traces, of former existence as a body and a grave. Compared with this newest invention for doing away with people, the old-fashioned method of murder, political or criminal, is inefficient indeed. The murderer leaves behind him a corpse, and although he tries to efface the traces of his own identity, he has no power to erase the identity of his victim from the memory of the surviving world. The operation of the secret police, on the contrary, miraculously sees to it that the victim never existed at all. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 970

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the totalitarian innovation: ‘holes of oblivion’ where the victim’s identity, unlike a murderer’s victim, is effaced entirely.
• XREF: Connects to later Islamophobia-readings on necropolitics — erasure of the subject from both the living and the dead as the totalizing gesture.