Totalitarian ideology requires perpetually new categories of victims to survive

Evidence

Totalitarian politics which proceeded to follow the recipes of ideologies has unmasked the true nature of these movements insofar as it clearly showed that there could be no end to this process. If it is the law of nature to eliminate everything that is harmful and unfit to live, it would mean the end of nature itself if new categories of the harmful and unfit-to-live could not be found; if it is the law of history that in a class struggle certain classes “wither away,” it would mean the end of human history itself if rudimentary new classes did not form, so that they in turn could “wither away” under the hands of totalitarian rulers. In other words, the law of killing by which totalitarian movements seize and exercise power would remain a law of the movement even if they ever succeeded in making all of humanity subject to their rule. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1046

Categorization

• DEFINE: The passage defines why totalitarian killing cannot end even with full conquest — the movement itself depends on ongoing elimination.
• XREF: connects to: Administrative mass death requires a humanity already dead to itself. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 255; the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”