Totalitarian lawlessness operates against a backdrop of written constitutions it never repudiates

Evidence

The co-existence of an ostensible and a real government therefore was partly the outcome of the revolution itself and preceded Stalin’s totalitarian dictatorship. Yet while the Nazis simply retained the existing administration and deprived it of all power, Stalin had to revive his shadow government, which in the early thirties had lost all its functions and was half forgotten in Russia; he introduced the Soviet constitution as the symbol of the existence as well as the powerlessness of the Soviets. (None of its paragraphs ever had the slightest practical significance for life and jurisdiction in Russia.) The ostensible Russian government, utterly lacking the glamour of tradition so necessary for a façade, apparently needed the sacred halo of written law. The totalitarian defiance of law and legality (which “in spite of the greatest changes …still [remain] the expression of a permanently desired order”) found in the written Soviet constitution, as in the never-repudiated Weimar constitution, a permanent background for its own lawlessness, the permanent challenge to the nontotalitarian world and its standards whose helplessness and impotence could be demonstrated daily. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 906

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the idea that legal formal equality can coexist with — and even enable — substantive exclusion, central to critical race and Islamophobia literatures.
• SEED: Article angle: how regimes weaponize their own constitutions as a permanent demonstration of the nontotalitarian world’s impotence — ‘the constitution as taunt.’