Totalitarian leaders spoke candidly about atrocities only among initiated followers

Evidence

In his speeches to the SS Himmler always stressed committed crimes, underlining their gravity. About the liquidation of the Jews, for instance, he would say: “I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly.” On the liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia: “…you should hear this but also forget it immediately…” … Goebbbels, op. cit., p. 266, notes in a similar vein: “On the Jewish question, especially, we have taken a position from which there is no escape… Experience teaches that a movement and a people who have burned their bridges fight with much greater determination than those who are still able to retreat.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2670

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Milgram’s ‘committed crimes’ and the psychology of irreversibility — ‘burned bridges’ as the mechanism binding followers to totalitarian movements, a mechanism that resonates with the Islamophobia field’s readings on how commitment to an exclusionary cause becomes self-reinforcing.
• DEFINE: Shows the ‘committed crime’ concept: the deliberate creation of irreversible complicity as a binding mechanism between leader and follower.