Totalitarian mass murder expresses what the masses have already become rather than a death-wish.

Evidence

Accordingly the destructive tendencies of the masses that explode in both varieties of totalitarian state are not so much death-wishes as manifestations of what they have already become. They murder so that whatever to them seems living, shall resemble themselves. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 254

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s other writings on anti-Semitism as projection, and to the earlier passage here on the ‘psychotic character’ of totalitarian mass-movements. — connects to: Fascist body-worship masks a repressed death-wish that aligns with killing — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 222; Murder preserves existence while totalitarianism erases the fact of having lived. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 989; Administrative mass death requires a humanity already dead to itself. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 255

Broader Connections

• Murder preserves existence while totalitarianism erases the fact of having lived. #complicates (0.82) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 989
• Administrative mass death requires a humanity already dead to itself. #exemplifies (0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 255