Totalitarian movements stay in power by perpetual motion and near-total historical discontinuity

Evidence

This impermanence no doubt has something to do with the proverbial fickleness of the masses and the fame that rests on them; more likely, it can be traced to the perpetual-motion mania of totalitarian movements which can remain in power only so long as they keep moving and set everything around them in motion. Therefore, in a certain sense this very impermanence is a rather flattering testimonial to the dead leaders insofar as they succeeded in contaminating their subjects with the specifically totalitarian virus; for if there is such a thing as a totalitarian personality or mentality, this extraordinary adaptability and absence of continuity are no doubt its outstanding characteristics. Hence it might be a mistake to assume that the inconstancy and forgetfulness of the masses signify that they are cured of the totalitarian delusion, which is occasionally identified with the Hitler or Stalin cult; the opposite might well be true. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 741

Categorization

• QUESTION: Arendt’s claim that post-war forgetting of Hitler indicates lingering totalitarian contamination rather than cure is a striking and testable claim worth probing against later scholarship on memory and post-fascist societies.
• XREF: connects to: The post-war stability system bred the very movements that challenged it — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 147