Totalitarian police multiply and layer competing spy agencies to prevent any stable authority

Evidence

In Russia, the ostensible power of the party bureaucracy as against the real power of the secret police corresponds to the original duplication of party and state as known in Nazi Germany, and the multiplication becomes evident only in the secret police itself, with its extremely complicated, widely ramified network of agents, in which one department is always assigned to supervising and spying on another. … Neither the average inhabitant of the country nor any one of the police departments knows, of course, what decision will be made; today it may be the special division of the NKVD, tomorrow the party’s network of agents; the day after, it may be the local committees or one of the regional bodies. Among all these departments there exists no legally rooted hierarchy of power or authority; the only certainty is that eventually one of them will be chosen to embody “the will of the leadership.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 914

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt’s ‘total domination’ mechanism: duplicating and multiplying power organs so no legal hierarchy or settled authority ever stabilizes — the ‘will of the leadership’ remains perpetually ambiguous.
• XREF: Connects to the scaffolding vocabulary of how totalitarian power dissolves stable institutions, feeding into later Islamophobia readings on state power operating through the arbitrary exclusion of populations.