Totalitarian police need no enemy pretext because victims are anonymous and arbitrary

Evidence

The connection between secret police and secret societies is obvious. The establishment of the former always needed and used the argument of dangers arising from the existence of the latter. The totalitarian secret police is the first in history which neither needs nor uses these old-fashioned pretexts of all tyrants. The anonymity of its victims, who cannot be called enemies of the regime and whose identity is unknown to the persecutors until the arbitrary decision of the government eliminates them from the world of the living and exterminates their memory from the world of the dead, is beyond all secrecy, beyond the strictest silence, beyond the greatest mastery of double life that the discipline of conspiratory societies used to impose upon their members. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 971

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes how totalitarian secret police differ categorically from older tyranny’s secret police: no conspiratorial-enemy pretext required, victims are arbitrary and anonymous.
• XREF: Doctrinaire arbitrariness of the victim echoes Arendt’s banality-of-evil theme and prefigures the bureaucratic rationality enabling mass exclusion in later readings.