Totalitarian regimes define their enemies ideologically before seizing power, not through police evidence

Evidence

This dubious role of provocation might have been one reason why the totalitarian rulers discarded it. Provocation, moreover, is clearly necessary only on the assumption that suspicion is not sufficient for arrest and punishment. None of the totalitarian rulers, of course, ever dreamed of conditions in which he would have to resort to provocation in order to trap somebody he thought to be an enemy. More important than these technical considerations is the fact that totalitarianism defined its enemies ideologically before it seized power, so that categories of the “suspects” were not established through police information. Thus the Jews in Nazi Germany or the descendants of the former ruling classes in Soviet Russia were not really suspected of any hostile action; they had been declared “objective” enemies of the regime in accordance with its ideology. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 949

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the key distinction between police-identified suspects and ideologically-declared enemies — a core concept to carry into Islamophobia readings.
• XREF: Connects to the later ‘objective enemy’ concept in paragraph 950, and to Arendt’s broader argument about the ‘carrier of tendencies’ vs. the individual. Also resonates with the Islamophobia field’s notion of groups defined as enemies by ideology rather than action. — connects to: the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”