Totalitarian regimes replace public opinion polling with mass provocation

Evidence

In Soviet Russia, provocation, far from being the secret weapon of the secret police, has been used as the widely propagandized public method of the regime to gauge the temper of public opinion. The reluctance of the population to avail itself of the periodically recurring invitations to criticize or react to “liberal” interludes in the terror regime shows that such gestures are understood as provocation on a mass scale. Provocation has indeed become the totalitarian version of public opinion polls. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2784

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Defines the mechanism by which totalitarian police states gauge public sentiment through engineered provocations rather than genuine consultation.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s scaffold on representation and the construction of the Other — the police fabricate the ‘public opinion’ they claim to measure.