Totalitarian rule deliberately maintains a gap between official words and actual deeds

Evidence

The more conspicuous the power of totalitarianism the more secret become its true goals. To know the ultimate aims of Hitler’s rule in Germany, it was much wiser to rely on his propaganda speeches and Mein Kampf than on the oratory of the Chancellor of the Third Reich; just as it would have been wiser to distrust Stalin’s words about “socialism in one country,” invented for the passing purpose of seizing power after Lenin’s death, and to take more seriously his repeated hostility to democratic countries. … This they try to overcome through a permanent and consistent discrepancy between reassuring words and the reality of rule, by consciously developing a method of always doing the opposite of what they say. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 930

Categorization

• XREF: Coherent with the reader’s toolkit: how ideology is expressed and masked parallels how modern bureaucratic rationality enables mass exclusion while claiming legitimacy. — connects to: Totalitarian collective language is as vacuous as private stylistic caprice — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 237; Soviet totalitarianism functioned through interpretive ambiguity, not just coercion — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 101; Rulers can make odious things acceptable simply by renaming them — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 74 (+2 more)