Totalitarian rule replaces conviction with purely objective selection criteria

Evidence

The consistent elimination of conviction as a motive for action has become a matter of record since the great purges in Soviet Russia and the satellite countries. The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any. The introduction of purely objective criteria into the selective system of the SS troops was Himmler’s great organizational invention; he selected the candidates from photographs according to purely racial criteria. Nature itself decided, not only who was to be eliminated, but also who was to be trained as an executioner. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1056

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• DEFINE: Concrete mechanism: SS selection by racial criteria from photographs — nature chooses executioner and victim alike.
• XREF: Racialized selection by objective criteria prefigures the bureaucratic race-thinking and statelessness toolkit later Islamophobia readings build on.

Related

• Total terror makes fear useless as a guide to behavior (similarity 0.86)
• Totalitarian rule shifts from persecuting an objective enemy to randomly selected undesirables (similarity 0.80)