Totalitarian rule shifts from persecuting an objective enemy to randomly selected undesirables
Evidence
Only in the initial stages, when a struggle for power is still going on, are its victims those who can be suspected of opposition. It then embarks upon its totalitarian career with the persecution of the objective enemy, which may be the Jews or the Poles (as in the case of the Nazis) or so-called “counter-revolutionaries”—an accusation which “in Soviet Russia …is established …before any question as to [the] behavior [of the accused] has arisen at all”—who may be people who at any time owned a shop or a house or “had parents or grandparents who owned such things,” or who happened to belong to one of the Red Army occupational forces, or were Russians of Polish origin. Only in its last and fully totalitarian stage are the concepts of the objective enemy and the logically possible crime abandoned, the victims chosen completely at random and, even without being accused, declared unfit to live. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 964
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEFINE: Defines the ‘objective enemy’ concept and its evolution into arbitrary ‘undesirables’ — central to the biopolitics/necropolitics toolkit.
Related
- Totalitarian terror targets objective enemies rather than actual opponents (similarity 0.81)
- Totalitarian regimes define their enemies ideologically before seizing power, not through police evidence (similarity 0.81)
- Totalitarian rule replaces conviction with purely objective selection criteria (similarity 0.80)
- Total terror makes fear useless as a guide to behavior (similarity 0.80)