Totalitarian solutions survive regime falls as standing temptations

Evidence

Political, social, and economic events everywhere are in a silent conspiracy with totalitarian instruments devised for making men superfluous. The implied temptation is well understood by the utilitarian common sense of the masses, who in most countries are too desperate to retain much fear of death. The Nazis and the Bolsheviks can be sure that their factories of annihilation which demonstrate the swiftest solution to the problem of overpopulation, of economically superfluous and socially rootless human masses, arc as much of an attraction as a warning. Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1034

Categorization

• XREF: Arendt’s warning that utilitarian common sense remains ‘in silent conspiracy’ with totalitarian instruments connects to biopolitics and to the technocratic-rationality strand of the module. — connects to: Regime legacies persist independently of the conditions that created them; Regime collapse preserves inherited advantages for some elites — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 1514
• DEFINE: Her claim that utilitarian frameworks render masses ‘superfluous’ anticipates modern biopolitical theory’s account of populations as problems to be managed.