Totalitarian spoliation of one’s own country is more efficient than foreign occupation

Evidence

The totalitarian dictator is like a foreign conqueror who comes from nowhere, and his looting is likely to benefit nobody. Distribution of the spoils is calculated not to strengthen the economy of the home country but only as a temporary tactical maneuver. For economic purposes, the totalitarian regimes are as much at home in their countries as the proverbial swarms of locusts. The fact that the totalitarian dictator rules his own country like a foreign conqueror makes matters worse because it adds to ruthlessness an efficiency which is conspicuously lacking in tyrannies in alien surroundings. Stalin’s war against the Ukraine in the early thirties was twice as effective as the terribly bloody German invasion and occupation. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 935

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘movement over nation’ logic pairs with later arguments about the nation-state’s replacement by the movement as the unit of politics.