Totalitarian systems erase people through graded categories rather than uniform cruelty

Evidence

The Nazis, with the precision peculiar to them, used to register their operations in the concentration camps under the heading “under cover of the night (Nacht und Nebel).” The radicalism of measures to treat people as if they had never existed and to make them disappear in the literal sense of the word is frequently not apparent at first glance, because both the German and the Russian system are not uniform but consist of a series of categories in which people are treated very differently. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 990

Categorization

• QUESTION: The ‘Nacht und Nebel’ decree is a concrete legal-historical artifact worth tracing — when was it issued and what did it authorize exactly?
• XREF: Connects to necropolitics and biopolitics readings — the graded administrative categories map onto Mbembe’s later analysis of colonial death-worlds. — connects to: Totalitarian uniformity could be enforced through soothing medicalized re-education — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 893