Totalitarian terror engineers dilemmas where conscience can only choose between murders

Evidence

Totalitarian terror achieved its most terrible triumph when it succeeded in cutting the moral person off from the individualist escape and in making the decisions of conscience absolutely questionable and equivocal. When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children, for whom he is in every sense responsible, to their death; when even suicide would mean the immediate murder of his own family—how is he to decide? The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1014

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is Arendt’s core mechanism for how terror destroys the moral person — making the moral dilemma itself the instrument, not coercion of belief.