Totalitarian terror peaks when resistance has already vanished

Evidence

Terror by the Nazi regime reached its peak during the war, when the German nation was actually “united.” Its preparation goes back to 1936 when all organized interior resistance had vanished and Himmler proposed an expansion of the concentration camps. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2709

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Central Arendtian mechanism — terror operates independently of resistance — that the Islamophobia scaffold will need for understanding how exclusionary systems reproduce themselves.

Related

• Total terror emerges only after opposition is already defeated (similarity 0.82)
• Terror intensified as internal political opposition disappeared (similarity 0.82)
• Totalitarian terror targets objective enemies rather than actual opponents (similarity 0.81)
• Totalitarian radicalization accelerates with war and defeat rather than being checked by them (similarity 0.79)
• Totalitarian movements justify present terror by reckoning in millennia rather than generations (similarity 0.79)
• Totalitarian camps require permanent arbitrary persecution to survive (similarity 0.79)
• Totalitarian terror intensifies after all opposition has been eliminated, not before. (similarity 0.79)
• Totalitarian terrorism served as self-expression rather than calculated policy (similarity 0.78)
• Insulating members from the outside world makes them underestimate risks and aggression costs (similarity 0.78)
• Totalitarianism spreads complicity through the population to organize collective guilt (similarity 0.78)