Totalitarian terror targets objective enemies rather than actual opponents

Evidence

Only after the extermination of real enemies has been completed and the hunt for “objective enemies” begun does terror become the actual content of totalitarian regimes. Under the pretext of building socialism in one country, or using a given territory as a laboratory for a revolutionary experiment, or realizing the Volksgemeinschaft, the second claim of totalitarianism, the claim to total domination, is carried out. And although theoretically total domination is possible only under the conditions of world rule, the totalitarian regimes have proved that this part of the totalitarian Utopia can be realized almost to perfection, because it is temporarily independent of defeat or victory. Thus Hitler could rejoice even in the midst of military setbacks over the extermination of Jews and the establishment of death factories; no matter what the final outcome, without the war it would never have been possible “to burn the bridges” and to realize some of the goals of the totalitarian movement. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 946

Categorization

• DEFINE: Central distinction: terror against ‘objective enemies’ (categories) vs. real enemies — key scaffold for later understanding of how biopolitical categories function.
• XREF: Echoes Foucault’s biopolitics and the later necropolitics readings in the Islamophobia sequence — population categories marking who may be killed. — connects to: Treating enemies as vermin to be exterminated actually amplifies the terror it targets — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1454