Totalitarian terror weaponizes ideology by enforcing its extreme logical consequences

Evidence

The device both totalitarian rulers used to transform their respective ideologies into weapons with which each of their subjects could force himself into step with the terror movement was deceptively simple and inconspicuous: they took them dead seriously, took pride the one in his supreme gift for “ice cold reasoning” (Hitler) and the other in the “mercilessness of his dialectics,” and proceeded to drive ideological implications into extremes of logical consistency which, to the onlooker, looked preposterously “primitive” and absurd: a “dying class” consisted of people condemned to death; races that are “unfit to live” were to be exterminated. Whoever agreed that there are such things as “dying classes” and did not draw the consequence of killing their members, or that the right to live had something to do with race and did not draw the consequence of killing “unfit races,” was plainly either stupid or a coward. This stringent logicality as a guide to action permeates the whole structure of totalitarian movements and governments. It is exclusively the work of Hitler and Stalin who, although they did not add a single new thought to the ideas and propaganda slogans of their movements, for this reason alone must be considered ideologists of the greatest importance. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1069

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the necropolitics/biopolitics strand of the Islamophobia toolkit: ideology’s logical consequences authorize mass killing. — connects to: Instrumental rationality carried to its extreme leads to totalitarian barbarism. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 797; Counterterrorism policy derives from Cold War totalitarianism theory linking ideology to violence — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 566