Totalitarian themes were pre-prepared by imperialism and the mob’s entry into politics.

Evidence

Totalitarian propaganda perfects the techniques of mass propaganda, but it neither invents them nor originates their themes. These were prepared for them by fifty years of the rise of imperialism and disintegration of the nation-state, when the mob entered the scene of European politics. Like the earlier mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care or dare to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered up with corruption. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 820

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the later imperial chapters of Origins of Totalitarianism, and to Gramscian hegemony on how silenced content becomes politically potent.