Totalitarian violence reduced prisoners to objects even in their own self-perception

Evidence

It seemed as if I had become convinced that these horrible and degrading experiences somehow did not happen to ‘me as subject but to ‘me’ as an object. This experience was corroborated by the statements of other prisoners…it was as if I watched things happening in which I only vaguely participated… This cannot be true, such things just do not happen.’ — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2816

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The subject/object split in self-experience under totalitarian violence is a dense, paradigm-shifting mechanism of how the camps destroyed personhood from within.
• XREF: Prefigures Arendt’s later claims about the camps as laboratories destroying the distinction between subject and object, and connects to biopolitics/necropolitics vocabulary in the Islamophobia module.