Totalitarianism aims to transform human nature itself, using camps as laboratories

Evidence

What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself. The concentration camps are the laboratories where changes in human nature are tested, and their shamefulness therefore is not just the business of their inmates and those who run them according to strictly “scientific” standards; it is the concern of all men. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1032

Categorization

• XREF: The camps-as-laboratories motif carries into biopolitics/necropolitics readings on how state power operates on bare life. — connects to: Totalitarian uniformity could be enforced through soothing medicalized re-education — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 893
• SEED: Angle: ‘human nature as the target’ as a way to distinguish totalitarian from merely authoritarian or colonial projects — a diagnostic framework for contemporary politics.