Totalitarianism feeds on the misconception that it is ordinary despotism

Evidence

The dominant role of the secret police in the domestic politics of totalitarian countries has naturally contributed much to the common misconception of totalitarianism. All despotisms rely heavily on secret services and feel more threatened by their own than by any foreign people. However, this analogy between totalitarianism and despotism holds only for the first stages of totalitarian rule, when there is still a political opposition. In this as in other respects totalitarianism takes advantage of, and gives conscious support to, nontotalitarian misconceptions, no matter how uncomplimentary they may be. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 944

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt distinguishes totalitarian secret police from despotism’s secret services — a core conceptual distinction in the scaffold.
• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s broader thesis that totalitarianism is genuinely new, not an extreme form of tyranny; ties to how the Islamophobia field resists folding its object into generic ‘authoritarianism’.