Totalitarianism punishes conceivable future crimes rather than committed offenses

Evidence

From a legal point of view, even more interesting than the change from the suspect to the objective enemy is the totalitarian replacement of the suspected offense by the possible crime. The possible crime is no more subjective than the objective enemy. While the suspect is arrested because he is thought to be capable of committing a crime that more or less fits his personality (or his suspected personality), the totalitarian version of the possible crime is based on the logical anticipation of objective developments. The Moscow Trials of the old Bolshevik guard and the chiefs of the Red Army were classic examples of punishment for possible crimes. Behind the fantastic, fabricated charges one can easily detect the following logical calculation: developments in the Soviet Union might lead to a crisis, a crisis might lead to the overthrow of Stalin’s dictatorship, this might weaken the country’s military force and possibly bring about a situation in which the new government would have to sign a truce or even conclude an alliance with Hitler. Whereupon Stalin proceeded to declare that a plot for the overthrow of the government and a conspiracy with Hitler existed. Against these “objective,” though entirely improbable, possibilities stood only “subjective” factors, such as the trustworthiness of the accused, their fatigue, their inability to understand what was going on, their firm conviction that without Stalin everything would be lost, their sincere hatred of Fascism—that is, a number of factual details which naturally lacked the consistency of the fictitious, logical, possible crime. Totalitarianism’s central assumption that everything is possible thus leads through consistent elimination of all factual restraints to the absurd and terrible consequence that every crime the rulers can conceive of must be punished, regardless of whether or not it has been committed. The possible crime, like the objective enemy, is of course beyond the competence of the police, who can neither discover, invent, nor provoke it. Here again the secret services depend entirely upon the political authorities. Their independence as a state within the state is gone. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 956

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘possible crime’ as the totalitarian replacement for the suspected offense — a core concept for how totalitarian legality inverts the presumption of innocence.
• XREF: The ‘possible crime’ mechanism connects directly to biopolitics/necropolitics readings on how states preemptively classify populations as killable, and to how Islamophobia discourse constructs threats from hypothetical future acts. — connects to: Preemptive prosecution jails people for crimes never committed — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 584
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — subjective factual innocence losing against fabricated ‘objective’ logical possibility — is a paradigm-shifting account of how totalitarian legality converts hypotheticals into punishable crimes.