Totalitarianism spreads complicity through the population to organize collective guilt

Evidence

The gangster complicity, on the other hand, which played some role in the early stages of the Nazi dictatorship, loses all cohesive force, for totalitarianism uses its power precisely to spread this complicity through the population until it has organized the guilt of the whole people under its domination. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 920

Categorization

• DEFINE: Key mechanism for later Islamophobia readings: totalitarian rule works by distributing complicity/guilt across the whole population rather than concentrating power in a clique.
• XREF: connects to: Instrumental rationality carried to its extreme leads to totalitarian barbarism. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 797