World War I’s mass experience dissolved national identity into generational comradeship that Nazism exploited

Evidence

War had been experienced as that “mightiest of all mass actions” which obliterated individual differences so that even suffering, which traditionally had marked off individuals through unique unexchangeable destinies, could now be interpreted as “an instrument of historical progress.” Nor did national distinctions limit the masses into which the postwar elite wished to be immersed. The first World War, somewhat paradoxically, had almost extinguished genuine national feelings in Europe where, between the wars, it was far more important to have belonged to the generation of the trenches, no matter on which side, than to be a German or a Frenchman. The Nazis based their whole propaganda on this indistinct comradeship, this “community of fate,” and won over a great number of veteran organizations in all European countries, thereby proving how meaningless national slogans had become even in the ranks of the so-called Right, which used them for their connotation of violence rather than for their specific national content. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 783

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the imagined-community framework the reader is building for the Islamophobia toolkit — national slogans emptied of national content and repurposed for violence resonates with how Islamophobic rhetoric deploys ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’ without referential content. — connects to: Economic collapse destroyed social fabric and private life before Nazism’s rise — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 253
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘community of fate’ concept that fascism weaponizes — a key mechanism for the reader’s scaffolding vocabulary.