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pensable less for any uncommon administrative or intellectual virtues than
for his ability to resolve conflicts among his comrades or the innumerable
agencies; the expansion of a secret police that becomes the supreme
power; the police state locking arms with an obsessional ideological pro–
paganda addressed to the masses; and the development of an esoteric
doctrine reserved for the few. No one of these phenomena in particular
reveals the originality of totalitarianism.
All of them taken together
reveal its
essence, named by terms such as "permanent revolution" or "terror and
ideology."
Many times, in phases of revolutionary crisis, the demands of ideolog–
ical orthodoxy have manifested themselves. The novelty does not lie in
the fact that the Communist Party, once it seized power, sought to put
aside individuals, groups, and agencies.
It
lies in the Communist Party's
holding more sway in 1938 than in 1917, more in 1952 than in 1938.
The ideological passion does not abate; rather, it is exacerbated. Stalin's
Marxism is more all-encompassing than Lenin's. No one in the 1920s
would have conceived of anything like the condemnation of genetics.
In the same way, totalitarian terror intensifies over time. It is fully un–
leashed when the regime has no more adversaries. The great purge that
imprisoned between five and seven million citizens, among them key fig–
ures in technical and military spheres, took place from 1937 to 1938, at a
time when peasant resistance had been broken and when the initial diffi–
culties of the industrial buildup had been overcome.
Terror
is the essence
of the totalitarian regime, terror manifest in hitherto unknown ways.
From the moment punishment is meted out to a potential criminal who
might have threatened the revolution or to one who, by belonging to a
group condemned by history, might be harmful tomorrow, from the
moment whole categories of people are singled out, everyone feels aban–
doned, alone. While the party's collective dynamism moves ahead, indi–
viduals become frantic or resigned, prisoners of an implacable fatality, the
playthings of an inhuman force .
Once abandoned, individuals lose the organic ties that bind them to
their families , their neighbors, their companions at work or in poverty.
The wife or children seek the father's death; no one any longer trusts his
neighbor; the secret police are present in every factory, every office, even
within every home. This "massification" reaches its extreme form in the
camps, where the individual is anonymous, lost in the midst of a crowd
where productive solitude is forbidden. The camp management regulates
the life of these phantoms who pass from an existence of shades on to
death, without anyone sensing their passage as human or meaningful.
The Third Reich, according to Mme. Arendt, did not become totali-
