“For Arendt, the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin were quite different to the tyrannies and dictatorships of the past, which merely sought to control populations. The most striking aspect of totalitarianism is that “it is let loose when all organized opposition has died down and the totalitarian ruler knows that he no longer need be afraid.” Stalin began his great purges, for instance, only in 1934 when all potential opposition had been executed or sent to the Gulag.
The totalitarian leader is not content simply to control the population; he seeks to control hearts and minds, so that the leader, the state, and the people are as one. This not only requires great organization on a mass scale, but brings with it
new levels of evil, since the individual means nothing and every kind of state crime can be justified.”*
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Hannah Arendt as quoted / summarized in Tom Butler-Bowdon's
50 Politics Classics (50 Classics) (Kindle Locations 981-987). Quercus. Kindle Edition. (Bold emphasis added.)
Hannah Arendt ... German: ... 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German-born American political theorist. Her many books and articles have had a lasting influence on political theory and philosophy. Arendt is widely considered one of the most important political thinkers of the 20th century. / Arendt was born in Linden, a district of Hanover, in 1906, to a Jewish family. At the age of three, her family moved to Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt
