Even the advice of common self-interest shares this fate in extreme cases, as was proved over and over again by the way Hitler conducted his war. Everything which stands in the way of this kind of reasoning-reality, experience, and the daily network of human relationships and interdependence-is overruled. The most persuasive argument, of which Hitler and Stalin were equally fond, is to insist that whoever says A must necessarily also say Band C and finally end with the last letter of the alphabet. This stringent logicality as an inspiration of action permeates the whole structure of totalitarian movements and totalitarian governments. If you take literally the dictum that the Jews, far from merely being the enemies of other people, are actually vermin, created as vermin by nature and therefore predestined to suffer the same fate as lice and bedbugs, then you have established a perfect argument for their extermination. If you believe in earnest that the bourgeoisie is not simply antagonistic to the interests of the worker, but is dying, then evidently you are permitted to kill all bourgeois. The operation Hitler and Stalin performed on their respective ideologies was simply to take them dead seriously, and that meant driving their pretentious implications to that extreme of logical consequence where they would look, to the normal eye, preposterously absurd. 328-360 sinfulness, that totalitarianism requires total domination and global rule and is prepared to commit crimes which are unprecedented in the long and sinful history of mankind. Jerome Kohn, New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1994, pp. Hannah Arendt, « On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding », Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, Ed.

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