The Origins of Totalitarianism

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.

Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the center of such events than balanced judgment and measured insight.

To yield to the mere process of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation, not only because it has assumed the spurious grandeur of 'historical necessity,' but also because everything outside it has begun to appear lifeless, bloodless, mean­ ingless, and unreal.

We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion.

The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.

Antisemitism, a secular nineteenth-century ideology—which in name, though not in argument, was unknown before the 1870's—and religious Jew-hatred, inspired by the mutually hostile antagonism of two conflicting creeds, are obviously not the same.

The decline of Western and Central European Jewry, however, constitutes merely the atmosphere in which the subsequent events took place.

It holds that Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; that both are articles of superstition, not of faith.

In this sense, it must be possible to face and understand the outrageous fact that so small... a phenomenon as the Jewish question and antisemitism could become the catalytic agent for first, the Nazi movement, then a world war, and finally the establishment of death factories.

Totalitarian politics—far from being simply antisemitic or racist or imperialist—use and abuse their own ideological and political elements until the basis of factual reality... has all but disappeared.