“Totalitarian terror achieved its most terrible triumph when it succeeded in cutting the moral person off from the individualist escape. When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children to their death; how is he to decide? The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder. Who could solve the moral dilemma of the Greek mother, who was allowed by the Nazis to choose which of her three children should be killed? Through the creation of conditions under which conscience ceases to be adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible, the consciously organized complicity of all men in the crimes of totalitarian regimes is extended to the victims and thus made really total.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Tagged: Framework Foundations, Governing Frameworks, Totalitarian, Conditioning, Societal Construction
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The Origins of Totalitarianism

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