As a political philosopher and German Jew during the rise of Nazism, Hannah Arendt had a lot to say about totalitarianism and the elements that give rise to such movements.

The “masses” refers to those people who, either because of their large numbers or indifference (or both), cannot be meaningfully integrated into any of society’s forms of organization, whether businesses, government, or unions. It is probable that these groups exist within every country, and that they comprise the majority of each country’s population. These are the people who are neutral and politically apathetic; they’re the kind of people who rarely show up at the polls.

Totalitarian movements can arise wherever the masses desire political organization. They’re unable to articulate concrete, incremental, realistic goals to describe their point of interest. It is usually from the indifferent segment of a nation’s population that a movement drums up support, from those people deemed too stupid or removed to be worth the politicians’ time.

In the 1930s, both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks were able to tap into those indifferent, previously unreachable groups. This led to new opportunities and the creation of new approaches to propagandizing that did not need to cater to the conventions and mores of established political parties. These newly recruited masses were not yet “tainted” by the party system. Thus, there was no need to refute party arguments. The movement’s arguments would appeal to deep, natural sources that transcended the grasp of reason and were simply to be taken for granted.

The rise of totalitarian movements shattered two illusions held by democratic nations—particularly European democracies. One illusion was that the majority of a democracy’s population actively participates in civic life and that most individuals are involved in or at least sympathetic with one party or another. They discovered that this was far from the case. In fact, the majority of a population can be indifferent and uninvolved, the rules of a country determined and recognized by only a minority.

The second illusion that totalitarian movements decimated was that this neutral, indifferent, unintegrated population was inconsequential. The free world learned that democracy owed its continuance as much to the consent—or, minimally, tolerance—of the indifferent masses as to the engaged individuals visibly shaping democracy through party politics.

Scholars have commented that totalitarian leaders used the organ of democratic freedoms in order to abolish them. But neither the slick maneuvering of leaders nor the imbecility of the masses fully accounts for the undoing of democratic values. The equality of the individual under law might be a basis for freedom and democracy, but that freedom has meaning and functions within a stratified society—a structure that both Germany and Russia had been grinding down under National Socialist and Communist Party control, respectively.

Totalitarian movements thus have the dubious distinction of being the first truly anti-bourgeois movements in history. They organized masses rather than classes, laying the vulnerabilities of democracies bare.

A remarkable feature of totalitarian regimes is the rapidity with which leaders are replaced and forgotten. Hitler’s charisma spellbound his audiences, but even those leaders over whom the masses obsess are soon forgotten. The neo-fascists and neo-Nazis do not look to Hitler as a patron saint whose ideas could aid their movements. Neither did Stalin’s successors feel compunction to honor his name, even though Stalin had spent years positioning himself as Lenin’s natural successor and had powerful propaganda machinery.

These facts bring to mind the phrase, “The crowd is fickle” and other such idioms. A better explanation for the transience of figures than fickleness is the non-stop motion hysterics of a movement.

The forgetfulness of the masses is not a sign that the totalitarian state is a thing of the past, but rather that the foundation for future totalitarianism is still present.  It would also be a mistake to believe that totalitarian regimes could emerge without mass support. Neither Hitler nor Stalin could have survived inter- and intra-party skirmishes, assassination attempts, upheavals, or wielded control over sizeable populations without popular support. This popularity was not simply due to mendacious propaganda or widespread ignorance or the wiles of Hitler or Stalin: they were both well-liked.

As long as a movement has momentum, it doesn’t much matter who the face of that movement is or was. The leaders in the Nazi party were forthright about past crimes and future ones, which had a macabre allure for many. The Bolsheviks were known for shirking conventional moral standards. The mob’s tendency to revel in evil acts is nothing new; what is new is that self-interest is not always the motivating force.

One of the most disquieting elements of totalitarian movements is the utter selflessness of its adherents. A Nazi or a Bolshevik may not be shaken from his convictions by the killing of those who are considered enemies to the movement, but neither is he shaken when the movement’s frenzy consumes his own family or himself. When a movement turns on its own, to the amazement of the world, those turned on won’t waver from their fervor, even if they are framed and found guilty or sent to a gulag.

Incredibly, most in this position will assist the prosecution, desiring above all the movement’s success and their own reputation within it preserved. These ideologues cannot be reached or dissuaded from their position by experience or argument. Their loyalty runs disturbingly deeper than self-interest. It’s an idealism that doesn’t shatter even when the ideal does. It is only when the movement loses momentum that conviction begins to dissipate.

Small nations are much less susceptible to totalitarian rule than large ones. Europe after the first World War saw a growing number of semi-totalitarian regimes spring up. The fascist impulse emanated from Italy and infected most eastern and central European states.

Full-fledged totalitarian aspirations and single-party-rhetoric are necessary to set in motion the political machinery required to effect large-scale changes. But in these small European nations, these efforts would yield only semi-totalitarian forms of government. Even Mussolini’s Italy was considerably less repressive than Germany’s National Socialism or Russia’s Bolshevism.

The Nazis balked at the half-hearted fascism in smaller European nations. Hitler reserved his admiration for the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Communist Party in his own country. Hitler referred to the Soviet leader as “Stalin the genius” and had utmost respect for the man. Apparently the high regard was mutual. Khrushchev’s speech at the Twentieth Party Congress alluded to the fact that the only man whom Stalin trusted was Hitler. Stalin maintained this trust even in the face of solid intelligence that Hitler planned to invade the Soviet Union.

Both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR had large populations—populations they considered expendable and readily replaceable. The machinery of total domination and slaughter was far more complete and efficient in the USSR than in Nazi Germany; though, had Germany emerged the victor, the Nazis would have eventually reached a similar level of efficiency in its killing systems, with manpower and resources redirected to bureaucracy rather than military.

Countries with large populations are more susceptible to totalitarian rule. In India and China, for example, the probabilities of Oriental varieties of totalitarianism arising are unnervingly high. This vulnerability is partially due to India’s and China’s enormous populations. The sense of mass man’s superfluity is a rather recent phenomenon in some European nations; but in Asia, the presumption of superfluousness has been a common feature for centuries—to the devaluing of human life. A large population assuages the fear of a crippling depopulation that large-scale murderous repression would bring.

Countries with smaller populations realize that adopting similar tactics would result in a country with no one left to rule, and, thus, can’t afford to move beyond the single-party states and dictatorships of semi-totalitarianism.

The indefatigable loyalty of a totalitarian movement’s followers and the mass support for totalitarian regimes are certainly unsettling patterns, but perhaps even more disquieting is the appeal that these movements have to elites and the strange bonds that unite them to the mob.

There’s no doubt that the list of high-profile sympathizers with totalitarianism is staggeringly long. That elites are drawn to such movements tells us something about the environment in which these movements are fomented.

We have defined the masses as the neutral, apathetic, unintegrated segment of a nation’s population. A group distinct from the masses is the mob, the underworld of the bourgeois class.

Both the elite and the mob remove themselves from bourgeois society before its decay and collapse. The breakdown is marked by a change in cultural mood from smug bourgeois piety to a hopeless anarchism. Such a breakdown is the moment when the elite’s and mob’s interests align. Leaders rise up from the ranks of mob elements, even if their private lives are morally bankrupt. This bankruptcy might be reproached by the more respectable and firmly established politicians, but it only furthers the renegade leader’s intrigue.

The prewar elite, often referred to as the “front generation” (those who had lived through the first World War), saw war as a means of purifying and rebuking a society that had grown sick from its excesses. Even those who’d witnessed the terrors of war firsthand did not become pacifists but spoke of their experiences with a deep reverence and even longing. Chaos and destruction were the currency of high honor and respect.

Those who view the elite’s openness to totalitarianism as an attempt to find meaning amidst the widespread malaise of nihilism underestimate how repugnant a malaise industrial society had produced. The front generation despised what they viewed as a petty and fake bourgeois society with an education built upon a precarious framework of naïve ideas rather than experience.

The previous generation that grew up in an age of imperialism had found opportunities to escape the monotony and pettiness by traveling to or working in an exotic colony in the far East or North Africa as a merchant or a spy or an official. But there were few dragons in far off lands left for the front generation to slay; they remained trapped in society’s stifling constraints.

The front generation, which had witnessed the horrors of the first World War, was more in touch with questions of death and suffering, which made the hypocrisy even more insufferable. Interestingly enough, this elite transcended borders; it was a mindset that united people from various European nations—the Frenchman and the German could bond over it, even though their countries had been bitter enemies during the war. The choice between being a hero or a criminal mattered far less than doing either with utmost integrity and authenticity. Cruelty was not necessarily frowned upon. If it helped satisfy the restless hankering for violence and vexing society, then it was a virtue of sorts.

Another strand that characterized the front generation was the desire for dissolution. One author wrote that he no longer wanted to be merely I but We. A totalitarian movement gave opportunity for the front generation to get the anonymity they sought—losing themselves, in a sense, in something larger than themselves. So hungry was the elite for the laying bare of bourgeois hypocrisy that the horrendous acts the Nazis were carrying out didn’t grieve them, nor check the anti-Semitic sentiment that the elite bandied about in essays and opinion pieces. The mob was brutal, but at least it was honest—and that authenticity was to be praised.

In short, totalitarianism appeared an answer to many of these longings: opportunity for violence, for the dissolution of self, losing oneself in a cause greater than oneself, the value of experience, and doing something rather than nothing. For the elites, it was a show they watched with amusement: the social underbelly insisting on respect, elbowing their way from exclusion to inclusion—much to the horror of the petty upper class. Even the cost of civilization itself was not too high for the elites.

Propaganda is the bridge between totalitarian aspirations and a world that is essentially non-totalitarian. A leader’s brand of propaganda will be determined by the outside world. The connection between propaganda and indoctrination depends on a few factors, like the size and strength of a movement within the nation and pressure from outside it.

The more external pressure, the more robustly the totalitarian leader will employ propaganda. The leader propagates, but the movement itself indoctrinates. The indoctrination reinforces the movement’s strength (especially when paired with terror). This indoctrination also serves to isolate and prevent meddling from other nations.

Terror aided propaganda in Nazi Germany and the USSR, but especially in the former. Nazis killed influential politicians from competing socialist parties, which effectively instilled terror. Mass killings went up because police wouldn’t arrest and courts wouldn’t prosecute perpetrators. One writer referred to this as “power propaganda.” It communicated to Germany that Nazi power had become superior to traditional means of keeping order. The implicit messaging was that it was safer to be a Nazi than remain loyal to the traditional republic.

Hitler’s propaganda took advantage of the West’s centuries-old reverence for science by adopting an air of “scientificality” in his speeches. He paired this with prophetic rhetoric to grimly effective ends. It gave the appearance of superhuman predictive power based on some kind of special knowledge of history’s movements. Both Hitler and Stalin postured like prophets and the resultant slaughters were viewed as nothing more than the fulfillment of their prophetic utterances.

Ultimately, the goal of propaganda is not persuasion but organization. Once the propaganda takes on a life of its own, the slogans cannot be retracted without compromising the entire political system that has been built around them. Such an edifice becomes impenetrable by mere argument. So inextricable were the lies about the Jews to the Nazi’s social and political organization that to question anti-Semitism or the superiority of the Aryans was to question reality itself. This was true of Bolshevism as well. How could anyone debate the validity of Bolshevik claims about class struggle and the proletariat’s fate being tied to the State when the State had set up kulaks and collectivized farms across Russia and Eastern Europe?

Totalitarian movements win by organization rather than mere persuasion. Its propaganda is far more powerful than other forms of propaganda because a totalitarian regime can bend all of society’s institutions to fit the ideology’s purposes.

The only way to overturn an ideology so comprehensively integrated into public (and even private) life is with a more compelling story. When a totalitarian regime is defeated, the flimsiness of the propaganda becomes apparent. The vision for which its people were ready to sacrifice their lives no longer holds their attention or reverence in the slightest. There’s a selective fanaticism to its followers. They are willing to die a robot’s death as long as the totalitarian machinery is running, but, unlike the religious zealots, they are unwilling to die a martyr’s death, continuing to fight for a vision even as the enemy closes in.

About 90 percent of Germans had been genuine Nazi sympathizers at some point in the Third Reich’s ascendancy. The fact that Allies had such a difficult time finding any Germans still defiantly clinging to Hitler’s creeds after the war cannot be explained away as self-deception, cowardice, or opportunism, as many analysts have tried to do. The convictions the Germans held were only as real as the Nazi state: the convictions crumbled with Hitler’s Germany.