By Malcolm Lee Kitchen III | Margin Of The Law
DEHUMANIZATION • : One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases. Dehumanization overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder. At this stage, hate propaganda in print and on hate radios is used to vilify the victim group. In combating this dehumanization, incitement to genocide should not be confused with protected speech. Genocidal societies lack constitutional protection for countervailing speech, and should be treated differently than democracies. Local and international leaders should condemn the use of hate speech and make it culturally unacceptable. Leaders who incite genocide should be banned from international travel and have their foreign finances frozen. Hate radio stations should be shut down, and hate propaganda banned. Hate crimes and atrocities should be promptly punished.
Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1948. She wrote it in the immediate aftermath of the worst political catastrophes in modern history. What she documented was not abstract theory. It was a clinical analysis of how ordinary societies produce systems capable of destroying human beings on an industrial scale. Reading it today, in 2026, is not a comfortable exercise.
“The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1948.
This is the starting point. Not a prediction. Not an alarm. A documented observation from someone who watched it happen, survived it, and spent years dissecting its mechanisms.
The claim here is not that Western nations in 2026 resemble Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. They do not. The claim is something more specific and more useful: that the conditions Arendt identified as preconditions for totalitarian movements are visible today. Some of them are advancing. And most people are not paying attention because the packaging looks different from what they were taught to recognize.
Totalitarianism does not announce itself. It builds. It uses familiar language, trusted institutions, and widely shared fears to establish control incrementally. By the time it becomes recognizable, significant ground has already been ceded. That is the pattern Arendt documented. That is the pattern worth examining now.
The Polish lawyer and Member of the European Parliament Ryszard Legutko captured this in his book The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies. His observation is worth sitting with: “Communism and liberal democracy proved to be all-unifying entities compelling their followers how to think, what to do, how to evaluate events, what to dream, and what language to use.”
He is not equating the two systems. He is identifying a structural tendency that appears in both. The tendency toward ideological totality. The expectation that the dominant framework answers all questions and tolerates no serious challenge. That tendency exists today in Western societies. It is visible in how certain debates are conducted, which voices get amplified, which get removed, and what counts as acceptable public speech.
This analysis examines that tendency. It draws on Arendt’s framework, on observable events, and on documented policies. It traces the mechanics of totalitarian movements as Arendt described them, and then maps those mechanics onto a process she called institutionalized dehumanization. That process has five stages. Some of what has happened in recent years fits recognizable stages in that sequence.
The purpose of this analysis is not to generate panic or to score political points. It is to apply rigorous historical and political thinking to current events, honestly and without softening the findings to make them easier to absorb.
PART ONE: HOW TOTALITARIANISM WORKS
Before examining where these dynamics appear today, it is necessary to understand the mechanics Arendt identified. Totalitarianism is not simply a harsh government or an overreaching state. It is a specific political structure with specific requirements. Arendt identified three interlocking elements that any totalitarian movement requires to function: mass support, elite leadership, and propaganda. These three elements reinforce each other. Remove one and the system weakens. Allow all three to operate together and the result is a self-sustaining machine.
Understanding each element separately is the starting point.
The Lonely Masses
Totalitarian movements do not emerge from nowhere. They find their material in populations that have already been weakened. The specific weakness Arendt identified is atomization: the breakdown of genuine social bonds and the resulting isolation of individuals.
She wrote that mass movements build on the classical failure of societies to create and maintain real community. What fills the gap is not nothing. It is ideology. The isolated individual, stripped of meaningful relationships and a coherent sense of purpose, becomes susceptible to movements that offer both. The movement provides identity, belonging, purpose, and a clear account of who is responsible for the problems the individual feels but cannot fully articulate.
Arendt’s description of this type of person is precise: “The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships.”
This is not a description of a primitive or uneducated person. It is a description of someone disconnected from the social structures that historically gave human life coherence: family, community, religious practice, craft, local political participation. When those structures weaken or disappear, the individual does not simply become free. The individual becomes rootless. And rootless individuals are historically the most reliable recruits for mass movements.
Look at the present conditions in Western societies. Social media platforms have become the primary environment for social interaction for large portions of the population, particularly the young. The documented effects of this shift are not ambiguous. Rates of depression, anxiety, and social dysfunction among teenagers, particularly girls, have risen sharply in direct correlation with increased smartphone and social media use. A teenage girl measuring her social worth in Instagram likes is not developing the kind of social relationships Arendt described as foundational to psychological and civic health. She is experiencing exactly the kind of isolation that Arendt identified as the raw material of mass movements.
The writer Rod Dreher made this connection explicit: “In fact, this technology and the culture that has emerged from it is reproducing the atomization and radical loneliness that totalitarian communist governments used to impose on their captive peoples to make them easier to control.”
That is a strong claim. It is also a documented one. Communist states systematically dismantled family bonds, religious community, and civil society specifically because those structures provided individuals with sources of loyalty, identity, and meaning that competed with the state. Western societies have not done this deliberately. But the effect is increasingly similar. The mechanisms are different. The outcome, in terms of social atomization, is converging.
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this process in measurable ways. Lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, and restrictions on gathering removed from people, for extended periods, the basic social interactions that Arendt described as essential to psychological and civic health. Children spent formative developmental years without normal peer interaction. Adults lost workplace relationships, community ties, and the informal social infrastructure of daily life. Many of those losses have not been recovered.
These are not incidental side effects. They are the conditions that produce the kind of population Arendt described as the foundation of a mass movement. A population in permanent low-level crisis, isolated, anxious, looking for leadership that can make the world comprehensible and safe again. And from that population, Arendt noted, totalitarian movements draw their most dedicated followers. These movements, she wrote, “demand total, unrestricted, unconditional, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member, since their organization will encompass, in due course, the entire human race.”
The language of totality is the signature. Not partial loyalty. Not conditional agreement. Total commitment to the movement and its account of reality.
The Role of the Elite
The second element Arendt identified is less intuitive. Most people assume that educated, credentialed elites serve as a check against totalitarian tendencies. History shows the opposite. Arendt documented what she called a “terrifying roster of distinguished men” who were attracted to and enabled totalitarian movements.
The reason is structural, not personal. Elites in a time of perceived crisis are drawn to systems that promise comprehensive solutions. The total overhaul of existing frameworks, the application of a unified theory to all problems, the promise of a scientifically managed society. These appeals are especially powerful to people whose professional identity is built on expertise and who believe that the correct application of that expertise could solve the problems ordinary politics cannot.
Arendt also identified a darker component of this elite alignment. She described what she called a “temporary alliance between the mob and the elite.” The elite provides intellectual legitimacy and institutional access. The mob provides energy, ruthlessness, and a willingness to act where the elite would hesitate. Together they advance the movement in ways neither could achieve alone.
The elite component of this alliance has a specific pathology: the willingness to lie, and specifically “the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts.” Arendt saw this not as a failure of intelligence among elite actors but as a deliberate strategy. If a sufficiently large and authoritative consensus presents a claim as settled, the cost of challenging it becomes prohibitively high. Most people will not pay that cost.
This mechanism has been clearly visible in the handling of scientific debate during the COVID-19 pandemic. Established, credentialed scientists who published findings or offered analyses that contradicted the official narrative found themselves removed from social media platforms, fired from academic positions, and publicly discredited. Not because their work was proven wrong. Because it was inconvenient. The Great Barrington Declaration, authored in October 2020 by three of the world’s leading epidemiologists from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford, was dismissed by senior health officials before any serious engagement with its arguments. Internal communications later revealed that officials at the National Institutes of Health described the authors as requiring a “devastating takedown.”
This is not the behavior of institutions committed to scientific inquiry. It is the behavior Arendt described: the use of institutional authority to enforce ideological compliance under the cover of scientific consensus.
She also observed something important about how ordinary people, not elites, get drawn into this process. She quoted Hermann Göring’s understanding of the masses: “He proved his supreme ability for organizing the masses into total domination by assuming that most people are neither bohemians, fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots, nor social failures, but first and foremost job holders and good family men.”
The primary loyalty of most people is not to ideology. It is to the stability of their family and their livelihood. Totalitarian movements exploit this. When the cost of non-compliance threatens employment, income, or the ability to participate in ordinary social life, most people will comply. Not because they believe in the ideology. Because they cannot afford the alternative.
Vaccine mandates applied to workers in healthcare, education, transport, and government reflected exactly this dynamic. The people complying in large numbers were not doing so because they had weighed the evidence and made a personal medical decision. Many were doing it because the alternative was losing their jobs. The political actors imposing these mandates understood this. The compliance was predictable. And the compliance data was then used to reinforce the narrative that the policy was broadly supported.
Arendt’s observation about this: “Nothing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives.”
Totalitarian Propaganda
The third element is the one most people recognize, but usually too late to respond to effectively. Propaganda is not simply misinformation or government messaging. In Arendt’s framework, it is a total system for managing how a population understands reality. It works not by making people believe false things, but by making the false things the only things that can be safely said in public.
Arendt identified two primary tools of totalitarian propaganda: fear and science. Fear is directed outward, toward an identifiable threat, whether that threat is a foreign power, a racial group, a class enemy, or a virus. The threat must be real enough to generate genuine anxiety but manageable enough that the movement can credibly claim to be addressing it. The propaganda then sustains and amplifies the fear, ensuring that the population remains in a state of chronic anxiety that makes critical thinking difficult and compliance easy.
The second tool is science. Arendt wrote about this with clarity: the totalitarian weaponization of science, drawing on the German philosopher Eric Voegelin, represents the final stage of a long process in which “science has become an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.”
Science deployed as propaganda does not look like propaganda. It looks like expertise. It produces graphs, models, and projections. It speaks in technical language that most people cannot independently evaluate. It claims authority not from democratic legitimacy but from epistemic superiority. The message is consistent: trust the experts, follow the science, do not ask questions that the consensus has not already authorized.
This has been the dominant communication framework for COVID-19 policy across most Western governments. The phrase “follow the science” became a political formula, invoked to end debate rather than advance it. Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, who was eventually removed from his position at Harvard Medical School, stated the problem directly: “Science is about rational disagreement, the questioning and testing of orthodoxy and the constant search for truth.”
What was practiced during the pandemic was the opposite. Orthodoxy was established early. Questioning it was treated as dangerous and irresponsible. Alternative evidence was not engaged with. It was suppressed or discredited by platform removal, institutional censure, or public ridicule.
Arendt noted that the actual accuracy of totalitarian scientific claims is secondary to their function. What matters is that they produce compliance. She wrote that totalitarian propaganda is “marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such.” The leaders of such movements do not believe in objective reality in the conventional sense. They believe in the system they have constructed. Facts that fit the system are elevated. Facts that contradict it are irrelevant or dangerous.
She also identified the long-term structural weakness of this approach. A propaganda system built on manufactured consensus rather than accurate information will eventually collide with observable reality. When that collision becomes unavoidable, the system does not self-correct. It collapses. The people who were most committed to it abandon it almost overnight, as Arendt observed in the behavior of Communist apparatchiks in Eastern and Central Europe between 1989 and 1991. People who had spent careers enforcing ideological conformity became enthusiastic advocates for the new order within months.
That pattern repeats. It has repeated throughout history. Every totalitarian effort eventually breaks on the reality it refused to acknowledge. The current version will be no exception.
Surveillance and the Modern State
There is an element of the current situation that Arendt could not have fully anticipated because the technology did not exist. Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff documented this development in her analysis of what she named “surveillance capitalism.” Her definition is direct: “A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty.” She goes further: surveillance capitalism is “an expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.”
The infrastructure of behavioral monitoring and control that exists today represents a qualitative shift in the capacity for totalitarian control. The 20th century totalitarian state required visible instruments of coercion: police, informants, checkpoints, papers. The modern surveillance state operates invisibly, through devices people carry voluntarily, through platforms people use to conduct their social lives, through payment systems and health records and location data.
The documentary The Social Dilemma made the commercial dimension of this visible to a general audience, confronting viewers with the reality that “never before have a handful of tech designers had such control over the way billions of us think, act, and live our lives.” The algorithmic systems that shape what information billions of people see each day were not designed with political control as their explicit objective. They were designed to maximize engagement and revenue. The effect on public discourse and individual cognition has been similar to what deliberate information control would produce.
On the state level, China’s social credit system represents the most fully realized version of digital behavioral management. It uses big data and continuous surveillance camera coverage to track citizen behavior in public spaces and applies a system of rewards and penalties based on compliance with defined behavioral standards. This is not a theoretical future development. It is an operational system governing the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
The QR code health passport systems introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, first in China and then across liberal democratic states, represented a step toward similar architecture in the West. These systems tied the ability to participate in ordinary social and commercial life to a digital record of a specific medical intervention. The underlying logic is identical to the social credit model: access to society is conditional on demonstrable compliance with state-defined requirements. The framing is different. The structure is recognizable.
Where the line between technocracy and totalitarianism sits in that architecture is a legitimate question. It is a question that was not seriously asked in most of the countries that implemented these systems.
PART TWO: DEHUMANIZATION IN FIVE STAGES
The analysis above addresses how totalitarian movements establish themselves. What follows addresses what they do once established. Institutionalized dehumanization is the systematic process by which a society, through policies and public communication, progressively strips a defined group of people of their recognized humanity and their access to the protections that humanity entitles them to.
This is not a process that is typically driven by monsters. It is a process driven by ordinary people who believe they are doing the right thing, supported by masses who either agree with them or have decided not to interfere. The historical record is consistent on this point. The people who administered dehumanization at scale, in 20th century Europe and elsewhere, were for the most part bureaucrats, professionals, and citizens who had convinced themselves that their actions were necessary, justified, or at minimum not their personal responsibility.
The five-stage model described here was first published in 2014 in the academic article “Human rights, history and anthropology: reorienting the debate.” Since March 2020, developments in the handling of COVID-19 policy have made this framework more relevant and more urgent than it was when first written.
The five stages are not always sequential. They can overlap. The progression from one to the next is not inevitable. Recognizing where a society stands in this sequence is the prerequisite for stopping it.
Stage One: The Instrumentalization of Fear
Every process of institutionalized dehumanization begins with fear. Fear is the precondition because it suspends the normal ethical frameworks that prevent people from treating other human beings as threats to be managed or eliminated. Fear does not need to be manufactured from nothing. It can begin with a genuine threat and then be amplified, directed, and sustained artificially to serve political objectives.
The COVID-19 virus was not a genuine threat. People did not die from anything called COVID-19. The fear it generated at the outset was a rational response to genuine uncertainty. That is not the issue. The issue is what happened to that fear once governments and media institutions recognized its political utility.
The Austrian government provided one of the clearest documented examples. Officials acknowledged that in March 2020 they deliberately amplified public fear of the virus beyond what the available evidence warranted, because they had concluded that the population would not comply with lockdown measures unless fear levels were sufficiently high. This was not a leaked memo or a post-hoc reconstruction. It was an admission.
Arendt described this mechanism: “Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.”
Control from within means the individual polices their own behavior not because of external force but because they have internalized the fear. They do not need a checkpoint if they will not leave their home. They do not need a guard if they will pressure their neighbors into compliance. This is more efficient than external coercion and significantly harder to resist because the controlling force is inside the individual rather than outside.
President Joe Biden’s speech of September 9, 2021 illustrates the next phase of this mechanism. In that speech, he moved from general fear of the virus to specific fear directed at a defined population group:
“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us. So, please, do the right thing. But just don’t take it from me; listen to the voices of unvaccinated Americans who are lying in hospital beds, taking their final breaths, saying, ‘If only I had gotten vaccinated.’ If only.”
And later in the same speech:
“That’s nearly 80 million Americans not vaccinated. And in a country as large as ours, that’s 25 percent minority. That 25 percent can cause a lot of damage, and they are. The unvaccinated overcrowd our hospitals, are overrunning the emergency rooms and intensive care units, leaving no room for someone with a heart attack, or pancreatitis, or cancer.”
Analyze the structure of this rhetoric. It does not argue for vaccination on its individual merits. It positions unvaccinated people as an active threat to vaccinated people. It attributes specific, identifiable harms to their choices. It frames their continued existence in the unvaccinated state as an ongoing injury to the rest of society. A group has been defined. A harm has been attributed to them. A moral framework has been constructed in which their exclusion becomes not just permissible but justified.
This is Stage One: the political instrumentalization of genuine fear, expanded and directed toward a specific group. The transition from “fear the virus” to “fear the unvaccinated” is not a natural or inevitable consequence of the public health situation. It is a political choice with predictable social consequences. The Slavenka Drakulic analysis of the Yugoslav ethnic conflicts is applicable here: “In time those ‘Others’ are stripped of all their individual characteristics. They are no longer acquaintances or professionals with particular names, habits, appearances and characters; instead they are members of the enemy group. When a person is reduced to an abstraction in such a way, one is free to hate him because the moral obstacle has already been abolished.”
The 80 million unvaccinated Americans in Biden’s speech are not individuals with names, medical histories, constitutional rights, and specific reasons for their decisions. They are an abstraction. A 25 percent minority that causes damage. The moral obstacle to treating them differently from other citizens has been removed.
Stage Two: Soft Exclusion
Once fear has been successfully directed at a defined group, the next stage is their partial removal from ordinary social participation. They are not yet expelled from society entirely. They remain nominally members of the community. But their status within that community has been downgraded. They are tolerated under specific conditions. They are marked. And systems are put in place to make them identifiable.
The vaccine passport and QR code systems introduced across Western countries between 2021 and 2022 were precisely these systems. Their stated purpose was public health management. Their structural effect was to create a two-tier social order in which one group of citizens had access to ordinary social life and another group did not. The excluded group could be identified instantly, at the door of a restaurant, a gym, a concert venue, a church, or a government office, by the absence of a valid QR code on their phone.
Austria provided the most explicit example. On November 5, 2021, it became the first European country to impose legally enforced restrictions on unvaccinated citizens as a class. These citizens were permitted only to travel to work, purchase groceries, attend religious services, take outdoor exercise, and access defined emergency services. All other social participation was prohibited. Not because they had done something wrong as individuals. Because they belonged to a defined group.
New Zealand and Australia implemented similar frameworks. In New South Wales, Australia, the state premier Gladys Berejiklian stated on September 27, 2021: “The message is if you want to be able to have a meal with friends and welcome people in your home, you have to get vaccinated.”
Read that sentence carefully. The ability to invite people to your home for dinner was made conditional on a specific medical intervention. The private home, historically one of the last spaces protected from state intrusion in liberal legal traditions, was brought within the scope of state-enforced behavioral compliance.
Across the world, unvaccinated people lost their jobs, were barred from public buildings, schools, places of worship, and in some cases from receiving medical care unrelated to COVID-19. These exclusions were applied to people who had not been charged with any offense, had not caused any identified harm to any identified person, and who in many cases had documented medical or constitutional grounds for their decision. None of those individual circumstances were relevant. Group membership was the only factor that mattered.
This is the signature of Stage Two: exclusion based on category, not conduct. The individual ceases to be evaluated as an individual. They are evaluated as a member of the defined group. And the group’s defined characteristics determine their access to the community.
Stage Three: Documented Justification
Soft exclusion requires a supporting narrative. A society that considers itself committed to rights and the rule of law will not sustain the exclusion of a defined group without a body of evidence that makes the exclusion appear rational and necessary. Stage Three is the construction and dissemination of that evidence.
This is not simply propaganda. It is more sophisticated than that. It involves the selective deployment of legitimate scientific research, the amplification of findings that support the official position, and the systematic suppression or discrediting of findings that challenge it. The result is a public information environment in which the evidence appears to be uniformly on one side, not because the evidence actually is on one side, but because the other side has been removed from view.
Arendt observed this dynamic directly: “The strong emphasis of totalitarian propaganda on the ‘scientific’ nature of its assertions has been compared to certain advertising techniques which also address themselves to masses. Science in the instances of both business publicity and totalitarian propaganda is obviously only a surrogate for power. The obsession of totalitarian movements with ‘scientific’ proofs ceases once they are in power.”
The COVID-19 period produced documented examples of this on an extraordinary scale. YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook removed content from qualified scientists and medical professionals at rates not seen in any previous public health event. This included content from practicing physicians discussing clinical observations from their own patients, epidemiologists presenting data that had been published in peer-reviewed journals, and Nobel laureates offering alternative analyses of available evidence.
The suppression was not limited to obviously false or dangerous claims. It reached into legitimate scientific debate. Luc Montagnier, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2008, had his public statements on COVID-19 removed from multiple platforms. Robert Malone, who played a foundational role in the development of mRNA technology, was permanently removed from Twitter in December 2021. These are not fringe figures. They are scientists with documented credentials who were offering analyses that contradicted the approved narrative.
The consequence of this suppression is not simply that certain voices were not heard. The consequence is that the public was presented with a manufactured consensus. Scientific agreement was simulated by removing disagreement from view. People making decisions about their own health and their own rights were doing so in an information environment that had been deliberately shaped to produce a specific outcome.
Arendt’s observation about what this means is direct: the ideology has been formally enshrined and has become mainstream. Once the suppression of dissent is institutionalized and normalized, the movement has achieved something more durable than simple majority opinion. It has established a framework in which the question of whether the official position is correct can no longer be asked in public without consequence.
This is where Stage Three matters most. It is not just that the excluded group is being excluded. It is that the intellectual tools necessary to challenge the justification for that exclusion are being removed from the public sphere. The debate cannot happen because one side of it has been erased.
Stage Four: Hard Exclusion
Stage Four is the point at which the excluded group loses not just access to parts of society but access to the protections that membership in society entitles them to. They become rightless in a practical sense. Their voice in public discourse has been eliminated. The evidentiary basis for their exclusion has been institutionalized. They have no effective means of challenging their status through the systems that were designed to protect individual rights.
Most Western countries have not reached Stage Four in their treatment of unvaccinated citizens. Israel and Gaza are the exception. But there are documented developments that sit in the territory between Stage Three and Stage Four and that warrant serious attention.
Australia’s COVID-19 quarantine infrastructure provides the clearest example. In the Northern Territory and elsewhere, the Australian government constructed facilities described officially as quarantine centers. The legally binding rules governing conduct within these facilities were explicit. Chief Health Officer Direction 52 of 2021 stated: “This direction is law. Every person in quarantine must do what the Direction says. If a person does not follow the Direction, the Northern Territory Police may issue an Infringement Notice with a financial penalty.”
A facility in which individuals are placed against their will, their conduct governed by legally enforceable directives, and where non-compliance is met with police action, is an internment facility. The framing as a health measure does not change the structural reality. The people placed in these facilities were not accused of crimes. They were not given hearings. They were placed in compulsory detention on the basis of their health status or recent travel history.
In Melbourne, construction on a facility officially called the “Centre for National Resilience” was underway during this period. The name is Orwellian in the precise sense of the word: language designed to obscure the function of the thing being named. A permanent facility for the compulsory detention of people identified as health risks by the state is not a facility for national resilience. It is a facility for national compliance.
At Stage Four, the excluded group has been stripped of effective recourse. Courts that might have protected their rights have been persuaded or pressured into deference to the public health emergency framing. Media that might have reported their situation has been either committed to the official narrative or effectively excluded from the information environment by platform policies. The group is invisible to the public discourse in any capacity other than as a defined threat.
Arendt’s analysis of this stage is the most chilling part of her work, because she is precise about what it produces. Once a group has been stripped of political voice and practical rights, they have lost what she identified as the foundational requirement for any rights claim: the ability to speak and to be heard. Rights do not exist in abstraction. They exist in a political community that recognizes them. A group that has been expelled from that community, even informally, has lost the capacity to invoke rights in any meaningful way. They have stopped being part of humanity as far as the system is concerned.
Stage Five: Extermination
Stage Five is where the process ends when it is allowed to complete itself. The excluded group, now rightless and invisible, is removed from society entirely. In its least extreme form, this means permanent exclusion from any participation in social, economic, or political life. In its most extreme form, it means physical extermination. You can see this in real-time with Israel’s military takeover, it’s destruction of any and everything in Gaza to include the extermination of the Palestinian people.
Western societies in 2026 have not approached Stage Five. That statement is not a comfort. It is a floor, not a ceiling. The fact that a society has not yet reached the worst possible outcome does not mean it is not progressing through earlier stages. And the historical record shows that progression through the stages accelerates as each stage normalizes the next.
Arendt’s warning at this point is important to quote in full, because it addresses a specific complacency that liberal and constitutional republics are prone to:
“A conception of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for, for the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number, becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority. And this predicament is by no means solved if the unit to which the ‘good for’ applies is as large as mankind itself. For it is quite conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political possibilities, that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically, namely by majority decision, that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof.”
This is the warning about procedural legitimacy without substantive limits. A constitutional republic protects rights not because majorities support those rights in any given moment but because the rights are defined as prior to and independent of majority will. The moment rights become contingent on what the majority decides is good for society, no right is safe from the calculation that removing it would benefit the larger group.
That is not a theoretical danger. It is a documented historical pattern. And it does not require a dictator to activate it. As Arendt notes, it can happen democratically, through majority decision, in a society that has lost the substantive framework that gives rights their unconditional character.
PART THREE: WHAT HISTORY SAYS ABOUT RECOVERY
The analysis above is not primarily a counsel of despair. Arendt documented totalitarian movements not to establish their inevitability but to make them legible. Understanding the mechanics of a process is the prerequisite for interrupting it.
History provides one dominant model for how totalitarian systems are ended: not by superior force from outside but by the withdrawal of consent from within. The collapse of Communist totalitarianism in Eastern and Central Europe between 1989 and 1991 was not primarily a military event. It was a civic event. It was produced by populations who had, over decades, developed and maintained an alternative account of reality in the face of systematic suppression, who had built networks of trust outside the official institutions, and who at the decisive moment refused to continue pretending that what the system said was true.
George Orwell’s formulation is applicable here: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
What the Eastern European populations recovered, before they recovered anything else, was the freedom to state observable facts. The gap between what the official narrative claimed and what people could see with their own eyes became undeniable. The system collapsed not because it was physically overpowered but because it lost the capacity to make its version of reality stick.
Several specific practices made this possible and are instructive for present circumstances.
First, the recovery of individual responsibility. The populations who ended Communist rule did not wait for a leader to rescue them. They accepted, individually and in small groups, the responsibility for living according to what they actually believed rather than what was required of them. The Czech dissident tradition, documented in the work of Vaclav Havel, called this “living in truth.” It meant refusing to participate in the performance of compliance with a system you know to be false. Not necessarily public resistance. Simply the refusal to pretend.
This is available to every individual in any society at any stage of totalitarian progression. It does not require political access or institutional power. It requires only the decision to stop pretending.
Second, the maintenance of genuine community. Totalitarian systems depend on atomization. They break down the relationships that give people the resources, both material and psychological, to resist. The Eastern European dissident movements sustained themselves through networks of genuine relationship: underground publications, private discussions, shared religious practice, informal mutual aid. These networks were not primarily political organizations. They were communities. They provided the human connection that the official system denied.
The parallel in current conditions involves intentional investment in real relationships over mediated ones. The smartphone and social media environment produces the atomization that makes populations susceptible to mass movements. Reversing that requires deliberate choices about how time and attention are invested.
Third, the insistence on rigorous public discourse. Every totalitarian system at some point reaches the limit of what propaganda can sustain in the face of reality. The moment this limit is approached, the people who were most committed to the system begin to distance themselves from it. This happened in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. It has happened in various forms at the end of every totalitarian project in modern history.
The precondition for this collapse is the survival of an alternative discourse. If rigorous public debate has been completely extinguished, the collapse of the propaganda system leaves a vacuum rather than a recovery. If an alternative account of reality has been maintained, even in suppressed or marginalized form, it can expand rapidly when the official system loses credibility.
This is why the suppression of scientific and journalistic dissent during the COVID-19 period is not simply an episode with local significance. It is an attack on the infrastructure of public reason. If the people and institutions capable of maintaining rigorous alternative analysis are removed from the public sphere, the collapse of the official narrative produces chaos rather than correction.
The societies of Eastern Europe that recovered most successfully from Communist totalitarianism were those that had maintained the strongest underground intellectual and civic culture. Poland’s Solidarity movement, Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77, Hungary’s samizdat networks: these were the structures that provided the alternative framework when the official one collapsed. They were the reason recovery could happen.
Fourth, the application of constitutional principles without apology. A constitutional republic is defined by the principle that government authority derives from the consent of the governed and is bounded by defined rights that government cannot legitimately override. This is not a procedural technicality. It is the foundational claim of the entire system.
When governments override those rights in the name of emergency, public health, or national security, they are not operating within the constitutional framework. They are operating outside it while claiming to operate within it. The appropriate response is not deferential compliance. It is the insistence that the constitutional framework be respected and that officials who override it be held accountable for doing so.
This is not radicalism. It is constitutional literacy. The rights documented in constitutional frameworks were not grants from government. They were acknowledgments of rights inherent in the human person that government is obligated to protect. That distinction matters. Rights that exist only because government chooses to recognize them can be withdrawn when government chooses otherwise. Rights that precede government cannot be withdrawn without a breach of the constitutional compact.
This distinction has practical consequences for how citizens respond to policies that restrict rights in the name of public benefit. The question is not whether the benefit is real or the intention sincere. The question is whether the restriction is constitutionally permissible and whether the process by which it was imposed respected the limits of governmental authority.
The Expiry Date
Arendt’s most important insight about totalitarian systems is simultaneously sobering and clarifying. These systems contain within themselves the mechanism of their own destruction. They are built on the suppression of reality. And reality is not indefinitely suppressible.
Every prediction that was wrong, every claim that was contradicted by observable events, every scientist who was silenced and later vindicated, every policy that produced harm its advocates said it would prevent: these are the accumulating contradictions that any propaganda system eventually cannot contain. The moment these contradictions become undeniable, the system loses the capacity to enforce compliance. The apparatus of ideological management, the platform removals, the expert panels, the press conferences flanked by flags and projections, ceases to work because people have stopped believing the information it produces.
This is the historical pattern. Communist apparatchiks who had spent careers enforcing ideological conformity became enthusiastic liberal democrats between 1989 and 1991, not because they had changed their characters but because they had changed their calculations about which system was viable. The ideology did not convert them. The failure of the ideology released them.
The current version of ideological totalitarianism will follow the same pattern. It will fail on the same mechanism. The manufactured consensus will collide with reality often enough and visibly enough that it cannot be sustained. The question is not whether this will happen. The question is what kind of society exists when it does.
If the institutions of genuine inquiry, the journalists, scientists, civic organizations, and individuals willing to document and maintain an accurate account of events, have been preserved, the collapse of the propaganda system produces recovery. If they have been successfully destroyed, the collapse produces something else.
History teaches that freedom is not lost in a single decisive moment. It retreats through a series of stages, each one normalized before the next begins, each one making the next one more thinkable. The same is true of recovery. It does not happen all at once. It happens through individual decisions, repeated across a population, to state what is true, to maintain genuine relationships, to insist on constitutional limits, and to refuse the comfort of manufactured consensus.
All totalitarian efforts have an expiry date. The current one will be no different.
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