The three phases of Arendt's theory of totalitarianism

In the case of the Nazis, the imagined conspiracy of choice was of course that of the Jews, as allegedly revealed in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." (Hitler expressly cited the fact that the "Protocols" had been repeatedly exposed in the respectable press as a cheap forgery--a pastiche concocted from identifiable sources--as the decisive proof of the document's authenticity [358, n.

42].) Arendt's discussion of the Nazis' propaganda success with the fiction of Jewish conspiracy is one of the few points in part III at which she returns to topics from the first two parts of the book. Yet in this discussion too, she takes care to distinguish the basis of that fiction's appeal to the masses and that of its earlier success in inciting the mob: "the discovery of the Nazis was that the masses were not so much frightened by Jewish world rule as they were interested in how it could be done, that the popularity of the Protocols was based on admiration and eagerness to learn rather than [the mob's] hatred" (358). If the mob had seized upon anti-Semitism opportunistically, for the sake of venting antisocial hostility and pursuing real or perceived personal advantage, the masses are attracted instead to the fiction's premise that organized, conspiratorial action--for whomever's advantage, and to whatever end--could suffice to control every aspect of the human world. Whereas before she had treated anti-Semitism and racism as essentially continuous, she now emphasizes instead an aspect of the Nazis' anti-Semitic propaganda that in practice has less in common with the racist doctrines used to justify imperialist aggression than with Stalin's more ad hoc fictions of ubiquitous anti-Soviet conspiracies. Indeed, she says that the Bolshevik movement's use of the latter, in comparison with the Nazis recourse to the "Protocols," affords "a better illustration of the essentially fictitious nature of totalitarianism, precisely because the fictitious global conspiracies against and according to which the Bolshevik conspiracy is supposedly organized have not been ideologically fixed" (378).