The embers of World War and nazi destruction had cooled only six years prior when, in 1951, Hanna Arendt published her post-war historical opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
In chapter 12, Totalitarianism in Power, Arendt concludes section 1 of that chapter (page 418 of the Mariner Harper Collins paperback edition) with an analysis of Hitler’s use of organized power.
Third Reich power had not been built up by wealth, worldly possessions or riches, but by organized military force.
By the end of WWII, Germany itself had been laid upon the sacrificial pyre of highly organized SS Stormtrooper War. Hitler’s obsession with organized warfare propelled his highest priority into an organized SS war machine. That wehrmacht had driven Germany into its final, fiery destruction. Hitler didn’t give a damn about the German people. He used their nation to prepare his own funeral pyre.
Hanna Arendt exposed the dictator’s absolute selfishness with this statement:
“He did not consider the war lost when German cities lay in rubble and industrial capacity was destroyed, but only when he had learned that the SS troops were no longer reliable.”
Hitler’s self-induced, self-obsessed destruction of Germany was an historical prequel to Donald Trump’s self-induced, self-obsessed attempt to destroy our Constitutional Rule of Law.
Using Hannah Arendt’s quoted totalitarianism statement as a framework to explain what happened at our US Capitol on January 6, 2021, the outcome could be stated this way:
“Donald did not admit the election lost when our Constitutional Electoral process lay in rubble on the Capitol grounds, but only when the American people finally compelled him by Rule of Law in four courtrooms to shut his big mouth and go to jail. Do not pass Go; Do not count 200 fake Electors.”
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