The Masses

• Totalitarian movements and their leaders are characterized by the startling swiftness with which they are forgotten and replaced.

• Stalin took many years with bitter factional struggles to legitimize himself as Lenin’s political heir, but his successors made no such concessions.

• Hitler, despite his lifetime fascination over many, is now largely forgotten even by neo-Fascist and neo-Nazi groups postwar.

• This impermanence is linked to the fickleness of the masses and the constant motion totalitarian regimes require to maintain power.

• The totalitarian mentality is marked by extraordinary adaptability and absence of continuity.

• The forgetfulness of the masses does not mean they are cured of the totalitarian delusion; it may indicate the opposite.

• Totalitarian regimes and leaders, while alive and in power, command mass support up to the end.

• Hitler’s rise to power was legal via majority rule, and both he and Stalin maintained leadership through mass confidence despite internal and external crises.

• Events like the Moscow trials and liquidation of rivals depended on mass support for Stalin and Hitler.

• The myth that Hitler was only an agent of industrialists or Stalin only came to power by conspiracy is refuted by facts and their popularity.

• Totalitarian propaganda is both frank and mendacious, often boasting of crimes and outlining future ones.

• Nazis believed that evil-doing has a morbid force of attraction; Bolsheviks similarly rejected ordinary moral standards as propaganda.

• The attraction of evil and crime to the mob mentality is longstanding; mobs admire clever violence even if mean.

• Totalitarian followers show true selflessness: they remain committed even when the regime turns on them, persecuting or imprisoning them.

• Followers may even help prosecute themselves to preserve their movement status.

• This stubborn loyalty is not simple idealism, which depends on individual conviction and experience; totalitarian fanaticism breaks down only when the movement collapses.

• Within the movement, fanaticized members are immune to experience or argument, with total identification destroying their capacity for experience even under torture or death threat.

• Totalitarian movements aim to organize masses, not classes or citizens with opinions like traditional political parties.

• They depend on sheer numerical strength, making such regimes unlikely in countries with small populations.