What the great political thinker Hannah Arendt meant by totalitarianism was not an all-powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between priv… - Timothy Snyder

The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions...

Both fascism and communism were responses to globalization: to the real and perceived inequalities it created, and the apparent helplessness of the democracies in addressing them. Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people.

Since homo sapiens can survive only by unrestrained racial killing, a Jewish triumph of reason over impulse would mean the end of the species. What a race needed, thought Hitler, was a “worldview” that permitted it to triumph, which meant, in the final analysis, “faith” in its own mindless mission.