Dimitri’s Reviews > The Origins of Totalitarianism > Status Update

Legends offer a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories. They attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.

National institutions resisted the megalomania of imperialist aspirations & bourgeois attempts to ùse the state for its own economic purposes were always only half succesful. This changed when the German bourgeoisie staked everything on Hitler & aspired to rule through the mob instead. After destroying the nation state, the mob proved quite capable of taking care of politics by itself & liquidated the bourgeoisie.
??

The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced a complete whitewash of one's own people & a sweeping condemnation of all others, as everywhere nothing but termites in an otherwise healthy body of state; it did not matter that the corruption of the body politic had started without the help of such outsiders.

[By Disraeli's time] Secularisation & assimilation of the Jewish intelligentsia had changed self-consciousness & self-interpretation in such a way that nothing was left of the old memories and hopes [of belonging to a specific religion or nationality] but the awareness of belonging to a chosen people.