So, your argument is basically… everything is just lies? Fine. Let me show you why you have been wrong about Arendt. Do you remember when I told you that you needed to read the whole thing, and not just select passages from it? This is why. I quote from Arendt’s article “Imperialism: Road to Suicide. The Political Origins and Use of Racism”.
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Indeed, the alliance between capital and mob could only be effected through the concept of race and race-unity. The two great forces that seemed in the beginning to thwart the ambitions of this alliance and the full development of an imperialist policy — the tradition of the national state, and the labor movement — proved helpless in the end.[…] Today we see that the main threat is the political structure of the imperialist machine, the chief problem how to destroy ideologies that induce peoples to help and serve them. Imperialist politics long ago veered from the path of obedience to economic laws, which are discarded once the “imperial factor” takes the center of the stage. Only a few elderly gentlemen in high finance still believe in the inalienable rights of profit; and the mob, believing only in race, tolerates them for the sake of their financial support, which is granted — even when all hope of profit has vanished — to protect at least the remains of former riches. For in the alliance between modern capital and the mob, the initiative has passed to the latter, whose race-worship and cynicism as to moral values have triumphed over the nineteenth-century faith in infinite profits. The recognition of the mob and its power in politics has resulted in the discarding of all hypocrisy — which after all was at least a compliment to virtue. Domestic and colonial policy can no longer be kept strictly separate. No longer is it possible to avoid the boomerang effects of “empire building” on the home population, and on the foundation and structure of the national state. The British imperial system is becoming obsolete. Organization by race, which is the true heart of Nazism, is inevitable if imperialist policy is to be supported by masses and not only by capitalist interests. The mob, on the other hand, growing in numbers in all “civilized” countries and already complete with its own intellectual elite, but without any social or other base or structure of its own, can be re-organized and set in motion only as a race — as white men (or black or yellow or brown). He who was formerly an Englishman can end by becoming a “white man,” now that so many Germans have become “Aryans.” The failure of the German venture in no way guarantees that other peoples and nations will not disappear into races.
As you can see, Arendt laid the blame for Nazism on Imperialism, the ‘rapacious’ profit-seeking through colonization, and the instilling of a racist ideology to conduct said colonization: Nazism in her thought was a natural progression of European colonialism. Capitalism in deterioration indeed. Arendt herself writes this a little further down. I quote from the same article:
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Destruction is the most radical form of domination as well as of possession. No philosophizing devotee of power has dared to express this with the same sublime detachment as Hobbes — founding the equality of man on his ability to kill. A social system based essentially on property cannot possibly proceed toward anything but the final destruction of all property; for one possesses definitely and for all time only what one destroys. And only what one possesses through destruction can be really and definitely dominated. For its own sake and for all our sakes, bourgeois society has never recognized nor actually accepted this last secret of power — until just now. […]The seeming disparity between cause and effect which characterized the birth of imperialism is thus not a matter of accident. The occasion — superfluous capital created by over-accumulation, which needed the mob’s help to find safe and profitable investment — set in motion a force that had always been contained in the basic structure of bourgeois society, though hidden by nobler traditions. At the same time, completely unprincipled power-politics could not be practiced until a mass of people was available who were free of all principles and so numerous that state and society could not care for them. Add to this the fact that this mob could be organized only by imperialistic politicians, and inspired only by racial doctrines, and we can see how the illusion arose that imperialism alone could settle the grave domestic, social, and economic problems of our time.[…] The Nazis’ strategy during this war has set the stage for the first demonstration of the strategy of suicide. In Nazism we saw the first case of a thoroughgoing imperialist policy, whose lust for conquest is governed by the principle “All or Nothing,” and whose wars end in “Victory or Death.” And we also saw the workings of its peculiar, curious logic by which the All inevitable reverts to the Nothing, and even Victory cannot end but in Death. Following its own law, the power-accumulating machinery built by imperialism can only go on swallowing more and more territory, destroying more and more peoples, enslaving and involving more and more human beings — until finally it ends by devouring itself. This inner law of imperialism, its hidden drive to suicide, its insane fascination with death as such, was revealed during this war in the mass-slaughter of the Jews. […] Global destruction and the suicide of mankind are not mere accidental results of political errors or war, to be avoided by more careful planning. They are inherent in the ethos of imperialism. If imperialism is allowed to continue its course, it can hardly be expected to revert to its first harmless beginnings or to retain its more moderate forms.
Now, Arendt’s argument starts coming off like my argument, doesn’t it? Let’s continue a with the article “The Three Phases of Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism”.
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Both in this article and in the later book, Arendt says that what set off the era of imperialism in the last decades of the nineteenth century was that the European bourgeoisie was no longer content to accumulate capital under the benign noninterference of the state and instead seized the reins of state power for the sake of expanding investments abroad. Her pointed condemnation of the capitalist elite's rapacity gives her account a passing resemblance to the influential theories of earlier writers like H. Hobson and Rosa Luxemburg. Unlike them, however, Arendt takes remarkably little interest in the workings of the capitalist economy as such, let alone a Marx-inflected analysis of it."* Her concern with capitalism is restricted almost entirely to the ethos of the ruling bourgeoisie, and its concomitant understanding of political power. Imperialist policies may have begun simply as an attempt to use military force to safeguard foreign investments; nevertheless, she argues, "the resulting introduction of power as the only contents of politics, and of expansion as its only aim, would hardly have met with such universal applause. . .had it not so perfectly answered the hidden desires and secret convictions of the economically and socially dominant classes" (138).
And later in the same article:
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Arendt argues that it was this abiding, unavowed belief in the legitimacy of domination by force of sheer collective violence that made the imperialist financiers and politicians so readily able to draw upon the active participation of the "mob"—the denizens of the frankly criminal milieu that thrived in the bowels of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century capitalism, a motley assortment of "armed bohemians" who share the respectable bourgeoisie's possessive individualism without the latter's inhibited propriety, and who bypass the much-vaunted ethic of work in favor of more or less organized violence.^ (Note that she uses the term "mob" not in the word's older sense of the merely uncouth and disorderly poor, but with the slang connotation of a specifically criminal underworld.) She holds that the bourgeois elite’s inevitable collusion with this mob in agitating for imperialist adventures abroad, and, when successful, the mob's involvement in actually managing those adventures, is what ultimately transforms the mere exploitation of markets into a rapacious drive for the outright subjugation of native peoples—a Hobbesian accumulation of power for its own sake.
From all the above, you can see that Arendt’s stance on Nazism as a whole was far different than what is presented in your argument. In fact, it is surprisingly close to mine. Arendt traced the origins of Nazism on the extension of imperialism and the ‘rapacious’ nature of Bourgeois society for aggressive economic expansion. However, she decided for some reason to negate Nazism from that to totalitarianism in her book On the Origins of Totalitarianism. Her negation however, does not really work because of various issues the Stalinist regime had that the Nazi regime didn’t and vice versa. I quote from the same article:
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Together with Arendt's surprisingly scanty treatment of totalitarian genocide, this circumstance points to a second unexpected aspect of this phase of her thought: her theoretical account of totalitarianism is more closely modeled on Stalin's rule than Hitler's, at least in a few important respects. She may discuss the Nazis at somewhat greater length—in itself no surprise, as she had far more documentary evidence to work with—yet it is the Bolshevik case alone that provides her most pertinent illustrations of certain key aspects of her theory. It was Stalin, after all, who had made famous the phrase "it is no accident" as the all-purpose device of ideological explanation (a fact she curiously neglects to mention); her entire analysis of the totalitarian movement's "refusal to recognize the fortuitousness that pervades reality" could be regarded as an extended gloss on his success with that formula (351-2). […]Although the ostensible subject of this passage is "a Nazi or a Bolshevik,"
the particular spectacle that she has in mind is of course the Moscow Trials (and the countless repetitions of this same phenomenon in the interrogation cells of the N.K.V.D.). She (correctly) never suggests that Hitler demanded any such thing of his movement's members.'^^ The lack of a close parallel for this in the Nazi dictatorship is a reflection of a basic difference in the two totalitarian regimes, namely, that acquiescent Germans outside the proscribed categories of targets—and certainly the Nazis themselves—were largely immune from the violence of Hitler's terror, while Stalin's struck most ferociously at the most loyal of Bolsheviks—including (and for a time, especially) the agents of his secret police.
The reason for this mismatch was that the book was two different projects merged into one. I quote from the same article:
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There is a straightforward explanation for the book's unruly organization. It is that Arendt arrived at her basic views on totalitarianism only after she had already written nearly all of what would become parts I and II. Until then, the chapters of those first two parts were to have led not to an analysis of totalitarianism, but instead to one of Nazism, which at the time she understood as the direct successor to imperialism.4 Her decision to treat Nazism as a species of totalitarianism instead—and to extend her purview to the Bolshevik version of it as well—occurred at about the same time she abandoned that view of the former, sometime around 1947. But to accommodate this twofold change, she did little more than graft a new theory onto the trunk of the old, adding a completely new third part to the nearly complete text of the manuscript as written. The reason "Totalitarianism" so confounds readers' expectations is that she revised the previously written part of the text just enough (chiefly in the first chapter of "Antisemitism" and the last two of "Imperialism") to avoid any outright inconsistency with the claims of the new third part, but without any alteration to its basic contents or organization— which thus continue to reflect the priorities of an earlier phase of her thought. In a similar way, the new chapter on "Ideology and Terror" added in later editions represents still another phase of Arendt's thinking on the subject, displacing without fully dislodging the arguments of the one before.
So, as you can see what you called ‘lies’ is actually fact. Hannah Arendt composed her theory of Totalitarianism on Stalin’s reign of terror, not Hitler – and she blurred lines between the two to equalize them for some reason. The only fact we know is, she had a lot of material for another book that tied Nazism to imperialism, which she decided to cram in this book, but that caused her argument to negate the monstrosity of the Nazis she herself recognized earlier in her work to the brutal Stalinist dictatorship. And as for the credits on calling Stalin Totalitarian, I think they should really go to Leon Trotsky. I quote from Trotsky’s book “The Revolution Betrayed”, published in 1937, page 99-100:
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The members of the present Politburo occupied secondary posts throughout the history of the Bolshevik party. If anybody in the first years of the revolution had predicted their future elevation, they would have been the first in surprise, and there would have been no false modesty in their surprise. For this very reason, the rule is more stern at present that the Politburo is always right, and in any case that no man can be right against the Politburo. But, moreover, the Politburo cannot be right against Stalin, who is unable to make mistakes and consequently cannot be right against himself. Demands for party democracy were through all this time the slogans of all the oppositional groups, as insistent as they were hopeless. The above-mentioned platform of the Left Opposition demanded in 1927 that a special law be written into the Criminal Code "punishing as a serious state crime every direct or indirect persecution of a worker for criticism." Instead of this, there was introduced into the Criminal Code an article against the Left Opposition itself. Of party democracy there remained only recollections in the memory of the older generation. And together with it had disappeared the democracy of the soviets, the trade unions, the co-operatives, the cultural and athletic organizations. Above each and every one of them there reigns an unlimited hierarchy of party secretaries. The regime had become "totalitarian" in character several years before this word arrived from Germany. "By means of demoralizing methods, which convert thinking communists into machines, destroying will, character and human dignity," wrote Rakovsky in 1928, "the ruling circles have succeeded in converting themselves into an unremovable and inviolate oligarchy, which replaces the class and the party." Since those indignant lines were written, the degeneration of the regime has gone immeasurably farther. The G.P.V. has become the decisive factor in the inner life of the party. If Molotov in March 1936 was able to boast to a French journalist that the ruling party no longer contains any factional struggle, it is only because disagreements are now settled by the automatic intervention of the political police. The old Bolshevik party is dead, and no force will resurrect it.
Trotsky, one of the harshest critics of Stalin, kept calling the take-over "Bonapartism" and "The Soviet Thermidor". And I think he is right in suggesting this, as I have already written earlier in this thread.
So, there you have it. That’s why you needed to read the entire book. Because it doesn’t make sense, unless you know the full story of how this book came to be in this form. Of course, Cold War enthusiasts jumped on it and used it to declare the USSR an Empire of Evil decades after Stalin had died and the country had reverted back to its supposed style, all the while curtailing the scathing argument Arendt herself proposed on how Nazism came out of capitalism.