Arendt, writing about Hitler, had described a nostalgia for the First World War, which had satisfied a “yearning for anonymity, for being just a number and functioning only as a cog. . . . War had been experienced as that ‘mightiest of all mass actions’ which obliterated individual differences so that even suffering, which traditionally had marked off individuals through unique unexchangeable destinies, could now be interpreted as ‘an instrument of historical progress.’”16 The concept of historical progress—of perpetual motion—was, in turn, key to Arendt’s understanding of how totalitarianism
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