A Government of Thugs, by Thugs, for Thugs

The Democrats seem to have taken their cues from earlier totalitarians in the way they have built bridges to the world’s thug population.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, a massive work first published in 1951, Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Nazism, noted striking similarities between Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes. In both of those state-of-the-art tyrannies, the governing classes forged a mutually profitable alliance with society’s criminal elements. These totalitarian governments, which were concerned with ferreting out and removing opposition, took full advantage of their unsavory connections.

They enlisted inveterate criminals to spread terror, lest anyone question their ruthlessness in settling scores. The designation that the father of the late Hitler biographer Joachim Fest ascribed to the Third Reich as a “Verbrecherstaat” (criminal state) was true in two senses. Not only did the Nazis break those laws that characterize civilized societies. They also incorporated criminals into their political operation and often rewarded them. But the party leadership also eliminated some of these hellraisers when they were no longer useful, as Hitler did with the Brown Shirts in 1934.

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