This moment of anticipation is like the calm that saddles after all hopes have died.

In 1933, when she was 27 years old, writer and philosopher Hana Arendt was forced to flee

Germany for France as the Nazis rose to power and autocrats ascended worldwide.

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world, the masses had reached the point where they

would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing.

I think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.

Hana Arendt wrote about the preconditions for creating a totalitarian movement.

Nothing perhaps illustrates the general disintegration of political life better than the fake

purvasive hatred of everybody and everything.

She talked about mass displacement, she talked about economic anxiety.

The hatred consequently turned in all directions,

haphazardly and unpredictably.

German Jews lost their citizenship.

They lost the right even to call themselves German.

She also thought that imperialism and the niceemitism, but I would say racism,

are essential elements, right?

It has to be built against other people.

There also has to be a sense of anxiety, about losing status,

in which people don't feel like they have a clear identity.

It is only natural that these masses, in the first helplessness of their new experience,

have tended to what an especially violent nationalism.

Heating the call of somebody who says, you know, we're going to show them,

...