“Nazi infiltration of interest groups and also the creation of parallel organizations, which gave the impression of a party listening attentively to particular grievances. It also reflected a totalitarian aspiration, in the sense that Nazis believed that no area of life was to remain unpolitical, and a very modern view that an aggregation of interests would facilitate an eventual political takeover.”

— Michael Burleigh

Source: The Third Reich: A New History (2000), p.105

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Michael Burleigh 17

American historian and writer 1955

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Context: Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens — and real diseases are useful material. Epidemic diseases usually elicit a call to ban the entry of foreigners, immigrants. And xenophobic propaganda has always depicted immigrants as bearers of disease (in the late nineteenth century: cholera, yellow fever, typhoid fever, tuberculosis). … Such is the extraordinary potency and efficacy of the plague metaphor: it allows a disease to be regarded both as something incurred by vulnerable "others" and as (potentially) everyone's disease.

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Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) German jurist, political theorist and professor of law

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