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Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
When people get into re-education camps and are never heard from again.. well, Hannah Arendt again:
> The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.
And ALL that is required on behalf of the population is to look the other way, to just deny the people who get disappeared is to have blood on one's hands. The excuses people made in the last century are on record, and the excuses we hear today are no better.
It's one thing to feel helpless or be scared, it's one thing to want to, but to not know how -- but to simply look away, and to pat oneself on the back for it! There are a bunch of circles in hell, then there's few hundred circles for nobody, which Dante mistakenly thought to lead nowhere, and then there's a final circle for that.