There were no lights, stoves, or window panes... We slept on army cots — Concentration camp

"In a society such as ours, it is almost impossible for a person to be responsible. ...In the whole of our technological society the work is so fragmented and broken up into small pieces that no one is responsible. ...Everyone has his own, specific task. And thats all... The director of the was asked at the Nuremburg trials, “But didn’t you find it horrible? All those corpses?” He replied, “What could I do? I couldn’t process all those corpses. The capacity of the ovens was too small. It caused me many problems. I had no time to think about these people. I was too busy with the technical problem of my ovens.” That is the classic example of an irresponsible person. He carries out his technical task and isn’t interested in anything else."

"This is a history of the : a history of a vast network of labor camps that were once scattered across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union... Literally, the word GULAG is an acronym, meaning Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration. Over time, the word "Gulag" has also come to signify... the system of Soviet slave labor itself, in all forms and varieties: labor camps, punishment camps, criminal and political camps, womens camps, childrens camps, transit camps. Even, more broadly, "Gulag" had come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the "meat-grinder": the arrests... interrogations... transport in unheated cattle cars... forced labor... destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths."

"The Gulag had antecedents in Czarist Russia, in the forced-labor brigades... in Siberia from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. It... took on its modern... familiar form almost immediately after the Russian Revolution. Mass terror against real and alleged opponents was part of the Revolution from the very beginning—and by... 1918, Lenin... had already demanded that "unreliable elements" be locked up in concentration camps outside major towns. A string of aristocrats, merchants, and other people defined as potential "enemies" were duly imprisoned. By 1921, there were... eighty-four camps... mostly designed to "rehabilitate" these first enemies of the people."

"An ethic gone wrong is an essential preliminary to the sweat shop or the concentration camp and the ."

"No nation can fully understand itself or find its place in the world if it does not look with clear eyes at all the glories and disgraces, too, of the past. We, in the United States, acknowledge such an injustice in our own history: The internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry was a great injustice, and it will never be repeated."

"Total loyalty to the movement, which is the psychological basis for total domination, can be expected, Arendt contends, "only from the completely isolated human being" who does not have any social ties. In times of war, revolution, or economic crisis, these masses of isolated people become available for mobilization by totalitarian regimes. Membership... promises... a cure for their "loneliness" and feeling of "not belonging to the world..." The totalitarian propaganda offers "a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to [their] needs... than reality itself." Clinging to the ideology and propaganda of the... movement, these "uprooted masses" can feel at home "through sheer imagination." ...[I]n Arendts conception of total domination, the subjects of this power move in two distinct circles: the wider circle... in society... members... prepared to provide total loyalty to the movement. The narrower circle... inmates of the concentration camps—the "laboratories" in which the experiment of total domination is fully realized."