How terror turns people into willing accomplices:

« It was not just this client [of psychoanalyst Arutyunyan] who was living in a state of constant anxiety: the entire country [i.e., Russia] was. It was the oldest trick in the book – a constant state of low-level dread made people easy to control, because it robbed them of the sense that they could control anything themselves. This was not the sort of anxiety that moved people to action and accomplishment. This was the sort of anxiety that exceeded human capacity. Like if your teenage daughter has not come home – by morning you have run out of logical explanations, you can no longer calm yourself by pretending [...] and you are left alone with your fear. You can no longer sit still or reason. You regress, and after a while the only thing you can do is scream, like a helpless, terrified baby. You need an adult, a figure of authority. Almost anyone willing to take charge will do. And then, if that someone wants to remain in charge, he will have to make sure that you feel helpless. »

— Masha Gessen, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017), p. 467 f.

The perfidy of this mechanism is that the person who instills the insecurity and anxiety poses as the safeguard against it. And while people trust him to "restore" "stability", all he does, under the guise of stability, is create more instability. The war never ends and is not allowed to ever end.

#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten