Politics & Power Quote by Arthur Seyss-Inquart

A sentence like this isn’t argument; it’s a designation. Seyss-Inquart isn’t trying to persuade so much as to sort the world into categories that justify what comes next. By naming “the Jews” as “the enemy,” he converts a civilian minority into a military target, collapsing political disagreement into existential threat. That’s the key rhetorical move: it evacuates individuality and replaces it with a single, hostile essence. Once a group is defined as an “enemy,” the moral vocabulary shifts from rights and law to defense, necessity, and preemptive violence.

The phrasing is also strategically impersonal. There’s no “some Jews,” no grievance, no policy dispute. Just “the Jews,” a totalizing label, welded to “National Socialism” as if the ideology itself were a body under siege. It’s propaganda that flatters its audience: if you’re part of the movement, you’re automatically on the side of survival; if you resist, you’re implicitly collaborating with the “enemy.” That’s how regimes turn complicity into identity.

Context matters because Seyss-Inquart was not a fringe agitator; he was a high-ranking Nazi functionary central to Anschluss Austria and later the occupation of the Netherlands, where deportations and terror were administrative practice. Read against that backdrop, the line functions less as opinion than as bureaucratic preface. It’s the kind of declarative simplicity that makes atrocity legible as policy: not “we will harm,” but “they are the enemy,” leaving the listener to supply the “therefore.”