The dead die a second time by being forgotten. The totalitarians could perform such feats because among their novel arts was a wholesale assault of the factual world and a replacement of it with a factitious world of their own devising.

Intro to 'On Revolution'

For power can of course be destroyed by violence; this is what happens in tyrannies, where the violence of one destroys the power of the many, and which therefore, according to Montesquieu, are destroyed from within; they perish because they engender impotence instead of power.

Terror, the essential means of totalitarian regimes, is found to be a perversion of revolution, often unleashed by what Arendt sees as the mistaken attempt, illustrated by the French revolution, to use revolution to solve "the social question".