And I thought I was making some progress telling her about the innovation under socialism, definitions of economic systems, and so on. She’s a doomer anarcho-pacifist btw. She has been wasting hours of my life recent by constantly texting and not really listening to me.
I’ve been wanting to say this for a while, and now would be a good time to do so:
Being the local expert on capitalism in decay, it took me a while to realize that it is impossible for anybody to have a truly perfect grasp of Fascism, not only because the Axis destroyed thousands of documents and the already small minority of witnesses and participants from the Fascist era dwindles yearly, but also because you simply can’t get other people’s exact same feelings from a book, or even a great film like Lion of the Desert or The Grey Zone.
To have a perfect understanding of Fascism, you would have had to live the entire lives of both the oppressors and the oppressed, feeling just how beneficial Fascism was to capitalists like Gustav Krupp at the expense of victims like Anne Frank; how sometimes it was both beneficial and disadvantageous simultaneously, as in the case of the Jewish Sonderkommando XII. Feeling how even after 1945 it benefitted organizations like the C.I.A. while also haunting thousands of ordinary people. Feeling every effect, in real time, that was directly and indirectly from Fascism. In short, you would have to do the impossible.
I can always get closer and closer to the truth, and I plan on continuing doing so. But I am not so naïve or arrogant as to believe that there will come a day when my understanding of the subject will be truly perfect. There’ll always be more that I need to learn, because that is simply a limitation that comes from living only one individual’s life. For me personally, this was the most important lesson that I learned from studying this subject.
Your comment here reminds me of Lenin’s view of dialectical epistemology and human knowledge in general from his notes where he puts it as eloquently as ever: