When discussing repression, it is important not to lose the human being behind the statistics.
When we speak of “millions of victims,” this can remain an abstraction. But as soon as specifics appear, a name, a role, a biography, personal pain, a person’s fate, our very way of looking at what happened changes.
For my ontology, this is fundamental:
- distinction begins where we single out an individual person rather than a mass;
- detailing transforms a lifeless sum into living reality;
- depth of understanding arises through attention to the singular, not through averaging;
- ethical precision requires speaking about specific people, not only about abstract camps and groups.
In other words, detailing what happened is not a secondary “illustration,” but a necessary act of distinction that creates depth and restores the human dimension.
This is a very important thought from my ontology, and I simply want to record it in some document.
I’m watching a discussion of repression right now, yes, but what matters is something a person said to me, because this organization works with the victims of Stalinist repression. That we should not speak in millions, like five million or however many, that we should not treat people as numbers, right, but look at this particular person, at their position, at their life. Right. And here it is very important to understand, yes, that this too is distinction, right? That is, we add detail, we add detail to people, we add detail to these lifeless statistics, and this matters because it matters in my ontology. This is a distinction, a distinction is created, right? That is, we distinguish an individual person. In other words, detailing, detailing what is happening is what needs to be done, it is what creates depth. It is therefore what we need to move toward. I can just see that the way we look at things naturally changes immediately if we are speaking about a specific person, about their particular pain. Yes, we must speak about specific people, not some abstract camps, some abstract names, right, that attempt to sum them up, to group them together. This is absolutely right.
