Loyalty to dead comrades can outlast all ideological conviction.

Evidence

When my father was thoroughly disenchanted with the system, I asked him why he still called himself a Communist. He showed me a little plastic—well, I suppose, bakelite—cube, with six little photos glued on its sides: the portraits of some of the best friends of his youth, tortured to death by the royal Hungarian and Romanian secret services, or by the Gestapo in that awful year, 1944. “Because I cannot explain it to them,” he said. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 252

Categorization

• CANDY: The bakelite cube of six dead friends is a quietly devastating anecdote — ‘because I cannot explain it to them’ — that lands without needing surrounding theory.