Matches a lot of my experiences with Trots, often well read and know a lot about socialist history, but always in a “I can recite the exact names and addresses of everyone who attended the first international” sort of way. They can recite things that they have memorised, but they don’t seek to understand it or interpret it, the “information” is pure and not to be examined or discussed or challenged, like religious dogma. There’s no reflection, no understanding of the human element of these events, no “what would I do given the information they had at the time?” it’s always just “the bad people did the bad thing and suppressed the good kind of communism forever.”