When governments begin to lose the intellectual argument, they tend to attack those who are perceived to be winning it. Totalitarian governments from Stalin’s Soviet Union to Mao’s Communist China targeted intellectuals. Stalin sent political opponents and writers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the gulag, Maoist China attacked intellectuals and ‘reactionary academics’ during the Cultural Revolution. In some cases, brainwashed Maoist children often killed their own parents for ‘disloyalty’ to Mao.
In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge slaughtered the educated. Nazi book burning campaigns in the 1930s consigned to flames all so called communist and ‘un-German’ books. In the Lok Sabha recently BJP MP Kirron Kher turned her ire against intellectuals and jholawallahs, saying they are politically motivated and only returning awards to Read More
