What better opportunity to examine a brief history of how the intelligentsia have been the first up against the wall in times of revolution than with the recent launch of Professor Watchlist (www.professorwatchlist.org).
Run by US far right lobby group Turning Point USA, Professor Watchlist claim paradoxically on the one hand to ‘fight for free speech,’ yet want to keep an eye on those pushing a ‘radical agenda in lecture halls.’
While Australia is not at this point – yet – the same rhetoric can be heard in this country by similar pundits and politicians, mournful that the youth are being corrupted by Marxism and the like.
Questioning the vanilla flavour of predatory market capitalism is apparently a threat.
The distrust of knowledge and the persecution of those with it is nothing new – throughout modern times there are many reminders of how knowledge was a threat to extreme left/right dictators.
Here’s a short list of extreme idealogues who purged intellectuals: Vladimir Lenin’s communist Russia (1917–1924), Joseph Stalin’s communist Soviet Union (1929–1953), Hitler’s fascist Nazi Germany (1933–1945), fascist Francisco Franco’s Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Mao Zedong’s communist China (1966–1976) and Pol Pot’s communist Cambodia (1963–1997).
Most recently, the failed Turkish coup in July 2016 saw thousands of military personnel, judges and academics rounded up.
The Atlantic reported at the time that ‘Turkey’s higher education authority demanded the resignation of every university dean in the country in the wake of an attempted coup.’
A similar event happened with the 1915 Armenian genocide, where the Ottoman Empire (pre-Turkey) rounded up, arrested, and deported intellectuals and community leaders, who were later murdered.
If Britain had fallen to a dictator in the first or second world war, one of the first against the wall would surely have been philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell (1872–1970).
As one of the sharpest thinkers in modern history, Russell opposed the extremes of communism and fascism.
He rejected Marxism and modern communism as an ‘abandonment of democracy’ and a ‘doctrine bred of poverty, hatred and strife.’
His 1956 essay, Why I am Not a Communist explains how why he thought the ‘theoretical tenets of communism [are] false’.
On the other hand, he said of fascism that the first step towards that movement is, ‘an energetic leader… who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity.’
‘The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.’
– Hans Lovejoy
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