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Persecuted Intellectuals

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"There so many worse crimes! Why are you persecuting me?!"note 

Carl: Let's make litter outta these literati!
Lenny: That's too clever. You're one of them!

Some communities regard all intellectuals as suspicious at best, and a danger to society at worst. This kind of prejudice sometimes crops up in isolated rural areas where most people lack a formal education and intellectuals are outsiders by default.

Other times, such an attitude is the hallmark of a totalitarian dictatorship. If knowledge is power, then all that book-learning could pose a threat to the regime — better to keep the people ignorant and complacent. In a speculative fiction setting, the government might fear that scientists or other scholars are dangerously close to uncovering the truth behind The Masquerade, and must be suppressed at all costs.

Sometimes, the fear and hatred of intellectuals stems from a past disaster: if half the world was destroyed in the Great Robot War of 3052, for example, the survivors may be wary of mechanical engineers. More often than not, however, the educated are merely a convenient scapegoat. After all, nobody likes a know-it-all. That jerk with his fancy college degree thinks he's better than you! Like other forms of institutionalized prejudice, this can be a brutally effective tool for directing the public's anger away from the government.

An exaggerated situation of this trope (mainly in SF) happens when the intellectuals lean so much on the side of Übermensch that they seem to form a new species to any "normal" human. Expect Torches and Pitchforks, maybe also Humans Are the Real Monsters.

All of the above aside, it should be noted that sometimes the intellectuals were the ones persecuting others, making life miserable for other intellectuals they don't agree with. In this case, you have an Intellectually Supported Tyranny that doesn't appreciate other intellectuals who don't toe the line.

See also Book Burning, which often accompanies the persecution of academics, and Tall Poppy Syndrome, where any sort of specialness is equally dangerous. Compare and contrast Evil Luddite and Intelligence Equals Isolation. For works that portray intelligent or learned people in a negative light, see Dumb Is Good and Science Is Bad. Contrast Academia Elitism, for people being persecuted for their lack of education.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • In Attack on Titan, this is the true purpose of the Military Garrison's 1st battalion. They are charged with brutally persecuting scientists, inventors, explorers, and anyone who tries to find out too much about the outside world.
  • One Piece: In Robin's backstory, the scholars of Ohara were annihilated by the Marines because they pursued forbidden knowledge. Specifically, they sought the history of the "Void Century" which the World Government keeps hidden at all costs. Since Robin was affiliated with them and managed to escape, she became a wanted criminal at the age of 8.

    Audio Plays 
  • In a flashback in the Blake's 7 audio "Solitary", Federation troops march into a school, round up the students and the teachers, and then execute the teachers for the crime of "agitation". The children are sent off to factories.

    Comic Books 
  • 2000 AD: The short strip Danger! Genius At Work! features a society where intelligent people are persecuted because Individuality Is Illegal. Literally; all the men and women look exactly the same, are respectively named Terry or June, and anyone who tries to create progress by getting ideas for new inventions is forcibly put into the Equalizer, a machine that turns a person into a Terry or June. However, at the end one of the police officers who arrests intelligent people is shown getting struck by the spark of creativity himself.
  • The DC Comics series The Atomic Knights featured a post-Atomic War setting where scientists were blamed for creating the superweapons that destroyed civilization and made the world a radioactive wasteland. The Knights wore their concealing helmets partially to obscure the fact that some of them were scientists, and thus acceptable targets for the mob.

    Fan Works 
  • Always Visible: Jordan Thurlow's character is portrayed as a well-read bookworm who had the misfortune of meeting a girl whose parents accused her boyfriend of molesting their daughter.
  • The Moon Cries in Reverse (Naruto): The whole plot of the series is set into motion by Anko fearing that her students Shikamaru and Sakura could turn on Konoha due to their intelligence making them question things too much for her liking. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the Sandaime and Ibiki decide her paranoia is reason enough to shunt the pair into their Torture and Interrogation department for several months, alongside their teammate Naruto. Hiruzen refuses to show any remorse for this, even after Jiriaya points out the likelihood of them turning on Konoha as a direct result of this mistreatment.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • At the end of the Spanish movie La lengua de las mariposas (or Butterfly, as it was called in English-speaking countries), the wise and kindly old teacher is rounded up after the Falangists take over.
  • Land of the Blind: One of the signs the new regime is as bad as the old one is that they round up intellectuals and send them to re-education camps.
  • The Promise (2016): The main protagonist is a doctor who gets rounded up by the Ottoman authorities alongside several Armenian notables during the Red Sunday, the event usually regarded as beginning the Armenian Genocide (when over 200 intellectual Armenians were rounded up, with most killed).

    Jokes 
  • In Soviet Russia, cops move in threes: one to ask questions and write them down, one to read what the other wrote, and the third to keep an eye on these dangerous intellectuals.

    Literature 
  • In Anathem, mathematicians (called "Avout") are confined to monasteries (called "Maths"), and only allowed contact with the outside world once per year, decade, century, or millennium. On three occasions the Maths were invaded because the Avout invented technologies considered too dangerous ("new matter", genetic engineering, and magic). There are lesser schools within the Maths, where outsiders can go for a limited amount of time (not more than a month) to learn needed skills, but the more advanced orders are shut off from the rest of society for the most part.
  • The Burning Kingdoms: Ahirani poets and scribes who had written in support of their country being independent are viciously executed for it by the Parijati who rule them.
  • In A Canticle for Leibowitz, this is part of the aftermath of global nuclear war. After the enraged survivors slaughter the scientists who developed the bombs, they begin to target other scientists... and then other scholars... and then anyone with a formal education. The ultimate result is a society where it's dangerous to admit that you know how to read.
  • In Emprise, the first novel in the Trigon Disunity trilogy by Michael P. Kube-McDowell, society has mostly collapsed and backslid technologically after an ambitious effort to improve the world horribly backfired resulting in laws against intellectuals and Kangaroo court executions. The astronomer who sets off the efforts by the leader of India to change things after revealing an alien spaceship is coming is executed by the American Redneck court for the trumped-up charge that he had wasted resources on such nonsense as studying the stars instead of turning over his solar panels for 'proper' use by the community.
  • The reason for the existence of the Firefighters in Fahrenheit 451.
  • Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle dramatizes Stalin's imprisonment of scientific intellectuals. The paradox, as noted in many of Solzhenitsyn's novels, is that intellectuals are actually freer in the Gulag, where the worst has largely already happened to them than they would be in the Soviet Union outside. Their bodies might be imprisoned, they might be on a poor diet, but their minds are free to interact and think and speak heresy.
  • Guardian Cats and the Lost Books of Alexandria: In the 4th century, anti-intellectuals did mass Book Burnings of libraries under the guise of "protecting" the youth from harmful ideas and bloated egos. They'd murder and imprison the librarians, with the imprisoned ones also being executed eventually.
  • In Hard to Be a God, intellectuals of all kinds (derisively dubbed "book-readers") are persecuted by the Evil Chancellor Don Reba and his storm troopers, to better prepare the country for annexation by an Enlightenment-hating theocracy.
  • Exaggerated to the extreme in the short story Harrison Bergeron where even having, by today's standards, an average intelligence, athleticism, or appearance is handicapped in order for all to be equal by way of lowest denominator.
  • In the H.I.V.E. Series, this is how Dr. Nero sells the Alpha program to the scared first-years who have just been kidnapped and told they will not be able to go outside for the foreseeable future: that had they stayed in the outside world, they would be treated as outcasts for their intelligence.
  • Martín Fierro When Fierro reflects that the Judge punished him because Fierro didn't vote the last election, Fierro invokes this trope arguing that The Judge took him for one of them, when the truth was that Fierro didn't vote because he is Dumb Is Good and he is simply not interested in that.
  • In Nineteen Eighty-Four, those who are too openly intelligent are quietly eliminated, both from the Party ranks and the proletariat. This happens to Winston's friend Syme — even though he's a vociferous supporter of the regime, he "sees too clearly and speaks too plainly", and simply disappears one day.
  • Tales of the Bounty Hunters: In "The Last One Standing: The Tale of Boba Fett" we learn that the Empire had arrested and killed famous musicians who spoke out to protest them, along with trying to destroy all their music. Devaronian Kardue'sai'Malloc, Fett's bounty at the end of the story, owns the only remaining copies of many such musicians' work. He comes quietly with Fett in return for bringing his music recordings and disseminating them. Fett agrees to his offer.
  • Victoria has the heroes conducting a brutal purge of Straw Liberal college professors, while wearing Crusader surplices and wielding swords, with a Gregorian choir providing live musical accompaniment. This is broadcast throughout their new nation, to show that 'Cultural Marxism' has no place there. In fairness, the professors in question had done things like force men to prostrate before a temple to Artemis and publicly confess to PC "sins", but still...

    Live-Action TV 
  • In 30 Rock, Dotcom is often ridiculed, disrespected, or even disliked by others for being intelligent, articulate, and well-read. He's even told he has a "need to be the smartest guy in the room" and believes this is why he's still single.
  • In an episode of Becker, Becker is called to jury duty but keeps getting rejected. He believes that lawyers don't want him because they believe as a doctor he is too intelligent. At one point he almost gets accepted on a jury until he mentions he was reading a book. Meanwhile, his ditzy assistant Linda is quickly put on a jury and made foreman.
  • Discussed in the Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey episode "Hiding in the Light", which depicts the Burning of Books and Burying of Scholars that took place in the Qin dynasty. Neil deGrasse Tyson points to this as one of the great dangers to science and human achievement.
  • Farscape: The Peacekeepers are implied to be somewhat anti-intellectual, with rank-and-file soldiers looking down on and oppressing the "techs" and also showing suspicion of Gammak Bases and the "Science-Military" based there. On the other hand, the officers in command of Gammak Bases, like Scorpius, are full-fledged scientists whose rank still commands respect, so this may only apply to technicians.
  • The Handmaid's Tale:
    • Offred notes that all college professors were sent to the Colonies (a slow death from radiation poisoning) or... we don't get to hear the rest, but presumably killed. They spared Ofglen because she was fertile. We later learn that a prostitute was once a professor and (judging by Moira's story) was given the choice of working as this or going to the Colonies.
    • When Emily meets a Wife who was sent to the Colonies, the Wife assumes that she was sent there for that reason, and tells her that she opposed the "university purges" because "getting an education doesn't make you a sinner." Emily doesn't correct her assumption until right before she kills the Wife.
    • In the second episode of season 2, Offred encounters another version of this while hiding in the offices of the Boston Globe. All their desks are filled with their personal things as if they never left. When she goes to the basement of the building, she finds nooses, bullet holes, and human-sized bloodstains, suggesting they were all assassinated by the Gilead regime.
  • John LaMarr from The Orville grew up in a farming colony where eggheads weren't exactly prized, so he learned to adapt via Obfuscating Stupidity. When Kelly Grayson discovers how smart he really is, she gets Captain Mercer to promote him to chief engineer.
  • Trotsky: In 1922, the Soviet government starts rounding up all kinds of dissident intellectuals, mostly poets and university professors. They initially want them shot, but Trotsky successfully convinces the government to just exile them (in a rare moment of mercy, though he says it's practical as mass executions could alienate many Western Communist sympathizers, urged on by Maxim Gorky).
  • The Twilight Zone (1959):
    • In "Time Enough at Last", everyone looks down on and picks on Henry Bemis for being a reader.
    • In "The Obsolete Man", Romney Wordsworth the librarian is considered obsolete, as books have been banned.
  • The Twilight Zone (1985): In the episode "Examination Day", the government exterminates anyone who scores too high on a mandatory examination at twelve years old. Dickie Jordan is one such victim.
  • In V (1983), The Visitors begin persecuting and rounding up scientists and getting humanity to go along with it, because scientists had readily identified that the Visitors were not actually Human Aliens, so they feared exposure of their true natures or nefarious agenda. In order to do this, they brainwashed famous scientists who blow the lid on a fake international conspiracy among scientists to seize Visitor technology, and say that they withhold breakthroughs like cancer treatments for money.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Genius: The Transgression has Clockstoppers. Walking avatars of anti-intellectualism who can turn even communities of scientists into an angry mob looking to persecute the intelligentsia.
  • The Coalition States in Rifts promote this trope to their general population, to the extent that Rogue Scholars and Rogue Scientists are playable character classes. This is hypocrisy however, as the CS is ruled by an elite class of educated technocrats. CS Propaganda teaches that only government-trained scientists are safe. Which is ironic because their foremost think tank, the Lone Star Genetic Research Complex, is staffed by a raging pack of Mad Scientists whose leader considers himself a god! Literacy is frowned upon (though not actually illegal), and the Coalition has an extensive list of banned books, and Public Enemy Number One is the famed scholar and writer Erin Tarn, who is in her 70s and whose only threat is in promoting open-mindedness and acceptance of non-humans.

    Theatre 
  • In Henry VI Part 2, Dick The Butcher says "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." Although this is often interpreted as a standard Evil Lawyer Joke, the implication is that without lawyers, there would be nobody who knows any law to get in the way of Jack Cade's autocratic rule.
  • Parade: The violently anti-Semitic people of rural Georgia are already suspicious of Leo Frank because he is Jewish, but the fact that he is one of the few men in town with a college degree doesn't help matters. Prosecutor Hugh Dorsey, milking the Simple Country Lawyer persona for all it's worth, even cites Leo's "big fancy talk" as evidence that he can't be trusted.

    Video Games 
  • A Vox Populi rebel in Bioshock Infinite tells his comrades to kill anyone they see wearing glasses, probably in reference to the Khmer Rouge doing the same. The Vox are not specifically anti-science or anti-intellectual, but as the poorest and most oppressed citizens of Columbia, they oppose anything that represents the upper classes.
  • In Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, the planet Bryyo's backstory involves a war between the intellectual Lords of Science and the traditional Primals, which eventually ended with the Primals hunting down and killing any of intellectuals that remained after the war.
  • In Tropico, intellectuals can be cowed into submission via Book Burning or become a banned faction altogether.

    Western Animation 
  • Cow and Chicken: The episode "Black Sheep of the Family" invokes and lampshades this. Because Cousin Black Sheep is actually a very articulate sheep, and the rest of this universe is a Cloud Cuckooland, other characters take Black Sheep's big words as insults, to the point that even Red Guy, who is Officer O'Fannihee, deems Black Sheep as a wanted criminal.
  • Lampshaded in Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius when Child Prodigy Jimmy runs from the Angry Mob of kids demanding to know where their parents were, assuming this trope to be in effect and stating "In times of crises intellectuals are always the first to go!"
  • In one episode of My Gym Partner's a Monkey, Adam convinces the school to switch their grading system from picture stickers to competitive letter grades. Due to the animals' natural instincts to destroy all they declare a threat, Adam, as well Phineas Porpoise and his "Spiffy" gang, gets persecuted for being smart. The trope then gets inverted in the climax, where Adam gets other students to join him and the Spiffys by pointing out they are intelligent in their own way. The conflict ends with the "smart" students ganging up on the not-so-smart Henry Armadillo.
  • Used several times as throwaway gags on The Simpsons to illustrate how much of a Crapsack World the town is (at least once to the point that even the corrupt mayor gets sick). Torches and Pitchforks are a common sight.
    • In "A Star is Burns", Mayor Quimby shows a video of one time when Seymour Skinner saying that the Earth revolves around the Sun almost has him torched on the stake. Quimby is upset at how this has ruined the town's reputation.
      Grampa: Burn him!
      (a reporter takes a picture of him)
      Grampa: You've stolen my soul!
    • When tests of a mysterious skeleton fail to prove that it was the remains of an angel, the citizens of Springfield become enraged at science. The resulting riot culminates in the local research laboratories being bombed with Molotov cocktails and the museums being thrashed.
    • In the episode "HOMR", Homer becoming incredibly smart (or at least comparatively) for a short time leads to him temporarily becoming a pariah.note  In a parody of a Drunken Montage, he even wanders past signs saying "Dum-Dum Club" and "Smart People Not Welcome".
    • In "Bart's Comet", when the titular comet almost destroys Springfield, the first reaction of the Springfeldians is to set the local observatory on fire "to prevent it from happening again."
    • In "The Monkey Suit", we get one of the worst examples of The Lopsided Arm of the Law in fiction (and the current page picture) when Ned Flanders forces the Springfield school system to switch to creationism. As a result, Lisa gets arrested for daring to continue to read Charles Darwin's "Theory of Evolution" on school grounds, and this police force decides to wilfully ignore Snake going on a killing spree right in front of them (in Wiggum's defense, extremely feeble as it is, he sheepishly mentions the police department only has enough budget to enforce the most recent law passed, and he does admit that it's the absolute worst, far as policy goes).

    Real Life 
  • The association between this trope and totalitarian dictatorships is very much Truth in Television:
    • Anti-intellectualism is a common motif in fascist rhetoric, and such persecution was rampant in both Nazi Germany and Francoist Spain.
    • We may find solace in the fact that the Nazis delayed their own efforts to build the Bomb because they had labeled nuclear physics "Jewish science", as many of its top contributors (e.g. Albert Einstein) were German Jews. Others like Werner Heisenberg, although not Jewish, were prohibited from using their work.
    • The Francoists had a worse precedent in the "Ominous Decade" (1823-1833) during the reign of Ferdinand VII, under which all universities were closed (only time this happened in the history of Spain) and the long-past-its-date Inquisition was brought back for a swan song as basically the king's secret police.
    • Intellectuals were targeted in the USSR as part of Josef Stalin's "Great Purge". The primary example was persecution of biologists who disagreed with "Lysenkoism", a doctrine promulgated by an obscure agronomist named Trofim Lysenko who believed Lamarck was right. For ideological reasons, the regime favored Lamarck/Lysenko over the then-new synthesis of Darwin/Mendel.note  Persecution of dissidents from Lysenkoism went on into the 1950s, helping to cause the Soviet famines as its methods were painfully disproven and setting back genetic science in the country by decades. To a lesser extent, astronomers began to disappear when sunspot research was deemed "un-Marxist", linguists who disagreed with Stalin's preferred pseudoscientific "Japhetic theory" were killed or imprisoned, and the Meteorological Office was purged for failing to predict weather harmful to crops. Mathematicians who disagreed that the Law of Large Numbers was false also suffered persecution.
    • One extreme example is the massacre of academics under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, who would kill people for merely wearing eyeglasses (as it suggested literacy).
    • China's Cultural Revolution included a war against academia, with many scholars, teachers, scientists, and especially historians (a major goal was to abolish old traditions) beaten up, foreclosed on, killed, or drafted for menial labor.
    • During the Qin Dynasty in China, intellectual discourse was suppressed in order to consolidate power in the hands of the emperor. Known as the "burning of books and burying of scholars," this period in time saw the murder of many intellectuals and the destruction of their works in an attempt to eliminate dissenting political opinions.
  • Napoléon Bonaparte fancied himself as an intellectual and usually made a show of giving rewards and sinecures to important scientists and artists. But in practice, the likes of Madame de Stael were driven into exile, the media was policed and subject to strict control. He also had Marquis de Sade imprisoned in Charenton for the rest of his life, solely because he read his works and found them disgusting (which, to be fair, they were, and De Sade comes across as a depraved monster for anyone who has read about his personal life). Far less well known, except in Germany, is the time he ordered the execution of Johann Philipp Palm of Nuremberg, a publisher of a pamphlet criticizing the French occupation.
  • This even happens in major democracies on occasion:
    • In the 1790s, the English government in fear of The French Revolution taking root in England passed laws of sedition driven to suppress dissent and pro-French support within England. English rioters burned down the house of pro-French scientist reformer Joseph Priestley and Thomas Paine found himself driven away from England to France. Within their colonies, the English, proclaimers of democracy and rationality, often arrested intellectuals who criticized the government on charges of sedition and passed many draconian laws of censorship.
    • France during the Terror was not shy of using the guillotine against anyone they felt were threats to the state or who had shady political pasts. Of course as a rule, they did not persecute people solely because they were intellectuals but in practice, they did claim populist ideas and subscribed to Guilt by Association and show trials. Prominent victims include chemist Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier (who was guillotined because of his past as a tax collector), Thomas Paine and Marquis de Condorcet, both of them imprisoned for their connections to the Girondins, with Condorcet committing suicide in captivity. Likewise, Marquis de Sade was confined because his son defected to the enemy and he was an ex-aristocrat, who as judge of the local Revolutionary tribunal let many people escape the guillotine.
    • In America, during the Red Scare, there were the Palmer Raids which deported many radical intellectuals, local and international, out of America. During The '30s there was the Dies Committee which investigated the Federal Theatre Works committee and accused Christopher Marlowe and Euripides of being communists and even argued that art was inherently subversive of American values. During the era of McCarthyism, you had the Blacklist where many Hollywood filmmakers, screenwriters, and actors were forced out of work and into exile because of suspected and actual communist sympathies and affiliations. Similar persecution existed during the Civil Rights Movement and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was notorious for wire-tapping and building files on many artists and other intellectuals who had been accused of being subversive.
    • India, despite being The Largest Democracy, has draconian censorship policies and tends to have a poor record in upholding freedom of speech under threats. Famously and ironically, India was the first nation that banned The Satanic Verses despite being a secular democracy with a Hindu majority, and that its author Salman Rushdie was British-Indian. Likewise, books critical of certain public and historical figures will lead to riots.
    • Recep Ergodan's Turkey has been arresting and firing a number of journalists and university professors in the wake of a failed coup attempt in 2016 (some believe no plot even occurred, that it was a ploy to allow this).
  • More generally, this trope has been both inverted and played straight. Communist revolutionaries like Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong were themselves intellectuals, who in some cases wrote door stoppers on Marxist theory and persecuted other intellectuals when they came to power. These purges were used by democracies as justification to persecute their intellectuals-some of whom were and are Marxists themselves.
  • The Red Sunday was the deportation and eventual execution of 200 some Armenian intellectuals like artists, journalists, lawyers, clergymen, and doctors by the Ottoman Empire under the Committee of Union and Progress just prior to the Armenian Genocide in order to decapitate any resistance by Armenians before it could happen.
  • Similarly, during the German occupation of Poland, intellectuals were targeted for elimination to prevent them from leading any Polish resistance efforts. 25 professors in Lwów were killed along with their families, for instance. Teachers and clergy (sometimes overlapping) were especially targeted. It didn't work, as Poland soon had the occupied countries' largest resistance movement.
  • During the Bangladesh Liberation War, over 1,111 Eastern Pakistani intellectuals were murdered by the army, terrorists, and Islamist militias from March to December 1971 because they protested discrimination from their Western counterparts and encouraged nationalism and sedition. Today, their tragic deaths are honored on December 14 in Bangladesh as the Martyred Intellectuals Day. In the 2010s, dozens of intellectuals (mostly professors and bloggers) were assassinated (or attacked with an intent to assassinate them) by Bangladeshi Muslim extremists for their (real or alleged) atheism and support of secularism. These attacks were linked to the war, as the Islamist parties have links to the militias which slaughtered the intellectuals then too. Modern secularist Bangladeshis have denounced the war criminals involved then and advocated a harsher punishment for their crimes, which sparked Islamist ire, resulting in a death list being circulated by Islamic militants that they used. Even those who weren't attacked (or survived attempts) fled Bangladesh to avoid harm. Others were arrested by the government for supposed blasphemy, which was roundly criticized for punishing people threatened with violence rather than protecting them. Dozens of prominent Islamic clergy in Bangladesh publicly called for all atheists/secularists to be executed over their "insults" to Islam or the Prophet Muhammad. However, even in exile (say, within the UK) some exiled Bangladeshi intellectuals were still threatened as word about who they were was spread. Some of the murderers were punished in Bangladesh, but many such murders have still been left unsolved, while extreme fear has spread as a result of voicing opinions labeled anti-Islamic, quite naturally.
  • The Algerian Civil War really came to a head with a series of assassinations of university academics, intellectuals, writers, artists, journalists and medical doctors by the GIA (Armed Islamic Group in English), a renegade faction even more radical and fundamentalist than the other Islamists, who targeted intellectuals more than government officials because they were seen as a "corrupting, foreign influence" due to speaking French. One infamous quote by GIA leaders is "those that fight us by the pen will die by the sword". The most well-known victims were Rai singer Cheb Hasni and secularist/poet Lounès Matoub.
  • The Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram (whose name translates to "Western education is forbidden") has made its goal to wage a deliberate war of destruction against civilization by targeting schools and placing teachers on assassination hit lists alongside security officers and politicians. Insurgents have shown particular distaste for certain subjects like geography and science and reject the theory of evolution, rain being caused by evaporation and condensation, and that the Earth is round.
  • The infamous Yeonsan-gun of Joseon made a habit of persecuting intellectuals. First, he organised two purges of scholars and their families. Then he executed scholars who criticised his great-grandfather. Then he outlawed all forms of writing because the common people wrote against him. Then he turned the Seonggyungwan, the most prestigious school in Korea, into his personal brothel.
  • The Qin Dynasty was the first imperial dynasty, that is, the first whose rulers gave themselves the title Shi Huangdi (emperor). They were noted for standardizing axle lengths (so carts could travel on all the rutted roads of the empire), coinage, writing style, etc. They were also noted for burning all the books that didn't conform to the philosophy of Legalism. And also burying all the scholars who knew anything about those books alive. It's known among historians as the burning of the books and the burying of the scholars. Nearly all the texts we have from before the Qin had to be recreated by later scholars from memory. Fortunately, the Qin dynasty was a short one, being supplanted by the Han dynasty after only 15 years and two emperors.

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