The USSR at least pushed hard for science, engineering and technology education. Political party type and organization aside, the rapid growth of their electrical grid and large-scale engineering projects (hydroelectric dams, airports, nuclear power, hospitals etc) in the post-1945 era was quite rapid.
The Khmer Rouge and its strongly anti-intellectual stance was quite the opposite. You can't return an entire country to an agrarian subsistence agriculture system and literally kill off every educated person that can be found, and expect good results...
Much of the "progress" in the USSR was based on slave labour [1]. And it was not limited to just physical labour. Many intellectual feats were also the product of people working in, what essentially amounts to, a prison [2].
They were particularly encouraging of scientific endeavors that contributed to national posterity over other nations and disregarded the rest. Intellectual pursuits in politics and really any criticism of government or social norms could get one easily disappeared.
> the rapid growth of their electrical grid and large-scale engineering projects (hydroelectric dams, airports, nuclear power, etc) in the post-1945 era was quite rapid.
In the 1920s and 1930s, 2,000 writers, intellectuals, and artists were imprisoned and 1,500 died in prisons and concentration camps. After sunspot development research was judged un-Marxist, twenty-seven astronomers disappeared between 1936 and 1938.
[...]
Official figures put the total number of documentable executions during the years 1937 and 1938 at 681,692,[1][92] in addition to 136,520 deaths in the Gulag;[3] whereas the total estimate of deaths brought about by Soviet repression during the Great Purge ranges from 950,000 to 1.2 million
The Soviet universities also had Marxist agriculture departments that guaranteed year after year of food shortages due to "bad weather". Anyone who disagreed was purged until only Marxists, whom they defined as the only true "intellectuals", remained.
True anti-intellectualism is when you don't allow intellectual debate. It doesn't require emptying the universities entirely. It is sufficient to empty them of anyone who doesn't sufficiently support the mandated opinions. You can then define those politically pure supporters as the "intellectuals" and anyone who doesn't go along with them as, by definition, "anti-intellectual". You then have an anti-intellectual system where intellectual debate has been silenced, but the universities remain open and anyone who disputes their pronouncements is on the outside and is called "anti-intellectual".
walrus01|5 years ago
The Khmer Rouge and its strongly anti-intellectual stance was quite the opposite. You can't return an entire country to an agrarian subsistence agriculture system and literally kill off every educated person that can be found, and expect good results...
clon|5 years ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka
enitihas|5 years ago
The USSR was no less anti intellectual in other fields like biology:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
kennxfl|5 years ago
rdtsc|5 years ago
Some of the large construction projects, were built with slave labor. Not all of course, but many where. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Gulag_camps. "The Road of Bones" is famous as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R504_Kolyma_Highway
And while science and engineering was promoted later, during Stalin's time, a lot of intellectuals were purged https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
---
In the 1920s and 1930s, 2,000 writers, intellectuals, and artists were imprisoned and 1,500 died in prisons and concentration camps. After sunspot development research was judged un-Marxist, twenty-seven astronomers disappeared between 1936 and 1938.
[...]
Official figures put the total number of documentable executions during the years 1937 and 1938 at 681,692,[1][92] in addition to 136,520 deaths in the Gulag;[3] whereas the total estimate of deaths brought about by Soviet repression during the Great Purge ranges from 950,000 to 1.2 million
---
SiVal|5 years ago
True anti-intellectualism is when you don't allow intellectual debate. It doesn't require emptying the universities entirely. It is sufficient to empty them of anyone who doesn't sufficiently support the mandated opinions. You can then define those politically pure supporters as the "intellectuals" and anyone who doesn't go along with them as, by definition, "anti-intellectual". You then have an anti-intellectual system where intellectual debate has been silenced, but the universities remain open and anyone who disputes their pronouncements is on the outside and is called "anti-intellectual".