Intellectuals and Violence

The hideous crimes committed in Cambodia from April 1975 onwards, which involved the deaths of between a fifth and a third of the population, were organized by a group of Francophone middle-class intellectuals known as the Angka Leu ("the Higher Organization").  Of its eight leaders, five were teachers, one a university professor, one a civil servant and one an economist....

The association of intellectuals with violence occurs too often to be dismissed as an aberration.  Often it takes the form of admiring those"men of action" who practise violence.  Mussolini had an astonishing number of intellectual followers, by no means all of them Italian.  In his ascent to power, Hitler consistently was most successful on the campus, his electoral appeal to students regularly outstripping his performance among the population as a whole.  He always performed well among teachers and university professors.  Many intellectuals were drawn into the higher echelons of the Nazi Party and participated in the more gruesome excesses of the SS.  Thus the four Einsatzgruppen or mobile killing battalions which were the spearhead of Hitler’s "final solution" in Eastern Europe contained an unusually high proportion of university graduates among the officers.  Otto Ohlendorf, who commanded "D" Battalion, for instance, had degrees from three universities and a doctorate in jurisprudence.  Stalin, too, had legions of intellectual admirers in his time, as did such post-war men of violence as Castro, Nasser and Mao Tse-tung.

Paul Johnson, “Intellectuals,” cited by Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society p.236-237