Purges and Victims
“A decade ago I had started writing Academic Armageddon, but I wasn’t thinking much about purges. Though the book does mention the Khmer Rouge persecution of the bookish, I underestimated the fallout from this and other 20th-century ‘Cultural Revolutions’. Whereas these cataclysms eradicated the freedom of academics and intellectuals per se, their eventual fallout in the West didn’t, in fairness, look like a purge at all. More like a plague. Certainly in UCD it was a covert, corrupting contagion coinciding with the new milennium …” (more)
[In a Strange Land, 11 April]