STATUS: Mostly incomplete.
Chapter 8 -- Target Key Individuals

    No one can equate the consequences for those who are spied on. (In East Germany: loss of university place, like Young Brecht; loss of job, like Erhard Haufe; reprisals against your children, as happened to Werner, and imprisonment, as in the case of Dr. Warmbier, with the court's sentence decided in advance--by the prosecution.)
        Timothy Garton Ash

All dictators or would-be dictators strategically target key individuals. Job loss or career setbacks are the first kind of pressures these people are likely to face.

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Whether driven by Mussolini or by Goebbels, by Pinochet or by China's Politburo, it's always the same tactic: The state leans on university administrators, who lean on professors and students.

Italian Fascists leaned on university rectors to scrutinize the politics of those whom they oversaw: The rector of Milan's Catholic University actively informed on politically anti-Fascist students to the secret police. If you were either a student or a professor in Mussolini's Italy, expressing unpopular views could get you fired-or even arrested and sent to internal exile. By 1927, if you wanted to secure welfare benefits or get a job or a promotion, citizens, including academics, faced a political litmus test.[10]

Germany emulated the tactic: From the early 1930s, professional purges led so many Jewish and "communist" academics and scientists to emigrate that this led to a major brain drain. By 1933, about 2,000 of the nation's premier artists and writers had fled as well." The Nazi periodical The Nettle depicted this emigration as "a triumph for the German nation."

The National Socialist German Students' League was set up in 1926. It sought to get independent professors fired and to direct the universities' resources toward Nazi goals rather than toward pure research. By 1933, Propaganda Minister Goebbels set in motion one of these purges: "By the beginning of the academic year 1933-34, 313 full professors had been dismissed .... By 1934, some 1600 out of 5000 university teachers had been forced out of their jobs .... Very quickly, newly Nazified Education Ministries made political criteria central not only for appointments but also for teaching and research:"' On May 10, 1933, pro-Nazi students also orchestrated a series of book burnings-events designed to look "spontaneous" but actually directed behind the scenes by Goebbels.'

This pressure on students and academics worked in Chile in the early 1970s as well. Chilean students had been among the few who still dared to march, hold meetings, pass out flyers, and create posters attacking Pinochet after his military coup. But Pinochet purged nonaligned academics and university administrators and put his own military officers in those positions. He closed down whole departments, gutted some university programs, and moved others to new locations. He made it clear that student life was now under new management: that of his cronies. It was obvious to Chilean academics that they had to support the Junta or give up their careers."

Students and academics are always democracy's foot soldiers: Czech students helped bring about the Prague Spring democracy movement. Students in Shanghai and Beijing led the democracy movement in 1989: It was Chinese art students who set up the statue of Lady Liberty in Tiananmen Square.

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