"Trivializing it like that will help hide the true situation from you. Look back on the twentieth century. Find the five largest slaughterings of human life. Intellectuals claiming to be in the service of high intellectual ideas will show up in at least two of those (Stalin's farm purges, Mao's political purges). Hitler's purge would be debatable, though I'm willing to agree that simply fancying oneself an intellectual is not the same as being one. Some of the other largest slaughterings that don't make the top five, but still involve hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths, have intellectual roots."<p>I fail to see how intellectuals are deeply at fault in your list of Godwinian examples.  Each nation's military was far more deeply involved in all of those horror stories yet we love our troops and our military.<p>Furthermore, all 3 men in your example were, strictly speaking, populists who crafted themselves as intellectuals only through propaganda.  Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were never known for their intellectual prowess until they took power and their respective propaganda machines rebuilt their image.<p>And your central claim, that contemporary distrust of intellectuals is somehow rooted histories butchers begs the question: why isn't anti-intellectualism more widespread, especially on the populations most devastated by these monsters?<p>The type of anti-intellectualism outlined in this thread and news story is a distinctly American version.  Yet in your rationalization of this view you name none of the cultural causes in the US for this view.