"It was after the war, and Americans were on one of their monotonous conscience 'trips': be kind to niggers, for Christ's sake, be kind to Jews!" To some extent, Baldwin used his blackness as a kind of surrogate Jewishness: it was his "difference" that sold, and the Jewish intellectuals who knew persecution at first hand could understand racism as persecution of a different hue.
The discovery provides rare insight into the persecution of intellectual figures and efforts then to deal with inquiries into human rights abuses during the Dirty War, when as many as 30,000 people are thought to have been killed or disappeared.
The fact that this assumption is spurious did not prevent the Aryan myth from gaining wide acceptance in Europe from the 18th century onward, and it was eventually to provide a supposed intellectual justification for the persecution of the Semitic Jews by their Aryan Germanic "superiors" during the period of Nazi domination.
The students were angry about censorship, the persecution of intellectuals and the thugs who beat up any student overheard disparaging the regime.
Although French Calvinists had long offered intellectual justifications for resistance to persecution, the term monarchomach is generally reserved for those who wrote after the 1572 St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Paris, in which thousands of Huguenots were slaughtered, an event that made clear that thenceforth religious persecution in France had royal support.
Anslinger was ruthless in his crusade, often stooping to methods that were unethical and, at times, actually illegal – particularly in the monitoring and persecution of artists, scientists and intellectuals he saw as a threat.
"Surely these are the last days" Masters intones, speaking of persecution, not physical, but "political and intellectual", of how so many have turned away from God.
The persecution of Mr Summers for the sin of intellectual rumination is symptomatic of a wider problem.
Though he opposed persecution and endeavoured to convert the Protestants by intellectual argument, Bossuet supported the king's revocation in 1685 of the Edict of Nantes, an action that in effect prohibited French Protestantism.
