Anti-Science in Communism

Suppression of knowledge weakened Russia in the Lysenko affair. which a political ideologue and former peasant named Trofim Lysenko ingratiated himself to communist leaders and was placed in charge of national agriculture because of his ideological conformity. He denounced and suppressed scientists who questioned his odd schemes as "fly lovers and people haters"^^ (because geneticists were doing fruit fly research-h—I kid you not!) and his uneducated methods decimated Soviet agriculture. Soviet scientists who opposed him were persecuted, jailed, and shot. Similar to modern Republican characterizations of climate science as 'junk science" by an "environmental priesthood," Soviet geneticists physicists, and chemists were characterized as "caste priests of ivory-tower bourgeois pseudoscience."^* Soviet agriculture, biology, and genetics were held back for forty years, weakening the Soviet Union and helping lead to its eventual downfall.

Suppression of knowledge similarly weakened China during Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward. Mao prided himself on his peasant roots and considered intellectuals arrogant, dangerous antirevolutionaries. similar to the modern characterization of them by Rush Limbaugh. h. Similar to Eisenhower, Mao was concerned that scientists could take o over as a "technical elite," so he demanded that ideology take precedence o over science, effectively silencing scientists. In 1957 he set forth a plan to transform China into a modern industrialized society. It would overtake Britain in fifteen years while simultaneously feeding its own people and exporting grain to other nations. Mao had no knowledge of metallurgy. but based on a single demonstration he mobilized millions of peasants to smelt steel in "backyard furnaces." They burned trees, doors, and furniture as fuel and melted scrap metal like their pots and pans. At the same time, peasants were given outrageously optimistic grain production quotas based on Lysenko's assumptions. Because ideology and appearance of success mattered more than the facts of their meager harvest, the peasants gave more grain to the state than they could spare. Meanwhile, millions of other peasants were diverted off the farms into large-scale public works projects needed to industrialize the country, and grain crops were left to rot in the fields. Scientists and others who suggested that Mao's plans were unrealistic were "struggled against," sentenced to hard labor, and often executed.^"^ The furnaces failed, the steel was unusable, and forty million Chinese people died in the greatest famine in human history.

The USSR and China as examples of how anti-science attitudes and political loyalty over empiricism damaged both countries.