There were still lots of smart people in Nazi Germany, as evidenced by Operation Paperclip which brought ~1,600 Nazi scientists over to the US to work on rockets and help the US fight the USSR in the Cold War and space race.
Well, yes, as that's the defining characteristic of the group and why they moved to the United States and became known as the martians.
Spain under Franco and Portugal under Salazar did not persecute Jews, in fact allowed them safe passage from Vichy France.
Italy really turned antisemitic after more than a decade with the alliance with Germany to appease Hitler mostly. There's a nice book on the topic, in Italian, "Mussolini Razzista Riluttante" by Antonio Spinosa.
So it's just a matter of time an "intellectual", or any individual really, says or does something that will be used as a pretext to accuse them of not being a good enough member of in-group (this will earn the accuser status as a guardian of purity). Soon enough the society is full of people accusing others and also of those that want to appease "the authorities" by proposing the most extreme ways of purifying and enhancing the in-group. It's easy to see this is not the best environment for seekers of truth.
Of Comte, Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, the people credited with the establishment of "modern" (pre WWI & WWII) sciences of society all were "political" philosphers | thinkers that looked at the behaviour of societies.
Max Weber (1864 – 1920) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber was a German of some influence, and the pre and inbetween World War periods were a time of intense political debate in France, Germany, and surrounds.
Who are "they" to whom you refer, and what is "political" as opposed to "social" ?
One might guess (and its just that, a guess) that such regimes target the social sciences first because such departments (eg economics, political studies) are adjacent to live politics, the regime's people think they understand them and can make contributions (in reality, trying to take control of course) and of course because the hard sciences require the payment of a hard tax of mathematical skills to say anything useful, which most political hacks do not have.
> alienation is core to fascism
Fascism, a neighbour of Futurism, idolises technology, of only for its semiotic power. But then so did Soviet Communism. Stalin executed all the "bourgeois engineers" and Bolsheviks who built the industrial engine of the CCCP. Alternatively, the great leap forward in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia both rounded up the thinkers, teachers and engineers first.
So I don't think it's unique to fascism. What is common?
Seems it's a hallmark of the treachery of totalitarianism. Tyrants fear but use intellectuals. They need actual smart people to gain power, but then who is more threatening than people who know how the system works because they built it for you? So they are always betrayed. Consider Oppenheimer. Many of the great scientists and artists are put out to pasture once they've done what's useful for the party.
> "alienates the best thinkers" seems like a good litmus test.
Almost the whole Frankfurt School were Jewish intellectuals who fled to America.
I've written (probably in Digital Vegan) on how the Silicon Valley Billionaires, once they've built their "Social Media Digital Utopia" - a pageant of vanity, fear and cybernetic governance - would simply dispose of the coders (perhaps not as directly as Stalin). Maybe an indicator of that came early with the layoffs when some got a bit too moist about "AI". I think they hope that "AI" will be the way to pull up the ladder, leaving no challenging class.
And would you have preferred that Japan be left to the mercies of the Soviets, turning them into what North Korea and Cuba are today?
Childish naïveté, world wars, and postwar geopolitics don't mix.