Recently, due to my nearly constant need to take my mind on strange tangents of historical and philosophical significance, I became interested in the Salem witch trials and their implications in the formation of the modern American story. I suppose this curiosity is also partly due to what my wife and I call "The Rubberneck effect", which is the same reason we all slow down to look at a car accident, or watch "COPS" (or "American Idol" for that matter) on TV. I mean that witch-hunt stuff was some bad s**t. When awful things happen to others we as people often do put our hands over our eyes, but we also tend to spread our fingers apart far enough so we don't miss a thing.
As I searched, I stumbled across a book entitled The Salem Witch Trials Reader by Frances Hill, an apparent expert in the witch trials, having written four books on the history of the subject, and, as it turns out, of a great analytical mind about the import of the trials on our lives here and now. I dove into the book with gusto, anxious to see the trials from the points of view of the people who experienced it, but as I sat there reading the introduction to the book, the physical manifistations that take place during moments of profound epiphany began to happen to me in force. The hair on the back of my neck started to stand up, my heart rate increased and my eyes got wider as it dawned on me. The Puritan persecutors of 1692 and the modern consertvative movement of 2010 are the same. They are not just infected by the same sickness, the same blight, but are carriers of that illness as well, contaminating their respective societies with a disease of fear.
Ms. Hill on the witch trials from her introduction:
They provide an astonishingly clear and instructive model of the universal and timeless processes by which groups of human beings instigate, justify, and escalate persecution. Precisely because the number of people involved in the Salem witch-hunt, and the timescale of events, were on a small scale, the steps are easy to trace by which a few deranged, destructive human beings led ordinary mortals down the dark paths of fear, hatred and envy to demonize and destroy innocent victims.
(Ephasis mine.)
Does this sound familiar to anyone else? FEAR - of "Demons" (terrorists) and "witches" (liberals). HATRED - of "Spells and witchcraft" (socialism and taxes). It all clicked in my head. The vitriol, the hatred, the racism, the vile attacks of the right: It all resembled the past in a specific way.
Hill continues:
When those steps are understood, the recurrent persecutions in human history, whether ethnic, religious, political, or superstitious, become less hard to comprehend.
Maybe this is plain to everone else, but I thought it eye-opening to draw the parallel.
To study what happened in Salem is to gain greater understanding of the human tendancy to separate evil from good and project that evil into the enemy, and then destroy it by destroying the enemy. It is also to gain a greater understanding of how people use persecution to promote their own interests and thereby further promote persecution.
How many times have we heard the right repeatedly and relentlessly call Democrats and Democratic leadership all kinds of weighted names ("Hitler", "Stalin", "socialist", "marxist", "brutal dictator", "communist", or god forbid even a muslim) because they hope the negative connotation sticks even if it's patently untrue.
But here's the money quote from Hill:
The tendency for witch-hunts to start, and continue, is exacerbated by a society or group's insistence on its monopoly of righteousness. The countertendency is promoted by an understanding and acceptance of the fallibility of all human beings, including ourselves.
I thought, I can't be the only one who noticed this. And it turns out I'm not. I later discovered that Frances Hill herself saw fit to point to the similarities in a book called Such Men are Dangerous, chronicling the parallels between Salem in 1692 and neo-conservatism in 2004. Well, at least I'm in good company!
So where does this leave us? Our only response is to champion the countertendancy for the witch-hunt, including the ones we ourselves perpetrate. Avoid the quick kill. Take the high road without softening up on message.
The greatest weapon a good Progressive has is the facts, and if we can continually and swiftly knock down these lies perpetrated on the American people by the Right, if we can persistently present the truth of our national situation, if we can be vocal without being brutal, we will win. We have to get back away from the pettiness, the name-calling, and move toward what brought us here in the first place: More and BETTER Democrats. Thats the only way to stop spreading the Right's disease of fear.