Witch Hunts

[HARDCORE]

8-22-2018

IF, in reality, the recent attacks against a president and a congressman are truly witch hunts, then it must also be remembered that a plethora of those who were so charged (in the past) were genuinely innocent! “That, however has never stopped the hungry from pontificating and burning them at the stakes anyway?”

As no man, save for Christ Himself, has ever been totally innocent of anything, are we also to assume that like in 1692, Salem Massachusetts, we will again start burning people at the stake for any charged infraction, and that, before they are even given their day in court?

“At that point in time, and regardless of their guilt or innocence, will anyone who even dares to espouse a contradictory opinion or an unpopular belief, also be viciously attacked or maligned in the courts of public opinion?”

“Beware, as this type of activity is usually under-taken only upon very slippery slopes” And who then, will be left to defend mankind – “Guilty or Innocence?”

“TREAD CAUTIOUSLY - BUT MOST OF ALL, BEWARE THEE OF POLITICAL LYNCH-MOBS!”

Hardcore

[Boats]

How Did ‘Witch Hunt’ Become the Complaint of the Powerful?
By Annalisa Quinn - June 6, 2017
RE: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/m...-powerful.html

Photo link: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017...y=90&auto=webp

Enemies are useful: We all know the sweet, full-bodied relief of having someone else to blame for our problems. Why did the crops fail? It could be that you are an inept farmer. It could be that everything is up to chance. Or it could be that your neighbor, who has always been jealous of you, is doing something sinister to your crops.

Everyone does this, but Donald Trump does it with a special wronged fury. As a candidate, he obsessed over spectral forces that might deny him victory: phony polls, a calcified Republican establishment, vast voter-fraud conspiracies. He has brought the same instincts to his presidency, with increasingly self-defeating results. Last month, Trump embarked on his first big international trip as president. The itinerary included a major address to the Muslim world in Saudi Arabia and a much-anticipated NATO meeting — occasions that presented, for Trump, welcome opportunities to divert attention from the allegations of coordination between his campaign and Russia that heightened after he fired James Comey, director of the F.B.I. Instead, on the morning of May 18, one day after the Justice Department announced it was appointing a special counsel to investigate the matter, Trump fumed on Twitter: “This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!”

“Witch hunt” seemed like a particularly Trumpish complaint — an unshakable belief in his own persecution leading him to compare his own experiences to vastly worse ones — and indeed, it was the fifth time since January that he had denounced one “witch hunt” or another on Twitter. But an obsession with the witch hunt long precedes him in American politics: In the last century, a parade of disgraced presidents and other public figures (almost all of them men) have also chosen to don this particular black mantle of victimhood. “Witch hunt” once meant persecution of the marginalized by the powerful. So how did it come to suggest something so nearly the opposite?

Nixon helped introduce a new way of thinking about the witch hunt —a persecution not by, but of, the powerful.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, a frenzy of witch trials engulfed parts of Europe and New England — though at the time, witch hunters wouldn’t have called themselves that. “Hunt” would have had too strong a flavor of bloodlust. Witch “finders,” as they were more neutrally called, thought they were fighting God’s battles against satanic foes trying to upend the structures of religion, government and community. Witches were shape-shifters, embodying the murky and limitless depths of human dread: darkness, death, sexual perversion, sickness, scarcity, deviant lines of power away from government and church. They were thought to be devil-worshipers who had sex with demons. Old women and young girls were stripped and searched for evidence of third nipples — on which Satan’s imps were thought to suck — and tortured until they confessed, implicating others in desperation. Tens of thousands of people, mostly women, were killed, in a grim fulfillment of Exodus: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

Witch hunting declined in the 1800s, becoming a distant-enough memory by the end of the century that pantomime “witch hunts” were performed to entertain the queen of England. (In 1881, Princess Beatrice herself lit the pyre.) By the early 20th century, they had entered figurative speech, at first unobtrusively. A search for a podiatrist is called a “witch hunt” in a 1915 collection of World War I stories (he is found, and makes rounds in the barracks “carrying the implements of his gruesome trade”). Occasional references to political “witch hunts” crop up in the late 1910s (once when a British politician defended a colleague against the public outcry at his use of “private telegrams” — plus ça change).

“Witch hunt” first became regular shorthand for government repression in the 1920s and ’30s, when American newspapers covering events in the Soviet Union applied the label to Stalinist purges of dissenters. A typical Times article from 1937 describes the Soviet “witch hunt” and executions of supposed spies and saboteurs working for Japan, and carries an eerie quotation attributed to a group of Moscow schoolchildren: “All the pupils of our school welcome the execution of the verdict against the Fascist reptiles.”

In the years that followed, “witch hunt” was transplanted back to American soil, as hyperbole for unreasonable government regulation of almost any variety. The right tended to use it to describe persecution of industry, the left to describe persecution of labor and everybody to describe persecution of themselves. By the mid-’40s, people quoted in The Times had complained of witch hunts against bathing-suit wearers, horse-racing bookies and a group of New England egg dealers (a pleasing dozen) accused of price fixing. When Arnold Reuben — he of the corned-beef sandwich — was fined by health inspectors in 1946 for having roaches in his New York delicatessen, his lawyer complained: “If ever there was a witch hunt, this is one.”

The next year, the House Un-American Activities Committee began holding its first hearings on the suspected Communist infiltration of Hollywood and government agencies, and in 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, grabbed the national spotlight with his list of supposed Soviet spies inside the State Department, ushering in a frenzy of hearings and generalized paranoia that placed the witch hunt at the center of American politics. McCarthy flamed out politically in 1954 and died in 1957, but the fear of Reds lingered: My mother recalls her elementary-school textbooks in the 1960s having illustrations of Communists with horns. The devil this time was godless, opaque, cold, cloistered Moscow, whose agents, Americans were assured, lurked invisible in schools, universities, trade unions and film studios.

The central paradox of modern witch hunts is that those who claim to be the victims are often the ones most enthusiastic about carrying them out.

Richard Nixon first rose to prominence amid the McCarthy-era witch hunts; he was a member of HUAC and lobbied for the indictment of Alger Hiss, who was accused of spying for the Soviets. Yet in the cyclical way of witch hunts, it was only a couple of decades later that he was the one under investigation. He described Watergate as a “witch hunt” to his confidants, who promptly leaked the comment to the press. Nixon helped introduce a new way of thinking about the witch hunt — a persecution not by, but of, the powerful.

Until recently, aggrieved presidents complained, as Nixon did, by proxy. During Whitewater, Bill Clinton’s supporters in Congress, not Clinton himself, were the ones to cry “witch hunt.” And when the Democratic Party chairman, Terry McAuliffe, accused George W. Bush in 2004 of going absent without leave during his time in the National Guard, it was Laura Bush who protested: “I think it’s a political, you know, witch hunt, actually, on the part of the Democrats,” she told The Associated Press. Trump, of course, has few such inhibitions, tweeting personally about witch hunts immediately before departing for a friendly visit to Saudi Arabia, where people are still executed for sorcery.

Male politicians are the ones who generally cry “witch hunt,” and female politicians are the ones who are called witches. After Margaret Thatcher died, the “Wizard of Oz” song “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead” reached No. 2 on the British charts. An opponent of Julia Gillard, the former Australian prime minister, famously gave a speech in front of two signs: one calling Gillard a witch, the other calling her a bitch. “Witch” is like a chemical that’s inert when applied to men but combustive when it touches women. Trump as a witch is ridiculous. But Hillary Clinton has been called a witch — or, per Rush Limbaugh, “a witch with a capital B” — for years. During the presidential campaign, the Trump-sanctioned conspiracy site InfoWars ran articles headlined “Hillary ‘Regularly’ Attended Witch’s Church, Clinton Insider Claims” and “Occultic Hillary Summons the Dead, Refuses to Speak to Christ.”

The central paradox of modern witch hunts is that those who claim to be the victims, like Nixon, are often the ones most enthusiastic about carrying them out. Trump’s wealth and attraction to conspiracy theories have always made him more hunter than hunted. In life and business, he has emulated his mentor Roy Cohn, the vengeful, frequently indicted lawyer who was previously a McCarthy aide and chief counsel during the Senate investigations of the Red Menace. Trump, too, sees powerful forces arrayed against him: leakers whispering maledictions into the listening ears of journalists, protesters funded by his enemies and a federal intelligence apparatus bent on using his campaign’s supposed Russian connections to undermine his presidency.

The figures in Trump’s demonology all have one thing in common: They all threaten the legitimacy of his claim of genuine popular support. Once they are over, hunts reveal not witches but our own doubts. When these imagined threats evaporate, they leave exposed our fears about the fragility of our hold on power, fears that then fulfill themselves. As Arthur Miller wrote, “the paranoid creates the reality which proves him right.” Witch hunts can refract, rebound and replicate indefinitely — because we each contain within us the hunter, the witch, the rack and the pyre. And fear, like fire, catches.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you go to this site there are 19 comments about this article all of which we should read. Their summations are interesting to say the least.

Boats

[reconeil]

Boats,
Quinn's typically QUITE LENGTHY Leftist or Fanatical Democrats Posing as Liberals variation of the herd-like (both Dems & Their mainstream press/media) standard: "Trump Bashers" was truly quite amusing and interesting, to say the least.

Though, that bit going way back and to about: "Was fined by health inspectors in 1946 for having roaches in his New York delicatessen, his lawyer complained: “If ever there was a witch hunt, this is one.”,...was a bit too much.

Yeah, I know.

I'll betcha that there are still many American Leftists/Progressives and/or Dem Political Supremacist leaders and pundits (many American journalists & professors also) that believe Stalin, Marx & Lenin were all great guys, and should be still admired and to be politically emulated for changing America TO THEIR ONE PARTY RULE PREFERENCE.

Whatever,...I sure-as-hell DON'T!!!

Neil

[Boats]

Patriot - I'm tired of these pissing matches all the time.

I have "no" party loyalty - neither side has done a thing for me. What I have - I worked for and earned - but also know what I am and that is an American Patriot - with an open mind and the freedom to speak my mind - and that's all I care about.

Boats

[reconeil]

GOOD FOR YOU, Boats.

This the perfect place for openly speaking your mind, no matter if Constantly, Perpetually & Incessantly: "Trump Bashing", just like the rest of the obediently duped and echoing herd.

Still, it's truly too bad that SO MANY other Honorable Veterans (before quite active on this forum) are no longer as gutsy as you are and they once were at speaking their minds,...or at least so it seems.

Whatever, Boats,
Why did you take my knocking of Annalisa Quinn's, NY Times article so-damn-personal?
Is she some relative or good family friend??

Neil

[Boats]

The central paradox of modern witch hunts is that those who claim to be the victims are often times the ones most enthusiastic about carrying them out.

Boats