The Real Witch Hunt: Salem
The Travel Channel’s Witches of Salem
Suggesting that there is a “witch hunt” is a common enough — if not obnoxiously over-utilized — expression in the modern age. It has been claimed in cases from everyday castigation for which someone takes umbrage, to the absurd on a grand scale during which someone is accused of crimes, malfeasance, corruption — or some other charge to which the subject inherently objects (often a bit too much, such as in the case of certain among today’s dangerous and hyperbolic political figures). This often comes with the cloying pleading of his or her innocence — at first deflecting the charge, and then projecting the crime unto someone else — often an innocent party.
But in going back to whence the original term came, this was not the subject of some flip punchline. This, instead, was a very real, very political, inherently religious, and malevolent socio-cultural charge with often deadly consequences. From the burning of heretics following inquisition in Europe to the new frontiers of the “New Jerusalem” in North America in which innocent members of Puritan society were castigated and murdered in the name of the kind of hysteria and paranoia that can come from the stress of…
