All this is a witch Hunt. President Donald trump will tell anyone who will listen that the investigation Robert Mueller in connection trump campaign Russia (and other disorders) is a political witch Hunt. The single greatest political witch hunt, really.
There are many other tweets like those. Trump is not even a context.
He is not alone. Last week, when the Governor of Missouri, Eric Greitens was charged with a horrible sexual misconduct, he unsubtly told that it was “exactly like what’s going on with the witch hunt in Washington, D.C.” criticism #Metoo — often, but not always men — compared the campaign to eradicate sexual violence in a witch hunt.
If you want people to believe you without guilt, a subject of malicious criticism from your enemies, you shout that you’re the target of a witch Hunt.
Trump didn’t get that phrase out of thin air. Politically, it dates back at least to McCarthyism and Watergate. Nixon White house also said that it was the subject of a witch hunt. Critics insidious-Communist Senator Joe McCarthy probes called them “witch hunts”. At the time, playwright Arthur Miller made the subtext the text of his play the crucible, an anti-McCarthy allegory set during the trial of the Salem witch trials in the 1690-ies.
Where our story really begins. In today’s environment, “witch Hunt” is a useful defense because the people living in the 21st century know that the “witches” of the 17th century Salem is almost certainly innocent and, therefore, that the persecution which led to the deaths of 20 people was unfair. It is hyperbolic if, of course, a powerful rhetorical device to claim innocence.
There, too, as soon as you stop to think about it, something bad about people in power — in particular, the two men credibly accused of sexual abuse — using a term that harkens back to an era in history in which a Patriarchal society wrongfully persecuted (mostly women).
“We turned the expression on its head. Traditionally, the charge of witchcraft was made strong men powerless charging women with false crimes. Now this powerful men screaming that they are accused of false crimes,” Stacy Schiff, who wrote the book on the 2015 Salem called witches, said to VOX via email. “Unfair attacks, only two have in common, and even that’s debatable.”
The Salem witch trials, explains policy
What was the reason for the mass hysteria in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 and 1693 is still a subject that divides historians and others who study the witch trials. What we do know is that between 1692 and 1693, 19 people were hanged and one crushed to death, ostensibly for civilian crimes of practicing evil sorcery, after the outbreak of mass hysteria. All of them maintained their innocence, with the exception of Tituba, the local enslaved woman, whose recognition may have tortured her.
Most the Salem witch trials, it was not in Salem called Salem today — but in the village of Salem, the inner hamlet, which was renamed Danvers in 1752.
Mary Beth Norton, Cornell University Professor, who wrote in 2007 in the devil’s snare with an eye to the explanation of the crisis in its historical and political context, what is the hysteria about witches and the processes and activities of elders of a native American attack on settlers of New England.
She summed up her understanding of the trials of witches in the VOX is this:
As Norton emphasized, it is simplistic to think about the trials of the Salem as a purely political: Christians living in New England in the 1690-ies absolutely believed that witches were real and that they can serve as a Pact with the devil to wreak havoc in their city.
But the relevance in the modern sense of “witch hunt” is creepy. Sinister power, using the Ghost of “witch” to protect their interests. The deterioration of faith in political institutions. From the very beginning of “witch hunt” were imbued with a lot of sense to make it such a powerful rhetorical tool in 2018.
As a “witch hunt” has become so politically powerful
As a result, the Salem figured prominently in America’s political imagination is still.
As Texas Gretchen Adams described in his book the Specter of Salem, witches several political purposes in the intervening centuries. In 1790-ies, textbooks will use Salem as a typical example of a less enlightened America history of the new state was a failure, as it embraced the ideals of the enlightenment in the first years of its existence.
In the 1830-ies, during the religious revival known as the second great Awakening, which rejected the Enlightenment, critics will compare these new religious orders of the elders of Salem, in an effort to remind people about the dangers of uncontrolled fanaticism. During the Civil war, southerners would refer to witches to attack the Union for its alleged irrationality in the pursuit of war.
But for modern politics, a turning point seems to have been a play Arthur Miller’s 1953 the Crucible. A retelling of the tests, the performance was coded exposé of anti-Communist hysteria of the 1940s and ‘ 50s. Miller hinted that the prosecutors and judges of Salem were dictated by a combination of fear and greed, including the desire to seize the land of the accused. History of Salem, Miller was the story of any mass panic — as selfish people use fear and panic to drown the “witch hunt” for personal gain.
“This is a 20th century term that comes into use during the cold war. There was not a Director, witch is the definition of power in 17th-century America of persecution,” said Schiff. “In this sense, Salem really are not ‘hunting.’ This is more panic, or epidemic, or misleading the public”.
As VOX’s Dara Lind noted earlier, Richard Nixon (or his staff) is called Salem as a consequence of Watergate was gaining momentum:
The current “witch Hunt” claims as a gross and dangerous
VOX Lind not only to connect Nixon and Watergate to use the trump phrase. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward led laments trump “witch hunt” as they described “very similar to the confrontation” that the trump with Mueller and that Nixon had special Prosecutor Archibald Cox.
On the one hand, trump investigation comparing his campaign to a crisis that has left 20 people were killed in the 17th century is clearly ridiculous — there is much more evidence in criminal sentences, the court authorized the wiretap, and the consensus of Republicans and Democrats investigators to the intervention of Russia in 2016 presidential elections than witchcraft — and quite questionable.
As for Greitens, who is so transparently monitors trump’s tactics, he uses this term may be even more outrageous: this man is accused of forcing a woman into sexual acts and then threatening to blackmail her if she spoke.
“There is something twisted, misdirected, vaguely demented in the cries of ‘witch hunt’,” said Schiff. “Many American women (and some men) not to protest his innocence. They weren’t witches, although the courts decided that they were; they hung still. Nobody ever shouted ‘witch Hunt.’”
But trump’s never-ending complaints of “witch Hunt!” is not simply to be dismissed. They perform an important function for the President: the discrediting of the Mueller investigation.
It is no coincidence that trump’s most influential media allies, like Fox’s Sean Hannity (a man is also related to trump, Michael Cohen, whose presence on the domestic stage arose from alleged payments for women on trump’s name), to deploy the exact same rhetoric.
Now, the vast majority of Americans support the Mueller investigation: 69 percent, according to the latest Washington post/RIA Novosti poll. With a cry of “witch Hunt” did not save Nixon or — not that we should necessarily believe Mueller probe will end the same way Watergate did.
But at the same time, the Mueller investigation is under water with Republicans: only 43 percent support the probe, while 51% do not support it. Trump’s “witch Hunt” claims found a specific audience, it seems — and this audience is responsible for most, who now control both chambers of Congress whose leaders say they don’t want trump to fire Mueller, but at the same time has refused so far to take any steps to protect the Prosecutor.
Investigation of possible crimes against the country should not be of any party. But it became that way. Trump and shouting “witch Hunt!” — helped to make it so.
Sourse: vox.com
