Another Time, Another Witch Hunt

“You could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist” - Hermione Granger, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. 

Witchcraft was practiced on the holy grounds of the Salem Village in 1962. A wave of fear shook the entire village. Witchcraft was considered a horrendous act and would not, under any circumstances, be permitted. The authorities of a village launched a witch hunt trial, questioning anyone accused of being a witch. There was only one problem with the witch hunt trials: the court could never prove someone to be a witch. This didn’t stop them from bringing in 200 individuals, and executing nineteen of them to death.
It started in the spring of 1962. A bunch of young girls in the village claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several women in the village of witchcraft. What should have been dismissed by the authorities as a child prank was made a matter of utmost juridical importance. The witch trials were commencerated and lasted upto 1711. It’s how long the judges took to regain common sense. The trials were not ordinary court trials demanding a solid heap of evidence. The accusation that “she’s a witch” is enough to bring anyone in. The modus operandi of Salem’s court was adjourned. A new modus operandi was adopted which was charted from the 1478 book Malleus Maleficarum (Latin for “The Hammer of Witches”). The book was written by inquisitors of the Catholic church as an intent to codify knowledge of witches and how to identify them.

According to this book, when a situation as grave as witchcraft in the village presents itself. It is a folly to make attempts to find evidence in support of the claim. Anyone who makes such attempts is a lunatic. The modern definition of a witch hunt states.

 “A dedicated and unjust investigation or persecution of a group or person in which the extreme and threatening nature of the alleged crimes is used to justify suspending or ignoring the rules of usual evidence”

This can be observed clearly in the following excerpt from the book Malleus Maleficarum:

And this is when the accused is not convicted of heresy by her own confession or by the evidence of the facts or by the legitimate productions of witnesses, but there are indications, not only light or even strong, but very strong and grave, which render her gravely suspected of the said heresy, and by reason of which she must be judged as one gravely suspected of the said heresy.

In simple words, It’s a matter of national importance. There are witches among us. The court doesn’t need evidence to be convinced. The indications would suffice. Leave it to the (supposed) experts.

Acquisition meant guilt. If one was accused of being a witch. She had to defend herself and disprove the claim. The normal rules of evidence didn’t apply. The coincidental death of a cow is enough to justify the burning of a strange woman who lives at the other end of the village. The methods of investigation were as bad (if not more) as the punishment. Your choice is to confess and be executed, or to not confess and be tortured. There is a superficial resemblance to a fair trial, but in actuality a witch hunt is nowhere close. From the 1300s to 1700s, fifty to sixty thousand people in Europe were executed in witch hunts. Some estimations raise this number well over to hundreds of thousands.

 McCarthyism and The Second Red Scare

McCarthyism (also known as the second red scare), initiated by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in the1950s, was a modern day witch hunt. The witches were now communists who had infiltrated every important department in the USA including the congress, Hollywood, American universities, and the army. This was McCarthy’s claim.  At the height of tensions between America and the Soviet Union, the anti-communist sentiment in the US was at an all-time high. McCarthy claimed that he has a list of 205 communists in the US who are influencing government policy. This is akin to saying there are witches among us.
As it should have happened in the Salem Witch trials, the judges should have disregarded the claim as a childhood prank in the absence of convincing evidence. The US supreme court should have dismissed McCarthy’s claim too on the basis of incomplete evidence. As we all know, this didn’t happen. In the McCarthy witch hunt, thousands of notable people were brought to hearings, questioned about their loyalty, political views, and asked to incriminate their friends or family members. Those who refused to cooperate lost their jobs, or risk being sent to jail.

The fear-riddled senate formed a committee to investigate McCarthy’s claims. His first case was against a prominent lawyer and activist, Dorothy Kenyon. Despite her publically vocal anti-communist record, McCarthy accused Kenyon as being a member of 28 organizations that are communist fronts. The committee scheduled a hearing giving Kenyon 5 days to prepare. All the characteristics of a typical witch hunt were followed.. 

The Burden of Proof Fallacy

The second red scare could have been completely avoided (or the damage toned down) if the government realized the fallacy they were making in their reasoning: 

Reversal of Polarity 

Reversal of polarity  is also known as the burden of proof fallacy. It stems from a form of argument from ignorance: assuming that a claim is true because it hasn’t been proven false .
The committee thought that Kenyon must be a communist because she has not proved she is not a communist. The burden of proof must lie on the person making the claim. In this case, it shouldn’t be upto Dorothy Kenyon to disprove her being a communist. The burden of proof lies on McCarthy to prove Dorothy’s (or anyone else’s) communist ties.

If I were to claim that there is a flying teapot orbiting between Earth and Mars. I must be the one providing the proof to support my claim. However, if you’re not able to disprove the claim about my teapot. I mustn’t conclude that my claim is true. It might just be that the claim can’t be proven false, or it hasn’t been proven false yet, or IT ISN’T COMPLETELY TRUE or FALSE.  To avoid such complexity, the burden of proof must lie with the person making the claim. If someone claims that aliens exist, you shouldn’t run off to find proof they don’t exist. You should ask the person to show you the UFO.
Everytime McCarthy made an allegation against someone. He must have been summoned to the court for questioning and asked to present the proof. If the thorough examination of his evidence couldn’t disprove his claim. Only then the defendant must have been called.
As it turns out, McCarthy’s claims were insubstantial. Some of the so-called communist organizations he assured Dorothy of joining didn’t even exist. The victims of McCarthyism included Albert Einstein, Dalton Trumbo, Charlie Chaplin, and Leonard Bernstein to name a few. Senator McCarthy was put down when he started pointing fingers to the army.

Another Time, Another Witch Hunt

If there’s anything we learn from reading history. It’s that humans don’t read enough of it. History repeats itself because humans are aloof to common sense. After McCarthyism, one might think humans would have had enough witch trials. The hysteria seems distant. Fast forward a few decades, we are proven wrong, again. 

In the 1980s, came the Satanic Panic, children who went to different day cares in the US started to claim that their caretakers are involved in satanic rituals. It was a moral panic consisting of more than 12,000 unsubstantiated cases. It emerged from the McMartin Preschool. Judy Johnson, mother of one of the preschooler’s reported to the police that her son has been sodomized. Other allegations included that people at the daycare had sexual encounters with animals. The police launched an inquiry into the matter. Several hundred children were interviewed for lengthy periods of time by therapists. The children (& their parents) reported that they have been sexually abused, saw witches fly, flushed down toilets to secret rooms (then cleaned up later and presented to their parents), forcibly photographed nude, and made to travel through secret tunnels. The moral hysteria spread and locals in different towns started to believe devil-worshippers have set up shops in day-care centers. Their clever adepts were sodomizing and raping childerns, partaking in satanic rituals, drinking blood, killing and dismembering the bodies of cats, dogs, and a crying baby, all unnoticed by the parents, neighbors, or authorities.

The McMartin preschool trial was launched. It was based on unproven claims. All they had against the teachers were highly-fabricated testimonies by young children and accusations made by their emotional parents. I say highly-fabricated because the therapists which questioned the children took part in the use of suggestive and leading questioning, with sessions lasting upto hours at times. The method then implied by most of the therapists is called “Recovered-Memory Therapy (RMT)”. A school of psychoanalytic therapy where it is believed, contrary to evidence, that traumatic memories can be buried in the subconscious and retrieved through RMT techniques. RMT has another use: developing false memories. RMT has been scientifically discredited and legally banned because it led children to formulate false memories, believing they were sexually abused when in fact they weren’t.

It took about $15million and seven years for the judges to dismiss the case because nothing could be proven. The grave accusations put forth by children were mostly self-created. No proof of secret tunnels, bodies of dead animals, or satan-worshiping sadists were found. Judy Johnson later on admitted that she was mentally ill when she made the claims. The McMartin preschool case was the longest and most expensive case in US history.

Another time, another witch hunt. The public fell prey to the same argument from ignorance. They believed whatever the children, and ‘supposed’ experts told them.  The human mind is gullible to false memories, illogical thinking, and repeating past mistakes; time and time again. Let’s hope we don’t live to see another witch hunt in the modern era; although it’s on the cards.