I hate to dwell on the obvious, but a witch hunt strikes me as something done far, wide and somewhat continuously. I believe there are many minor witch hunts here in the United States, like radical christian groups seeking out gay supporters and rallying against them, or police still primarily targeting the afro-american populace with the belief they are always up to no good.
But the one which has been hitting home for a while has been Americans being aggressive and offensively finger pointing the Muslim groups. The World Trade Center bombing is such an icon for controversy, if you follow it closely. There have now been numerous Americans of prestige who have looked more deeply into the matter and have the most solid evidence that it indeed may have been our own government, however inconceivable, which set up this collapse, to prompt Americans to engage in more war. The main purpose being enormous amounts of money into the puppeteers pockets.
Whatever the case, Muslims have been targeted as evil and haters of Americans, regardless of where they live or how they act. Anyone with the general appearance, beard, clothing, of a Muslim is possibly looking at direct risk to life depending where they are at the time. They are devout to their religion, which means they cannot choose to “ditch” the beard or the attire, since it is part of their faith. This is very much like the upstanding Japanese Americans who were thrown into internment camps, such as Manzanar, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Sadly, even the slightest bit of propaganda, through the newspaper, internet, or television, is enough to prompt most Americans into all out aggression.
Outside of the time the witch hunts took place, I see very little difference between the Crucible witch hunts or todays. If it were accepted to burn people in the town square these days, I have complete faith in it being done in a heartbeat, sadly. One thing that directly comes to mind from the Crucible to now, is that people just start to randomly come up with fictitious stories. “I saw this person doing that…I saw those people conspiring over there…I heard that these people were saying this…”. For whatever reason, when it gets started, a wild fire of assumptions and beliefs start hitting the pavement and the emotional torches of the witch hunters take light.
I have a hard time saying that there are still witch hunts going on in Modern US, but the things that you mention seem to be the closest thing I could think of. The discrimination against a group and calling them inherently evil because of their religious beliefs or sexual orientation certainly has some relateable qualities to the the witch hunts. I just hope that we quickly realize that these groups are indeed not witches!
ReplyDeleteI think your points about stereotyping and automatically assuming someone is guilty because of their religion or race is spot on. The judgement of those who appear to be Muslim was one the first things that I thought of too. I had forgotten about the Japanese internment camps that we had in the US. I feel like that is a period in history that we try to gloss over here in America. We are critical of the Germans and their concentration camps, but we try to deny that we did the same thing. Granted, ours was not nearly on the same level as the Germans, but it still was not right. After Pearl Harbor we suddenly were scared of anyone of Japanese descent even though most, if not all, Japanese Americans were on our side. We just assumed they were all evil.
ReplyDeleteLack of education and information about religion leads to an unwarranted fear of those different. Most individuals who believe that Muslims are by nature terrorists have no information to tell them otherwise. Most individuals are programmed to just believe what they are told by news sources and feel there is no need to question what they are being told. The news did not come right out and say that all Muslims were terrorist, however the world Muslim is used to describe militant groups in the Middle East, such as Muslim extremist. This feeds the stereotype and reinforces the belief that all Muslims are terrorists.
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