Witch Hunts by Robert Rapley

Author:Robert Rapley [Rapley, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2007-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

11

The Witch Hunters

The case of the Scottsboro Boys was a typical witch hunt, but it was unusual in one respect: although there were nine of them, they were actually treated as though they were one individual. So you can have a multiple-case witch hunt where the “witches” are treated as one person. Thus it is not the number of people targeted that defines a witch hunt but whether the characteristics of a witch hunt are met.

Of course, somebody might say that the case of the Scottsboro Boys was not really a witch hunt because there wasn’t a hunt involved – they were found on the train. But this protest suggests an unnecessarily literal interpretation of a “hunt.” The case of the Boys met the characteristics of a witch hunt very clearly. They were “guilty” as they got off the train and were met by the posse, and they were treated as guilty all the way through, necessitating false evidence, forced confessions, the works. This was indeed a witch hunt.

The real originator of a witch hunt is never the “witch”; it is the witch hunter. It is the witch hunter who first declares the witch to be a witch. And the hunter does this when he or she decides that somebody is guilty and is to be pursued to the end and then publicly announces this view. It all starts in the mind of the witch hunter when he or she first decides guilt without evidence. This is why witch hunting is really not an activity but a state of mind – the witch hunter’s mind.

We have seen some of the things that drive witch hunters: fear, anger, hatred, to start with, brought about by some terrible event that impels them to act and to decide on guilt.

Sometimes their decision of guilt is coloured by the fact that the person whom they are accusing belongs to a despised group, a Jew in Dreyfus’s case and blacks in Scottsboro. There, the root of the case was fear in the white local population that given the least opportunity, the blacks would rise, rape, and pillage. Feared they certainly were! But despised, too. To the vast majority of the local whites, the blacks, and certainly these poor blacks, were a subclass – a dangerous subclass. Only by the severest of treatment could white society be protected. To this end it became justifiable to the society of Alabama to force confessions, to subvert the normal justice of trials, to lie, and knowingly to accept the accusers’ lies as the truth. As the trials dragged on, it must have been increasingly obvious that Victoria Price was lying, yet her lies were accepted, even if not believed. If somebody is despised (especially if they are feared and despised), their ill-treatment is made more acceptable. Further, if somebody or some group is described as evil, their ill-treatment is made quite acceptable – as the Bamberg and Salem witches discovered and as Grandier did, too. The true witch hunter

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