Reliving the Salem Witch Trials

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

-George Santayana

Gov't: 1 in 300 US Residents are Terrorists

Living today is like living back during the Salem Witch Trials. Everything you did and said put you at risk to be accused of being a 'Witch', in which 19 people were hanged and 17 died awaiting trial.

Are these 'terrorism' accusations not any different than the mass hysteria we endured so long ago?

The US Gov't is adding 20,000 names to their terrorist list every month. People like John William Anderson, age 6, or retired Major General Vernon Lewis, recipient of the Army's highest medal for service, the Distinguished Service Medal, and many more just like them.

Are we once again living in a state of mass hysteria? Why do we not learn from our past mistakes?

The report also shows that the FBI is increasingly targeting citizens and green card holders, with more than 11,517 requests in 2006 targeting U.S. persons, while Non U.S. persons were targeted with 8,605 requests.

SRC: www.abovetopsecret.com...

[edit on 3/14/2008 by bigbert81]

More like The Red Scare and McCarthyism really. The witch trials had more to do with panic and delusions. This is more political.

I believe that the German term "Reichsfeinde" or Enemy of the Empire would be a more appropriate analogy than that of a Witch. Also, while we're making comparisons, Orwell's concept of "Goldstein" would fit well here as he was used in a very similar manner as is Osama Bin Laden, to justify extremist repression against the domestic population.

I think that if you read Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum's book, "Salem Possessed" that you would find that the social realities of Salem in the 1690's are vastly different than that which exists today in the US. The concepts of "witch" and "terrorist" are drastically different. If you look at groups like the Russian "Narodnaya Volya" the German "Bader Meinhof Gang" and the Algerian followers of Franz Fanon you would find very little in common with their politically motivated violence and the demonic concepts associated with witch hunting.

We also need to look at scale and persistance, while the Salem Witch Hunt was indeed symptomatic of a much larger phenomon of Witch Hunting in Europe in general, within the American colonies it was almost a rather unique event. It was very nearly insulated to this small Puritan comminity and died out rather rapidly, as compared to some of the more massive episodes of Mass Burnings of Witches in Germany earlier that century.

Terrorism today appears to be a global phenomon, which can indeed be seen as an outgrowth of a largely US dominated global media. In Imperialist Germany the term "Reichsfiende" was used in a very similar manner within the German media to combat a rising socialist movment. Bismark used this tecnique to outlaw the German Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland (SPD) party.

Later, under Nazism and after the fabled "Stab in the Back" the term "Jewish-Bolshevik" became intertwined with the term "Reichsfiende" by the ever-so-popular Nazi Minister of Propoganda, Joseph Goebbels. This was not due to a fanatical rise of antisemitism in Germany at the time, it was merly a continuation of Bismark's class war against the Left.

Today the term "Terrorist" is used to brand Leftist movements globally, the US is branding the Venezuelan Chavistas as terrorists - simply because they stand in the way of US Corporate Imperailism. The "War against Terror" is a Macrocosm of the class war being waged at an international level where as Hitler's "Mein Kampf" was a class war waged at the National level.