Wednesday, December 06, 2017

Witch hunts in Europe sound familiar

There was a mid 19th c. book called "Memoirs of Extraordinary popular delusions" by Charles Mackay that's still in print that lists the crowd delusionary behavior (a lot of it financial schemes) that has the most perfect description of the Trump witch hunt. These witch hunts in Europe lasted 2.5 centuries, and anyone (both women and men) could be accused, who would then be tortured to reveal more names. Sounds just like the FBI tactics with Flynn. The crowd cheerleaders asking for more victims sound like Joy Behar of the View

“An epidemic terror seized upon the nations; no man thought himself secure, either in his person or possessions, from the machinations of the devil and his agents. Every calamity that befell him he attributed to a witch. If a storm arose and blew down his barn, it was witchcraft; if his cattle died of a murrain—if disease fastened upon his limbs, or death entered suddenly and snatched a beloved face from his hearth—they were not visitations of Providence, but the works of some neighbouring hag, whose wretchedness or insanity caused the ignorant to raise their finger and point at her as a witch. The word was upon every body’s tongue. France, Italy, Germany, England, Scotland, and the far north successively ran mad upon this subject, and for a long series of years furnished their tribunals with so many trials for witchcraft, that other crimes were seldom or never spoken of. Thousands upon thousands of unhappy persons fell victims to this cruel and absurd delusion. In many cities of Germany, as will be shewn more fully in its due place hereafter, the average number of executions for this pretended crime was six hundred annually, or two every day, if we leave out the Sundays, when it is to be supposed that even this madness refrained from its work.”

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/713/pg713.txt   Vol. 2

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