#witchunts

"Goody Smith was consorting with the devil. She threatened their lives. She had to die. Most witches were hanged, rather than burnt, by the way." The lecturer put up the next picture, a woman wearing a yellow star.

"Frau Schmeid is a Jew. She threatens society. Her neighbours informed on her. She was sent to a concentration camp."

Next picture, a black and white photograph. A woman with her hand raised to swear an oath.

"This is Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican senator from Maine. She stood up to Senator McCarthy. 'It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life,' she said. If you recall, McCarthyism is named for this senator and his behaviour during the Red Scare that was the new witch hunt, hunting down communists who threatened American lives, getting people to inform on their friends."

Another image. A woman in distress. "The Satanic Panic led to this woman, let's call her Mrs Smith, having her children taken from her," the lecturer said. "Just another example of a moral panic. Children ripped from their families. Bad science claiming to uncover repressed memories causing massive hysteria and terrible harm to so many."

Another picture. A woman being wrestled to the ground by police.

"Miss Smith left her home more than once in a day and her neighbours reported on her. A few weeks later when Miss Smith refused to cover her face - this is England, remember - police arrested her and forced a cloth over her face."

"That's different," a student called out. "They thought she was endangering lives."

"As they thought was the witch," the lecturer said. "What we now call the Panic-Demic was just another form of witch hunt. A scared population looking for scapegoats. People informing on their friends and neighbours for violating lockdown. Uproven and ineffective mask wearing on a scale never seen before as necessary became a virtue so that anyone unmasked was a threat. Someone refusing to veil their face was an undesirable to be forced to wear a badge, or to be threatened, fined, arrested. All for a virus that most people would never get, with an over 99.9% survival rate, and people were treating each other like biohazards and demanding forced vaccinations, caught up in media induced hysteria just as peasants were caught up in religious hysteria."

Another student frowned. "You're saying we never learn? We just repeat the witch hunts and moral panics over and over again?"

The lecturer shrugged. "When the next panic comes along, the next crisis, the next disease, will you resist? Or will you inform on the scapegoats? Don a hazmat suit if the government insists on it? Cheer for your oppressors the way the villagers cheered as the witch died, the Jews were captured, the supposed communists arrested? Because many will applaud. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. And those who remember are forced to watch as others not only comply but collude."

The screen went dark.