In case you didn't listen to the NHPR interview linked in the previous entry, here's one key part, from around 25 minutes onward, which I have transcribed as accurately as I might. The interviewer, John Walters, has just asked Margo Burns, a scholar/computer geek involved in the project of updating and correcting the transcriptions of the Salem Witch Trial documents who happens to be descended from Rebecca Nurse, one of the witch-hunt victims (and a neighbor of sorts of mine, though I don't know her IRL we live in the same city) if she has a novel about the events in mind, and she laughingly having admitted it but sadly no time to work on it while the project is still underweigh, outlines her idea for Pandemonium as she has titled it:
MB: ...the narrator is, ah, none other than the Devil himself--
JW: Hm!
MB: --who has come to Salem not because he has actually done anything, but because he finds it very entertaining, that they are all taking his name in vain and he loves it.
JW: [Laughter]
MB: And, so, it's a little tongue-in-cheek, but as accurate as I can possibly render it.
But, uh, the Devil has a very different perspective. Many people who have written, um, novels about Salem have invented an extra character, um, that they've inserted in there, or that they've changed some things, they've conflated characters, but I thought, just - the Devil should be there.
JW: He hasn't had a chance to tell his side of the story yet.
MB: Well, he was, he was - um, the audience.
JW: Hm?
MB: And his - he wasn't even a part of it. He found it very entertaining! [laughter]
JW: Well, yeah, I would think he would have an interesting perspective, because, y'know, he's getting all this credit--
MB: Mm-hm!
JW: --for all this witchcraft that's going on, and I assume that from his point of view he hasn't done anything--
MB: Right!
JW: --And there aren't any witches there--
MB: And the magistrates keep pressing the people who were confessing, you know, [baritone] 'What did the Devil promise you?" and they say, "Oh, a new suit of clothes." "--And did he give it to you?" "--Noooo!" and of course the magistrates are saying, "See! This is proof that the Devil lied to you!" and of course the Devil's watching this and going, "Pft! Well, of course he didn't get it - I never promised it to him!"
JW: The witch trials are often seen as a cautionary tale--
MB: Mm-hm--
JW: --about the rush to judgment and mass hysteria...ah, are there other lessons to learn from the story?
MB: I'm particularly interested in the coercion of false confessions. Um - so it isn't even just 'rush to judgment' but that kind of need - to find somebody to be accountable, to pressure somebody into - taking the blame, and I think with, um, the word that's come out about what's happened to the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and the kind of pressure that they've subjected those people to, it has very clear implications today. When you look at what they got people to confess to in Salem - one woman, they got her confessing to, "Oh yes, I flew over the trees on a broomstick, oh and it broke, and the Devil - if it hadn't been for the Devil reaching down and grabbing my hand I would have broken my neck!" --That's a little different from saying, "Okay, fine, yeah, I - I made a pact with the Devil, sure - where did I do it? Ummm, let's see, oh yeah, over in the pond, uh, he baptized me--" Y'know, any - the people would try and say anything just to make the interrogations stop. They worked them so hard they invented things: I feel very confident that this woman did not fly on a broomstick over trees, therefore she - had to be confabulating it. And I think it's very easy for people who are, um, investigating crimes to have an idea of what happened, and they pressure people into admitting it. And I think that's the cautionary tale here. They got people to admit to outrageous things in Salem and - I think we have to remember that.
That was in April 2005, and I believe I posted on it back then, but of course nothing's made it any less relevant, alas, any more than the rest of my invocations of past centuries' tackling of the same problems and wrongs we face today. The fact that we have a potential head-of-state who has self-avowed witchfinders as mentors and backers up for election next week makes it a little more relevant, imo. There was a reason that when I looked for a link to illustrate my point about the "City Onna Hill" attitude, I picked a website that is by a bunch of Christians who consider themselves to be the exact heirs and emulators of the Massachusetts Bay Colonists today. But then of course we have all the usual chronological snobbery going in both directions along the timeline - how can this "medieval" [sic] mindset still be among us? How can people today still be as stupid and gullible as they were back in the 1600s?
And as I've noted all along, the past isn't so very different from the present when you look at it up close, or as close as we can get through a wide range of first-hand source materials. If you didn't follow the link in the post about Matthew Hopkins to The Discovery of Witches at Project Gutenberg,
you should really read it. it's a FAQ he put together to defend his actions to the courts, but the frequently-askedness of the questions serve as a good indication of the general rationalism and skepticism he was contending with in the 1640s, mind you - remember, Robert Boyle was twenty when this FAQ was written, and he died the year before the Salem Trials - But don't elderly people have lots of raised moles? Are you sure these are really "third nipples" and "devil's teats"? How can we know you're not condemning people for warts and hemorrrhoids and stretch-marks? What do immaterial beings need to drink human blood FOR, anyway? and so on.
Note, too, the hypersensitivity to accusations of torture - including sleep-deprivation - and the denial of use of the same, claiming that the prisoners just stay up and don't sleep because of their own stubbornness, or that the water-test was only used on proven witches, and anyway it didn't count because the testimony wasn't used in court (!) and, finally, argues that he doesn't accept any confessions of things that are scientifically impossible, like flying on broomsticks --!!!
Now, come fifty years and more later, in the Colonies, and the next generation of English Puritan lawgivers believes the broomstick-flying entirely - or pretends to for the sake of the scam, at least - and generally seems a lot less skeptical than their parents & grandparents were. But still you have lots of the skepticism of the "flashy people" that Cotton Mather deplored, and you also have anti-Witch-Trials pamphlets being rushed to press in 1692 to try to influence public opinion - and of course inevitably reflecting it to some degree - like this one from Burns' website,
written in the time-honored form of a Socratic Dialogue, here taking place between "S" [Salem] and "B" [skeptical, sophisticated, "flashy" Boston] and touching all the bases - an obligatory nod towards the belief in witches and witchcraft, as a formal statement of oh dear no, we don't question the authenticity of the Bible that must be made, before daring to broach the we just don't see that you can safely say that anybody SPECIFICALLY around here IS a witch with the danger of false accusations, and the harm therein is too great to risk it--
Note the constant harping on the inhumaneness of torture - and the warning against people suffering from clinical depression confessing or accusing themselves of crimes they haven't committed! Again with the rationalism and the modernism, note ye well. But that is not the most notable thing: I've written before about how neither our Constitution nor the rights invoked in the Declaration of Independence sprang fully-formed from the Founders' heads (note the authentically-retro neoclassical ObRef there) and ex nihilo, but rather depended on the long tradition of jurisprudence and human rights debates in England, much of which was formed in reaction to the overreachings of the Tudors and Stewarts in what were genuine times of crisis but which themselves didn't come out of nowhere and which were most certainly exploited by the executive branch of government each time.
Here's an example of that, written less than three years after the English Bill of Rights that in some parts is almost word-for-word invoked in our founding documents, in a crisis which came about in part due to the unsettled state of who would have voting rights and thus indirectly to the control of wealth and property in the MBC, in the wake of the government shakeup and the effects that had on the administration of the Colony. Does any of it sound at all familiar--?
B. That is not my business: but did you think that every suspicion is enough to commit a man to Prison for such a Crime?
S. Why not, if the suspicion be built on just Presumptions! for this is only in order to a fair Trial, which is to pass through two Juries, where he will have the liberty to Vindicate his Innocence openly.
B. You must give me leave to dissent from you here, before I Proceed in my Queries. I am informed that in a Legal Warrant made for the Commitment of a Person, his Crime may not be mentioned under the Lenefying term of suspicion; but the Act or Acts are to be Expressly Charged; E. G. you are to take into your Custody, &c. for several Acts of Witchcraft Committed on the body of, &c. now certainly, there is more than a meer suspicion upon fallacious Presumptions, necessary for the doing of this Honestly. Our statute Laws therefore have provided great Cautions against the Committing of persons without Substantial grounds: Besides, it is certain, that on lighter suspicions of Capital Crimes, Bail may be taken; so that if the person be committed to Goal, his Mittimus goes for want of Bail, and doth not directly charge the Crime on him; yea and Bail may still be taken after Commitment. Moreover, Reason it self saith, that when a man is Committed without Bail, and may not come off without a Jury; and in order to that an Indictnent must be formed against him, where the Acts are again to be Positively & Particularly charged upon him, and Witnesses to be Examined, which exposeth him to open Ignominy, there ought to be something Substantial against him. Yea Conscience will tell a Justice, that if he verily believes that a Grand jury ought not, or cannot Legally find Billa vera against such a man, he doth him an ineparable wrong in so committing him; since hereby, his Credit is Steined, his Liberty Restreined, his Time Lost, and great Charges and Damages come upon him; which, who shall repair?
By the community standards of 17th-century Puritans, the Bush justice department is MADE OF FAIL - and so aren't Free Republic, RedState, LGF and all the myriad horde of pants-pissing McCarthyites reanimated from our undead past to demand an end to warrants and a beginning to secret courts and charges and tortured confessions - pfft! what's mere terrorists, against THE WORK OF THE DEVIL--? Be scared of a few mortal men with bombs and guns, when they were facing INVISIBLE AGENTS OF LUCIFER MORNINGSTAR HIMSELF--???! Now that's an Enemy Out To Destroy Us Because They Hate Our Freedoms that one can feel bravely afraid of--
I joke, here, darkly, but I tend to think that the balance is pretty damn shaky between secular government and an explicitly-Anti-Satan-Xtian-state, and that while the result of putting still more anti-checks'n'balances, pro-theocracy predators in power here would be the same as it was at the turn of the 18th century - that is, the long discrediting and disgrace of such behavior and attitudes - that would be small consolation for the increased number of victims it would take first for the backlash to solidify.
But think on this: in the midst of the Witch Trials, at least one anonymous proto-blogger was publishing defenses of Habeas Corpus and denunciations of warrantless arrests and torture...
We didn't start the fire...