RELEASE THE HOUNDS:

Crucibles: THE ENEMY WITHIN: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World By John Demos (GERMAINE GREER, 10/12/08, NY Times Book Review)

The institution of what we would call a “witch hunt” is only tangentially related to the practice of witchcraft. Demos understands that any group can be demonized; he mentions the cases of the Knights Templar, the Waldensians and the Cathars, but he could have mentioned many more. He makes a strange muddle of the fact that belief in witches was considered heresy by the fathers of the early church, partly because he appears not to understand that medieval witch hunts directed themselves toward the detection of heretics as the real enemies within and paid scant attention to charlatans. Only people baptized as Roman Catholics could be prosecuted as heretics; the enemies the Inquisitions addressed themselves to were those that infiltrated believers’ most secret souls. The Dominican order, known punningly as “domini canes,” or hounds of the Lord, was founded in the 13th century specifically to hunt down Cathars. [...]

In the last portion of “The Enemy Within” Demos includes a series of brief essays on American witch hunts — the various anti-Masonry scares, the persecution of the Bavarian Illuminati, the anarchists following the Haymarket riot, the different Red scares and McCarthyism, and the child sex-abuse panic. The discussion of all of these is brief and superficial. Demos keeps asking himself whether these episodes could be correctly described as witch hunts, which of course they can.

As have been various crackdowns on the Klan, FDR's persecution of the Bund, Bill Clinton's crushing of the militia movement, etc. Witch hunts are just how we deal with those groups that refuse to conform to societal norms.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 11, 2008 8:00 AM