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[happiestsadist]

It occurred to me, while I was cleaning the bathtub, just how much a lot of the popular rhetoric around the medieval European witch-craze is really, really offensive, and that apparently I need to write about it on the internet instead of cleaning the sink

Comments

[realinterrobang]

I actually took a course on "The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Witchcraft" with a guy who studied the European witch craze from the primary sources, and one of the really sooper sekrit motives hardly anybody ever talks about is money.

Seriously. A really comprehensively accurate explanation of the European witch craze is basically religion using misogyny to make money (same as it ever was). You see, a lot of the people they targeted (mostly women) were heiresses or widows with property and not a lot of (surviving) family to defend them (and no male owners husbands), because accused witches' property automatically defaulted to the local authorities, plus the estate or the family had to pay for the prisoner's cell, the guards, their food, the torturers, and the executioner, not to mention burial costs. A lot of municipalities (Triere is one example I remember; it was a long time ago) actually went bankrupt because the corrupt local officials prosecuted so many of the less-powerful moneyed class they effectively wiped out their

[happiestsadist]

Well yeah, it's kind of conspicuous that so many of the victims were widows and single women with property.

You do have an excellent point with the last paragraph, though.

[realinterrobang]

A lot of people really don't get that the Holocaust was also a profit-making venture.

Personally, I'm developing a hypothesis that fascist regimes are often antisemitic and act on that antisemitism in eliminationist fashion (as opposed to merely maintaining a despised minority) because they perceive Jews as competition. When your ideology is predicated on palingenetic nationalism, with the goal largely for the owners of the means of production to own the machinery of state as well, you don't necessarily want (what you perceive as) mercantile outsiders getting a share of the pie.

[happiestsadist]

It's definitely not an unreasonable hypothesis. I mean, historically most of the people who have been hunted down the hardest have been people with stuff, not just all outsiders. Scapegoating alone doesn't pay the bills, and when you see the people you don't consider human with all that swag...

[charlycrash]

The odd thing is that for quite a while it was actually heretical to believe in witches. IMS, Charlemagne had people killed for it.

[happiestsadist]

That too.

[kankurette]

I'm ashamed to admit I bought into all that 'NEVAR AGAIN TEH BURNING TIEMZ' shit. Then I grew up.

Those women were killed because they were a bit different or because the villagers had a grudge. They weren't witches in the modern sense and Wicca is a 20th century thing anyway.

[ginasketch]

They were killed for being women. Probably women who wouldn't always do what men told them.

[happiestsadist]

And having all that property, that rightfully should be in the hands of a man.

Some of these evils are what I see as animating the GOP's Zombie Corpse.

[capybyra]

One history lesson I had been taught by people with numbers on their arms was about how easily their classmates signed on to Hitlerjugend. Recently- a family friend was tutoring an 18 year old lady on Holocaust reality. His teaching tool was handing her an approximately egg sized rock. And telling her to find out why she would have been given it on the way to a shower.

I often despair of ever living to see us grow up. Posts like yours are a help. Thanks.

Re: Some of these evils are what I see as animating the GOP's Zombie Corpse.

[happiestsadist]

Thank you.

The reason Burning Times rhetoric bothers me isn't because it's not historically correct. I mean, I loved HBO's Rome inordinately. It's the way it puts those events firmly in the past, and disconnects them from other, similarly horrifying chapters of our history that keep going on, and where the feelings that drive them never went away.