The Crucible
The Crucible is a 1953 play by American playwright Arthur Miller. It is a dramatized and partially fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692–93. Miller wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism, when the United States government persecuted people accused of being communists.
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What Hacker News says
- You see parallels between the Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism because the left made those comparisons repeatedly.
For example, "The Crucible is a 1953 play by American playwright Arthur Miller. It is a dramatized and partially fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692–93. Miller wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism".
But there is a crucial difference between the witch trials and McCarthyism. Witches don't exist. Communists did exist.
And by Communists, I mean members of and supporters of the Communist Party USA in the US government. The CPUSA was dedicated to the violent overthrow of democratic government in the US and its replacement with a dictatorship loyal to Stalin.
After the release of Venona documents and Soviet archives, we know now with certainty that those Communists did exist - they weren't imaginary. They existed in high positions in the US government, they spied for Stalin, gave nuclear and other military information to the Soviets, they made government policy that favored Stalin, the US government knew many of their names, and did nothing about it for years, in some cases over a decade. When people pointed this out, they were called paranoid.
I don't see the parallels to the Salem Witch Trials in that. I see gaslighting. I see blaming the messenger. I don't see a witch hunt.
- Classic literature so frequently uses a setting that was already archaic to its readership, to depict that readership's contemporary politics. Literature isn't exclusively escapism. For example, Arthur Miller's The Crucible is about the 17th-century Salem witch trials, but it was written to respond to the McCarthy trials of 1950s America.
- Remember Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" from secondary school? [0] Fundamentally these coordinated social media attacks are witch hunts. When the 'good feminists' viciously attacked Margret Atwood accusing her of being a 'bad feminist' as she strongly supported due process defending a male professor being accused of sexually impropriety is the moment when these modern witch hunts went too far. More so than when Reddit misidentified the Boston Bomber or other instances. The moment they attacked Margret Atwood they attacked the very idea of due process which she strongly warned women about in her book "The Handmaid's Tale". Nonetheless, it is part of the human condition how we organize into social structures whether being a small town in New England or a capitalist economy to join groups attacking someone else since it prevents the focus of the attack being on ourselves.
The only way out is through due process and supporting it even for the worst of the worst.
(EDIT: Weak downvoting this comment without responding with a counter comment.)
- > That there were spies working for the Soviets cannot be doubted
That the executive branch in the late '40s and 1950s was "full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals", in Arthur Miller's phrase, was very much doubted. He, of course, was the author of "The Crucible" which is a depiction of the Salem witch trials and was an explicit allegory of McCarthyism as a witch hunt. At least that's what I was taught growing up.
The distinguishing attribute of a witch hunt is that the thing being hunted does not exist. It's like a snipe hunt. The message of The Crucible, at least the way I was taught it, wasn't that the wrong people were accused of the witchery going down. It was that the entire hunt was fraudulent and paranoid, because witches aren't real. Or in the common vernacular, "there's a red under my bed and there's a little yellow man in my head". The "Red Scare". Again, suggestive of paranoia.
So, I was raised doubting exactly the things you suggest cannot be doubted, and I don't think those doubts were uncommon at all. Venona makes those doubts look ridiculous. Although people are still calling it a witch hunt, and people are still making excuses for the Rosenbergs.
McCarthy was famously ineffective and incompetent in doing anything about the very much non-witch Communists in government who committed treason to further the cause of a communist dictatorship in the US. Who did a better job than he did in hunting them down while they could still be punished for their crimes?
- “We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”
― Arthur Miller, The Crucible
- I wonder how exposure to Arthur Miller's The Crucible affects opinion on these types of accusations?
