Mariella Gattini

No, I’m not referring to the term that shady, pseudo-politicians and lawyers with a poor usage of the English language use willy-nilly and scream at the top of their lungs like the shrinking violets they are, just because they are under investigation and rightly so.

The witch hunt I’m addressing here is the actual, historical, and factual persecution of women that took place first in North Berwick, Scotland, in 1590, and a hundred years later in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, here in this country. Salem was the inspirational world for the title The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin. Salem, Omelas, get it?

According to Dr. Lucy Worsley in the episode called, you guessed it, The Witch Hunts, part of her program Lucy Worsley Investigates, Agnes Sampson, a highly esteemed midwife and healer, was accused of causing the near death of King James VI. She was condemned following her confession extracted after days of vicious torture. Her only sin was that of trying to help people, something that made her very popular, far more popular than her community religious leader, John Knox, who disapproved of women in a position of authority, and for that reason, he would become her enemy, since in the same way she brought joy to the world with each newborn, she could also be blamed for anything bad that happened to them. The night King James VI was going back to the shores of Scotland, there was a terrible storm that almost ended his life. People in the community attributed this storm to the conjure of a group of women who had gathered that night to drink and laugh their hearts out, among them, there was this healer. That had been their sin! Laughing and having a good time in spite of the storm.

A hundred years later, Margaret Scott, an ancestor of actress Claire Danes, according to an investigation for the program Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was accused of witchcraft, condemned, and consequently hanged in 1692, after a dispute she had with a neighbor. Years later, in 1710, this practice of persecuting women was abolished in Massachusetts and the colony sought to pay restitutions to the affected families of women like Margaret for the inhumane miscarriage of justice inflicted upon them, but Margaret’s family was nowhere to be found. Other families were actually monetarily compensated but not Margaret’s, probably because those related to her wanted to escape the pain that that injustice had caused them, but also because having a family member condemned and killed in such brutal manner for such unconscionable reason was a stigma on their family name and, for that reason, they didn’t want to be associated with that atrocious ignominy. Claire Danes stated that it is incredible that still today we are vulnerable to this magical thinking.

In the same way that Jewish populations have been persecuted, generation after generation, women have suffered the scrutiny and accusations that no man has, simply because of their gender. Still today, a man is assertive; a woman with the same ability is considered hysterical and nonsensical, yes, even by highly educated men, who do not dare to say it out loud. However, we have suffered nothing compared to what women accused of witchcraft sustained. Not even we, women of our times, have the right to use that term to illustrate our plight today, let alone shady, pseudo-politicians or lawyers of dubious repute. Not even la Meloni in Italy will deserve to use that term the day of her reckoning that for sure is in her future. She represents her party’s intention of going back to the Reign of Italy established in 1862, after being divided in small reigns for centuries. Mussolini was successful because he ruled at a time Italy was not yet a republic. It became a republic only in 1948, after WWII, when Mussolini had long been dead by the hands of the very same Italian people.

The far-right movements in Italy are a reminder of that intention, that of taking Italy backward, and it is a disgrace that women like la Meloni are serving them in this noxious fantasy of having the entire Italian population under their total control, and as their mere subjects, a woman who thinks that those who died recently on Italian shores brought their dead to themselves and had nothing but what they deserved.

Same here in this country, with women in Congress like the Sarah Palin’s impersonator or the bleached, straw-haired, short woman who talks about “The Founding Fathers” as if they were the paternalistic heads of a sect, who became saints after their death, and now are sitting at the right, of course, of the biggest father figure of all, the one in charge of the final judgement. The rest of us know the slave-owners they were, and, unlike the women above mentioned, we still manage to truly respect the constitution and support our institutions in this country. What a disgrace these women are, however, they don’t deserve to be the victims of a true witch hunt, in the same way that they themselves don’t have the right to use that term in their speeches.

This tiresome and tired, pathetic, entity that drags his feet to any venue he himself fabricates in the pursue of his ultimate, noxious fantasy of being the head of an autocratic, paternalistic reign where everybody else is his subject, should go beyond the four words he knows in the English language, and should, at least, use a synonym or equivalent term to describe the investigation that the United States of America is pursuing against him on different fronts and in different states following lawful findings of facts and legal procedures.

The actual witch hunts, that occurred in Scotland first and a hundred years later in the colony of Massachusetts that later would become part of the U.S., are stains in the history of the respective countries and should be remembered as what they were: the murder of a massive amount of women caught in disputes with their neighbors, disputes that according to the judgement of their communities, they didn’t have the right to challenge because of their gender. They should be a reminder of what happens to women who fall into the hands of misogynistic, racist, autocratic governments, whose raison d’être is precisely that of keeping women’s heads down, limited to their ability to procreate and serve as entertainment for the men in their party and in their personal lives.

The fervent followers of this noxious, autocratic dream, should be acquainted with the fact that Hitler was the puppet of the Kaiser and of the ruling class of his time and Mussolini was the puppet of the Italian aristocratic ruling class of the Kingdom of Italy, and not of the Republic of Italy, established much later, in 1948. Neither of them invented racism but they harvested it, because it was there for the taking.

What is the far-right excuse today then? The will of bankers? Or that of the wealthy? When we all know that they don’t need an excuse, they just go ahead and harvest the hatred lodged in every one of their followers. Hatred is considered a commodity, nowadays, one they can even trade in the stock market, because it’s all around. Why? Simply because allowing hatred to rule their lives is far easier than doing something constructive. Blaming someone else or any different racial or gender group is far more comfortable than recognizing their own limitations and their own inability to work in a democratic society. It’s far easier for them to impose their ideas than debate them and come to the realization that they might be wrong, and even far more difficult to accomplish for them is the act of apologizing for their own bad deeds.

Unfortunately, our current societies have not come far from ancient ones, when women were hanged for having abilities no man had and for daring to stand up for themselves. Today, the least we can do is to leave the term witch hunt in the past where it should remain and remember it as part of the sad history that we all have to carry with us every step of the way.

It’s truly ironic that men who had the means and opportunities to do anything else with their lives but chose one of deceit and cruelty, portrayed themselves as shrinking violets victims of a judicial system they have evaded their entire lives, buying defense lawyers left and right to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions. True witch hunts don’t allow for a defense, true witch hunts are deadly and not out for debate. True witch hunts murdered a big number of women.

In the name of those women, who still can’t defend themselves, bite your tongues and ask your mercenary lawyers to look for another defense, because this one doesn’t apply to you, cowards.